Cats and Cars

Its been a while since I featured any of our cats but lately there have been a few photogenic moments involving a couple of them. Here they are:

Velvet playing under the sofa

Sunny showing off his ruff

And finally, our newest indoor-outdoor house cat, KitKat:

KitKat at rest

KitKat was supposed to be an outdoor cat, and was for several months, until she decided to come back into the house. Still quite anti-social, she will allow herself to be petted on rare occasions but plays with the inside cats (particularly Sunny) and seems to enjoy herself. She goes outside often and is comfortable around the dogs. We hope she ‘mellows’ a bit and becomes more social when inside the house. She is, apparently, a very strong-willed feline.

In my last post I said I would have photos of our ‘new’ used car, a 2004 Toyota RAV4. This particular car is the base level trim but has some options such as all-wheel drive, luggage rack, and alloy wheels. Color is a light tan with silver bumper covers and accents.

2004 RAV4 – front

Driver’s side

Passenger side

Rear

We have a slip-on cover coming for the spare tire and a center cap for the passenger front wheel. Otherwise the car seems to be in good shape.

We removed the back seats to gain cargo area and have already used the space to haul the three dogs at once, brought home a Christmas tree, and took packages (and hand truck to move them) to The UPS Store. The space will be very useful to us.

Cargo space with seats removed

The cockpit area is smaller than the Honda but comfortable.

Cockpit area

The 5-speed manual transmission and 4-cylinder engine got us 26mpg on the first fill; we hope to get a few mpgs better in warm weather when we tend to take longer trips.

The car has an after-market JVC brand stereo system in it; I was planning to revert back to an original CD/radio deck when I downloaded a User’s manual and found the JVC will play music from a USB thumb drive. This eliminates the need to carry CDs in the car. I copied some of my music to a USB drive and tried out this feature and it seems to work very well.

JVC deck

Another feature of this deck, which I have not yet tried, is that it can “pair” with a smartphone to enable hand-free phone operation. (Well, 14 states have banned the use of hand-held phones when driving and 46 states have banned texting while driving.) The pairing is done via BlueTooth technology. There is a microphone installed, part of the deck, that should enable voice commands to work with my iPhone 6+. I doubt if I will use this much as radio and music are the most-used features we wanted, but I occasionally do get calls while driving to and from work and the hands-free features may come in handy for those calls. For the record, the deck is a JVC model KD-X310BT. Reviews show it to be a decent entry-to-mid level unit.

The past week was pretty quiet and the weather for the upcoming week shows snow probable on Monday followed by a cold spell with high temps below freezing for the rest of the week. Not much will get done in those conditions other than some filing of photos, updating a few web pages, working on Christmas cards, and other indoor projects.

That’s it for now. Thanks for looking in!

Pam’s Two Cents Worth:

Finally succumbed to the first head & chest cold of the season, it was a doozy.

A few words about the guitar playing, see-eester; I play in private to keep my fingers (and brain) limber, no public performances (not even for Fields).  Did you think we were having hootenannys around here or something? Lately, my fingers have been cracking with the dry weather and office work, so until they heal I won’t be plucking and strumming much in any case.

Happy Trails.