Thursday morning things

* Got my mail. A lot of it could be tossed (mostly charity pleas; I am already giving what I can give, thanks). There were also a couple credit-card ads, so I guess the security hold I put on my accounts after that big credit breach have expired. I also learned that the credit-card ad stuff is now packaged thickly enough that you cannot simply shred it...you have to separate the pages and do them individually. Bah. And yes, I do that, because

* I am a worrier. In many ways. I like to plan for eventualities and have things covered. Hence, shredding the applications for credit cards that may come partly pre-filled out and things like the stupid "checks" one of my credit-card issuers does, where they send you "checks" you can use against your account (nevermind that you're paying whatever the going interest rate is right now - I budget carefully and pay off the cards every month so I don't pay attention to what the interest rates are; credit cards for me are a way to avoid having to carry lots of cash or mess with a debit card....)

I also worry about other things...got home, logged in to the various social media I'd been away from for two weeks, verified that my various "friends" (well, I guess on Twitter they're called "followers" or "people you follow") were OK, and then I relaxed.

(I learned, sadly, this spring, that people you care about can be taken from you VERY suddenly, and yeah, it's reawakened an old worry, one that flared up the end of January 2016....)

And then in my mail: a recall notice from Ford. My car has the stupid Takata* airbags that might contain shrapnel. I've been driving this car for eight years now. Normally I'd shrug it off, but the recall contains the comment of "if you require a rental vehicle, your local dealer is authorized to provide one for up to $30 per day" (but of course it's for personal transportation only, and fuel and insurance are not included).

(*I was originally saying "Takara" but that's not right, we're not discussing defective Pokeballs)

Okay, a couple things here:
 - it might be MONTHS before parts are available based on how I read this ("Second or third quarter of 2018" as the expected date - well, by the calendar year, we're more than halfway through the second quarter)

- My dealer doesn't rent cars so we'd have to go through a somewhat-dodgy local "agency" (I've rented from them before when my car was in the shop for a while, and it was a pain, and they have the reputation of randomly closing before the posted closing time, or opening late)
 
- $30 here is likely to get you a piece of junk. That I'd have to drive for several months maybe. And which I'd feel uncomfortable driving very much. (I don't even know what rental cars cost, but for things like that - well, we pay a "BFE surcharge" because there's one place that does it and they can kind of ask what they want)

(And I checked: for a basic car, the cheapest option? It's $58 a day here FOR A COMPACT CAR. So I'd be out $28 a day for however long it took, and have to drive a small car that's uncomfortable and I feel unsafe driving. This sucks. I guess once again they assume everyone lives in an easily-walkable city with mass transit, and people might need a car one day out of seven. I need one pretty much every day in the summer)

I just....I don't know. I said on Twitter, "Well, my car has failed to kill me up to this point" but I just don't know. (I can't go without driving until maybe November; I don't think I could happily go without traveling to Sherman or elsewhere until then)

And when parts DO come in - how long will my car be in the shop? (I may break down and demand a rental car then; I can't rely on the kindness of colleagues or fellow congregants to get me places for more than a day or two).

This was just such a giant mess and it makes me angry because my understanding was that Takata out and out LIED about the safety of the airbags.

I guess I just....drive really carefully and pray no one hits me in a way that will trigger my airbags? You'd think the dealer could just temporarily DEACTIVATE the airbags if they're that great a hazard; we all drove until 1990 or so without airbags at all, and while they're lifesavers when they work well, they're not when they contain parts that might fragment (and I live in a hot humid climate, where the chemical breakdown causing the problem seems to be worst)

Or maybe I just assume that (a) I have a guardian angel, (b) I'm here for a reason and God won't take me out until it's my time, and (c) If I die from a faulty airbag, it was my time, and something else would likely have taken me out. I don't know. I wish they gave us some approximate level of risk - like, "There's a 15% chance you'll be seriously injured if your airbag triggers" (in which case I shrug and go about my business) vs. "There is a 100% chance of you being killed" (in which case I....I don't know, I buy a Vespa or something for getting around town and garage my car until it can be fixed, or I decide, "Well, I had to buy a new car SOMEDAY" and just accelerate that process)

I'm guessing it's closer to the "15%" though I've not been in an airbag-triggering accident so I don't know.

Hm. And looking here, it suggests that MAYBE it's just the passenger-side inflator? I don't know. If I knew that for sure I'd feel a lot more secure - I rarely have a passenger in the car, and the next time I do, if the car's not fixed yet, I can just suggest they ride in the backseat if they're worried. (Though I bet if the passenger-side one is bad, the driver-side one is too; it seems odd that they'd use different inflators. And anyway: shrapnel can scatter, though I suspect the driver is safer than the passenger). But the recall notice does specifically say "passenger" so maybe I'm less likely to be directly impaled in a crash?

Crikey, what a mess this is. The fact that there is no clear risk-assessment given doesn't help, though what I've gleaned from that website is (a) Passengers are at greater risk than I, the driver, would be, (b) they seem to think no airbag is worse than a possibly-faulty airbag, (c) it seems unlikely there will be a problem UNLESS there is a crash, and while I drive defensively, still, I can only control what THIS idiot does out on the road and not what the OTHER idiots do....

