I also got the side of the cabinet attached last night. The glue didn't work worth a damn though, so we shall see how well this worked.
I also got the support for the shelf above the fridge installed. I need to clean off the top of the fridge before I attach the shelf though. Too much booze in the way.
Also, just as a reminder to me, I need to get my truck undercoated. If I remember correctly, Tucker's is the guy that did the welding on my camper frame. The work was fine, but he took forever to get it done.
I also started car searching in earnest last night. I started at the Honda dealer. The Accord doesn't look like it will meet my comfort demands. I also stopped at the Nissan dealer. There was still a sales guy there at 8 so I got to take one aroudn the parking lot. While they have fixed a lot of my gripes and it has a lot of the niceties (remote starter, its actually an AWD, etc), it is narrower on the inside than the Geo. Next up I stopped at Ford, who doesn't even stock Ford cars anymore (Ford is getting out of the car business though). Next up was Hyundai. Disappointingly they also only had one Sonata on the lot. It had the same appearance as the others (large center console, steering wheel in the dash) but the car was locked. I made an interesting observation there though, the Elantra (their compact) honestly looked like it was more comfortable. The seat appeared to be the same as the Sonata, but because the car was smaller the console was very small. Last up I checked Mazda. Unlike the others, they had a whopping 2 mid-size cars on the lot. The Mazda 6 actually looked like a decent car. It had a big console (just like everything else) but the steering wheel looked right and all that. I didn't bother to look at a Chevy (they have already-broken-down-Yugo rated reliability). I couldn't remember where the Kia dealer was either.
So that was disappointing. Something that popped into my head as I was chatting with Mike though was why not just sell the car and drive my truck full time? I don't really need two vehicles. The benefit of the car is comfort, the car will never pay for itself based on superior gas mileage. I calculated out that at 33mpg (most of the cars I looked at don't quite get that), I am looking at ~1200 in gas every year (I drive around 15k miles). If I do that same driving in my truck (average of 15mpg) it runs me around 2500. The car will take over 17 years to pay for itself (assuming a 23k car, which is among the cheapest I found. The added wear and tear on the truck isn't really a negative (considering how much I love the design of the truck) and if I were a betting man I would guess the truck rots away before it breaks down at this point anyways; it is already 9 years old, has never been undercoated, and has less than 100k on it. That allows me to redirect the 8-9k I have saved for a down payment to something like the septic loan or my mortgage, plus whatever I get for selling the car.
I went up to the Honda dealer today at lunch and sat in one of their show models, and it wasn't as bad as it looked. They do have telescoping steering wheel (their website doesn't actually list it) and was wider than it looked, with one fatal exception: they added an additional cutout thing that goes directly into my kneecap for the start button. Remembering the Hyundai experience from last night, I also sat in a Civic. It was smaller, but more comfortable than the Accord. The model on the floor though was a Sport Coupe though, so I would have to see if a regular Civic is the same way. I want to do more research on it too. I plan on visiting the Hyundai dealer this afternoon, and the Kia dealer (I want to look up their models first though)
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