So nice to forget our troubles for a while and get together with friends. Chad Page came down from Santa Barbara and Deref, a guy I only knew from Cyberspace, came over from Australia(!!!) to hang out for a few hours. We hit Hollywood and Highland and CityWalk...yeah, they're both touristy places but Deref is a tourist and wanted to see a bit of the Legend for itself.

If we had more time together and we weren't fucking immobile with a car with a front end tweaked so badly the car can't be driven we perhaps could have shown Deref more of "the real Hollywood"...places like the cottages Walt Disney built for his animators in Silverlake, the Hollywood Museum built into the barn that was Cecil B. DeMille's first studio building, Hollywood Forever Cemetery, etc. etc.

However, Hollywood and Highland was a place I had never been and I was glad to get a look at it. While it's kind of hard to have much fun there without spending gobs of money, we managed. And it was actually sort of upsetting to see how much money one can spend in Hollywood. $15 to take a tour of the Kodak Theatre??? No freakin' way!

Anyway, after scanning the listings at Craigslist.Org it looks like there actually are some possibilities out there that won't be too expensive. What we're looking for is a small station wagon. A minivan would be cool but it would not fit in our parking space, and would probably be more gas hungry than a small Toyota or Honda or Nissan station wagon that is basically an elongated econo-box. We are open to Korean or American makes along these lines, and would actually prefer a Volvo station wagon if we could find one in our price range. That would be somewhere floating around (let's get mathematical here) $2000>$1000>X . As in we can't afford something above $2000, $1000 would be the median, and we'd prefer something below a Grand, thankyouverymuch.

We'd like something that will also get better than 20MPG on the freeways. The now-broken Chibi Caru (Chevy/Toyota/NUMMI '86 Nova) got something like 30MPG on the freeway and 25MPG in stop-and-go traffic, and that remained consistent throughout the time we had it. Actually maybe we should look at Corolla Hatchbacks. The Nova was actually a Toyota Corolla in all but badge, and it was so good maybe it's what we should be zeroing in on.

Anyone reading this blog, living in LA, or even better in the Valley, with something meeting our requirements should drop a line to me via the email address you see on the right hand links. Yes, it does work.

Oh yeah, and we'll be checking to see if your car recently passed smog. Thank you, CA Department of Consumer Affairs Bureau of Automotive Repair for putting up your smog test history on the web. This is something that we didn't have in 1999 when we got the Nova. There's also Carfax, which did exist back then, and proved that the guy we got the Nova from wasn't kidding when he said he was the first, last and only owner of the Chibi Caru. It's good that there's so much independent info for checking cars now. It's a little less of a crapshoot.