Everything But Bake a Cake

Well, the time came this week for the Commander to give up his car and get a new one.  All of the negotiating actually happened when I was in Michigan so I was getting the updates long-distance.  The hardest part of the whole thing was finding the right color after he decided on the type of car.  He picked a Ford Escape but then they were having problems coming up with a color that he thought he could live with.

For some years now, he has driven a big gray Envoy.  I certainly don't blame him for wanting to go with a different color car now.  Unfortunately, the Escape Limited doesn't come in a wide range of colors.  He really wanted Sport Blue but it isn't made in that color.  I kept getting text messages and emails with different color combinations.  When he texted white with tan interior, I put my foot down.  That just offended my color sensibilities.  White with charcoal or white with black, fine!  But white with tan?  Ugh!

The salesman finally located a dealership that had a steel blue Escape with a charcoal gray interior.  We both liked that color combination so they had it sent down to our dealership and that's what we picked up yesterday.

Wow, it's a pretty fancy thing inside.  It has a feature called Sync-Surround which allows you to synch your phone and iPod to the audio system.  Once you do that, you can call people, answer calls, and play your music, all by giving voice commands to your car after you punch a button on your steering wheel.  How cool is that?  Once the car had synched the Commander's iPhone, it downloaded his phone book into the car system in less than a minute.

This particular car also has the Navigation system built right into it, has live weather updates available, has Sirius satellite radio, AND has a backup camera.  I'm particularly enamored of that particular feature.  It even has a backup sensor that beeps as you get close to things, with the beeps getting faster and faster as you get closer and closer to an object.  Now THAT could come in handy.  We almost got one with the "parking assist" which is the feature that basically parks the car for you.  I am rather glad we didn't get that because both of us like to be in control and I could just see us wrestling the steering wheel as the car tries to take over.

On the way home, we called my brother by "telling" the car to "Call John's Cell", which it did.  It was amazing to just be carrying on a conversation with my brother with our hands free and no earpiece and to hear his voice clearly through the car's speakers.  He said he could hear us clearly, too.

I hadn't realized how much smaller it is than the Envoy until we came home and I took the Commander's picture next to his new car.  He quite dwarfs it.  But he has plenty of room inside.  Oh, that's not a dent in the side, by the way.  That's my reflection as I stood on the sidewalk taking the picture.

So after I came home last night from another Great American Aran Afghan class, what did I find but the Commander sitting in the living room pouring over his new owner's manual.  For a technie, he must have been in pure heaven.  I just shook my head and went downstairs to continue knitting.