Youngest Daughter is home for a week from camp. I’m almost as happy as the animals were. She’s got a week off, then one more week at camp. Then she’s home for two weeks, and heads off to college. I’m not sure I’m ready for all of that.
Cars
My wife and I are twinsies now.
We spent Friday in Tulsa looking at cars. I test-drove an Audi A4 that I really wanted to like, because it was, as I told family, “speeding-ticket red.” I’d seen this car late last month at one Tulsa dealership, but then found it’d been sold the day before I was going to look at it.
But then it popped up on CarGurus again, this time at a different dealership. Amusingly, it still had the other dealership’s promo tags on it in the new dealer’s photos. We drove it, and like I said, I really wanted to like it. It handled well. The controls were pretty intuitive. But in the end, it just didn’t grab me.
I had a list of four cars to look at, so we moved on to the next only to find out it’d been sent to auction because there were too many problems with the car for the dealership to fix affordably.
We headed on north to drop off some used homeschool curriculum at a consignment store, then drove to a third dealership to check out a 2016 Chevy Malibu LT. This one is a year older than Diana’s Malibu, with about 35k more miles (but still under 100k) and a higher trim level. It’s got leather seats, too, which Diana doesn’t like but I do. It was very nicely appointed, drove well, and I liked it, so I brought it home.
Now I just have to turn off the email alerts from all of the car-buying sites.
Reading
What happens when a Conviction Review Unit finds a solid case, one even the original DA realizes was wrong, and the judge doesn’t buy in? Read He Was Convicted of Killing His Baby. The DA’s Office Says He’s Innocent, but That Might Not Be Enough at ProPublica.
Writing
I wrote some this week!
Sure, it was only about 200 words or so. But it was actual fiction, not just notes in my planning documents. It was just a little bit of dialog between the MC and a new antagonist in Ghost of Innocence, but it was new writing. I read somewhere a while back that when some writers feel blocked, they just write some dialog between two characters, even if they end up not using it. It didn’t exactly break the dam, but it did feel good to have new words written.
Here’s some Dolly Parton to wrap things up this week. I started streaming her Rockstar album the other day. There’s some good stuff on it.
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