No purchase

Yet another month drifts into the filmy past without consummating the purchase of the proposed Suzuki SX4 station-wagon.
The SX4 is supposed to replace our CR-V; which is fine, except it’s a truck.
That means it’s big, unbalanced, and rides high. It’s very car-like, yet still a truck.
We bought it instead of a Subaru, because it’s a Honda, and our Faithful Hunda went over 160,000 miles.
We’d probably still be driving it, but it got smashed up.
The Subaru at that time had a ramped floor with a giant gap between it and the front seat-backs.
That was because the rear seat-backs folded on top of the rear seat-cushions — leaving a gap that could swallow dogs.
The Faithful Hunda had a flat floor, and bottom seat-cushions that folded into the gap.
It was a great system, and nobody is doing it since. (Maybe the Honda Fit is, but that ain’t available in All-Wheel-Drive, which I need [see below*].)
The Sube still has seat-backs that fold down onto the bottom seat-cushions, but finally the floor is flat.
—Just high above street-level, so that it ends up with a flat floor despite seat-backs folding atop the bottom seat-cushions.
And that seat-folding system still leaves a dog-swallowing gap behind the front seats.
The lack of that gap was part of the reason we chose the CR-V, but in that -1) the entire rear seats fold up as a unit to cover the gap; that is, bottom and back seat-cushions as a unit, and -2) the remaining flat floor is way above the street outside, and to get to it requires negotiating a step.
The rear door also blocks the path a dog would take to jump up to the floor, as do the folded-up seats.
It made Sabrina a nervous wreck. She didn’t like getting in the CR-V. She fell backwards many times, and I’d have to pick her up.
For that reason we hardly ever carried our dogs in the CR-V.
OF COURSE, SUCH CONSIDERATIONS DENY WHAT SHOULD BE FIRST; NAMELY, HOW WELL A VEHICLE PROJECTS A MACHO IMAGE.
If a dog has difficulty getting in, he/she can just deal widdit, or back wall for you, baby!
*The Suzuki SX4 station-wagon is also All-Wheel-Drive; which usually means I don’t have to blow out the driveway.
Both the CR-V and Bathtub are All-Wheel-Drive; as were the Faithful Hunda, the so-called soccer-mom Astrovan, and the Sube.

I hope I can consummate this purchase in October, but as always I have a surfeit of things to do: a dog to walk, lawn to mow, and the usual 89 bazilyun errands including doctor-appointments and home-improvements.
We also are supposed to do the mighty Curve the end of October.
Thankfully, lawn-mowing is winding down; which makes October more open. (The Bathtub was bought in October.)
—Except by now the cars available at the Suzuki store may no longer be what I saw a few weeks ago.
I’d rather make an offer on a car in stock (at the end of the month) — it’s a way to get away with low-balling.
I’d like to have made an offer at the end of September, but -a) what I’d offer on might have been already sold, and -b) I only had two days: yesterday and today (Tuesday, September 30, 2008).
It would have been impossible to move in two days.

“The CR-V” is our 2003 Honda CR-V SUV.

“The Faithful Hunda” is our 1989 Honda Civic All-Wheel-Drive station-wagon, by far the BEST car we’ve ever owned, now departed (replaced by our 2003 Honda CR-V). (Called a “Hunda” because that was how a fellow bus-driver at Transit [Regional-Transit-Service in Rochester, where I once worked] pronounced it.)

“Sabrina” is a previous dog; a rescue Irish-Setter. She died over a year ago at age 11.

RE: “OF COURSE, SUCH CONSIDERATIONS DENY WHAT SHOULD BE FIRST; NAMELY, HOW WELL A VEHICLE PROJECTS A MACHO IMAGE,” and “back wall for you, baby!.........” —My all-knowing, blowhard brother-from-Boston, the macho ad-hominem king, who noisily badmouths everything I do or say, is known as the pet-executioner. If a pet makes him angry (like requiring something that contradicts his desire to project a macho image), it get shoved out behind his house to die in a cage exposed to the frigid north wind.

“The Bathtub” is our 2005 Toyota Sienna van; called that because it’s white and like sitting in a bathtub.

The “mighty Curve” (“Horseshoe Curve”), west of Altoona, Pennsylvania, is by far the BEST railfan spot I have ever been to. Horseshoe Curve is a national historic site. It was a trick used by the Pennsylvania Railroad to get over the Allegheny mountains without steep grades. Horseshoe Curve was opened in 1854, and is still in use. (I am a railfan, and have been since I was a child.)