Non-fill post
The weather has broken to the point that I actively enjoy being outside, but of course the sun has gone down and the family remains out of town, so I pretended it was twenty years ago (the mind boggles!) and went for a random drive on back roads I only barely know with the windows and the roof open. No music this time. The drill is to burn around on unfamiliar roads with only a vague destination in mind, probably get lost, and then get back home. Ideally, the whole experience takes under forty-five minutes and doesn't involve any traffic, nor traffic lights. I mostly hit neither. Three or four of these a week is how I survived the second half of high school.
This part of Massachusetts is much, much less rural than central Vermont—and the roads are as uninteresting and straight as that mostly implies—but it beats watching television.
I have decided that it's exceptionally nice, even in traffic, to have a manual transmission car. But I expect (hope) that this is the last internal combustion–powered car I'll ever have. I won't even really miss shifting all that much in our quiet electricity-and-batteries future, since one can't lug an electric motor.