My first day was relatively uneventful. I had to leave at a particular time and of course got a call five minutes beforehand asking if I could pick something up to take up to Ridge. I made it out in time and indeed got to drive 10mph below the speed limit the whole way with twenty minutes to spare. They apparently give us a lot of time to get there. The twenty minutes turned into forty-five because the guy I was meeting was late. As it happened, there was another guy at this particular government installation who was waiting for his wife’s ex-husband to drop off his kid for the weekend. We chatted a bit and I fiddled with my phone.

I was a bit more pressed for time on the road to Bass, so I actually drove the speed limit there. I would have considered driving faster, but the roads were twisty-turney and it required driving through Redstone County, which has some pretty aggressive traffic enforcement. When driving through on my way to Alexandria last week, they had a speed limit drop straight from 75mph to 35mph for a construction zone. Cops were of course waiting right behind the hill where the speed limit falls. They are obviously very concerned about public safety, though there were no construction people for the first two miles of the Orange Cone Zone. It’s not the only time I’ve noticed Redstone’s penchant for making the road ways safe. The four or so times we’ve driven through it, I’ve seen more cops on the side of the road for that county than all of the other Arapaho counties I’ve driven through combined.

Living in a smaller town means getting used to earlier bed times and close times. Only one of the four convenience stores in Callie is 24-hour (one closes at midnight, one at 10, and the main one at 9(!!). There is a gas station and a convenience store in Bass. One closes at 6 and the other at 5. Fortunately, I got to the former and got an ice cream sandwich to soothe my aching throat. Unfortunately, when I went back to get some milk to wash it down, I discovered their closing time. No more convenience stores until my eventual return to Callie. My Bass contact never showed, so I ended up waiting there for an hour.

I got lost getting out of Bass. How I can get lost with a GPS in a town of something like three square blocks is truly a talent of mine. Well, “lost” may be an exaggeration. I just couldn’t figure out which road I was supposed to go down for the direct route back to Callie. The GPS wanted me to go back through Ridge. The estimated time it gave me for what I thought was the road was twice as long as it should have been, leaving me to believe I was heading down the wrong path. Turned out the GPS thinks something is up with that road because it was the right way and just driving the speed limit had me knocking a minute or two off my ETA every minute or two. I am wondering if maybe it includes inclement weather in its estimations because it does not strike me as the type of road that would be a really high priority for the plows. Alternately, maybe it assumes you’re going to get stuck behind a slow driver.

Garrison was not in the cards today. I called Alexandria to find out the number of my contact in Garrison. When I called said Garrison contact, she told me she had nothing but might have something for me tomorrow. So I went straight back to Callie and that was more-or-less my day.

Cell phone reception was as expected. There was some iffy service between Callie and Ridge. At least I assume so because the phone never rang and I had a message waiting for me when I got to Ridge (the guy saying he was going to be late). I gave the Bureau my Google Voice number because I didn’t know what my new cell phone would be. The good news is that I get the transcribed message. The bad news is that listening to the actual message is more of a hassle than it would have been if I’d just given them my regular number. Reception went out on my way to Bass and never came back, preventing me from calling the woman who stood me up. It came back up about 15 miles outside of Callie. So I am out of reach for most of my trip.

The audio entertainment was finishing up the BBC production of Terry Pratchett’s “Guards! Guards!” The audiobook was better. Either they changed up the plot or there were some things I definitely missed the first time around. I find that I don’t listen quite as closely to Pratchett as I do other audiobooks. In fact, I am most inclined to put Pratchett in when I am not in the mood to have to follow every word. He goes off on a lot of tangents. Some of them are really quite humorous, though I find if I think I missed something funny and go back, it’s sort of like having a joke explained to you. Not as funny.

After finishing that I moved on to the fourth Jason Bourne novel. I knew that the original author, Robert Ludlum, died and the Bourne books were being written by somebody else. I didn’t realize, though, that Ludlum only wrote three of them. This is the first not-Ludlum one. Honestly, I may like the new guy better. Less melodramatic. This audiobook was done by a different company and so the voice actor is different. In fact, it was done by the same company that did the Ender audiobooks and one of the various narrators of those books is the narrator of this one. It’s kind of confusing. Then again, a similarity in narrator style had me thinking of Ender while listening to Barack Obama’s autobiography despite the fact that the voice actor does not remotely sound like Barack Obama. So I guess I’m easily confused.

In the end, I got paid over a hundred bucks to deliver two envelopes. One of which was an employment document originating from me. Your tax dollars at work.

