Cold and Car

Please, if you are reading this as a friend in the Western mountain region of the US, put down your drink to prevent damaging your computer. I am not responsible!!!! We have a major snow warning for two inches of snow today. I know what you are thinking. All I can say is that we already have a layer of ice on top of snow on top of ice. So, while the major roads are clear and not a problem, we are grateful for the Subaru on our completely flat driveway. Eileen can handle polysyllabic words now, but we have yet to teach her sublimation, as that is not a problem where we have 100% humidity all the time. Meaning, that if it is cold enough for the snow to stick, there is an icy build up under it by definition. So, stop smirking! (and you can pick your beverages back up now that you have stopped laughing so hard).

I went to get some work done on our car yesterday. Literally the first work other than an oil change since we arrived 1.5 years ago. Anyway, it needed a CV boot replaced. Happily, we caught it just as it failed, so nothing else needed to be done on it. So, oil changed here are about 200 euro (or about 350 dollars  -- needless to say we do that ourselves), but all other work seems to be much much cheaper than in the US. Our CV boot was about 72 euro (or about 110 dollars). I am going to see if painting and body work is cheaper here, as that needs to be done at some point. Anyway, point is that changing oil, buying motor oil, disposing of it (unless it is back into the little oil bottles, in which case our recycling center takes it for free), even the filters, are unspeakably expensive, but apparently, one shouldn't take that as a metric for how much anything else would cost here.