Stuff

The past week or so of my life has been devoted to my stuff. Deciding whether to keep old stuff or replace it with new stuff. Deciding which stuff I can live without, and what stuff I need to hold onto a while longer.

In January 2001, I was still in my early 50s. George W. Bush was awaiting inauguration; the events of 9/11 were months away, which meant the world was still the same and hadn't been changed forever, as Republicans would soon be constantly reminding me. Chrysler had recently introduced a model called the PT Cruiser, a compact sedan with retro styling that captured my imagination. I had fallen in love at first sight.

In May 2001, I traded my perfectly good 1999 Volkswagen Jetta for a jet-black PT Cruiser with chrome wheels, a sunroof, and a 5-speed manual transmission. I'd been daydreaming about owning a PTC for months and now, I thought, dreams had become reality.

That delusion lasted until the first time I filled the tank and realized I was now making payments on a typical American gas hog. My average mileage on that first tank of gasoline (at 1.50 per gallon) was a puny 16.8 miles per gallon. The last time I filled up the Jetta, I'd gotten 22.5 mpg, which was relatively poor mileage for the German and Japanese cars I'd been driving since the 1970s. Making matters worse was the PTC's sluggish performance: This damned car wasn't fast enough to justify its level of fuel consumption. I began feeling like a man who suddenly realizes he's been seduced by a pretty woman who only wants to clean out his bank account.

I lived with the Cruiser for eight years, using it strictly to run errands around town. Last year, I started calling it "Sarah" (a reference to Governor Palin of Alaska, a seductress with a pretty face and not much else to recommend her).

When Chrysler's potential bankruptcy started making front-page news, I went online to check Sarah's potential trade-in value, which had dropped like a brick down a manhole. Saturday, I bit the bullet and unloaded her. Ironically, Sarah's replacement is a 2009 Volkswagen Jetta SportWagen, a sibling of the car I ditched for Sarah.

Mrs. bee decided she wants a new look in our living room, which she hopes to achieve by donating a coffee table and two end tables to the city mission and replacing them with smaller versions of the same furniture. She's also decided she can create an illusion of more space by replacing our old Sony Wega 32-inch TV, which is the size of a small refrigerator and weighs about 400 pounds. So -- my current project is researching the new generation of flat-panel HD televisions. I'm studying the pros and cons of plasma vs. LCD, Sony vs. Panasonic, and so forth. Yesterday, I exchanged the digital cable converter for an HDTV box with DVR, bought an HDMI cable, and hooked up the Sony for a tryout. I think I'm going to like high-def.