A point of pride
Since I've been commuting by foot and my adorable wife has been biking to the clinic, we've been falling a little behind on the automotive maintenance schedule. When we tried to start up the old wagon today to get the snow tires removed (!), we discovered the battery had died from a long period of driveway dormancy. We decided that the only reason we own two vehicles is so that when one dies we can boost it with the other one. Perhaps it's time to hold a car raffle.
Our neighbour across the street teaches new immigrants, disadvantaged single parents, dropouts and strays of one kind or another who have somehow managed to reach adulthood without knowing how to learn or organize properly. She's considering holding a contest in which competitors write a short essay about how owning a car would improve their lives. She's going to give her car to the winner.
Perhaps what we could do is to hold a similar contest, but make the condition of entry an essay describing how our giving our car to a contestant would improve everyone's lives (my entry would be that we could park it across the end of the street to block traffic and then cover it with pro-Green slogans, open up the hood and plant a garden among the cylinders). I've also been wondering whether there is a simple way to turn the car into a community vehicle, available for anyone's use in exchange for paying a share of maintenance and insurance. But, of course, I'm sure there are a million reasons why we'd never be allowed to do such a thing. There's a bikeshop in town that fixes up hacked up old commuter specials and sells them for $25 each. If we got a fair price for this car of ours, we could probably trade it for about 800 bikes. We could paint them all a distinctive colour (yellow?) and park them all over the city for anyone's use.
Our neighbour across the street teaches new immigrants, disadvantaged single parents, dropouts and strays of one kind or another who have somehow managed to reach adulthood without knowing how to learn or organize properly. She's considering holding a contest in which competitors write a short essay about how owning a car would improve their lives. She's going to give her car to the winner.
Perhaps what we could do is to hold a similar contest, but make the condition of entry an essay describing how our giving our car to a contestant would improve everyone's lives (my entry would be that we could park it across the end of the street to block traffic and then cover it with pro-Green slogans, open up the hood and plant a garden among the cylinders). I've also been wondering whether there is a simple way to turn the car into a community vehicle, available for anyone's use in exchange for paying a share of maintenance and insurance. But, of course, I'm sure there are a million reasons why we'd never be allowed to do such a thing. There's a bikeshop in town that fixes up hacked up old commuter specials and sells them for $25 each. If we got a fair price for this car of ours, we could probably trade it for about 800 bikes. We could paint them all a distinctive colour (yellow?) and park them all over the city for anyone's use.
posted by Colin at 2:10 PM
1 Comments:
Congratulations on having a dead battery for lack of use! You should be proud... ")
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