Saturday night sunset

I don’t use the blog to rant about things, but here goes.

First, do you know what the highest grossing movie was over the weekend?  An epic of world war II?  The Oscar buzzed space movie ‘Intersteller’?  Perhaps the new Bill Murrey flick?  A story about one of the greatest physicists of all time? None of the above.

“Dumb and dumber to”.  Top movie last week. Grossed 38 million dollars.  As a species we are doomed.

But I suspect both dumb and dumber were engineers at Chevrolet during the Malibu’s inception.  Remember I bought a 2008 Chevy Malibu, the most unexciting car in the world?  As I get to know it better, I have two complaints.

First off the speedometer goes to 220 miles per hour.  This in a car where ‘crisp’ would be an overstatement when describing acceleration.  ‘Pedestrian’ would be more appropriate. I’ve had the car up to perhaps 75 miles an hour and I suppose it could go a little faster if I wanted.  But even in free fall, I suspect terminal velocity for the car is under 220 and under its own power I doubt the thing would hit 100.


So why did engineers at GM have a gauge that is double the maximum and triple the practical?  I’ll probably never know.  But all my driving will be in the first third of the gauge and the difference between 50 and 60 or 60 to 70 is pretty difficult to discern.

The second complaint is the method of changing a simple headlight bulb.  I went to the owners manual and in clear simple terms it describes how to change nearly every light on the car.  The tail light was a snap.  But nothing about the head light.  There is a sentence in the manual that says ‘for any lamp not covered by this manual please go to your dealer’.

A quick check on the internet reveals why.  You need to take the entire front bumper off the car to change the headlamp.  There are several you tube videos on the subject, one where a 7 year old performs the procedure.  The 7 year old said was a pain and I believe him.  But it did give me the courage to do it myself.

Other than those 2 things, the Malibu is performing as advertised.  Which means it gets me from point A to point B in a quasi economical matter.

UPDATE:  I wrestled with the car for an hour yesterday.  I followed all the steps on the internet.  Failed miserably.  The light housing is immovable.  Looks like I need to take the car to the dealer to get a headlight replaced.  Phooey.

UPDATE #2:  Today (Sunday) I wrestled with the car again. Success. Still much ill will towards whoever decided to design the car the way they did.

Other updates:  A neighbor came over to dinner Saturday night to enjoy Jodi’s homemade winter chili.  Great conversation, turns out he worked on the show ‘Northern Exposure’ as the lead actors stand in and was part of the core group that worked on the show.  We quickly found out we had a common friend who was the animal trainer on that show.  Anne now lives in Panama but pinged in on Facebook Sunday morning and we had one of those ‘small world’ conversations via Facebook messaging.

Bruno stopped by with Chewie, a great, but somewhat stubborn, dog.  When chewie wants to go somewhere, he really digs in his heels and goes, sometimes dragging Bruno — or at minimum impeding his forward progress.  It doesn’t help that whenever we see him a dog cookie magically appears.

Experimented with night photography Saturday night as well.

It rained heavily Saturday night with strong winds.  After coffee the clouds parted, the wind stopped and the seas were calm.  Perfect time for a kayak outing.

Here are some pics.

First snow