As my handful of readers may have noticed, I haven’t posted anything here in a while. Many will assume this is because of work stuff and family stuff and life stuff, and while this is all true, it’s mostly because I’m just old and lazy.
So with everyone recently worried about artificial intelligence (AI) taking over our jobs, I thought I’d ask the currently popular ChatGPT AI to take over my writing. I told it to “write a humorous blog post for a driving enthusiast.”
As I’m wont to do, I was putting my trip notes from our family vacation last summer to the Grand Canyon into an Excel spreadsheet. I have many reasons for logging my trip notes, but the primary one is generally to procrastinate from doing something, like filing my taxes.
I recently survived a horrific car crash. I feel fortunate to have escaped with only bumps and bruises, but my 2019 Golf R was totaled.
My favorite purchase for a car is tires. I’ve written about this often. And I was reminded of this as I read an article on AutoWeek about getting Yokohama tires for a VW Golf GTI. In the article, it mentions the Yokohama Advan A008, the tire (A008P) that Porsche 911s used back in the 1980s. That was the first tire I was excited to get when I got a set for my 944 Turbo.
I’ve lost all track of time. My children have turned feral after hours of unsupervised screen time. I’ve been banished to the basement while working from home. And we’ve been so desperate for streaming content we’ve even subscribed to Apple TV+.1 But none of that really bothers me.
What I really miss is driving.
“Do you think we should pick up some pizza for my dad?”
We were on our way to visit my wife’s parents. Her father had been taking care of her mom in the nursing home and hadn’t had much time for himself.
“Sure, that’s a good idea.”
My wife looked up pizza places in town and started calling. Our kids, lacking internet connection, were in the back seat staring out the window.
“Could you slow down a bit? It’s hard to hear.”
I dropped the Subaru down below 100 mph.
I’ve had many flimsy excuses over the years as to why I’ve had a writing hiatus on this blog. Typical ones include being lazy, tired, or stressed. My new excuse is dieting, which makes me lazy, tired, and stressed.
I was going to write about highfalutin stuff and things like machine learning and autonomous vehicles, but I got distracted by something more important: toys metal diecast models.
A few years ago I posted about three of my cars hitting 148,300 miles at about the same time, something which took 15.3 years of random planning. That led me to look at my driving mileage at different points of my life. I’m doing that again here, but this time looking at my annual mileage. That just makes it easier to see the difference between being single and being married.
My kids (10-, 6-year-olds) sometimes walk 1 km to school here in Germany, and it freaks me out. That’s because we Americans never let our kids out of an adult’s sight, and because I have no idea how far 1 km2 is. German kids here walk or ride their bikes and scooters to school, which must mean German parents think this is normal, or they need to be locked up.
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