Sunrise Sunset

It wasn’t exactly dark when I started over to Cubelandia this morning but I turned the headlights on (to auto, which I always used on the Frog Hopper but don’t totally understand on Mooon Yooonit 🐽).

I guess I am still traumatized about the time when I was 17 and I went to a downtown address to meet some friends where we were practicing to audition for scholarships to the Interlochen All-State music camp. I drove my grandparents’ Ford Fairlane 500. Grandaddy was dead and Grandma didn’t drive any more and my family took her vee-hickle in for a while. I was a fairly new driver and I was soooo proud of myself. And then I managed to leave the lights on the entire time I was at the “musicale” and the battery died and my dad had to come out and rescue me. I was sooooo embarrassed. But probably not as embarrassed as the time I got into an ACCIDENT with that vee-hickle (on GLARE ICE in Sault Ste. Siberia, right in front of the funeral home). I didn’t have very good luck with that car I guess.

Nevertheless, it was my one and only accident (KNOCK ON WOOD). I don’t count the time I was sitting in a parking space in the Commie High parking lot waiting for a beach urchin and a kid with an old beater with a fake leg sticking out the back of the trunk tried to swing into the empty space next to me, missed, and hit my rear end with enough force to shove me over the concrete barrier. The beach urchin came out and was like, “Moom why are you parked like that?” I don’t remember any issues with backing *out* of the parking place but The Indefatigable *was* a Jeep Wrangler…

Anyway I was about halfway over to Cubelandia in our brand-new top-dollah Toyota RAV4 Adventure and, for the second day in a row, I heard DING! and I had a dashboard message: Roads may be icy! Well, not. It was 37 degrees. That was the same temp as yesterday when the DING! happened. I can’t figger what the trigger was for that alert. 37 degrees is well above freezing and *usually* means dry roads but also, at that point in my commute, there was fog and I have encountered icy roads in similar conditions. So I don’t really know what my hi-tech vee-hickle’s sensors were detecting.

I will have to note the outside temp when I *leave* the Landfill and try to figger if it is simply a temperature threshold that triggers the DING!. That won’t work tomorrow because it’s supposed to be “warm” (50s) and the predicted precipitation is rain (lots of it) and possibly thunderstorms. I wonder if Mooon Yooonit has a lightning detector…

Mooon Yooonit is a wondrous vee-hickle and I appreciate some of the high-tech crapola but some of it annoys me, especially the “stay in your lane” beeper. Off Off Off. And the Patriot Radio setting but I’m trying to listen to that a bit to TRYYYY to understand…

Oh, and “sunset”? The sun set at 5:06 today and since there was heavy cloud cover at that time of day, it was pitch black by the time I got halfway home. If you love living in the Great Lake State, you live with this.

3 Responses to “Sunrise Sunset”

  1. Sam Says:

    You have identified the same pattern that confused us. Turns out that in shadowy places on the road surface, 37° is cold enough to make icy spots. So, notification happens at 37 clever degrees.

    As I understand it.

  2. Margaret Says:

    Sensors are good and bad, I’ve found. If they go haywire or go off randomly, it is extremely annoying. Right now I’m getting a tire notification (after having my winter tires put on). Subaru says that Les Schwab must have touched a sensor and that it’s still working, but thinks something is wrong. Les Schwab says that since the tires are on rims, they wouldn’t have done anything to a sensor and that it was probably the old tires that they were reading and that the sensor will have to be reset. Sometimes in my zeal to be prepared for winter, I shoot myself in the proverbial foot.

  3. jane Says:

    my car dings and displays the temp for a few seconds at 39. 39? that isn’t helpful at all. 33 – yes please