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I like buttons, too.

HA! LOL! Its hard to enjoy driving when: 1. 2. Gas prices are through the roof! But I do enjoy, have always enjoyed driving. fast. slow. Especially cruising. No matter what car I experienced. The simple task of driving was always a positive one. I love driving. Especially when Im all alone on the road. Rain, sleet or snow, If Im alone on the road, regardless what car Im driving and what powers it, Im having fun! And if I have my family in my car, well, sometimes Im having fun. Nothing beats being alone, with my thoughts and my thoughts alone, with my music or the engine noises and the open road! But I do love my family and enjoy sharing my thoughts with them. But, there is something to being alone in a car, alone on the road and just driving! On another note, my 16 year old daughter has started her (is in the midst right now as I type this) first driving lesson!!! ZOOM call theory. Her first actual driving will be next month I think.

Even with a sewer line problem and also had to have the hot water tank replaced, we still had our annual Pot Sticker making party at the Felt House hold. We made a bit over 600 pot stickers and other than the meat, Tofu and vermicelli noodles, everything else in them was from the garden. Plenty of prep work as the wife and I spent Friday night and Saturday prepping everything and then Saturday night making the filling for the pot stickers. Most people are not aware that water is death to a pot sticker and as such, you have to squeeze as much water out of the ingredients as possible. So Tofu was in a vice for 24hrs being squeezed dry, water chestnuts were squeezed, Monge bean sprouts were squeezed. Next came the cutting up of Spanish Sugar Sweet Onions, green onions, fresh garlic, cooking of the vermicelli noodles and then cutting them up, seasoning everything to proper taste before mixing in a 50/50 mixture of ground sausage and beef and adding some eggs. You start by breaking up the tofu and then in goes the cut up noodles and the rest of the veggie ingredients and then season to taste. Then you have a finished veggie mixture that allows for veggie only Pot stickers if you like. This is a carnivore household so in goes the meat into containers to keep it chilled only taking out a small amount as the pot sticker making process goes. Then you have the assembly of the pot stickers and finished uncooked pot stickers. From here you steam them for 15 min, cool and start to freeze them on cookie cooling racks in the freezer so they stay individual in the bag for use across the holiday season. End result is gallon freezer bags of yummy pot stickers to be pan fried, put into Ramen and many other wonderful soups / dishes. Bon apatite Yes we do take breaks while they are being steamed to enjoy some fresh hot out of the pot, pot stickers with home made sauce on them.

Don't have to worry about any shifter boot/area cleaning when you have buttons. I've, surprisingly, loved this design.

You get a 113 in cholesterol, and you take nothing to get to that number? If so, wow. Even if you take something, wow. I am going to guess your triglycerides are also under 150. That whole health consciousness thing is so Seattle! And very West Coast in general. I once read that 'America's fattest city' is Houston. How can it not be? Brisket, Tex-Mex, buffets, and on and on ... You always get good food in Houston ... and plenty of it.

[typical surreal driving conditions : ]

You act like crumbs don't get down inside there or any other plastic ladened shifter. Newsflash. My Flex was terrible for that kind of stuff getting into the crevices around the shifter area. They do and they are even harder to clean than a simple boot area. Ive had any problem keeping mine clean. Guess it boils down to personal preference but lets not act like the other styles aren't a pain the ass to keep clean either. See my above post. Those crevices around the shifter area are not going to be fun area to get clean and free of debris. I don't even know why this is even a discussion, to be honest with you but since you brought it up then I figured it was fair game to point out your choices are also a pain in the ass to keep clean and there is simply no way that you will convince me otherwise.

Pan & bolts cleaned & painted. New filter, gasket going in:

I kind of like the old school column shift automatic also..

Very true about the cabin environment of the last-gen Impala. The dash is great and a big improvement over the last W-body's dash. However, while the window is actually sort of large, it's the rake of the roofline and the thick C-pillar that screw up the visibility. Interesting about the Iron Duke. Well, they were around for over a decade. Maybe it was a hit-miss with years and manufacturing batches of them that had quirks and reliability issues.

This would be to "use up," as you say. I don't like the Celebrity at all. Never did. It was the ugliest of that set of quadruplets. I would love to have the 4.3 mid-'90s Caprice. I love looking at that reliable, centered engine under the hood. And, their being so many on the road proves that they're heirlooms. It would be a great road trip car, assuming everything is in good working order. The way their interiors are decked out are all over the map - from ugly fabric bench seats to leather with nice stitching. Also, it would only be practical where the weather ranges from warm to mild, which would only go up as high as the Mid-Atlantic, the lower Midwest, the low elevation locations in the Mountain States, and the entirety of the coastal West Coast, owing to the rear wheel drive. The last gen Monte Carlo would have FWD, so it could "live" in more places. Okay, I was thinking you meant the 2000-2005 Impala with the 3.4. I once had a 2004 or 2005 Impala with bucket seats and a 3800 V6 as a rental and I really liked it. Not many of them, nor MCs other than SSs, in those years had 3800s. I saw a lady in a black last-gen Impala LTZ parking it in a shopping center parking structure. She was backing into the spot, against a wall. It took her some adjustments to make it happen. That model has poor rear visibility. Reviews by owners on the various sites cite this as being a demerit for them. Most of them otherwise like the car. I agree with the first part, but liked the Malibu prior to the current one, with the high trunk lid, the Camaro-esque rear lamps, and the 2.5 L4. The current one is more modern all the way around, but I had a great week with a rental of a previous one ... 2015, I think. Also, the W-body vehicles, and especially the Impala, required too much steering effort while parking and at low speeds. They should have eased up on it, without necessarily making it as soft as electric power steering. Haha. Well, were the Iron Duke 4s reliable? Or did you have any serious issues with the basic engine? (I'm sure you had all the maintenance under control.) The thought of losing a tooth / cog on a timing chain, for example, gives me heartburn just to read about it. ^ Unbelievable! Cars - even those priced for commoners - had so much personality. What happened? It must be that sharp corporate pencil.

Photo by Stephen Sproul, rural Indiana.

Nope. Not at all. The very few times I ever had to eat (like when I traveled across country), those few crumbs would get into the hard to reach places around the heat shifter. My bigger point, in case you missed it, is that a leather boot area around the shifter would have been far easier to clean. For the record, I was known as the Cookie Monster for years growing up.

Here you go, Robert Hall : 16 original miles, pre dealer-prep Cobra ~ https://www.ebay.com/itm/194496528432?mkcid=1&mkrid=711-53200-19255-0&siteid=0&campid=5337851298&customid=489489&toolid=10001&mkevt=1

Ok, except for the disgusting carbon fiber...hate the look of that shit, real or faux. And no cup holders, so not very usable. With a modern automatic, I see no reason for a big shifter, I like the dial approach as seen on the new GC and Wagoneer/Grand Wagoneer.

Not in the class of vehicles the Compass currently occupies. It's always cheap plastic or leather boots. I'm with ccap. I'll take the boot over the cheap looking plastic. And I'm guessing your car is something from a different decade?