Sunday, February 12, 2012

Crafting - My Star Trek Quiet Book

This Christmas I decided to get crafty with Bob's Christmas gift. I am a quasi crafty person, basically when I like something I decide to try it. So when I saw this I couldn't resist but to try to make it. I took some short cuts, got the help of friends, cursed a ton, but finished it. And here it is in all it's glory; My Star Trek Quiet Book
And this ladies and gentleman, was probably the last crafting project I'm going to do for a while. It took a lot out of me.

Yuppies

We've done a lot of adult things over the past couple of years, bought a house, embarked on crazy renovations, spent Saturday afternoons at the Home Depot and Lowe's, caned food, joined a farm share and the list goes on. We've adapted to our Ann Arbor lifestyle quite well; vegan diet, geothermal heating/cooling, not shaving often, again the farm share, composting, recycling, general crunchy granola earthy type stuff.

We've been talking about replacing the old Cavalac, Rosie, for a long time now and have spent hours on the web searching for the right car. If it were up to me, I'd get an old school station wagon with wood paneling. Surprisingly, there are not a lot of station wagon's, or as the young kids like to call them, sports wagons, or just wagons out there. Cars that call themselves station wagons, are actually SUV's. I've always wanted a Subaru Outback, but the new models are way too big (SUV) sluggish and I just wasn't really impressed. I had two major requirements for a new car, 1) all three dogs can fit in the trunk 2) all wheel drive 3) a manual transmission. I quickly gave up on the all wheel drive because all I got was large SUV's (even the midsize ones are too big for me). In the end we narrowed our choices to two, the Mazda 5 and the car we bought.  So we traded in this:

Communists Make Better Lovers
The front side
  




For this:

Ladies and gentleman, we bought a Prius V. A hybrid station wagon. As if all the Ann Arbor things I mentioned about us wasn't enough, we now have hybrid to add to the list.  We test drove it on a whim, not really expecting anything out of it. In fact, I doubted it would be big enough. But the Toyota people were really nice and let us test drive the car with three dogs. Yes, all three dogs jumped into the brand new Prius, and the good news? They fit!! All of them.  So why not?

It was hardest to give up the manual transmission, however, the car has been pretty awesome.

Our first real ride in the car was a road trip to Canada. We pulled onto the freeway, listening to NPR, with a soy cappuccino in the cup holder and I thought, "Yup. We are total Ann Arbor Yuppies now."