MINI Cooper Clubman S Order CANCELLED

Earlier this week I cancelled my aforementioned Clubman S order.  I was getting too wiggy about whether I wanted the S or the base model (horsepower -vs- mileage).

The folks at Northwest MINI were cordial and professional, immediately mailing me a check for the $500 deposit I had left.

MINI Cooper S has 60% Power Advantage

In deliberating between a MINI Cooper and a MINI Cooper S, you might wonder just how much more power the S is really going to deliver. For acceleration, what counts is the torque delivered to the wheels given a particular engine RPM. I figure the sweet spot for every day motoring is in the 2,000-3,000 RPM range, where the S has an advantage that ranges from 70% at the low end to 60% at the high. This is what leads people to say they have to shift their S a lot less. When they find themselves at a lower RPM they can just hit the gas and accelerate up to a higher RPM and so more power.



Next, I need to do the same graph for each gear, expressed as power advantage over speed.

MINI Configurator Drives Its Customers Insane

The MINI USA site has a nifty feature that lets you build your personal, highly customized, MINI. This "configurator" greets you at launch with a progress message announcing just how many possible feature combinations there are, and it rapidly grows to over 10 million! I don't care to admit just how many hours I've spent in this configurator exploring as many of those possibilities as I can, reading post after post on North American Motoring discussing the pros and cons of the features that seem most crucial to me, in the name of coming up with the perfect car for me. For good and well documented reasons, this has driven me insane. Too much choice leads to self doubt, worry, and, ultimately, unhappiness. The MINI Cooper North American Motoring forums are full of posts from worried folks who ordered a MINI with or without feature X and are having second thoughts. In contrast, buy almost any other car and you get to customize it minimally. The result is a car that is a lot like what you want, but you can blame imperfections on the manufacturer instead of your own stupidity at the "configurator."

This isn't unique to the MINI. I've totally lost the reference to it, but a furniture manufacturer in the 60s put out a line of completely customizable sofas with dozens or hundreds of possible combinations. Consumers could not handle it -- they didn't want to be interior designers, they wanted fewer choices.

Despite this, the whole "configurator" process is pretty fun, and could even be considered therapy for the indecisive. Once I started to go whole days without changing anything, I knew I'd settled on something I'd like. When I submitted it, my "Motoring Advisor" Mark suggested I go with a different interior trim line to compliment the roof color. There is no end! Perhaps I should ask Mark what color sofa I need.

Five month wait for the MINI Cooper Clubman begins!

In case you haven't heard, they made a bigger MINI Cooper, the MINI Cooper Clubman. Last weekend Karen and I carted the kids down to Northwest MINI and, to my shock and surprise, we actually fit in one. Even me, at 6' 2", fit in the back seat in a "could make it from Seattle to Portland" kind of way. This was in stark contrast to four years ago when I last tried to fit in one. We tried a regular MINI last weekend too; the kids complained about no leg room and Karen bumped her head getting out.

And so, not too many days later, I was back at the dealer laying down the $500 it takes to reserve a spot on their waiting list.

There are no humans in the suburbs

I've been stressed lately.

Work has turned up a notch in the past few months. The project I'm on was stuck in an ambiguous place for a fair number of months and recently became unsuck. As a result we have to code like mad to get the product out. That coupled with some new folks on the team and I've ended up with a lot on my plate.

My fiancé Karen and I recently began living together. This is stressful from big things such as figuring out what step-parenting is and figuring out how to to be together without sacrificing "me time". It is also stressful from small things such as where in the hell all my camping gear ended up after clearing out the closet so Karen would have room for clothes.

I've got two kids, 5 and 7, that precociously suck up any and all energy you will devote to them, constantly testing the boundaries.

I live in a big house that needs a serious dose of Feng Shui. Sometimes just walking around it is stressful because it feels so wrong. But it is has been a fantastic investment and selling a house is a real pain. The result is internal angst.

Most of these are fun problems. Engagement is way fun, as is engaging work, and parenting is some of the most rewarding work in the world. Even the prospect of fixing up a house to flow better is exciting. But none of this is inherently relaxing.

When I get stressed I frequently think back to an Anthropology class I had in college where the Professor had visited some indigenous people in South America. They worked 20 hour weeks gathering food, preparing/repairing their living spaces, fishing and hunting, etc. The men would go off and hunt in a relaxed way while the women stayed back chatting as they gathered food and such. The balance of their time was spent in religious and social activities. Kids had parents but everybody watched them and took part in basic supervision. Their life was low stress, and they were happy.

I contrast that with where I am now. I'm raising my kids ping-pong style in a post-divorce shared residence schedule. I work long and hard hours that put me, here in the Seattle winters, out of the house and inside or all the daylight hours. I come home drained having focused my best energies on work and immediately start building a new home and new kind of relationship with Karen. In the end I end up stressed and have been getting bad sleep with early morning insomnia for two or three months.

The solution is simple. Exercise. I've done it before (exercise got me through my divorce). Just 30 minutes of aerobic activity does wonders for the mood and prepares the body for a good night of sleep. More sleep means the body copes with stress better.

So tonight I went for a 30 minute fast walk. For some reason I ended up walking through all the nearby neighborhoods with new single home construction. Here in Kirkland, WA smaller 1500 sq. ft. houses on large lots are being torn down and replaced with 3-4 lot-filling 3000 sq. ft. houses with imposing pillars and pretentious fake rock facades. In my entire 30 minute walk I didn't see a single living human being in any window in any of these houses. I was left to wonder where all the people were. Imagine what an indigenous South American might think of all this intense separation between people.

The first and only person I saw on my walk my fiancé Karen as I arrived back at what now my but will soon be our house. Her beautiful curly hair was a comforting sign of life and humanity in the otherwise stark little chunk of life I had just experience. As I entered the house, it felt a little more like home.

I hope I sleep better tonight.

Garbage day as a grand social experiment

Some new folks moved in across the street and put their garbage out last night. A few other neighbors had done it as well, so I put my garbage out too. Easily 6 or 7 houses on the street had their garbage out Monday evening, despite garbage day being Wednesday. I didn't even realize my error until well into Tuesday night.

Makes me wonder what other things I might do automatically in response to what other people are doing around me.