I commented before on a thread on Ordinary Gentlemen about high speed rail. An oldish post on League of Ordinary Gentlemen got me thinking about recursive taxation. That is to say, taxes that depend on people on the exact sort of behavior that they’re trying to discourage (or stop encouraging).

When I mentioned that I believe that the roads ought to pay for themselves with gasoline taxes and tolls, a fellow by the name of Travis replied:

But that’s a trap, because the fewer gallons of gasoline sold, the higher the fuel tax would have to be in order to cover the costs of maintaining highways.

If gasoline went to $7 a gallon tomorrow and people all of a sudden bought much less of it, it wouldn’t materially affect the costs of maintaining roads and highways. There might be marginally less wear and tear on the roads, but the price of the raw material (asphalt) would increase sharply, as would the cost of operating gasoline-fueled maintenance equipment. Most other costs (policing, plowing, etc.) would be unchanged. Ergo, the tax rate would have to increase in order to continue funding current operations.

Conservatives often point out this sort of thing when there are proposals to tax some unpopular sort of behavior to fund something popular. The quintessential example of this is cigarette taxes to fund education. You tax cigarettes to raise money for education, but when people start quit smoking (which was stated as half the point) the lawmakers start getting antsy because they were depending on that revenue. So suddenly a tax that was supposed to hit smokers now has to be passed on to everyone else. Or you have to raise the cigarette tax again. Then more people quit (presumably — hopefully) and you have to keep doing it. It’s the danger in taxing something you want to discourage. On the one hand, it’s win-win because you get money while discouraging people from doing bad things. But it’s also lose-lose because it proves ineffective at one of its two mutually exclusive goals.

Taxing gasoline to pay for roads is not necessarily the same thing. The stated goal is not so much to take people off the roads but rather to make them pay for the roads. But a lot of people want gasoline taxes to reduce carbon emissions and it does sort of apply there. In either case, though, it’s hard to imagine that the government won’t become accustomed to the money it’s pulling in (unless the tax states that it must be revenue-neutral). And as Travis points out, with pay-for-the-roads taxation in particular, it does really actually need that money to maintain the roads.

Well, it mostly needs that money. While there are a degree of static costs, there’s also some variability. For instance, if people started driving less in response to the tax, we would not be needing to build and expand nearly as many roads as we are now. That’s money in the bank. There would also be some reduction in the wear and tear that the roads take as a result of drivers (but no reduction where the weather is responsible). But we wouldn’t be closing roads altogether and so we would still have to be paying for their maintenance even if fewer people are driving or people are driving less far or less frequently.

However, even in that case, if people are genuinely cutting back on their gasoline consumption, and even if we have to perpetually raise the taxes to close the hole, people will not actually be spending more on gas plus gas taxes. The weekly and monthly expenditures would be relatively constant and would, in fact, go down.

The following is taken from a hypothetical situation I posed in the comments:

If I am driving 55 miles to and from work each day (110 total) and paying $4.00 a gallon, $2.00 of which is going towards taxes, and I’m driving a car that gets 20mpg. I’m paying $110 a week for gas, $55 of which is going towards taxes.

So I decide to move closer to my job. Now I’m only driving 27.5 miles to and from work each day. Now I’m only paying $55.00 per week in gas. Happy day.

Uh oh, the government has a shortfall because too many people did exactly what I did, which is cut gasoline consumption in half. So now the gas tax is $4.00 instead of $2.00 (and gas is now $6 including taxes). My new weekly expenditure goes back up, but not actually to where it was before because while taxes have gone up, the cost of gas excluding taxes has remained constant. Now it’s $82.50. The government is still getting its $55 in taxes, though.

Even so, I decide to get a more fuel efficient car. Now I get 40mpg. I’m actually paying less per week than I ever have before ($41.25).

But once again, too many other people cut down on their consumption and the government is facing a shortfall. So once again the gas tax is doubled ($10/gallon now, $8 to taxes). Far from being right back where I started, I’m now paying $68.75 per week in gas, though the government is back to getting the $55 it needs from me to keep the roads up. Heck, let’s say that instead of purchasing a hybrid I purchased a compact that gets 30mpg. So I haven’t even kept up with the average consumption reduction and am paying more per week in taxes than I ever have before ($73.33)… I am still actually paying less in gas than I was at the outset ($91.67 now).

Now, some people are not going to be able to make the reductions that I (hypothetically) did. Others are going to be able to reduce it by more because they’ll take public transportation or move within walking distance of work or get a motorcycle.

But if reductions are not made then you don’t have to raise the tax. For those that want to ween us off of gasoline consumption, this is not ideal. But if the goal here is to make the roads pay for itself, you’re succeeding.

