THE GOOD
Yes­ter­day, I was the anti-sloth.  After work­ing half the day (bah!), I grabbed a sand­wich from the deli across the street, grabbed some (I later found out, some­what mediocre) H.G. Wells short sto­ries from iTunes for the iPod, and went to Tryon.  Hiked around a bit, lis­tened to the audio­book, ate lunch in the for­est.  Later, I came home and got more work done on the clock.  The main drive gear was tedious to build, and the escape­ment mech­a­nism is kick­ing my ass, but I am about half-way fin­ished.  The clock is actu­ally start­ing to look like a clock now.

THE BAD
My car does not have a key­hole on the driver's side.  It has a hole, but no key­hole.  It turns out that when some­one broke into my car and I thought they did no dam­age, they actu­ally did break some­thing in the door mech­a­nism.  Some­thing looked a lit­tle funky with the key­hole the other day, so I stooped down to look at it, then touched it with my fin­ger.  The key­hole slid back a lit­tle then fell into the door cav­ity.  Tech­ni­cally, it is no big deal because I always lock and unlock the car with the remote and the pas­sen­ger side still has a key­hole.  Still, it is a major annoy­ance.  I would rip open the door panel and fix it myself if I thought it was within my abil­i­ties, but it looks like some metal bits are dam­aged that might require a bit more than two-part epoxy.  Right now, I am play­ing phone tag with an insur­ance per­son, try­ing to fig­ure out if insur­ance cov­ers it, if it is cheaper/better/easier to get it fixed myself with­out involv­ing insur­ance, and whether I need to go back and try to file a police report (which I did not do orig­i­nally because noth­ing seemed to be dam­aged or stolen).

THE UGLY
Even though the process for reg­is­ter­ing your out-of-state care in Ore­gon is online, even though the other online DMV processes work per­fectly, my hint to you is this: actu­ally go into your local DMV office if you want to reg­is­ter your out-of-state car in Ore­gon.  My paper­work was an absolute mess.  They cached my check, but were wait­ing on var­i­ous forms that var­i­ous peo­ple had (or did not have, as the case may be).  I am not even sure I can describe what sort of bureau­cratic limbo I was in, other than this: the DMV up here is quite effi­cient (at least my local branch, as com­pared to var­i­ous DMV offices in Cal­i­for­nia) and it still took an hour.  There was more paper­work to fill out (that was not listed online).  The lady behind the counter had to call var­i­ous peo­ple at the cen­tral DMV office.  There were fees still remain­ing to be paid (again, not listed online).  It was a mess.  Now, at least, every­thing seems to be straight­ened out.  I have a print­out stuck to the back win­dow (obscur­ing a quar­ter of that tiny win­dow) and should have new plates in the mail.

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Tagged as: audiobooks, car, dmv