Miranda’s Back, Car’s Serviced, Art Pending

Busy, busy Saturday. But then, I always seem to say that, don’t I? 🙂 Well, it’s the truth. Today started with Ian, Tammy and I heading out at nine to go to Sidney to pick up Miranda after her week of visiting with Carol and Colin. But not before we spent an hour or so cleaning up just in case the realtor wanted to show our house while we were gone. Our other thing to accomplish was taking the car to get serviced at 1:30, so we expected to be out for a while.

We picked Miranda up no problem at 10, and then we pondered what to do until 1:30. It was just too short a wait to justify heading home. We didn’t really have any plans, other than stopping by Island Blueprint while waiting for the car. So Simon got evil…

Just a little backstory here: Tammy likes German stuff. When I first knew her, she told me she wanted either a VW Scirocco or a Porsche 944 (a little influence from “Sixteen Candles” on the second one, I think). Lately, there’s been a lot of advertising about the VW Golf, which has been irritating/tempting her. Irritating, because she likes the look of the previous Golf model, not the new one. But she’s being reminded about it all the time. It’s one of those things like in the VW Beetle commercials a few years ago, where the guy has a little green Beetle growing on his forehead. When we had our news about the difficulty with our squeaky floors, Tammy came blurted out a “Plan B”: just get a second car so she doesn’t feel trapped out here when Miranda and I are away at the dojo. Of course, that “second car” was mentioned in the context of yet another Golf commercial, IIRC.

So I called her bluff. We parked at Mayfair and I said we were going for a little walk. Halfway to Speedway Motors, Tammy guessed where we were going. We poked around the lot for a while. Tammy was searching for a Golf with a 5-speed and 5 doors. There were a couple high-end models, one black one silver for around 30k that met those criteria. When we’d moved along enough that Tammy was starting so look a bit disappointed, we spotted this:

Oh noes! This was exactly what she was looking for, down to the last iota. 93,000 km on it, $15,000. I didn’t expect that. I was just planning on “getting it out of her system”, letting her look at the cars. Hmmm… maybe it backfired. I guess we’ll have to see what happens.

After that, we walked up to Red Robin for lunch. Lunch was finished soon enough that we still had some time to kill before we needed to be at Mazda, so we popped up to Mount Tolmie, where the kids scrambled around on the rocks for a bit. It was a beautiful day for it.

After dropping off the car, we had two basic goals: go to Island Blueprint to eyeball the French easels, and get some ice cream. The first was about finally getting an easel for me. I really would like to try my hand at pastelling out doors (en plein air, as the French say), but that requires an easel. So I wanted to look at the ones at Island Blueprint so I could ask for one for my birthday. We did that, and then walked all the way to the Dairy Queen on Douglas St. After that, we stopped by Artworld, just to see what was there. Normally their prices are a bit high, but I’ve found my pastel boxes there. They had two models of French easel, including a Richeson for only $80. Regular price $245. The ones I was looking at at Island Blue were $179 or $345. I investigated the easel thoroughly, and I couldn’t find anything wrong with it. So we picked it up. Here it is assembled at home, with my latest work on it.

I’m going to start practicing using it and putting it up and down (it collapses down for carrying) before heading outside with it.