In the event that people can continue to make reductions, though, you can keep raising the gasoline tax as much as you have to because people will still end up paying less. More per mile, but less per week. You’re giving the same amount to the government(s), but you’re giving less to the oil producers.

This all assumes that the government needs a constant amount. I don’t think this is the case because there would be less demand for new roads, so I think that amount would go down. There will still be some ebb and flow because new roads need to be built to accommodate a growing population, but that growing population will be paying into the till as well.

This all also assumes that gas prices remain constant. That’s a little less likely because gas prices never stay constant. But that doesn’t really factor in all that much anyway because this tax itself should not cause gas prices to go up any more than they otherwise would. If anything, it’d be the opposite because there’d be reduced demand and the producers would have less leverage to control pricing.

If gasoline prices do go up considerably, it would be because of a reduced supply. The primary result of that would be for consumption to go down that much more quickly. I’m skeptical, but reasonable people disagree. If that happens and we’re not ready for it, the condition of our roads will be the least of our problems.

Of course, none of this is to say that the above scenario is ideal. Chances are that there were reasons that I lived as far away from work as I did and that I drove the car I did. My new place closer to work may be more expensive or it may be smaller. The hybrid may cost more to repair. The costs of goods and services that unavoidably require lots of driving in heavy vehicles would go up.

This isn’t even to say that gas taxes are the best way to get drivers to pay or that we should reallocate tax burdens towards drivers and those that directly and indirectly use our roads. In the case of how we tax drivers, I tend to prefer the gas tax to toll roads and GPS-mileage taxation because the logistics on the former can get very cumbersome and the latter is an unwelcome government intrusion that would be ripe for exploitation. But there is a good counterargument in that if the goal is to charge drivers then it shouldn’t matter as much if they are driving a hybrid of an SUV (yeah, the latter cause more wear on the roads, but I doubt they do twice the damage) if one is indifferent to environmental concerns and does not see a need to reduce carbon consumption. In any event, the above argument-counterargument about recursive taxation would apply to toll roads and GPS stamps as well. On whether or not we should push the transportation tax burdens on those that most frequently use them, but such taxes often tend to be regressive and perhaps it is best for everyone to pay for the roads with more progressive income and property taxes.

Though I’m not sold, all of those arguments make sense. I’m really not writing this to sell anybody on tax burdens and driving, but rather to point out that the recursive taxation argument is not a good one.

My friend Bob sent me this link a while back when I was talking about our (delayed) car hunt:

Granted, this is an internal Subaru video, but it’s quite impressive. One of the main reasons that we’re leaning towards Subaru is that neither Clancy nor I have much ice-driving experience. I drove in the snow and ice when I was living in Deseret, but it was almost entirely freeway driving. We’re probably going to get studded tires for Clancy’s car for the winter months. Depending on whether we decide to stay in Arapaho and depending on our experiences there, we may go AWD for all of our vehicles or we may just make sure to have one. The biggest issue, besides local driving, is that the nearest major city to our soon-to-be home is Gazelem, Deseret’s capital city. I also may want to take trips to Deseret to visit our friends out there. It’s a tough road.

If anybody has any similar videos or some good AWD tests in which Subaru is out-performed, please share them. The only one I’ve found is a Swedish video in which the Subaru was out-done by an Audi, which is out of our price range. I tend to have a little more faith in Subaru than in Toyota and Honda and the like because Subaru does AWD almost exclusively whereas for most of the competitors AWD is just an option they have. Ford brags on TV that they have more AWD models than any of the competition, so I might give them a gander.

Ford has, of course, been on a real uptick lately with an increasing reputation for reliability and a lot of good will since they didn’t need the government bailout. It would figure that right about the time I move away from Ford that they become cool again.

MSN Auto has a really good and pretty thorough piece on speeding that’s a worthy read. The subject of traffic enforcement is a staple here at Hit Coffee, so much so that Web recently commented to me that if we weren’t careful, we could write a post about it every day. That we call our series of posts on it “Badged Highwaymen” should tell you where we stand. It’s important that people that are dangers on the road be held accountable, but enforcement as it currently exists is mostly a game of cat and mouse. According to MSN Auto, it’s a game that we the mice are going to lose. The technology is getting so good that we no longer have to be trapped by a cop car hiding behind a giant rock or sign anymore.

