Archive for February 25th, 2007

2000 Subaru Legacy GT

Sunday, February 25th, 2007

My old 1993 Ford Explorer finally decided to come to an end when it started leak­ing gaso­line at a truly alarm­ing rate (you could see the pud­dles and drip trails). I sold the Explorer, right quick, over Craigslist for the rea­son­able price of $150 (with­out the stereo sys­tem). Then, between my solidly good 2006 tax return and my mother’s offer of sup­port, I set out to pur­chase a new vehi­cle. My new pur­chase was intended to be my first pur­chase of a car in good con­di­tion, to date.

I went to a num­ber of deal­er­ships with a very spe­cific set of min­i­mum require­ments in mind: 4WD/AWD, ABS, >20MPG, seat 5, have room for my stuff. The first vehi­cle that I encoun­tered, which met my require­ments was a Subaru Outback Sport but, upon test dri­ving, the car made a funny sound and really didn’t have much pickup. There turned out to be rel­a­tively few cars that met my stan­dards and seemed decent, namely a few Subarus and some Honda CR-Vs. In the end, the spe­cific car that most caught my inter­est was a 2000 Subaru Legacy GT. The Legacy had 71k miles on it, the clean­est engine that I’d seen, sounded great and felt great dur­ing test dri­ving. I ended up buy­ing that Legacy GT and am, really, quite pleased by my purchase.

I’m very happy to have a new car, espe­cially one as nice as the one that I’ve gotten.

UPDATE: It turns out that the Subaru AWD setup is decid­edly not over­rated when it comes to han­dling snow. We had a bit of a snow­storm – just over a foot – and I had needs that were best served by dri­ving to Target and Rainbow (our local gro­cery chain). There was, as expected, a solid layer of com­pacted snow sit­ting on the roads at the time, which allowed for ade­quate adverse weather han­dling tests. During the few instances when I found myself los­ing con­trol, the loss was min­i­mal and con­trol was regained in an instant. I should also like to note that the ABS com­bined with four disc brakes was quite fan­tas­tic in its stop­ping power. All in all, I am pleased to note that my car meets my adverse weather han­dling requirements.

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Coconuts

Sunday, February 25th, 2007

For the longest time, I really did not like coconut; mostly I couldn’t stand the shred­ded coconut that they put on candy bars, cakes and the like. Then, just recently, I hap­pened to be watch­ing Man vs. Wild, which is a fan­tas­tic show, and Bear Grylls was hark­ing on about the awe­some­ness of coconuts, hav­ing har­vested one for food and water. Having Bear Grylls speak so pos­i­tively of coconuts caused me to desire one greatly and, in spite of my pre­vi­ous dis­like thereof, I went to Rainbow – my local gro­cer – and bought a coconut for myself.

Much like lob­sters, another thing that I used to hate but have come to love, coconuts have a hard shell that is fan­tas­ti­cally fun to crack open. As with lob­ster, I have always like crack­ing coconuts open and have recently come to a changed taste opin­ion. I now find coconuts to be mighty tasty. On top of their mighty tasti­ness, coconuts are really quite good for you, serv­ing as a great source of vit­a­mins, min­er­als and fiber. To throw an inter­est­ing fact into the fray, coconut water is an iso­tonic liq­uid that can be used as an intra­venous fluid. Basically, coconuts are awe­some and I was a fool for not believ­ing as such earlier.

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