ATREIDES' DIARY ENTRY reminded me of a similar hey-there's-something-not-quite-right-about-this-guy I run into on my way in to work, only mine is in the Starbucks (shut up). Anyway, he hangs out in one of the tables near the counter, occasionally talking with the baristas, sometimes with the people waiting in line. One time he struck up a conversation with a woman behind me, opening with "Hey beautiful" and going on to ask her name, and talk about whether it was Welsh, Irish, or whatever. At times like these the city girl in me is suddenly completely transfixed by the display of mugs, coffee beans, coffee grounds, chocolate-covered coffee beans, chocolate (solid), chocolate (powdered), and other knickknacks on the display next to me.

This week they have Valentine's mugs with little impressions of hearts all over them in a rough grid, one heart printed in bright red, and messages of love scrawled on them in Starbucks script. I know this because the Guy was there yesterday morning and he noticed something about someone in the line behind me.

He walked up and asked him, "What do you do at _____?" I didn't catch the name of the place, but there's a lot of bio-med in the area. The man said he was a computer guy.

"Oh," said the guy. "I know medical stuff, I was wondering if you knew if they were hiring. I'm on this medication though, do you think that would be a problem? Computers, though, I don't know anything about that."

"Well, you can't be an expert on everything."

"That's right. I used to work at Dana Farber, I know all the medical terms, medical coding, but then they found out ... this medication thing, I'm OK, I do work and everything, but my memory's shot. I kept missing all the meetings, they thought, something's not right. I was going to say something else but I forgot."

AT THE BEGINNING OF December I got a new (to me) car. It's the color of D's eyes, which is to say it varies from a greenish grey to a slate blue.^* When I was trying to come up with a name for it, I said to D that I wanted to name it something to do with its color.

"North Atlantic?" he asked.

So I named it Halifax.

Some things I miss about Synergy, my old Jetta:

• Reverse was in the right place (next to first).
• The sunroof control was in the right place (near the rearview mirror -- not that it's been sunroof weather lately).
• It didn't yell at you if you didn't put your seatbelt on (I almost always do, but not if I'm going a really short distance, like from the mail box to my front door), and the driver's seatbelt wasn't so stretched out that it didn't retract properly without help.
• It was easier for me to tell when I needed to turn my headlights on -- in the new car, the dashboard lights are brighter when the headlights are off, so I don't have that "hey, I can't read the speedometer" cue to turn on my lights.

Some things I like about Halifax:

• It is the easiest car to drive, ever. It's so impossible to stall I'm probably becoming a worse driver for it.
• It has a glove compartment. Not a particularly exciting one, but it has one. Period.
• It has adjustable intermittent wipers, which is a really stupid thing to be excited about, except when your old car's intermittent pace always seems to be wrong for any kind of weather situation.
• The cupholders aren't some stupidly small size that fails to really hold most cups.
• You can set the clock by using the buttons on the stereo, rather than by poking with something pointy at two small holes in the instrument panel, which you cannot see once your hand is close enough to poke at them, and which aren't labelled, so that you always end up screwing up the minutes when you're just trying to set Daylight Saving Time.
• The paint is not flaking off of it like it was on Synergy.
• It has remote door locks. (Yes, ambrosen, I can hear you laughing.)

I feel a little bad getting over my old car so fast, but when I had to take spontaneous days off work to do things like change my passenger-side window from power to manual, and it developed angry-sounding rattling noises for the second time in six months, it became clear that it was time to move on.

BEFORE I TRADED IN the old car, D had taken out a battered old cardboard box that's always lived in the trunk, filled with miscellaneous useful supplies. When I got Halifax, rather than put the same ratty box in the new car, I went out and got a cheap plastic toolbox to put the things in. When I brought it home, D helped me sort through the stuff from Synergy, pulling things out of the box and handing them to me if they were worth packing in the new one.

"Rags for checking oil."

"Good winter hat."

"Screwdriver."

"It's always good to have a flashlight."

"Here's a frisbee."

"Some motor oil."

"Spare windshield washer fluid."

"And this ... is a piece of Synergy."

It was, indeed, a piece of plastic that had broken off from the interior of the car, and that had been tossed into the trunk at some point. We briefly debated transplanting it into the new box as a souvenir, but I rebelled against my packrat instincts and said, "No, let's get rid of it. I'm not going to come across it sometime in the future and go, 'Aw, a piece of Synergy.'"

So we tossed it. Somewhere.

After Christmas, as we were going through the piles of empty boxes, packing materials, wrapping paper, and so on, corralling them into garbage bags, something fell on the floor.

It was the piece of Synergy.

Aw, I thought. I put it aside. Somewhere.

On New Year's Eve, we lit some candles, and had one tall, partially burned-down pillar candle on the mantelpiece. At one point it burned through one of the sides and dripped a dramatic amount of wax onto the cajon sitting underneath it.

We brought the cajon into the kitchen to scrape off the wax, and D found a tool to get most of it off.

It was the piece of Synergy.

So we're keeping it.

--
^* I'm such a girl sometimes -- "I got a car!" "What kind of car?" "A green one!" It's a 2005 Accord EX-L with a manual transmission.