Skip to main content

Wheels Again.

I can't remember the last time I had my own car. I've only ever owned one car, a Mazda 1500ss. I certainly remember buying it for AU$500 (obviously it was second hand at that price) and then spending another AU$500 on it to fix some minor issues and to completely re-detail the interior. I do remember selling it but I don't remember the year. I can safely say it was more than ten years ago.

Since then I've either walked everywhere or borrowed cars of people (mainly my sister) that I've lived with.

Last month, my partner, Enigma, was looking for a car suitable for her son and came across a great buy. A 1971, Chrysler Galant (pictured). It was recommended to her by her Mechanic who used to do all the servicing on it. In the meantime Enigma's son had found an alternative car that a friend was selling so he went with that. However the Gallant, for which the price had been negotiated down to the price of a fairly flash, brand new bicycle, was hard to pass up. So she bought it.

Now the Galant is a manual gear box. In our family only two people have recent experience driving a manual, Enigma's son and myself. Enigma has driven a manual but that was so long ago she's not sure if she really wants to relearn. Since her son now had a car, I'm the lucky one to finally have wheels again.

I've been for a few short drives so far. I love a manual car because it feels like you're actually doing the driving. Not like automatics where you just kind of push a pedal and steer.

This particular car is a year younger than me and comes from an era before cars got complicated with all kinds of technologies that anyone without a degree in rocket science and electrical engineering couldn't understand. The most technologically advanced things in cars back then was the radio. Since the Galant has had the radio removed there's nothing left to be confused by - except maybe the speedometer which is in miles per hour.

Some of you may be thinking what's confusing about miles per hour? Well, in Australia, we switched over to the metric system probably about the same time this car was made. I've never had to read a speedometer in anything other than Kilometers per hour. I've made myself a little conversion chart to refer to that I've stuck on the dash.

Anyhow I won't go on about having a car. It is good to have wheels but really I just wanted to record the occasion somewhere and share it with you. My readers.
TET Life Topics:

Comments

  1. AnonymousOctober 06, 2007 8:13 PM

    Bravo for finally having a car - even if you didn't buy it! It looks pretty good, and a nice colour. Looks good on the outside, anyway. Just need to keep it in good working order now, so it will serve you well!

    It's strange that this one is older than you too, as the Mazda was a 1968 model I seem to remember, making it two years older than you! I think it got sold in the 80s sometime, though that is when you got it, but I don't think you had it in the 90s. That was brown too, but not bronzed like this one.

    This one is even older than the one in 'Life On Mars' a 1973, or maybe '74 according to one critic, but I have forgotten the make now - a Ford I think.

    I should know all about miles, having grown up with that table at school! I know there are 8 furlongs in a mile, but don't think this helps for fuel! Can't remember how many yards in a mile either. I know 3 feet make a yard, and 12 inches are a foot, so 36 inches in a yard! I don't understand the metric system properly! Still like my weight in stones and pounds!

    We also did 'chains' too! I think 10 chains make a furlong or something, but I have a conversion book for everything that Lesley bought me back in the 70s, so maybe that has something about miles in it!

    Take care with the driving! At least you got plenty of practise travelling from SA over to Perth and all things in between around NSW! Quite pround of you both for that, and pleased it went without mishap, in spite of the hairy encounter with the road trains, and the hills and bends!

    ReplyDelete
  2. TET (David Arandle)October 08, 2007 7:15 PM

    Have to correct you, this car is a year younger than me (1971). It's actually gold in colour though it looks brown in the picture. The interior is in very good condition because I think the person that had it before me re-carpeted it throughout. All it needs is some new seat covers in the front.

    Not much point in trying to explain feet, inches, miles etc. to me. You may as well be talking Greek.

    ReplyDelete
  3. AnonymousOctober 10, 2007 8:16 PM

    Oh, yes, I was going the wrong way!

    Feet and inches is easy, as it is just twelve inches make one foot and three feet make a yard, thereby 36 inches being in a yard. (3 times 12)

    I have to remember that a centimetre is one inch or there abouts, and 30cms make a foot! We had a table for all these things at school, to remember them, and it was on the back of the exercise books that you used to buy.

    ReplyDelete
  4. AnonymousOctober 22, 2007 1:30 AM

    You're going to have to switch to oil painting so you have plenty of oily rags to run it on, or are you going to video for petrol?

    ReplyDelete
  5. TET (David Arandle)October 22, 2007 8:10 AM

    Video for petrol sounds like a plan... maybe I should build a web site ...all proceeds go towards putting petrol in my car.

    Actually this car isn't very petrol hungry - and I don't drive that much either so it's not to bad cost wise.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Comments are moderated by an actual human (me, TET) and may not publish right away. I do read all comments and only reject those not directly related to the post or are spam/scams (I'm looking at you Illuminati recruiters... I mean scammers. Stop commenting on my Illuminati post!).

Buy Gifts and Apparel featuring art by TET.

Popular posts from this blog

I'm Confused About Why People Prefer to Say Discombobulated?

