Love Your Neighbor and New Wheels

I stumbled onto a kinda cool website recently where you can search out a myriad of streaming radio stations around the globe while brushing up on your knowledge of geography at the same time. Here's a link.

There's a house a few blocks away that has a sign in the front yard that encourages people to "Love your neighbor". I first noticed it about the same time a Muslim family moved in a few doors down from the home with the sign. Someone vandalized the sign recently by wrecking the metal frame supporting it. I hesitate to read too much into that. I was walking Toby and Charlie Sunday morning when I noticed the homeowner out front—I commented to him that I liked his sign while expressing disappointment that someone apparently thought differently. He quickly went to his car's trunk and gave me an extra one he had, minus the metal support. He said a church in St Paul was giving them out.

I've been taking the pups on some extra long walks lately—walks in excess of 3 miles. Our typical daily walks are around 2 miles. Toby loves the cooler weather and this is all about him. He'll be 14 years old in August and I don't know how much longer he'll be able to do these sorts of distances so I'm keying off him, and lately, that means we're doing a lot of running on our walks—even well into our 3rd mile. Once the heat of summer arrives we won't be able to do this so we're taking advantage of it while we still can.

Tammy has new wheels. We said goodbye to her 2006 Subaru Forrester with 126.000 miles (203,000 km). It was in need of a new transmission to the tune of $4500, essentially totaling her car and prompting us to do some tire kicking of what they had in the showroom at Walser Subaru in Burnsville. We decided to place our order for a 2017 Subaru Crosstrek. That was 5 weeks ago and it arrived on Tuesday. Tammy is really happy with it and that makes me happy. It has some very cool safety features that make texting and driving so much easier. Of course I'm joking but seriously, that's pretty much what some of these enhancements do.

Eyesight is a feature that takes over your braking if the car's external cameras feel it necessary to avoid a crash. Where I find the feature especially useful though is when you're operating with cruise control and the speed of the car in front of you is varying. Eyesight keeps you at a specific distance from the vehicle you're following. I tried it on a stretch of highway with stoplights. Eyesight applied the brakes and brought us to a stop when the traffic in front of us slowed and stopped for a red light. I, of course, kept my right foot hovering over the brake the entire time. Another useful feature is Blindspot Detection where your side mirrors alert you with a flashing light when someone is in your blindspot. I would love to have this feature on my Forrester. All of this technology is more than 2 years old but it's new to us.

Crystal Lake Golf Course opened on Wednesday and I was there, not scoring all that well but hitting some nice shots along the way. I feel it's going to take an intervention from my bikes, my clubs and my walks to get us back in the glassblowing studio but I hope not. We really need to get back there.

This just in (for my air traffic control friends) as I go to publish this. LP has left the building!

Here's some video from Monday's ride. C'mon along.