Now a part of me is sympathetic to mass enforcement of the law. Indeed, one of the big problems I have with enforcement as it currently exists is that it is sporadic and selective. If there were uniform enforcement of the law with a small but reasonable fine every time you were caught and insurance companies wouldn’t view someone with a ticket as though they are Luke and Bo Duke, I might actually object to it less. Instead we have sporadic enforcement so that when you get caught it catches the attention of the insurance companies which often operate under the assumption that if you were caught doing it once, you are probably doing it all the time. Of course, one big caveat to all of this would be that speed limits would need to be reasonable. And on a deeper level, I would have to be convinced that it really is about more than revenue-enhancement.

One of the reasons that I might be more amenable to more uniform enforcement is that it would probably force some changes on the drivers’ side. I don’t just mean getting us to slow down, though that would be part of it. Rather, I mean that if speed limits were uniformly enforced, you would start seeing a lot more actions on the side of the drivers to get speed limits up to more reasonable speeds. We would demand better and more frequent speed limit postings. And an industry would likely set up to help drivers in their task.

One of the problems with speed limits and speed limit enforcement is that a lot of speeders genuinely don’t intend to be speeding. My main fear with uniform enforcement (other than speed traps) is that it would penalize drivers who do not intend to do anything wrong, do not realize they are doing anything wrong, and would prefer not be doing anything wrong. It’s easy enough to say “Well they should be mindful of their speed” but frankly, if they’re going 30mph on a 25mph road, I would prefer that they be more mindful of the road.

I think that technology could provide a sort of solution for this. We’re already almost there. Some GPS systems actually have the speed limits on roads in the device. If you go over it, it turns red. It mostly pertains to freeways, but there is no reason that we can’t get to the point where all speed limits are included. And instead of it turning read, it bwoops whenever you’re speeding. Other than data volume concerns, which I believe will be addressed with time, the main concern would be data collection. How do they get all of those speed limits.

Now, one way of looking at it is that law enforcement agencies should be anxious to give their speed limits to the GPS makers because that would help reduce speeding. And since they’re not in it for the money, they should be glad to do so free of charge. Right? Getting real for a moment, I honestly think that making that data easily and freely available to the GPS-makers (and anyone else) ought to be another form of posting the speed limit. In other words, if they want to enforce the speed limit, they need to give out the data (or make sure that somebody else did). Otherwise, it’s an unposted speed limit and the speeder can get the charges dismissed on those grounds.

Tthis would come with its own costs in addition to data collection and disclosure on the part of the authorities. If successful, cities would lose a lot of revenue. They would need to raise local taxes. Everyone that gets less than the average number of tickets that thinks that they won’t still end up paying for some of the same things that tickets pay for now are deluding themselves. The money has to come from somewhere. There would be fewer traffic cops sitting around in expensive cars generating that revenue, though there would still be savings. But the speed cameras would have to be paid for.

Of course, all of this assumes that most drivers would, if given notification when they are speeding and reasonable speed limits, slow down. I think that this is true more often than some folks think. Some people like to feel smugly cynical and assume the worst of people, but the reasons that people speed now are plenty. A rule that isn’t regularly enforced isn’t really a rule and speed limits are not regularly enforced. Regularly enforce them and people will look at them differently. They will be more likely to demand that the rules be more fair and they will, because the alternative is a much higher likelihood of getting caught, follow the rules that are in place. People are more willing to follow the rules when they know that everybody else will, too. There’s nothing more frustrating than being the only guy on the road going the speed limit.

Everything takes longer than we think it will. Our moving was no exception and neither was the cleaning. We took two more hours than expected and that didn’t include the trip to the landfill. It was my third trip to the landfill that day and, because it was a weekend, the landfill was busy. By the time we got all that completed, it was already 5:30.

We had reservations at a hotel in Deseret that was about 8 hours away. We didn’t have the heart. The hotel was really cool about switching the days. We decided that we were going to just get the heck out of the Zaulem area for Saturday night. We’d make a three day trip out of it. Kind of pathetic, but we were exhausted. It turned out to be the right move because the second leg of our trip, which took place yesterday, Took Longer Than Expected.

Too much to do in this hotel room in too little time. I wanted to take advantage of the hot tub. I wanted to watch the last available vestiges of cable TV available to me. But mostly I want to surf the Internet because it’s going to take the local ISP two weeks to get me hooked up. It’ll also take me a bit of time to get cable/satellite hooked up (if we go that route). I absolutely have to find some sort of way to make sure that I don’t get behind on Lost. Any romantic notions of being unplugged go away when I’m really looking at the prospect of being unplugged.

I am writing this from the hotel in Deseret near the Arapaho border. We lost an hour due to the time change. My body has adjusted remarkably well. I will have no trouble sleeping tonight.

