My Truck

March 20th, 2000 - After 13 years of driving the same 1987 Honda Civic POS, I finally scored some new wheels. I was one of only four people that Butch allowed behind the wheel of his truck so he got first shotgun rights in my 2000 Ford F-150 XLT 4x4. Here's a picture of the truck in front of his house the day I picked it up from the dealership. Honestly, I don't know how I managed without one of these.

Note that I don't have a sliding rear window to pitch spent beer cans into the box. I'm always afraid that evil dwarves will get into the cab through that window and murder me in my sleep. Remember the X Files episode when the flesh eating dwarves got into the guy's truck by crawling through the cab rear window? Yeah *that* guy was *not* a happy puppy...

Back in the days when America first started buying Hondas we Honda owners would use the "trip meter" to calculate our gas milage and smugly brag about the great gas milage we were getting from our reliable, effecient Japanese cars. Thirty to forty miles to the gallon was routine for a Honda Civic. Well now that I have a truck, those days have come to an end. Last night I filled up the 'tater truck' and watched in horror as the big boy gulped down 22 gallons worth of gas. My calculated gas milage: 14.45 MPG. Since then I've improved that milage to between 15 and 18 MPG.

Groan... Yes, Butch, you warned me. No I don't regret it.

The gas milage aside, I love everything about this truck. Now I can haul furniture, plants and the furniture of my friends with room to spare. And the big engine gives me buckets of power. What a great utilitarian vehicle! Frankly, I can't imagine how I got along all this time without one!

Some of the other great features of this truck, that my Honda POS doesn't have, are air conditioning, AM/FM radio with built-in CD player and a center console for storing lots of stuff (like CDs for the CD player). One note on that AM/FM radio, even though the Hondas converted over to fuel injection in the late eighties, the 1987 model still uses a distributor, which means that its damn near impossible to hear AM radio broadcasts over the interference kicked up by the distributor. Bad bad bad. My Ford F-150 radio is quiet as a mouse because the truck has true electronic fuel injection.

Best of all, the Y2K Ford F-150 has large cup holders for those Super Big Gulps and the occasional cell phone!