A very good day

Sis and I both had the whole day free today, so we headed to the east end of the Columbia River Gorge for some wildflower viewing. We make a good pair for this sort of venture because neither of us moves very fast. I’m always stopping to take pictures, and she’s always stopping with her wildflower book to “botanize.” It was incredibly windy, which is pretty typical for that area, so photographing little wildflowers was difficult, but it was still beautiful. Sunshine all day, good conversation and good company, beautiful scenery, and fresh air with exercise. [Insert contented sigh here]

Will Ferrell is my idol

No, not really. But he is really funny. I have never seen a movie of his that I didn’t like, though I haven’t seen them all. Tonight I saw Blades of Glory which was huh-larious. Jon Heder (of Napoleon Dynamite fame) was really funny paired up with Will Ferrell. I loved all the cameos from the ice skating world: Scott Hamilton, Brian Boitano, Nancy Kerrigan, Dorothy Hamill, Peggy Flemming, and Sasha Cohen. Also hilarious: Craig T. Nelson as the coach. VERY funny movie. It made me laugh, and boy did I need that tonight!

Who do I look like?

This is pretty fun. It’s facial-recognition software that tells you which celebrity you look like. The interesting thing is that the first picture I used brought up entirely different results, even though it was very similar to the one used below (taken on the same day, come to think of it). The first time, Halle Berry was a 69% match, which is rather flattering since she is SO gorgeous. I’ve only heard of three of the celebrities below.

Good as new

I got my car back yesterday. It looks even better than it did before it was stolen. They detailed it inside and out, so the inside is all vacuumed and polished and the outside is all washed and waxed. They repaired the minor damage that resulted from the break-in and theft and put in a new stereo (that’s stereo #5 for this car!). I can’t even believe how lucky I am that I got my car back in one piece, pretty much good as “new.”

Today in the newspaper was a column by one of The Oregonian’s regular columnists, Margie Boulé. It was about car keys, and even though she’s talking about Toyota here, I’m sure this story would just as easily apply to Hondas. Read on….

Sure the key works, but are you certain that’s your car?

For a while on the afternoon of Monday, March 19, Portlander N.D. almost felt as if she were in an episode of “The Twilight Zone.”

“It was just really strange,” N.D. says.

The strangeness started when N.D. walked out of Lloyd Center midafternoon and went to the parking space where she’d left her folks’ beige 1999 Toyota Camry.

Home from Vassar College for spring break, 21-year-old N.D. had been running errands around Portland for a few hours. “Lloyd Center was my final stop,” she says.

She unlocked the car, got in “and the key wouldn’t turn in the ignition.”

Perhaps she was in the wrong car, N.D. thought. She knew she’d parked at street level in the garage, near Sears. “I specifically remembered parking there, next to a column and a red car.”

N.D. didn’t see another beige Toyota Camry nearby. So she called her mother, “because it’s her car.” Her mom, S.D., suggested N.D. jiggle the key and jiggle the steering wheel. No luck. So S.D. left work downtown and drove to the parking lot.

At this point, N.D. says, “I was really confused. I kept expecting a camera crew to come out and tell me I was on one of those TV shows like ‘Candid Camera.’ “

N.D. waited for S.D. inside the car. But as she settled in, she says, “something started to seem off. The car seemed a lot cleaner.” There was a shopping bag on the floor “with cat food in it. That was definitely not mine. So I got out of the car and looked at the license plate.”

It was the same make, model, year and color as N.D.’s car. But it had a different license plate number.

S.D. arrived, and N.D shared the new development. “We drove around the parking lot,” S.D. says. “There weren’t any other cars of the same type.” Maybe their car had been stolen, they thought. But the weird thing was, an identical one was sitting where N.D. had parked.

They called security. Kevin Peterson got the call. He and two other officers escorted S.D. and N.D. around the parking garage again. Again, they could not find their Camry.

Then Kevin came up with a possibility: Someone with an identical car might have inadvertently taken their car, using their own Camry key.

“When I was 14, in my hometown of Sitka, Alaska,” Kevin explains, “this happened to my mother and me.” Kevin and his mom drove off after church in someone else’s red Ford, identical to theirs.

So the security guards, videotaping their actions, retrieved the registration papers of the Camry in the lot, then gave S.D. the name and number of the owner.

S.D. took N.D. home and picked up the phone. “They lived just blocks from us,” S.D. says. No one answered, so Sue left a message. “I said, ‘You’re going to think I’m crazy, but we think you may have our car.’ “

Cars inadvertently have been switched many times, in many places. Employees of car repair shops have driven or towed the wrong cars — and then repaired them — because the key fit the lock on an identical car.

Here in Portland, the mystery was solved that afternoon. S.D. drove by the home of the other Camry owner and went to the door.

“I felt weird,” S.D. says. The woman answered the door laughing, S.D. says, because she had heard the phone message. But the woman had not been to Lloyd Center, had not driven their car away by accident. But she was missing her car.

It turns out N.D. was the accidental car “thief” that day. Before going to Lloyd Center, she had stopped by a Fred Meyer store and had run in, she says, for a few minutes.

