I Like My Hondas

I had to take the CRV into the dealer down in Brewster this morning. The light that signifies that something is amiss with the airbag system keeps coming on, and I don't want to take a chance of having it deploy at an inconvenient moment or fail to deploy when it ought to. I fear that voles may be nesting in the system. Why not? They're everywhere else! The drop off process and getting a loaner was very easy, so kudos so far to Brewster Honda's service department.

And kudos to Honda for their great cars. I aim to stay with the Hondas as they have been the most reliable cars I have ever owned. I've had GMs, and I say never never again. I've had Chryslers, and I say probably never again. I never had a Ford, although my folks had an Edsel and a Fairlane in the early 1960s. I had a NIssan that lasted almost 200K miles.

I rarely go to the dealer for service because I rarely need anything fixed. All I ever need is routine maintenance, and there's a Shell station down the block from my office where I can drop the car off in the morning and pick it up when I'm ready to go home. But it's good to know that the dealer has a good outfit if I need repairs.

This better be covered under the extended warranty, that I insisted we buy, or I'll never hear the end of it from Mrs Vache Folle who reckons extended warranties are not worth the money. We never had a warranty on the Civic, and it hasn't needed anything very costly over the years. Mrs VF smashed into a neighbor's mailbox in the snow this winter and took off the driver's side mirror, an expensive item to replace as it turned out when you add in the cost to replace the neighbor's property. Aside from that, a repair in the $400 range had to be made, but I didn't know what the mechanic was talking about then, and I can't tell you now what he did.

Bill, the guy at the Shell station in Tarrytown, has been working on our cars since 2001, and I trust him. I rely on him to inform me when maintenance is required or when things want replacing. When I find a mechanic I like and trust, I stick with him. I don't know a damned thing about cars, and I am not interested in finding out, so I depend on professionals. I would derive no pleasure whatsoever from working on my own car, and I attribute this in large measure to having had to help my psychotic and violent stepfather work on cars when I was a kid. He liked working on cars, so I decided that I would never work on cars since I wanted to avoid being like him in any way. It's too bad because he was a genius at so many things such as furniture making, woodworking, what have you, and I could have learned a lot from him if he hadn't been such an asshole or if I had been able to tolerate his abusiveness.

Damn. How did we get to the carzy stepdad? Maybe the bastard has defined my life more than I know and in ways I cannot even fathom. I hate to think that's so.

In sum, Hondas are good cars, and crazy stepdads suck.