* Speaking of guardian angels, something strange and bad (though not nearly as bad as could have happened) happened to one of my parents' neighbors. He is a pharmacist - used to work at the local hospital but apparently a combination of bad supervisor and hospital politics lost him his job locally and wound up transferring him to another facility in Peoria - so he has a nasty commute every day (about 45 minutes each way). Anyway, one morning last week he went out to the garage to start his car....and a tire was flat. Inspection of the tire found a nail. But not a nail in the treads like what happened to me once - a nail that had been POUNDED IN TO THE SIDEWALL, so clearly intentional. And then it turned out, when he got it towed to the shop, the tire on the other side had suffered the same fate. As he garages his car at home, lives with just his wife, both of whom are sane and decent people, the conclusion had to be that the nail was put in up in the parking lot at his workplace. (My comment, when my mom told me about it: "His guardian angel was looking out for him that day" - he could have had a blowout on the way home, on an interstate with scary drivers!)

Anyway. It's kind of a terrible thing. I'm hoping it's some random jerk doing random jerk things (a lot of vandals, especially teens, don't stop and think how their actions could genuinely harm somebody, or even how their actions might emotionally hurt someone) and not someone targeting him. Both he and his wife are SUPER nice people and have helped my parents a lot and it bugs me that someone might be targeting him, though it also bugs me that there's someone running around thinking pounding nails into tires is a prank that couldn't have deadly results....I hope he reported it to both his workplace and the local police up there. I know in cities the police are often overburdened and have to kind of let things like that slide, but still, it needs to be on record. (And I wonder if they have video surveillance in that parking lot).

* Another thing in the mail: a notice from the city about a local election. Two issues - first, "take away the sunset date on a 1% sales tax so we have the money for infrastructure" and second, "A bond issue that will raise the average property taxes $100 a year for infrastructure" (Mine will probably be less than that: small old house worth less than the average, but still, it's still money).

I don't know. On the one hand, our roads and bridges and the like need a lot of work and my town seems perpetually broke. On the other hand: the sales-tax burden seems particularly burdensome (it's close to 10%, and that's on groceries as well as non-food items). And also on the other hand: my town has not exactly been....transparent....lately about what's going on in city hall and I admit my first thought was "yeah and how much of that will wind up in someone's pocket?" Cynical, but I've seen some crazy junk go down in the towns around here and in my own town. So I'll have to think about it. Maybe no on the sales-tax extension (on the grounds that it hurts people with little money more) and yes on the property-tax thing? I don't know. It will be interesting to see the outcome - solid "nos" on both would tell me my fellow residents have a similarly low faith in how the town is being run.

* In happier news: I did get the "one-time bonus" tacked onto my May check. After the various deductions (taxes and also my TIAA-CREF contribution, which comes out of any of these types of things, and I suppose I'll be glad of that when I'm 65 and retired), it was a little over $700.

No, I haven't spent it yet. I am not sure whether to (a) chunk it into savings (or, more extreme: invest it) with the idea of it being "for emergencies" or eventually going toward buying a car when I need a new one* or (b) do the little maintenance things around the house I've talked about for a while (soon I will need a new kitchen faucet, for example) and maybe do a few upgrades (new showerhead, for example) or (c) blow it on fun stuff.

I don't know. Laura and I have tentative plans to go to one of the "Trades Days" in Canton this summer and I admit I like the idea of going in with a bunch of cash to buy whatever I wanted. I also had the odd idea while up at my parents, that maybe I needed to buy a SECOND dresser (if I could find a place in  my room to put it) and have one dresser for winter "foldable" clothes (like turtlenecks) and one for summer foldables (t-shirts). It would solve some problems....

if I were going that route I'd hit the antique or at least resale shops; newer furniture so often is made of either cheap wood or that pressboard junk and I'm just too old now for bad furniture.

(*That said: my dad told me he'd buy me my next car....my brother and sister in law had their Subaru TOTALLY fail on them this spring, they wanted to buy a new one, and my brother was asking my dad for permission to go into his (my brother's) stock account to take out money for a new car....that account is supposedly for retirement (as is a similar account I have; it contains stock, or at least the residuals from stock, inherited from our grandfather). My dad disliked that idea....so he offered to help them buy the new car (again: this is probably why my chunking money into TIAA is good, even if the return on it seems less-good than what my dad got over his career; he can do that because of having the TIAA account). And so, to be "fair," he told me he'd do that for me in the future. Though right now, except for the airbag issue, my car is pretty sound, and my dad's getting up in years and his health is not the greatest so....I kind of half-count on being on my own for buying the next car, and want to be financially able to, even if it means working out financing and paying it off in installments. But you never know. And yeah, if I had wanted to be real greedy right then I probably could have asked to be given the money later in the year or something but....that's not how these things work, at least not for someone of my temperament. And anyway: living on the East Coast and having a kid, my brother and sister-in-law have a more costly standard-of-living than I do. And part of me says "you're a grown-up adult so you should be buying your own stuff"

Heh. I guess in a way I am the reverse of some of the kids who show up on Yahoo!Answers complaining about how they were so hard-done-by because their dad bought them "only" a Nissan (a NEW Nissan, I assume) when their friends were getting BMWs and the like...)


* That said: I may take a trip to Sherman tomorrow. I need one or two things at the Ulta and I didn't buy as many groceries as I might have (I always worry about "did my refrigerator die over break" - it happened to a colleague and my refrigerator is getting up in years (it's 18 this fall). I suppose one of the ways I might spend some of my saved-up money - or ask my dad for an advance on what he might pay for that car - would be to buy a new fridge. I don't need a fancy one and I don't WANT an Internet of Things one that calls the grocery store when I'm out of eggs. What I want is a plain fridge that will last well and keep my stuff cold without using an inordinate amount of power....)