Just a Story about a Car

Back in 2015, I bought a used Fiat 500 Pop.

The Hyundai had been totaled in 2012 and the old CR-V was being ... problematic. I'll admit I was acting on impulse a bit and really frustrated, so I didn't do the full due diligence that I should have, but the price wasn't bad despite it being a fairly basic model. I'd had a rental Fiat 500 Sport a few months before and really enjoyed driving it. This one didn't have some of the bells and whistles, but it was still fun to drive. It was not fun to maintain. Over the next five years, it increasingly gave me trouble including a transmission issue that (after I'd paid to have it fixed) popped up as a recall.

During COVID, with no-one driving it and the car sitting on the street with a long list of problems for the mechanic to eventually look at, I decided to cut my losses and sell it. The 2021 value of a 2012 Fiat 500 Pop wasn't much, but I took Peddle.com's offer and a few days later a guy from Baltimore came and picked it up. I returned the plates to the Motor Vehicle Administration — due to COVID protocols, I needed an appointment and they had a guy sitting at card table out front of the MVA building waiting to collect them.

At that point, all we had were the memories, including a few of Celeste learning to drive.

Back in 2017, we'd gone down to Louisiana for Thanksgiving, including a trip over to Pass Christian where I remember my dad letting my brother and I practice driving on fairly empty back roads well before we had licenses. I came back thinking it was a good idea to let Celeste get some supervised time behind the wheel before she got her permit, so when she was (I think) 14, we headed down to an empty parking lot in the park and traded seats. We went over how to turn the car on and shift (automatic transmission), as well as how to use the pedals. Everything was going well until Celeste was ready to start and realized she could barely see over the steering wheel. We decided to wait a little bit longer...

About two years later with permit in hand, Celeste got a fair amount of her 60 hours of practice in the Fiat … at least until the day that she stopped in traffic and the wind shifted or something and a bit of smoke blew from the engine back across the car. (Burning oil was one of its issues at that point, along with some other engine issues.) She refused to drive it after that.

One other fun memory: While parallel parking the Fiat in front of the house, she somehow managed to hit the gas, jump the curb, and run into a pin oak that the city had recently planted in the side yard's strip between the sidewalk and street. The tree was a little crooked, but we were able to right it with no lasting damage (no damage to the car either).

In the middle of April, however, that same Fiat came back into our lives, sort of.

I received a weird letter from USAA informing me that they had confirmed with the MVA that the loan on the Fiat was paid off and the lien released. I thought that was pretty strange giving that I'd paid it off in 2018 and had at that time received the lien-release letter and half of the title. Of course, I'd also sold the car in 2021. A week or so after that, I get an official MVA envelope with a duplicate title. Weird.

So I call up USAA to see what's going on and they said there was some issue between computerized systems and the MVA was putting USAA back on titles as a lienholder. In those cases, they were informing the MVA that the loan was paid off and the lien released. MVA would then send out a clear title. As far as USAA was concerned, everything was clear on their system, so they suggested contacting the people who bought the Fiat.

I sold it online to Peddle.com, who basically acted as a broker for Copart, which is who actually picked up the car. Once I got contact information for Copart, I learned that my old Fiat had been sold overseas … and was last seen in Ukraine. No idea where or in whose hands, but I hope it's doing okay. (And if it's been conscripted into the Russian army, hopefully it's up to its old tricks and frustrating them.)

After reaching out to the MVA with all this information, they said to just send the title back. Hopefully the car will then disappear from my online account before I get dunned for not having it registered.

一路平安

They arrived in D.C. on December 6, 2000, and spent their first month getting used to their new digs before making their public debut on January 10, 2001. Today, Tian Tian and Mei Xiang, along with their three-year-old cub, Xiao Qi Ji, are headed back to China.

For the most part, this blog is dormant (though my kids love to look back at some of their very early adventures that I shared here), but the departure of Tian and Mei seems like it should be acknowledged. I started this blog in June 2003 in part to help myself do more writing and as part of processing the fertility issues we were going through.

