According to Grok the vernal equinox occurred on Friday, March 20, 2026, at 10:46 a.m. EDT. At that time Camera Girl and I were probably in Walmart buying eggs, coffee and chop meat. When we got to the register the cashier was this friendly talkative old lady who wanted to tell us that if we took out one of our eggs, we could balance it on its end. She explained that it was because of “the e-quick.” Well, she was a very nice lady so I smiled and said, “That’s great.”
The reason I was along on this expedition was because Camera Girl’s twenty-year-old ride (Nelly) was in the shop and the surgeon wasn’t too sanguine on Nelly’s future. The brake lines were leaking but when Dr. Steve put her up on the lift, he found metastatic rust throughout the length and breadth of poor Nelly. Camera Girl was devastated and so was my bank account. The surgeon asked if a mercy-killing wasn’t the best option but as a devout “right to lifer” I said, “No!!!!” So, Dr. Steve left me with the sad news and said it would take a few days to get the parts and finish the work.
But when we got home slightly after the equinox, there was a message from Dr. Steve saying we could bring the patient home. We rushed to find Nelly looking alive and well. Dr. Steve said it was “a miracle.” Nelly wasn’t as far gone as he had initially thought. And equally importantly it hadn’t cost as much as I had feared. So, Camera Girl and Nelly were reunited. They drove home together and later on I celebrated this Equinox Miracle with a bowl of vanilla ice cream.
But the larger lesson I’ve learned is that nothing lasts forever. Not even blue Toyota Corollas. The power of New England winter road salt is existential. The body of a car may look pristine with a bright paint job and a functional cd player in the dash board. But the mortality that follows from chloride corrosion cracking is as final and fatal as death itself. Nelly has served us faithfully and well. And generations of our dogs have had their own blankets on the back seats that they relax on during trips to the vet’s office and the nail clipping place. And decades of grandkids have sat in the back seat elbowing each other and complaining about how cramped they are. But very soon all this will be disrupted. They will notice that Camera Girl’s old car is no more. And she is very sad about the whole thing. I am too! I have to buy another car.
Well, never look a gift horse in the mouth. We’ve been given a reprieve and I’ll start figuring out what Nelly II will be. And it turned out to be a nice day walking between stores and parking lots and I even had a nice review for my book on Amazon and some more sales. So, all in all it wasn’t a bad e-quick as e-quicks go.
A beautiful story. I would recommend you look into a good-condition used Honda, before the touch-screen takeover. My wife’s ’95 Civic lasted 20 years of Vermont road salt, only to be done in by the salt-free waters of South Carolina. During the 2015 Millennial rains, we had several road ponds between our house and the main road. The water flushed the corrosion off the underside, and the gas tank straps failed. Our horse-power doc looked her over and said, yes, a transplant was possible, but the trauma had exposed stage-four chassis cancer, inoperable. We made the hard choice and had… Read more »
Did you try balancing your Toyota on its bumper? Older Toyotas are essentially forever cars, especially down here with no salt unless you expose your vehicle to the ocean. Not just sea breeze, like into the water. Many years ago, I had a Toyota PU that I bought used for essentially nothing and used for home projects and misc hauling. I eventually sold it to a guy who worked for me who kept it until he died close to 30 years later. I’m told that it had over 600,000 miles without a rebuild. Recently, even Toyota and Honda (of which… Read more »
We’ve had many Hondas, starting with 1984 Accord and currently still using a 2012 Civic. The Hondas have been in general excellent cars, but when my 2017 CRV was totaled in 2023 we found several issues with the Hondas. 1) The dealers seem to have to be absolute jerks. This included one we’d dealt with since 1995. 2) The CRV and HRV are bloated, adding several hundred lbs of weight and having a rather melted brick profile making them ugly and with poor visibility for the driver. 3) Honda has decided it is no longer making 6 cylinder engines nor… Read more »
Don’t buy anything German (I say even with my German heritage). I’ve had 4 or 5 of them and have found that maintenance and repair costs are astronomical. When I buy a car, I , research, shop negotiate and buy online. I just pick it up at the dealer. But even then, I have to put up with the finance/paperwork guy trying incessantly to up sell me incredibly overpriced and useless stuff. I turn it all down and then write a check for a pre agreed amount. And I immediately walk if they try to add a single penny. I… Read more »
My last new car, I was paying cash for it and the dealer almost had a coronary because I refused to finance it. He said, “You can’t have the car until the check clears and that could take a week!” I said, “So? I’ll wait to sell my truck for another week. Who cares?” He acted like I was going to nuke his neighborhood. He must get some nice kickback on the finance charges or something.
Tom and Ed, thanks for the valuable feedback. The circle of life here in New England is cruel and inevitable. Back in the late 90’s I was on assignment to a Sacramento area company which manufactured “highly energetic” organic intermediates (azides and such) for the pharmaceutical industry. They had manufacturing equipment separated by revetments with miles of space for operators to hide behind. I once saw a small reactor cover that was made of two inch Hastelloy metal blown through the roof of its building and land half a mile away. The hole in roof was beautifully round. But the… Read more »
Yeah I was part time in Palo Alto area in 1989/1990 and the parking lot where we had a shared apartment for the guys working with the west cost team there were a variety of Late 60’s early 70’s cars that in New England would have been rust buckets. Even a couple early 911’s, a 914 and a Karmann Ghia all of which would have been scrap metal for 20 years in New England. Other than the fact that a 900 sq ft ranch ran just shy of a million dollars in Palo Alto and the traffic made 128 in… Read more »
That’s the paradox. The climate for someone from the northeast is paradisical. But the human aspect is something out of Dante’s Inferno. And of course that’s excepting earthquakes, giant wildfires, flash floods, mudslides and El Nino and droughts.
Not to mention a tax structure that would make the Sherriff of Nottingham cream his chain mail pantaloons.
The latest polls indicate that the top two candidates in the CA governor’s primary are both Republicans! If some of the Democrats don’t pull out there might be no Democrat making it to the general election. That’s because they don’t have separate primaries but one combined primary out of which the top two vote getters face off in the general election. Of course no real conservative should bother to run CA. It’s a lunatic asylum and the only way to fix it is to let the inhabitants starve to death and then start over.
Seems like they’d have the same issue Massachusetts has when it elects a Republican Governor
It leads to disappointment all around
The National Republican party should sue to prevent someone like Mitt Romney from calling himself a Republican. Let the Democrats come up with a new name for the punching bag losers they use to save their state from bankruptcy every eight years. Maybe they could call them the CDP (Cheap Democrat Party).
And indeed I was in Palo Alto/San Francisco in December 1989, basically two months after the Loma Prieta quake. There was still glass damage (replaced by plywood) in the DEC building we were in. And many of the folks had homes over near Oakland and were having to come to the base of the San Francisco peninsula a 2.5-3 hour commute. Some were stay with folks in Palo alto and commuting 1-2 times a week it was so bad. But yeah even in December the highs were High 50s and I was roaming around in a heavy sweater having come… Read more »
Yeah, the weather is like some magic elixir. I felt like I was in a 1990s dopey movie comedy just going to the grocery store.