My voyage was going to be spent listening to the audiobook for Bourne Ultimatum, the third of the series of novels that the movies are very, very, very, very loosely based after. It’s 20 hours and the drive is barely more than half that. So I decided, when I had a trip out to Western Shores to pick up a couch, that I would start listening early and maybe get it finished on the drive. I did one better, listening while I cleaned and waited in the landfill queues and finished it before my drive even began. It’s the only think that did not take longer than expected. So I’ve spent the trip listening to one of what was supposed to be two audiobooks. I’ll barely finish the one. You would think that given a finite amount of time in the car that I would be able to plow through the audiobooks at a predictable pace, but not really. I lost time when driving through areas that require concentration. I lost an hour or so because I was getting sleepy and couldn’t listen to an audiobook, drive, and stay awake at the same time.

I was getting sleepy because I had a blood-sugar crash, which is pretty rare for me. I ate a whole Chick-Stick. I didn’t even want it all that much, but I used a convenience store restroom and like to extend patronage to those places that allow the public to use their restrooms. It was the cheapest option. I did the same thing earlier tonight (3/7), getting a candy bar. Using convenience store restrooms is bad for my waistline.

I am writing this post from a mostly empty room in a mostly empty house. We still have a lot of cleaning that we need to do, but the truck is finally packed. Clancy and I have collectively decided that this is the last time that we pack ourselves. I think I decided that last time, though the 18 months in between then and now I kinda sorta forgot why it was so important. When we moved out of Estacado, a bit part of the problem was a simple lack of preparation on our part. This time, both to avoid the problems of last time and because we had so much time, we were much more organized.

So by the time the truck rolled around, we were going to be good to go, right? Well, no. It turned into this weird sort of thing where every time we finished half of what need to be done, there was still half to go. We did half of what was needed and there was still half to go. Then we did half of what was left, which should have left only a quarter to go… but there was still half to go. Then we did the next half and instead of their being an eighth or a quarter left… there was still a half to go. For everything we accomplished, something new entered the calculation. Well, it wasn’t actually that because we had a list. Rather, it was that the stuff that we (or at least I) calculated as taking up a bulk of the time went by pretty quickly but that which we thought would be more quick ended up taking a lot longer. Invariably, it was the early stuff that fell into the first category and the late stuff in the second. Getting everything (or most of everything) on to the truck took no time flat. Getting it organized, on the other hand, took forever and a week. Twice as long as it has ever taken in the past, due to a number of factors including a moving truck not nearly as conducive to stacking stuff as the last moving truck and the fatigue that came with having already done so much. Adding 20% to the stuff we had to move ended up adding far more than 20% to the loading time.

The hope was that since we were giving ourselves more time that we could be more relaxed about it. The result was not only that we were not more relaxed, but we were stressed for that much longer.

It’s a funny thing about leaving a place. I was not thrilled about leaving Estacado because I really liked it there and though I was looking forward to Cascadia I could have spent the rest of my life in Santomas or Almeida, Estacado. So I wasn’t in a hurry. Until I was so tired of the moving process that I just wanted to be gone, gone, gone. The same applies doubly this time around. There are so many things that I love about the Zaulem Sound area and that I’m going to miss in Callie and Arapaho. I believe that I will find new treasures and delights in Arapaho, but what’s going to be missing is a little more apparent and I know that it may take me a while to find it. But I am so tired of packing and moving and this whole damn process that I cannot wait to see the “Welcome to Cascadia” sign in the rearview mirror and when I see the “Welcome to Arapaho” sign I will indeed feel welcome.

We put off the leave date for Saturday so that we can do a little recuperating while cleaning. We also want to visit an area attraction that we never got to go to while we were living here. The drive should take two days or so. Since it falls on a weekend, it shouldn’t affect Hit Coffee much except that I will be unplugging the Internet at some point later today and it will take a little bit of time to get it up and running in Callie. I have been relying on Sheila and Web to keep HC flowing and will continue to do so for at least another week.

One of the things that Clancy and I decided we wanted to do while we were here is pick up some furniture for the move. It’s kind of risky and not necessarily cheap because we’re having to get extra moving truck space, but there is a wealth of stuff available here on Craigslist where there is no counterpart in Arapaho. The two big things we wanted were a recliner and a sofa. We’ve been hobbling along on a single recliner throughout our time in Cascadia when we left my old one behind in Estacado (may it rest in peace) as it fell apart.

This was particularly inconvenient because our other piece of living room furniture, the futon, did not survive the trip. I mean, it didn’t break into a million pieces, but the wood panel on the bottom broke and so the futon sagged somethin’ fierce and was not easy to get in and out of with any real ease. Well, I guess gravity assisted with the “in”, but since you land on the injured would, you have to live with the guilt that each time you sit down, you’re making it more difficult to get back up. It’s a tough burden, man.

