Rental car; Harry Potter; Parent meeting; Trip preparations

So much for not hitting the "year behind" mark. Well, shit. Maybe I can knock out a couple posts tonight. I've done a good job of keeping staying on top of my daily reading, so that's one less thing vying for my time, so I'm going to shoot for picking up the pace.

7/23/07

Thanks to out fortune getting the California excursion paid for and getting airline vouchers to take care of our flights to New York, not only could I afford the new iPhone, but also to have some scratchy nastiness on my car fixed.

So, took the car to the good ol' body shop, where they now know and take care of me (this was round 3), and then got a ride to Enterprise to pick up my rental car as paid for by insurance. There was a brief time when I was worried I'd have to drive a PT Cruiser around, but thankfully got a pretty nice little red Nissan Sentra.

The Sentra was my first chance to drive a car with Continuously Variable Transmission. It's a pretty nice system, actually, probably great for most of the driving public. No jerky shifts, etc. It was creepy getting used to it, just because the car kept not shifting (or, rather, kept shipping imperceptibly) when you expected to. The "gearing", such as it was, was not as agressive as I might like, but hell, it's all software, it could easily be tweaked.

Now I just need to try out a dual-clutch system and my tour of new transmission technologies will be complete.

It was a decent little car, I suppose, probably a nice alternative to a Corolla. Didn't drive as well as the Mazda or, say, a Civic, but it was pleasant enough.

I'd passed up being home to receive my copy of the final Harry Potter book to attend the wedding the previous weekend, so Monday evening was my first chance to really dig into the book, so dig I did...

7/24/07

Band practice, then more Harry Potter reading.

7/25/07

During the days of this week, I snuck off several times for "lunch", found a quiet, comfortable spot, and got some Harry Potter reading done.

Picked up an iPhone case to protect my new baby during the new york trip. Dinner and Sopranos after that.

7/26/07

Got at haircut for the wedding. Paul, my stylist, referred to it as "tuxedo hair". It looked good, I have to say.

7/27/07

So, Cindy and I had been dating almost 2 years, and I still hadn't met her parents, who live in town. Of course, that's in keeping with the rest of our relationship. We weren't officially "together" until we'd been dating about 9 months; it was around the 1 year mark that my parents found out she existed, and around the 1.5 mark that they actually met her. We move at a leisurely pace, I suppose, so it wasn't too sad that I was just then meeting them.

We met them for dinner in honor of Cindy's birthday at a Chinese place out west on Bellaire. Food was good; must have been pretty authentic. Thankfully Linn, Cindy's brother who I'd spent some time with, was there. Cindy's parents were very nice to me, but I was surprised by now much of a language barrier there was. I definitely had trouble (and still do) understanding them (and more or less vice versa). But all in all, it was a pretty successful meeting.

7/28/07

Various errands, laundry, and so forth, preparing for our New York trip. I had planned to take Cindy out for a nice dinner for her birthday but she had work to finish up before the trip, so that didn't happen. We did make it to a party at the MFAH and then got some drinks at Rudz afterwards.

7/29/07

Somehow I'd gotten the crazy notion in my head that if I worked hard, my paper could be submitted while I was in New York. Idiocy, in retrospect. But anyway, did that, got packed.