Reflections

It’s 89 degrees with a heat index of 91 here in our corner of the Mid-South. It got up toward the mid-90s yesterday.

It got insanely hot here last summer and will turn hellishly hot here in another month or so.

We soldiered through it last summer, but now that I’m hauling a laptop/netbook computer with me most of the time when I go into town, I figured it was finally time to invest in a windshield reflector and turn down the oven that my black del Sol becomes in the summer sun.

So I went to Advance Auto Parts after lunch and picked up a couple of reflectors – one for the del Sol and one for the Subaru. I deployed one in the del Sol a few minutes ago before I came in to Hastings to catch up on my coffee and Internet surfing. I’ll be interested to see how much cooler it keeps the car.

And, yes, the car is in desperate need of repainting. The ravages of 15 years of sun, snow, road salt and other insults are showing. My once-beautiful del Sol has taken on the appearance of a beater, complete with blasted-out paint, bubbling window tint film, and numerous parking lot door dings. But with more than 210,000 mile on the odometer, it runs pretty much as well as it did when new. My biggest mechanical complaint is that the temperature gauge soars into the scary-hot range on days when the mercury is above 90. It needs some time in the Honda service department and may be a radiator flush.