New wheels

We bought a new car last week - a 2002 Vauxhall Zafira. (Rather excitingly, I stumbled upon this delightful young lady whilst looking it up on the internets.) We needed a bigger car really, since we'll soon have to carry a load of baby stuff around as well as Katie's stuff. (And, as a minor consideration, our stuff.) The Zafira has a cavernous boot, and two extra seats that magically spring up from the floor. So we'll be able to take the kids places and give a lift to two other people.

We wanted a diesel version really - the Escort's been doing about 11,000 miles a year. I looked at the official fuel economy figures, and that would have saved us about £200 a year. So we set our diesel budget (with gritted teeth) about £1000 higher than the petrol budget. But there were a lot more petrol ones around, and that's what we've ended up with. We bought it from CMH in St Helens - thanks Martyn - and I was pleased to part-exchange the Escort for a reasonable price, as it needs a new clutch and I really didn't want to have to get one. A bit sad to see it go though!

The Zafira is great. It's black - not silver like every other car - and it runs just fine. It's nice to be a little bit higher, and it's nice to have a slightly newer car with more automatic things. I've only filled it up once, so I don't know how many miles per gallon it does yet. Hopefully more than the Escort's 33.5. (As an aside, one of my colleagues expressed surprise that I kept a fuel economy spreadsheet. I would have thought that was quite a normal thing, especially among physics geeks. Mine even compares figures from different fuel suppliers.)

Blogging via IMified

Just messing around with IM-based services. It seems I can now blog via IM. I'm not entirely sure what the point of this is; maybe I can update it by phone at some point...