Category: Travel

Jetta TDI Sportswagen

I bought a new car. My Passat sedan is gone, replaced by a Jetta TDI Sportwagen.

I’m not going to go all introspective on you, but I still have a little trouble keeping car buying decisions entirely rational. The rational thing, in terms of pure personal/familial economics, would have been to drive the Passat “into the ground” and then replace it with something even more fuel efficient (the Passat got 18-31 MPG in my experience; the TDI, a diesel, should be good per EPA figures for 30 in the city, 42 on the highway).

But the TDI is simultaneously:

  • Sportier (it has a slightly rakish look and a sunroof that goes on forever)
  • More practical (station wagon in slight disguise; my older brother said of his that he feels like a teenage boy with his first pickup truck: “Can I take a bunch of stuff to Goodwill?”
  • Obviously, much more fuel efficient.

I’m aware, however, that it’s still a part of the great, ultimately-unsustainable, Happy Motoring Great American Auto Scam. It even comes with a tax rebate for energy efficiency.

Sigh.

Well, gotta go now. The road beckons.

Amo, Amas, I love a lass …

I could call it “Haikuly yours III,” but I’ll save that because (a) this one’s public domain now and (b) I know this poem and can sing it rousingly:

Amo, Amas

by John O’Keefe

Amo, Amas, I love a lass
As a cedar tall and slender;
Sweet cowslip’s grace is her nominative case,
And she’s of the feminine gender.

Rorum, Corum, sunt divorum,
Harum, Scarum divo;
Tag-rag, merry-derry, periwig and hat-band
Hic hoc horum genitivo.

Can I decline a Nymph divine?
Her voice as a flute is dulcis.
Her oculus bright, her manus white,
And soft, when I tacto, her pulse is.

Rorum, Corum, sunt divorum,
Harum, Scarum divo;
Tag-rag, merry-derry, periwig and hat-band
Hic hoc horum genitivo.

Oh, how bella my puella,
I’ll kiss secula seculorum.
If I’ve luck, sir, she’s my uxor,
O dies benedictorum.

Rorum, Corum, sunt divorum,
Harum, Scarum divo;
Tag-rag, merry-derry, periwig and hat-band
Hic hoc horum genitivo.

(“Amo, Amas” by John O’Keefe. Public domain.)

For what it’s worth, I can still sing the Portugese national anthem from memory, 42 years after the Wheaton College Men’s Glee Club learned it for our European tour. Rote memorization is odd.

Interlochen Center for the Arts

I need to think on good, kind, pure and “of good report” things after my last rant. An incident this evening makes that easy.

A few hours ago, the phone rang. My wife, upstairs, answered and directly called my name down the stairs that it was for me.

I knew it was going to be a charity or a “would you hold for an important recorded message  Grand Poobah Sen. Slicksy from Southern North Dakota?” political pitch. Indiana’s no-call law has reduced to naught the commercial cold-calls, but charities and politicians are bidding to fill the gap. Continue reading “Interlochen Center for the Arts” →

Travelogoblog

Retired Indianopolis Elder Law attorney Phillip Price will set out, volcano (and God) willing, on a 500 mile hike in France and Spain, blogging merrily as he goes:

Join me on my Camino de Santiago (Way of St James).  My journey begins  April 28, 2010 departing from Indianapolis, IN.  I start walking on April 30 in St Jean Pied de Port, France, cross through a mountain pass in the Pyrenees and walk westward to Santiago de Compostela, Spain about 497 miles of walking over 36 days.

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