V/A

Various items of note:

First, I made the last payment on my car. Toyota sent me a bunch of paperwork, and then a free-and-clear title came from the state. This is a 2014 Prius C that I got almost exactly three years ago. I stretched out the three-year loan because they gave me 0% financing, so no reason to pay it off early. That leaves my house as my only debt, and that won’t be paid off any time soon, although we did just round a corner on the number in the leftmost column of the balance, if that makes any sense.

This car still feels mostly new to me, because I barely drive it. It’s three years old, and I have not cracked 9000 miles yet. Aside from work (50 miles) and a trip to Davis (70 miles), the only long trip it’s taken is the 120-mile drive I took to Castle AFB last year. There’s a door ding and a few scratches on the driver side, and it could use a detail, but it’s otherwise in newish condition. I will probably keep it as long as possible, or until I have to start commuting to work again. If I had to go back to driving a hundred miles a day again, I’d probably upgrade to a model with more adjustable seats, and a backup camera. Otherwise, I’ll keep going on this one, especially since the new Prius looks pretty stupid.

I also don’t want to upgrade my laptop, and the 500GB drive was getting full, so I got an external from Santa and moved all of my photos off my machine. That gave me back about 150GB, so I’ve got some breathing room. I really don’t want to go to the new touchbar Mac, and I don’t want to pay four grand for the pleasure of doing it. Sarah just had to upgrade her 2009 MBP and take the hit price-wise. I’m curious how that works out, as far as the lack of ports and so forth.

I do need to upgrade my iPad at some point — it is the 2012-era iPad 4, which still gets the latest OS, but is getting flaky. Also my smart cover is disintegrating, and I can’t justify hunting down a new one just to use until the actual hardware croaks. It’s a bad time to upgrade, though; there are rumors that March will see an entirely new line.

And there’s the question about whether or not it’s even worth it to stay in the Apple ecosystem or jump ship. But I interact with Windows enough at the day job to know I can’t go there. And I would have to ditch Scrivener and find a new writing workflow, and that isn’t happening. I do hope Apple gets their shit straight though.

The weather here is still horrible. Cold, rainy, dark. Walking every day has been a real challenge. The weather also has been reminding me heavily of when I was in Seattle, especially the last winter or so. Seattle was beautiful from April-October, and I somehow powered through the first winter without major problems. But the second year was brutal. I don’t know how I managed to survive four winters there without taking a vacation or investing in a full-spectrum light.

So for whatever reason, there’s a weird nostalgia callback from the gray skies overhead. It makes me think of Seattle, which makes me think about people from Seattle, and jobs in Seattle, and all the various things I fucked up while I lived there. So that’s not good.

(Grammar tip: gray versus grey. GrAy with an A for America; GrEy with an E for England.)