“When I came out,” N.D. says, “I immediately saw the car, unlocked it and got in.”

N.D. started the engine and drove off to Lloyd Center. “It’s strange that I was able to start it the first time, and then when I tried to leave Lloyd Center it wouldn’t start,” she says.

But car security experts explain that as car keys get old they wear down, and they occasionally will work in different locks.

At any rate, N.D. says, it didn’t register that she was in someone else’s car: “I don’t usually drive that car, because I’m at college.”

The owner of the car N.D. had taken noticed N.D.’s Camry in the Fred Meyer lot, and she tried her key — it worked. But she’d assumed her car had been stolen and called police.

In the end, the cars were returned to their rightful owners, and no charges were filed.

Bill Kwong, spokesman for Toyota Motor Corp., says it happened because Camrys of that vintage use “a straight mechanical key. We probably have 16 different types of mechanical keys. And we sell over 450,000 Camrys a year.” That means a lot of Camrys share the same or similar keys.

“That’s why most of our vehicles now have immobilizer chips” imbedded in their keys, Bill says. “Even if the key will turn, the computer will not allow the engine to start.”

Still, Bill says, some Toyota owners with look-alike cars may have keys with the same codes.

This week N.D. is back at college, and the incident already has become a Famous Family Story in her household.

And though they laugh about it, S.D. and N.D. want others to be aware this kind of mix-up could happen.

It wouldn’t hurt to make sure the junk on the floor is your own.

Thank you, Mother Nature

78 degrees yesterday. A perfectly wonderful gorgeous day. Deborah and I walked three miles at Silver Falls State Park, enjoying the waterfalls and wildflowers and sunshine. It was one of those totally perfect days where the temperature is just right, the birds are singing their hearts out, the sky is blue, and you can’t help but feel happy. We put up with gray miserable winters every year, but Mother Nature rewards us well at the end of it.

And I’d just like to point out that the other Portland (Maine) had a freak snow storm a few days ago. This is why I live in the Pacific Northwest, not New England.

I LOVE SUN

It is absolutely gorgeous outside right now. It’s 9 a.m. and 55 degrees outside. And it’s supposed to get up to 75 this afternoon. 75! I’m wearing a summer skirt and sandals for the first time this year, which is totally AWESOME.

Sunshine rocks!

I got lucky

I just had a look at my car at the body shop. All I can say is that I got really lucky. I didn’t see any scratches or dents that weren’t already there (run-in with concrete pillar two years ago, ahem!). I expected to see a mess of wires where the ignition had been, but it looked fine. I tried the key. It went in, but didn’t turn. So I’ll need a new ignition.

The stereo was gone of course, but they appeared to listen to some of my CDs before they took it because the audiobook disc I had been listening to was on the floor, along with a handful of my burned music CDs I kept in the car. Methinks they didn’t like my taste in music! Also gone was my cell phone charger, cell phone headset, ipod radio adapter, and a DVD. They never got into my trunk and everything in there was as I left it, including my snowshoes. Thank goodness I keep my trunk release locked at all times.

Other than the console damage from stealing the stereo, there was no other interior damage. They left McDonald’s wrappers on the floor, but they didn’t leave the windows down to let in the rain and they didn’t take a crap in the backseat. They didn’t break any windows or put any new scratches in the paint. They’re still [insert cuss word here] assholes, but it could have been SO MUCH WORSE.

I’m living in the right place

I took an interesting quiz online today at FindYourSpot.com. After answering questions about climate, culture, education, recreation, etc., you get a list of major American cities that best match your criteria. You can view a whole report on the city and see what the climate is like, what jobs are available, how much houses are going for, etc. It’s pretty cool. When I answered the multiple choice questions, I stressed the importance of being close to or in a major city, good public transit, a good cultural scene, hiking and outdoor recreation, proximity to the beach, my love for warm summers, and my dislike of cold snowy winters.

Portland was #1 on my list, and Seattle was #6 (according to the site, Seattle gets 15″ of snow every winter, which was news to me). I think it’s interesting that Oregon’s four major cities all showed up somewhere in my list. But I’m baffled by all the southern cities that came up (perhaps because of how I answered the climate questions). Granted, I’ve never visited the South, but I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t like living there. I most certainly would NOT like living anywhere in Nevada. I could see myself living in some parts of California or New Mexico, though.

1. Portland, OR
2. Honolulu, HI
3. Baton Rouge, LA
4. Little Rock, AK
5.  Las Vegas, NV
6. Seattle, WA
7. Jacksonville, FL
8. Charleston, SC
9. San Jose, CA
10. Houston, TX
11. Fort Worth, TX
12. San Francisco, CA
13. Corvallis, OR
14. Alexandria, LA
15. Austin, TX
16. San Antonio, TX
17. Eugene, OR
18. Albuquerque, NM
19. Orlando, FL
20. Salem, OR
21. Memphis, TN
22. Norfolk, VA
23. Los Angeles, CA
24. San Diego, CA