Dad has been bopping along with a bad knee for about 2 months now due to some torn cartilage. He went in for 45 min outpatient procedure today to clean up the damage and it looks like it went quite well. He’ll work from home for the next few days with his knee wrapped up. They have a wacky cooling system for the surgical area now that uses distilled water and some tubes to keep swelling down. He should be much better in a week, he bounced back from his last knee surgery (other knee, same problem) quickly.

It’s been a car maintanence month! After breaking one of the windshield wipers in the last snow storm we had, I got a blown tire. I mentioned that a few posts below so I’ve got my full sized spare on the rear right (never used so it’s brand new) and the new one on the left rear. The tire that was on the left rear is now the spare tire. Since we’ve been getting a lot of rain lately I noticed that my rear wiper blade was shot. It just smeared things around and I think the rubber on the blade was actually coming off of the assembly near the bottom. That was a cheap an easy fix though, I also got the info on how to turn off the maintenance light since I forgot how.

I bought the car 3 years ago today and I’m at about 39,500 miles. Since then I’ve just had regular maintenance done to it, nothing has gone wrong with the car in typical Toyota fashion. I change the oil every 4-5,000 miles, had the tires rotated on schedule (along with the 30k mile tune up), bought one new tire, 3 wiper blades and a cabin air filter (or two). Not bad at all. I have 2 more years of payments to go and I plan on driving this car until it can’t go any further. At the very least I’m going to have it until 2010, probably keep it as a backup car no matter what. I’ll probably stick with Toyota, thinking about getting a hybrid the tech should be really good in another 4 years or so. Out of everything I wish my car got better mileage (23-26).