At that point, I was already a few years into being a Panda Behavior Watch volunteer with Friends of the National Zoo. They'd put out a call for volunteers as part of preparing for the arrival of Tian and Mei and I thought it sounded fun so I signed up. About twice a month, I'd sit with another volunteer or two in the camera room in the panada house, moving the cameras to keep the pandas in frame for panda cam watchers and making notes for the various scientists who were studying the bears. On the rare occasion there would be some talking to the public, but mostly it was just watching the bears and spending some time wandering around the zoo before my shift would start. The coolest shifts were like the one in my third entry here: overnight shifts. Just walking through the zoo at night, when more than a few animals are active, was always a treat. (Below is a screencap from one of those nights; I'm watching the monitors while Tian Tian sleeps in the enclosure next door.)

Last Friday, Evelin and I carved out some time to visit the zoo. It was our first trip there in a very long while, but we timed it well, getting there around 9 a.m. Some of the animals were having a lie-in, but the bears were all out and about (along with a few Rock Creek Park deer who'd wandered into the zoo and not made it out by opening time).

We watched one of the sloth bears (Melursus ursinus) exploring for food. As an enrichment, the keepers had wrapped bananas and other fruits in T-shirts and buried them under leaves around the enclosure. I did not realize that sloth bears peel their bananas, only eating the fruit inside the peel. It was more using a claw to break open the peel and scooping out the inside, but still interesting to see. We also saw the Andean (spectacled) bears (Tremarctos ornatus) out in their yard. The two cubs were resting high up in a tree.

But the highlight, as always, were the giant pandas (Ailuropoda melanoleuca), Mei, Tian, and Xiao Qi Ji were all out in their respective yards, enjoying some breakfast. There were crowds, but it wasn't so crowded that you couldn't get a good look at them sitting, eating, and ambling around. Watching them (only from the outside, we didn't make it in to my old post inside the panda house), I could feel myself getting a little choked up. It's been more than 19 years since I was a regular panda watcher (I only did maybe two shifts in the year after Celeste was born before officially withdrawing from the program), but the loss of the pandas is still emotional.

Celeste is in her second year of college. Quin is off to college herself next year. Evelin pointed out that maybe it's a good time for me to start volunteering at the zoo again (though I'd need to scale back my other volunteer/unpaid work efforts to make the time) …

Safe journeys, 添添, 美香, and 小奇迹. You'll be missed here in the DMV.

So ... Remodeling

The hedline pretty much says it all. About a quarter of the main living space in the house is off limits. We're washing dishes outside. The kelvinator is in the living room (it's really an Amana, but it's more fun to say "kelvinator" than "fridge"). And, in general, nerves are frayed. Details are being recorded at Survivor: Kitchen Remodel.

The Sounds of Dogs ...

... or at least their names.

Back in first grade, it was suggested to Celeste that she not not talk about a certain dog breed at school too much because the name — shih tzu — sounded a little too close to something rude when she said it. Flash forward to breakfast a few days ago when Celeste and Quinlan were both talking about shih tzus; C turned to me with a quizzative look and said: "I know what a shih tzu is and that it sounds like something bad, but I can't figure out what it is. 'zu' doesn't sound bad and I don't know what 'shit' means."

Games People Play

In general, Q doesn't like playing games; the one exception over the years has been Go Fish, although we not too long ago picked up Apples to Apples, and she's loved it. Despite that, she's had a long-standing aversion to "winning games." Instead she usually likes to play Calvinballesque card games where the rules constantly change to ensure that everyone playing is doing well.

Now, Quinlan has branched out into game design with her own version of Go Fish. Using some of my old business cards and the calling cards we had printed up for her a while back, she designed a mermaid-themed deck with numbers 1 through 13, as well as Jack, Queen, and King. There's only one pair of each, which can make the game move quickly. The rules follow the traditional ask for card and draw if you don't get it, but the best bit is the marketing. It didn't quite click with me when I noticed the image at the left that it was an ad for the game, but this morning I found the three other posters placed strategically around the house.


Beyond the posters, there's also the titling of the game — "Go Fish: An Underwater Game" — and the little touches in the card images, from the swirly numbers and the fish as pips on the cards to the little fish the mermaid keeps on a leash and the bubbles coming from the octopus.