A couple months ago, a neighbor was getting rid of his loveseat and was asking a woman who lived across the alley if she wanted it. I volunteered to take it on the spot. I shifted the living room around a bit and we had the futon which had been transferred to stuff receptical duty and a coach one step away from the graveyard. Clancy says that there is a minor smell on Not-Futon, though I can’t smell it. There are a couple of minor tears. The idea was that we would take the couch cover from The Futon and put it on Not-Futon. Still, though, it was not something we were going to want to display prominently in our future living room. Still loads better than The Futon.

So we set out on Craigslist for some new furniture and ran across a La-Z-Boy recliner. Now, LZBs are not the most comfortable of chairs, but they’re still not bad. Clancy’s recliner is a La-Z-Boy and we like it fair enough. The big thing, though, for packing purposes is that the top comes off and that makes transfer easy. And what do you know? We’re transferring stuff in a few days. Someday I’m going to want the recliner of my dreams, but it’ll do for a while yet.

Searching for a sofa was a little bit harder. The hangup was that we found the perfect sofa/love-seat early on and couldn’t get our minds off of it. Nothing else came close. It was more than we wanted to spend and it came with a love seat, but the biggest issue is that we would have to pick it up from Western Shores, a rich-person community a couple of hours from here. Setting aside my distinct lack of enthusiasm about driving for five hours a couple days before driving for a dozen, that made the vehicle rental situation much more difficult.

UHaul has those nice signs on their trucks that say $19.99 or somesuch, but in small print is “plus mileage.” In fact, with a 50-mile minimum and required insurance (unless you have a $10k credit line), there’s no way that you can get out of there paying less than $60. However, we were looking at far above and beyond the minimum mileage. And at 60c a mile, it was going to get really expensive, really quick. Budget was the same way except that they charged more for mileage. So we went with Enterprise.

Enterprise, it turns out, has a bizarre definition of the word “reservation” and “confirmation.” Whereas I interpret these words to mean “You are confirmed! You have a reservation for a truck with us!” what they mean is “Oh, we may or may not actually have the truck we confirmed with you. And if we don’t, well, that’s just tough luck” because they feel absolutely no obligation to live up to the reservation. They refused to upgrade us for the same price, which is what businesses typically do. They called around, but when they found one, it was too much trouble to have it transferred to their location. And it was more expensive than our reservation and they would not compensate the difference. So for the honor of using Enterprise (which was, prior to this week, my rental agency of choice) we would have to drive half an hour to pick it up and we would be paying $10 more a day than what we had reserved.

Sadly, this was still better than our alternatives. Enterprise charges a lot more by the day, but gives you unlimited in-state miles. Since we were going to be putting some serious miles on it, they could have charged us a lot more and still been cheaper than UHaul or Budget. That being said, getting an Enterprise through the website is a really bad idea. Apparently, they make reservations without regard to availability. This was a real sore point in the Paulsboro Enterprise, even though in this case they had what we wanted. It would have been a sore point at their Soundview Location, if they’d cared. I’ve noticed this before with Enterprise in that I will reserve one model and end up with another in the same class. As long as they have something, I don’t care about the particulars. This was different.

What Enterprise does not have is CD players in their vehicles. Clancy warned me about this, but it was still odd to see a car – any car – without CD players. I mean, how much could it possibly cost to have one installed and though most people won’t care, for some people it means spending hours in the car in between municipalities with no entertainment. Some people like me.

Last move, I kind of bugged my mother-in-law with my need to burn a bunch of audiobooks for the trip at the last minute. It was actually one of those things that was supposed to take only a few minutes but because of technical difficulties distracted me for a couple hours. This time she wasn’t around while I was scrambling to set up my audio entertainment. I took one of my old Pocket PCs and transferred the audio books to it and I’ll listen on bluetooth on the drive. I managed to mostly do this while resting in between taking boxes out, but man it would have been easier with a CD player.

So yesterday I picked up the recliner, which turned out to be closer than the one that we originally decided on. We had initially decided on one that was nearly the exact same as the one we had, but it was out in Enterprise City (no relation to the rental agency). Then one opened up at the next town over and that was more appealing. It was a different color, but I actually decided that I liked that because it wouldn’t look weird if they were two shades of faded.

