$3500 o.b.o.

Our Ford Contour marketing onslaught begins with an ad in Craigslist and a couple of big signs posted inside the car itself. Maybe we'll get lucky and the signs will catch the eye of somebody playing in the permanent pickup basketball game that's always going on in the park across the street — they look like members of our target demographic ...

Things removed from the car while it was getting a head-to-toe vacuuming this afternoon:

• Those four cassette tapes that have sat at the back of the center console ever since I replaced the tape player with a CD player in August 2000
• Five (mostly empty) disposable plastic water bottles; two Nalgene bottles (any car that Shelby sits in for any length of time will start attracting water bottles — you should see her car ...)
• A fast-food receipt from 1997 that had fallen underneath the driver's seat
• A Spring 1999 schedule of dance lessons at the Cubberley Pavillion in Palo Alto (from a pre-Shelby, post-dumping phase of trying to throw myself into as many activities as possible)
• Digory's first travel harness (the one he figured out how to get out of)
• A nice pocketknife
• About eighty cents in change, plus a Bicentennial Kennedy half-dollar
• Two cell-phone chargers for phones that we don't have anymore
• A twelve-volt (plug it into your cigarette lighter) air pump
• Road maps for places where we don't live anymore: San Jose, "Silicon Valley", San Mateo and the Peninsula, San Francisco, Oakland

Driving the car around (today it got a bath; tomorrow it gets a cheapie oil change) without its normal layer of deritus and dog hair felt strange — like sitting around in your empty apartment while your friends stuff that last load into the moving van.

Posted by Kevin at February 26, 2006 09:37 PM