D iscombobulated. Is a word that I think someone rediscovered about three or four years ago (maybe more because the pandemic years have thrown out my sense of time) and now I hear it a lot. It's not a new word by any means, but when I started hearing multiple celebrities using it in everyday sentences, I actively had to look up what it meant. Define it with as many synonyms as you like but essentially it's just another word meaning 'confused'. Seinfeld Quotes: Quotes.net The words are pretty much interchangeable. He was discombobulated by too many choices. He was confused by too many choices.  My confusion is the length of the word. It's unnecessarily long with too many syllables. There are many other words that mean confused, and therefore also mean discombobulated. Most of them are shorter and easier to say. So why not just say 'confused'? Perhaps discombobulated sounds more intelligent, maybe?  Hawaii Five-0 Quotes: Quotes.net I've noticed it gets us...
3 comments
Continue Reading »

Second Sunday Skateboard Session Ep 2 - Some Improvements

TET heelflip - looking better but still not a land. A s of writing this I've stuck to my plan of filming myself skate every second Sunday. By the time this post goes up I will have three episodes done. As part of that goal I am also skating more between episodes, about every second to third day for an hour, practicing Braille's Skateboarding Made Simple, Volume 1. That said, I'm not posting these videos here immediately after they're posted to my @TETLife YouTube Channel because I only post an article once a week, and that would make every second article a Sunday Session post. These posts are really so I can add some additional thoughts after the fact, and, of course, because this blog is about all things that interest me, of which skateboarding is one of them. In episode two I had intended to speak to camera more than I do but my driveway is right next door to my neighbor's shed/workshop, and I get a little self-conscious if I'm not too sure whether he's th...
Post a Comment
Continue Reading »

The Princess' Butterflies - Using an AI Image to Video Generator to Animate Art That Started as a 23 Year Old Rough Pen Sketch

B ack in October of 2023 I used Prome AI's Sketch Rendering feature to color a 23 year old rough pen sketch I did of a princess watching butterflies, sitting next to a waterfall in the forest. You can read more about that in my previous article,  The Princess' Butterflies - Using an AI Art Generator to Color and Enhance a 23 Year Old Rough Pen Sketch The three images I used to create my final image (bottom right). Notice how closely the AI has followed my line art sketch (top left) but in the first image (top right) has misinterpreted the waterfall as some kind of large tree stump. Prome's render of the artwork was pretty good but I did end up creating a composite image myself from two of the best renders, to get my final image. Since then AI Image to Video has come a long way, particularly when it comes to creating animation from artwork and maintaining the art style for the whole generation. AI still does much better with turning photographic images to video but I found ...
Post a Comment
Continue Reading »

Australian Federal Election 2025 - The Australian Democrats (Please Like Us Again) and The Greens

Image: Reve AI T here's not much to be said about the current Australian Democrats other than in 2025 Australian election, in May, they'll be out there hoping they win a seat... any seat... 'please like us again!' The Australian Democrats For just over two decades, from the late seventies onward, the Australian Democrats were the third most important party in the Federal government (if you don't count the National party since they've been on that coalition ticket with the Liberals for as long as I can remember). In fact, once I moved away from the Labor party, they were my top pick until the party slowly imploded in the early 2000's from a series of unfortunate events like leaders defecting to other parties, and a highly publicised incident of drunkenness, bullying, and abuse from a male party leader to a female colleague. It's been two decades since then (and that guy's with the Greens now)... please like us again! That aside, the party is still t...
Post a Comment
Continue Reading »

The Australian Federal Election 2025 Could Be a Win For Independents

Australian Democrats founder, Senator Don Chipp, embodied the role of minor parties holding the balance of power with his quote of "keep the bastards honest." Photo Manipulated Caricature by TET. A s of writing this, the actual Australian Federal Election date has yet to be announced, as our Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, attempts to keep the focus on the fallout of severe weather events in Queensland, however it's looking likely that some time in May is the safest bet. Despite this, all parties have been hard at campaigning, with smaller parties, and in particular, conservative independent candidates, seemingly rallying together to make sure people know how much influence they can have just by preventing the two major parties (Labor and the Liberal/National coalition) from having a majority in either (or both) houses of parliament. They're also doing their part to make sure voters finally understand that preferential voting works in everybody's favor over one ...
Post a Comment
Continue Reading »

Boom Crash Opera Born Classic But Not Again

Boom Crash Opera are an Australian Band that reached the peak of their popularity in the mid to late nineteen eighties. They are a band that I knew about at that time but was never really excited by until they released their ill fated double album Born and Born Again in 1995 (Album cover pictured). At the time of its release I was very much into emerging Australian musical acts and was also looking out for new sounds that were different and had kind of a futuristic/electronic sound. Artists that I was buying at the time included; Swoop , Nine Inch Nails and Pop Will Eat Its Self . As well as a really interesting release by David Bowie, the concept album, Outside . Born was a fairly radical departure for Boom Crash Opera (BCO). The first single, Gimme , was often compared to the sounds of Gary Glitter, particularly his single, Rock n Roll part 2 , because of the pounding drum loops. Watch the video below. My favorite single from the album is dissemble which probably went now...
16 comments
Continue Reading »

Making an Effort to Be a President Trump Free Zone - Final Rant (I Hope)

I  hope the American people, who voted for President Trump, get the full experience of what they thought they voted for along with what they're actually getting.  Now may be a good time for them to learn to speak Russian because if World War Three does break out, it's not beyond possibility that it'll be the USA and Russia against the rest of the world, as Trump appears to be emboldening Russia to dig in on their attack on the Ukraine. China, may opt to stay neutral, or even join forces with the rest of the world because they've been quietly winning an economic war with so many countries, they may not care so much about the USA. Especially since President Trump wants to bring manufacturing back to America and impose tariffs on every country exporting anything to the USA. After that fiasco meeting President Zelenskyy had in the Oval Office with President Trump I've pretty much had enough. I'm not writing about what new dumb ass thing Trump's doing this week. ...
Post a Comment
Continue Reading »