A different ride to work

 "So what oppresses us and scares us?  It is our own thoughts, obviously.  What overwhelms people when they are about to leave friends, family, old haunts, and their accustomed way of life?  Thoughts." - Epictetus

I drove the speed-barge into work today.  It's the first time I've driven it since early November.  The idea has been to avoid driving it over ice-melt chemical that the county sprays on the roads during the colder months.  The tires had gone flat and had to be refilled with air, so there is a locked in TPS (Tire Pressure Sensor) alarm on the dash.  There's a way to reset it using the menu buttons on the steering wheel, but I decided not to worry about it at 5:00 AM before heading to work. 

 I noticed that the gas tank was about half full, which is as low as I allow it to get in our vehicles.  There are a couple of reasons for keeping the fuel tank at least half-full:

• If the power goes out, gas pumps won't be working, and then it's not possible to refill an empty gas tank.  I've been in this situation a couple of times in the 1990's, and a couple of times since moving to Idaho.
• If you ever slide off the road and into the woods - and cannot get out of the car, and nobody notices for a while, you might want to have enough fuel to run the engine once in a while to keep warm.  Sadly, this is not as rare as you might expect. 
  

I topped off the fuel tank, and the calculated mileage was 15.1 miles/gallon (6.4km/l).  Ouch.  After refueling, the ABC system warning came on, saying "Drive Carefully"

This warning means that the system isn't working and the struts are locked in place for the time being.  If it comes on again next time the vehicle is started, there might be an issue with a connector or a strut (hopefully not the pump, because that is expensive).  Hopefully the OBD2 diagnostic tool can tell me what's up.  Just need time to scan the car for fault codes. 

The trip serves as a reminder that the car still needs a bit of TLC.  It has built-in garage door opener transmitters, and I need to teach the garage doors to open from the car, so that the sun visor clip-on remote can go away.  And the sun visor hangs down too low, and the drivers side mirror won't go up and down.  All fixable, and probably not too expensive to correct.  Just need to get with it.

And yep, it's still extremely fast.  Getting on the highway on-ramp, I floored it, and the back end broke loose immediately following an up-shift at about 40 MPH.  It's never good to have the back end come completely loose.  Crazy power.