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What did you do this week (and weekend)?
As part of a weekly series, these topics are a place for users to casually discuss the things they did — or didn't do — during their week. Did you accomplish any goals? Suffer a failure? Do nothing at all? Tell us about it!
After looking for a car for about 8 months, I finally bought one. I got a 2018 BMW M2! I've been on the hunt for a sporty manual car under ~$45k USD and there are just a million options new and used on the market so I took my time going through them all and ended up with the M2. This is also my first manual car so I've been slowly learning that too. Been trying to drive it in traffic and not cause any jams and so far, it's been going great. I've only stalled twice, which is a lot less than I was expecting myself to stall. I'm still a bit clunky on my shifts, especially the 1->2 shift but I expect myself to get better in the coming weeks.
Congrats, that's a nice car. I love driving manual, though I have the opportunity rarely now. I sold my mustang to buy a mini-van several years ago, and neither my wife nor eldest child drive manual. Actually, my other kids don't drive manual either, but it's kind of moot when they don't have a license.
Is somebody teaching you, or are you just picking it up as you go?
One of the scariest moments in my life was many years ago while teaching a girlfriend to drive manual; she made a poor decision to turn left, stalled in the middle of the left turn, and a huge truck stopped, inches from my face.
Thank you! I actually spent some money on a 2-3 hour manual driving lesson a few months ago so I didn't go into the car with 0 experience. Outside of that, I've been watching the YouTube channel "Conquer Driving" and then picking things up as I go.
My wife is a good driver, generally and she has been driving manuals as long as I have (25+ years), but when we were out in the UK last week, I rented a Renault Clio with a manual. I drove it 2+ hours and the next day when we needed to do the same trip again, I asked her to drive, as I was feeling nervous about my driving skills, being on the opposite side of the car, on the opposite side of the road.
She stalled it twice in the parking lot of the place we were leaving and I just said, nope! I'll cope with my slight anxiety of driving so that we don't get stalled in a roundabout with oncoming traffic, no thank you.
Recover.
My wife and I were in the UK all last week as a trip for my 40th Birthday. London was pretty cool, though I had/have zero interest in the touristy stuff like Buckingham, Big Ben, etc, which we saw anyway. Portabello road was pretty cool though, but I'm already a big fan of thrifting, so it was basically an extension of that. By far the coolest thing and the entire reason I wanted to go on this trip was to go to Bovington Tank Musuem which was just absolutely fucking awesome. I was astonished at some of the tanks they have there, which I just assumed, no one had any examples of, such as the Char B1. They also had a very interesting exhibit on WW1 and the evolution of the tank, with a couple of examples you could actually go inside, which was just so, so cool. My wife actually enjoyed it a good deal, as someone who has zero interest in history, warfare or tanks, though, bless her, she could only take so much. She was absolutely a good sport though and endured 8-hours over 2 days there, because I won't be able to come back anytime soon. That said, even after that 8-hours, I could easily spend more time there and hopefully will someday in the future.
The flight back wasn't so bad, but this weekend we've just been recovering. I'm still wiped out, but I managed to get some things done today while the kids were at school, such as mowing my lawn, which was dire and replacing the battery in my Sister-in-Law's car, which, by the way, fuck Ford and their designs. Utter, utter garbage. Every time I've worked on this car over the past 10 years or so has just been a cluster fuck and what should be easy never is and often requires proprietary tools. This simple battery replacement took me 2+ hours, because it's just such a janky, shitty design.
I also finished my book about Shareware, Shareware Heroes which was pretty interesting and started on reading All Quiet on the Western Front which is great so far. I'm well more than halfway through it now and very much enjoying it, though that feels like such a weird thing to say for such a book.