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WANNABE STUFF
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APPRENTICE STUFF
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MASTER STUFF
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And for our former harrowing adventures, there's always the archives
Sunday, August 24, 2003
In which we sink to new depths of cheesiness
I have never been the sort of person who names a car. I have always had little emotional attachment to my cars. (My cars, for their part, have always appeared to have little emotional attachment to me.) But I've never had a car with as much personality as this Element before. My previous cars were definitely on the wrong side of dull. I started out with a $200 Opal--anyone remember the Opal?--when I was sixteen, courtesy of a couple of adult friends to whom I had attached myself in high school. It died after my first year in college, and I purchased a used, pale yellow, Datsun B-210 in college. When I graduated, I bought my first new car, a Volkswagen Fox: made in Brazil (I'm not making this stuff up!), that car has to have been the worst, most unreliable vehicle ever to roll off an assembly line. After about six years of suffering, I gave up on it and bought the Mercury Villager minivan, which served me well for ten years. And now I have . . . Edgar.
Yes, I'm very much afraid that, without having been consciously aware of it, I have somehow managed to dub this car Edgar. I didn't plan to name my car, and for a few days I tried to pretend that it was the same nameless, functional machine as all the rest. But facts are facts; this car's name is undeniably Edgar. Why Edgar? I'm fond of assonance, and Edgar the Element has a nice ring to it. But there's more to it than that: this car is a geek. It's the sort of car that's only cool to people who were destined to end up *really* cool, not to the popular guy in high school who goes on to a life of bowling on Thursdays and longing for his adolescent glory days, or to the cheerleader he dated, who has moved on to her own fulfilling career as a hairdresser in the same tired little town where both of them allegedly grew up. It's the token "unpopular" kid that you see on every teen soap, the one secretly more interesting and more good-looking than the popular hero (a fact very obvious to the audience) but who is still mysteriously tortured and thrown into lockers by the stubbornly obtuse thirty-year-olds that Hollywood casts as "typical" high school students. You know the type: Pacey on Dawson's Creek, Noel on Felicity, Xander on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Clark on Smallville, Ephram on Everwood, and now Seth on The O.C. (Yes, I admit that I'm overly familiar with the genre. Your point?) But that's Edgar all over: he's only good-looking to the people who have a genuine sense of style, he's hip without being blatantly trendy, and he has the strength of character to go the distance.
Ok, I hope that's the last rhapsodic entry about Edgar that you'll ever have to read. In non-Edgar news, poor Phyl managed to slice her pad, and she's hopping around pitifully. She should be all right for Fosterfields next weekend, but I'd hoped to work her a bit before then. Thanks to the horrible weather we've been having, she's out of shape. I'm worried about how she'll do on the outruns. Now that autumn is coming, I'm really going to get serious about conditioning her.
Wednesday, August 20, 2003
In which we adopt a new identity
Ok, this one isn't precisely about Phyl, but it's still relevant to my trialing life: after ten years of the same silver minivan, I finally bought a new car! (R.I.P, minivan: you were a good car. 207,000, no major mechanical problems, nary a grumble about all the dogs that I stuffed into you over the years, or all the fields over which I made you drive . . . a good car. May you find eternal peace in some junkyard in the sky.) As anyone who spends weekends at dog trials knows, a good vehicle is a vehicle that can handle dogs, a little bit of offroad abuse, and a lot of miles. I settled on a new-this-year car called the Honda Element. The Element is what they call a "concept car" (I never heard the phrase before shopping for this car, and I'm still a little hazy about what it means. Basically, a car seems to be a concept car if anyone at all puts any thought into making it a little different from all the other cars on the road.) The Element (or the "E," to the hip) is a cross between an SUV, a minivan, and a pickup truck: it's smaller than my minivan, but it's inside is so well-designed and efficient that I can still fit four border collie-sized crates in it (it's a little taller than the van was, and it's easy to stack crates). The floor is some sort of polyurethane rubbery stuff, not carpet: perfect for sweeping out dog hair. It's all-wheel drive (although a wimpier version than the kind you find in heavy duty SUVs like jeeps), and it's very utilitarian: no leather covered this or that, no navigation computers, no internal temperature monitor. But it *does* have a kickass stereo that even has an auxiliary output jack for my Ipod! (The E was originally being marketed to 20-something guys into xtreme sports, but Honda quickly saw that many more older people with hobbies were the ones actually buying the car.) Best of all, at least as far as I'm concerned, it's designed for one or two people with stuff to haul around, rather than happy families of six. I'm sick and tired of all the child-centric cars out there: there needs to be one or two cars that doesn't assume that all of us are living the American dream!
The E is aggressively weird looking, but I'm really attracted to that. So now I'm the proud owner of a car that's considered cool, after years of driving a car that was most emphatically the opposite of cool. Who knows what else I'll start doing, now that I have a cool car? It's a scary thought! (Oddly, this means that I had a very grownup car from my mid-twenties to my mid-thirties, and that I'll have a youthful car from my mid-thirties to--I hope--my mid-forties. At this rate, by the time I'm in my seventies I'll be driving around on a tricycle!).
Here are some pictures of my E, for the curious. If you see this peculiar boxy thing at trials, that'll be us!
Sunday, August 10, 2003
In which we turn to our affairs
Just thought I'd check in with the blog and report what Phyl and I have been doing lately. Answer: not a heck of a lot. I had big plans for the layoff between our last trial (which was mid-July) and our next one, which won't be until Labor Day weekend; I'd even hoped that I could get to a couple of challenging fields and practice some long outruns. But this hazy humidity is killing me, and it's all I can do to drag myself to my own field a couple of times a week and tune Phyl up a little. Our sheep (we have a lot of lambs right now) are very heavy and tough to drive; I imagine they're just as miserable in this weather as I am. The good thing is that they're very easy to shed, so Phyl and I are getting in a fair amount of practice on that front. I hope I'll get a little more motivated this week. August is always a tough month for me; it's close enough to fall that I actually have hope of summer ending, but there's still enough of summer left that it feels very, very far away. At the very least, this week I want to sit down and come up with a plan for what I want to accomplish with Phyl between now and the beginning of winter: if I can't bring myself to do much physical work with Phyl, I have no excuse not to think about training!
