Saturday, October 31, 2009

We bought a hybrid... and it's not a Prius!


We just bought a fancy, new car, a Ford Fusion Hybrid. We live in a small, left-wing town (Ashland, OR) where every other car is a Prius. We like being different.

We bought a Ford Fusion Hybrid because:
  • It drives like a dream.
  • It gets excellent gas mileage, 41 city and 36 highway MPG per EPA, though we're getting better than that.
  • Hybrids are better for the environment and help reduce our dependence on foreign oil.
  • The Prius is prissy. The Fusion Hybrid is a real car with muscle.
  • We're proud to buy from a U.S. company.
  • Ford didn't take the U.S. government bailout.
  • Ford understands that we live in a global economy. The transmission comes from Japan, the engine from Mexico, and the assembly was done in Mexico.
  • Many parts were made in the U.S. and the design, engineering, marketing, sales, and management were done in the U.S. Plus, profits stay in the U.S.
  • Supporting the U.S. automotive industry saves jobs and helps spur the development of new technologies in the U.S.
  • Whereas I'd like to see more manufacturing jobs stay in the U.S., as a technical instructor, I'm confident that many manufacturing workers can be retrained to work in IT, green tech, and healthcare. Ford supports Michigan's No Worker Left Behind program, which has shown great promise so far. (I'm not always opposed to government programs, especially not ones that support education. :-)
  • We liked all the salesmen we encountered in our quest to buy a new car (the ones at Toyota and Honda as well as Ford), and we were pleased with the friendly (no pressure) way that cars are sold these days. (It's been 12 years since we bought a car). But we were especially impressed by the extra effort the Ford salesmen made to get us the car we wanted.
  • We were able to buy local (from Butler Ford right here in Ashland). To buy a Prius or Honda, we had to drive to Medford. We would have caused extra emissions just to buy a hybrid. :-)
  • I don't want to re-learn how to start a car. The Prius doesn't even start like a normal car. I work with annoying technology all day (I work on a PC) and I want my car to just work, without a bunch of technology that might be flakey and hard to use. Both my husband and I were concerned that the Prius has too many gizmos, too much technology.
  • What's with that silly 2-inch gear shift in the Prius? You give it a little poke but then it pops back to its holding place. I want a "real" gear shift that has some moxie. :-)
  • The Honda Insight LX we drove felt like a Go Kart. (Perhaps the EX model is better though.)
  • We like the dashboard in the Fusion, especially the LCD screens. Making more leaves appear as you get better gas mileage is fun, though I did run a yellow light while focusing on the leaves. Ooops.
  • My husband doesn't care too much about the leaves but he likes the other displays (the more manly, left-brained graphs for MPG, battery usage, tachometer, vehicle power demand, and all that other automotive stuff).
  • Speaking of technology, we can sync our iPhones to our new car with Microsoft Sync. We hope that actually works... We haven't tried it yet.
  • Finally, by buying a Ford, I have bragging rights with my fellow Michiganders. Go Blue!

Wednesday, October 7, 2009

Women are from Mars (or at least want to go there!)


A couple of weekends ago our local ScienceWorks Museum hosted NASA's Exploration Experience, an interactive traveling exhibit that lets visitors embark on a simulated journey into space. As you can see, I got to pretend I was an astronaut! This got me reminiscing about whether I ever really wanted to be an astronaut. I don't think I did. I assumed that people of all sorts would engage in space travel, not just astronauts. I envisioned traveling to the Moon or other planets in our Solar System, or even beyond our Solar System. As far as career aspirations, I admired astronauts, but I admired engineers (the makers of things) and teachers more.

Whenever anyone asked me what I wanted to do when I grew up, I said teacher. That was a safe choice for a girl in the 1960s. But the things I did for fun, in addition to teaching my little sisters, were pure engineer geek. I exchanged messages in secret code with my little brother, worked on the square root of 2 out to tens of digits (without, I must admit, realizing that this task would never end), tried to trisect a triangle, designed and drew mazes, read nerdy books, and practiced my viola.

Once we took an aptitude test (I think this was in 4th grade). The test said I should be a mechanical engineer. The other students made fun of me unmercifully! Next time we took an aptitude test I paid more attention to the clerical questions that were clearly geared towards making sure the female test-taker could show her aptitude for secretarial work.

I wonder if I had chosen to become an astronaut, whether I would have been successful. Wired Magazine has a fascinating article this month about women who trained to be astronauts in the late 1950s. The US government actually trained some women. They made good candidates because they were lightweight, hard workers, excellent pilots, and able to pass grueling endurance tests. The program was cancelled in 1961 though. Perhaps the women outshone the men! We can't have that! Back to the secretarial pool with you.

Well, it looks like I may never travel to space, but at least I can pretend, thanks to ScienceWorks and NASA. And thank goodness I have been able to become an engineer and teacher. I would make an abysmal secretary.

Thursday, October 1, 2009

Autumn Musings

My patient blog readers may be wondering where I've been. I somehow didn't manage to blog for the entire month of September. I find myself quite melancholy most Septembers. I think about family, harvests, and saying goodbye to old friends. I think about making pies and new websites and new iPhone apps, but ideas blow away, like leaves in the garden. I visited with family on the East Coast and in the Midwest. Everyone is getting older. Hair that was once dark is now golden or grey or pure white. Minds that once solved complex problems now worry about fires and salad forks and what's for dinner. The makers of things putter, passing the torch to the next generation.