Later today I’m driving out to Western Shores to pick up the couch and love seat. I’ll be wishing and hoping and praying that it will all fit into the cargo van. I think it will. I packed up most of my clothes yesterday, so I’m sort of slumming it today. The impression I get from these people and where they live and their wonderful couch that they’re getting rid of that these people have money and lots of it. I’m oddly self-conscious about it. Like I’m not worthy of the couch that they are bestowing upon me. Okay, not really. But sort of. No, not really. A little. I never claimed to be entirely rational.

I’ve mentioned before that we’re a bit unsure about what to do about our moving truck outside. When we moved in, the truck got a warning about “commercial trucks in a residential zone” or something to that effect. Man, I wish I’d kept that warning. Our landlord thinks that our neighbor dropped the dime on us. They apparently have a history. We were warned pretty thoroughly not to park in front of her house. Legally, there’s nothing you can do to prevent people from parking in front of your house, but as a courtesy we avoided it. Unfortunately, she has not been extending us the same courtesy with one of her cars perpetually parked in front of our house. Ordinarily, this isn’t a big deal because we park around back. But it does kind of rankle a bit. And it’ll inconvenience both us and our neighbor if we can’t park in front of our own place.

We’ve been debating how much trouble to go through to find out what kind of liability we face. I’ve asked around and as far as anybody knows, there shouldn’t be a problem. I mean, people have got to be able to move in, right? And it’s possible that the warning before was a mistake. It was a “commercial” vehicle in the strict sense, but not in the sense that you think of commercial vehicles. Further, it didn’t have any exterior markings to let an industrious officer know that it was a moving vehicle. It looks to all the world like a regular truck. So maybe it was a misunderstanding that we could have cleared up if we’d talked to the officer in question (we had the truck moved the day after the citation – we were done packing. We’ve seen a lot of UHauls around.

Anyway, so nobody was of any help in finding out who we would even need to contact because nobody had ever had this particular problem. So I was leaning towards letting it slide and hoping for the best. The main concern is that since it’ll be parked here over the weekend, we won’t be able to “hurry up” and get it out of here. It’s here from Friday to Monday come what may. As I was eating dinner tonight, I scanned over the document from the company we’ll be using and it said to contact local traffic enforcement if we needed a permit. That made perfect sense. It was our first lead.

So tomorrow I am headed down to the local PD office and I’m going to come out and ask them. It’s a bit risky because if they say something like “Oh, we don’t expect people to have to park a truck overnight to be able to move. There is no permit. You’ll just have to find another way to move” well, I will no longer be able to say “gosh, officer, I didn’t know” and they’ll probably know exactly where to look for any illegally parked trucks. Ideally, they’ll say that there is an exemption for moving trucks and I won’t have to get any sort of permit and I can explain to any officer that wants to ticket the vehicle what is going on. Next best is if they can sell me a permit off right there. Middle-case is that I’ll end up having to go down to the county courthouse or DMV or something.

As long as I get the permit, I really don’t care. I was previously going to set out fliers to our neighbors letting them know the truck was going to be coming and to apologize for the inconvenience. Sometimes, if you are just open and straight with people, they’ll be more forgiving. Especially when they know the truck is going to be gone soon. But I’d rather not have to rely on the kindness of neighbors. If need be, I’d like to be able to politely tell our complaining neighbor who parks in front of our house where she can shove it.

Update: No permit required, apparently. I spoke to a volunteer at the substation as well as an officer there. He said that as long as it’s a moving truck, there shouldn’t be a problem. He is with me that the problem before was that it was not clearly marked. There is some concern of people parking trailers and containers on the street and people living out of them (!!) and that was probably why it got some attention before. If I have any problem, he says that I should just contact the substation and explain the situation.

Part of me wishes that I could have gotten a permit. That would have made me bulletproof. Though the people I talked to didn’t know of any ordinance, an industrious neighbor may know something they don’t. So while I’m feeling pretty good about it now (and can tell anyone upset that I have contacted the police), a part of me takes back my previous suggestion that this would be ideal. Now, if nobody complains, then it will turn out to have been ideal all along. I’m probably just being paranoid here because of my tendency to explore worst-case scenarios, which in this case could be pretty bad. But it seems rather unlikely. So we’ll see. At least on the Callie end of things, they’ll be able to park it on the driveway.

Toyota has been making the news lately in ways that I’m sure they wish they weren’t. As most of you know, it was discovered that they have a problem with their accelerators getting stuck. The actual frequency of this problem is under dispute as any accident involving a failure to break and involving a Toyota magically becomes a hardware problem rather than a driver problem, but things like sticky accelerators have a way of getting people’s attention. The media has been having a field day and the government is coming down hard on Toyota.

