1984

New Car

Arriving at Mom and Dad's in our Volvo 240 GL

In the fall of ’84 we bought a new car. My Chevy van was now ten years old and I was beginning to question it’s reliability.  Julie had an even older Buick 1972 Skylark convertible which, although was nice, was having serious problems.  I had taken off the heads and had a valve job done on them and rebuilt the carburetor which helped, but it wasn’t all that reliable. We went and looked at Fords and Chevrolet were not all that impressed with their cars.  One of the American dealers said something like "you will probably only have the car for three years and then trade it in".  Well, he didn’t know us, both Julie and I kept cars for at least ten years so we went to the Volvo dealer.  Volvo’s had a reputation of being dependable, long lasting cars and when the Volvo dealer said "you probably will have this car for 10 years", we were sold.   Julie was still driving the car in 2001 and had over 250,000 miles on it. 

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School

I had continued to take courses at UCF taking Professional Report Writing II in the spring, Introduction to Computer Architecture in the summer term, and Calculus I in the fall.  I was a little wary of taking as I took Calculus I, II and II back in 1970-1972 at the University of Florida but it was under the quarter system, and I made D in both II, and III and UCF wouldn’t accept the credit for courses so here I was taking it again.  I was more serious about studying this time and was quite happy about making a B in Calculus at UCF.  

Sailing