Some are suggesting that the government is coming down particularly hard on Toyota because the government is, along with the Canadian government, a majority shareholder in General Motors. The more I think about this, the less sure I am that one has all that much bearing on the other. Maybe it plays a role, but there are other factors that play a bigger role. Namely press coverage and Toyota’s origin.

The press has loved the Toyota story because it’s Toyota, the number one selling automaker in the world. Not just that, but Toyotas are known for their reliability. If it were Jeep or Suzuki having problems, there would surely be coverage but I am not sure there would be nearly as much. While nobody expects Jeep or Suzuki to be dangerous, nobody expects them to be particularly reliable, either. Reliability is what Toyota is known for and thus that makes it a much more interesting story. It’s also a story because Toyota’s handling of the issue has been insufficient. My friend Rick, a longtime skeptic of “sudden acceleration” claims (and not a Toyota owner), believes that the media has gone out of control on this. Whether Rick is right or wrong, Toyota may have been thinking along similar lines and expected more people to be skeptical of the drivers making the claims. Or else Toyota just didn’t understand our culture and our media and failed to grasp how devastating this would be. Transportation Secretary Roy LaHood has said that the North American leadership was actually very responsive but they had trouble getting through to Japan, so culture may be an issue.

Regardless, the media sprang on the story and politicians of all political stripes love to capitalize on a good story. They especially love to do so when the villains fall outside their constituency. This is where Toyota being a Japanese company comes into play. The Democrats’ constituency is in Detroit. Not just in that the government owns a Detroit company but also because of labor relations and in the case of LaHood (a Republican) and Obama himself, it’s right in their back yard. Toyota builds cars in the US, but they’re not as much union factories (or what unions they do have are not as strong because they did not exist when the unions themselves were stronger). Plus… well… Toyota is foreign. This country has Ford people and Chevy people and some Dodge/Chrysler people, but Toyota owners may keep buying Toyotas but they don’t identify with the carmaker as much.

So, in addition to thinking that this would be less of a big deal if it were Suzuki or Jeep, I think that it would be less of a big deal with Ford or Chrysler even though they compete directly with General Motors.

This happens to be the perfect storm and Toyota, a company not used to making mistakes, is caught in the crosswinds. In a way I consider it unfortunate because, while I’m not quite as skeptical as Rick, I do think that this has been blown out of proportion both by an overenthusiastic government and Toyota’s handling of the issue. We’ve more-or-less decided to get a Subaru for our next vehicle, but at least a part of me is wondering if maybe I should be giving Toyota another look. While Subaru is having trouble keeping up with their inventory, Toyota may be really anxious to make whatever sale they can.

A while back (I’m too lazy to look it up), Web made a comment about how people complain about car dealers without any real appreciation for how small their profits can be.

He may be right about that, though I think that to some degree the dealers bring it on themselves. Not on a personal basis, but by the model that they work through. The negotiation set-up invites the sort of animosity that occurs. If you trust a salesperson, you are likely to get rolled over. Since determining that we were going to be buying a new(-to-us) car, I’ve had to do all manner of research in two different areas. Having to research different makes and models is unavoidable (and kind to fun, to be honest).

What I find most aggravating is having to research for the sake of getting the best deal that I can. I’m likely going to have to pay entities to find out exactly how much I should be paying for the car. Then I’m going to have to find out what tricks they will use to get me to pay more. Then I’m likely going to have to go to one dealer after another to try to get that deal. All along the way, I’m going to have to put on my best poker face to avoid giving them the impression that I am actually excited to buy the car, that I really want a particular make and model and color. Because if I let them know what I really want, I lose my bargaining chip. I’d end up having to get a color or something I don’t want just because it would be a harder sell for them. Or I pay more for one color car over another even though (with the exception of black paint and white) they all cost about the same.

The price-opacity is stressful and maddening. They know how much they’re willing to sell the car for (more-or-less), but I don’t know how much I should be willing to pay for a car (without help).

When it comes to used cars, this state of affairs is less avoidable. Since every car is a unique combination of year, mileage, and wear-and-tear, everybody is just winging it. Not so for new cars.

There are some no-haggle dealerships around, but they seem to be priced near where the regular dealerships are. I may end up going that route anyway just to save myself the hassle. But of course, I would do so knowing that somebody, somewhere paid less because they did more research or had a better poker face.

One of the things I find interesting is that two of the badges I know 0f with the most loyal following are Saturns (well, a soon to be former badge I guess) and Scions. Both are cars the fill (or filled) a particular niche, but I also think that part of it is that it’s much easier to buy a new one and come out of the dealership feeling a lot better about your purchase.