Having nothing better to do, and being tired of staring at the walls, today I decided to move some funds around and go for a drive…
The route was simple; I-225 north to I-70, then west to Golden.
I spent a lot of weekends at my grandmother’s place in Golden growing up, and part of my 11th grade year as well. And I’ve not been back there in probably two decades – so, why not go sightsee? And from there I’d just randomly make my way back across Denver to home…
The drive would have been nice if it weren’t for all the people. See, I don’t recreationally leave the house unless it’s to head away from civilization – so I don’t get to experience the anthill that Denver has become very often.
Today’s route took me right through Denver on I-70, so I got to see all of the homeless camps everywhere, the perpetual traffic jam on the highways through town, and the general shitshow that is the average metropolis in the 2020’s.
In case it’s not clear, I wasn’t impressed.
Once I got to the west side of Denver though, traffic lightened up and I hit almost 60 mpg as I entered Golden on highway 58. I took the back way to the old house through the subdivision that was springing up at the base of north Table Mesa in ’86; most of the mountainside is now houses of course.
The old house on East street is kind of a dump now and the current owner doesn’t seem to care too much about it. And they were in the garage with the door up, so I felt it would be creepy to stop and take a picture…
I drove from there down the route I would take to school; Ford street to Jackson street to Golden High School.
Golden high School apparently got a remodel some time in the past as it’s no longer the run-down 1950’s campus mess it was when I went there. It’s quite a ways back from the street now, and it actually looks pretty nice. And the parking lot is a lot bigger, so the students don’t need to park on all the streets around the school.
I then followed south Golden road down to 6th ave.
Over the years they’ve added a half dozen roundabouts along south Golden rd, which kind of complicates things that didn’t need to be complicated – but such is the way things go. The car dealership where I got my first car is still there though, as is the McDonalds I used to get lunch at a couple times a week.
As I crossed Colfax I briefly thought about taking it east, back to the Aurora side of Denver, but given how bad the traffic was on I-70 to get to Golden I figured attempting the reverse on surface streets was a really bad idea.
So I took 6th ave east to I-25, past Red Rocks Community College where I took AP data entry and computer science back in 1986…
After I’d aced the placement test, I got to ride a bus over there every other morning to work on professional grade hardware.
It also got me a login for the terminal system they were using for the data entry portion of the class, which I quickly discovered had levels of access…
To make a long story short, this was my first legit “system hack”. I gave myself supervisor privileges on the school’s S/36 by way of finding an overflow in the classroom application’s user menus that caused the session to drop to an unprotected command line…
This led to my getting a talking to from a system administrator… But it was more of a head-pat because he was impressed that I had figured out the S/36 on the fly with no manual or instruction. And this ended with me getting to spend time on the actual mainframe instead of doing data entry – as long as I promised to lay off the hacking.
I did a lot of tape loading, but I also got to write and run some of my own code on the IBM 308X that lived in a pressurized airlocked elevated floor cleanroom. It was basically about as high-tech as it got, and I had access.
Good times.
I headed east on 6th ave and got off on I-25 south, and slogged my way to south Colorado Blvd.
Heading a ways south on south Colorado Blvd. lead me to Action Computers; a place I worked at in 1995. I decided being as I was there I should at least stop in, say hi, and have a look around…
Unfortunately, early Friday someone had backed up to the front doors, wrapped a tow chain around the handles, and pulled out most of the front of the store… They then cleaned out a good portion of the inventory.
So the front of the place is boarded up and there’s not a lot in the store – and neither Mark nor Allen were there to say hi to. So I nosed around a few laptops before heading out and making my way back home.
Home was a bit further south on south Colorado Blvd, east on east Hampden Ave., south on I-25, north on I-225, and then south on Parker rd.
I stopped at the local McDonalds and got a quarter pounder with cheese and some fries, and ate them in the car as a bit of a wayback moment.
All in all I burned probably $8 in gas and spent $12 on lunch… $20 well spent I guess.
Taken with my Nokia 6300 4G, and this is as good as the camera gets – it’s like being in the late 90’s again!
I’ve taken to topping off the gas tank in the car every week just because it feels less expensive to spend smaller amounts more often… I know it’s not, but don’t ruin it for me.
So, I only used one and a quarter gallons this week, which was a mere $5… Not bad, even with the current levels of crazy in the world.
And it’s pretty typical really; I can finally leave the house without a space suit, but now it’s too expensive to leave the house.
Listening to "Boy Blue" by Electric Light Orchestra
I’ve had a lot of cars over the years; in fact, I’ve been accused of changing cars like some people change pants…
It all started with a friend of the family, John Zweygardt or “Johnny Z” to those that knew him – Vietnam vet, motor head, and general wild man who lived up in the hills and was somehow associated with my dad.
He used to ‘borrow’ me in the early 70’s and go get icecream or burgers, and I’d sit on his lap and steer his corvette down the local dirt roads while he worked the gas and brakes… It made my mom furious, but we did it all the time.
He also drove a really amazing Harley, and here’s a picture of me sitting on it in 1974.
In 1976, or thereabouts, he was involved in getting me a used go-cart for my birthday. It was red pipe-framed thing, single seat, with the engine on a centrifugal clutch driving one of the rear wheels. I remember it being picked up in Broomfield, and I got to ride it exactly one time.
On my first outing on the go-cart, under supervision mind you, I drove it into a fence across the street from the trailer on Francis street. The event happened at a pretty slow speed, but my mom still completely freaked out… For the remainder of the go-cart’s life it was chained and padlocked in the back yard so that mom could tell Johnny Z that I still had it – and then skirt around the fact I wasn’t allowed to even sit on the thing.
In 1980 I spent a summer with Johnny Z up at his ranch in the hills, and this is where I learned proper manual transmission operation on Johnny Z’s CJ5; heel and toe to downshift, clutch-less shifts by rev-matching, and other assorted driving skills.
Anyway, time passed and in August 1985 I came of age to get my learner’s permit…
My mom insisted on giving me lessons, which entailed about 3 minutes of warnings followed by me flawlessly executing her route – even the parallel parking bit. She knew that I was into cars, but had forgotten that I’d been ‘driving’ since I could hold a steering wheel thanks to Johnny Z.
And that takes us to my first car in February of 1986 – a 1969 Toyota Corona.
I split the cost of it with my parents, which wasn’t hard considering it was a whopping $300. It was metal flake blue, but the paint was an Earl Scheib job and they didn’t strip the wax off of the factory white paint… So, the blue paint was literally coming off of the car in blue sparkly confetti as I drove it down the street.
It was a 4-door with some huge yet anemic straight 4 and a two-speed automatic that collectively made for a car that couldn’t get out of its own way. But, when it’s your first car you don’t care.
I drove the Corona around until I left for the Navy in July of 1986, and then as soon as I was settled on the base in Groton, or April of 1987, I picked up a cream-colored 81 Chevy Citation from another sailor for a song… He was shipping out to Bangor and it would cost more to move the car than it was worth, so $100 later I owned it…
It was a total basket case though and about a month after I bought it the transmission grenaded right here.
So, in June of 1987 I found another car for sale on-base from another sailor in a similar situation, a red 1978 Chevy Chevette for $250. This car got the paint restored, new inch wider black and chrome rims on lower profile tires, new instrumentation, new seats, and my first high end stereo work that centered around a clarion head unit, infinity speakers, and a collection of pioneer amps.
I drove the wheels off of the Chevette before trading it in for a 1989 Chrysler LeBaron coupe in September of 1989. The LeBaron was my first new car and was a dark copper color with light brown interior – and I was in love with the thing.
The LeBaron was the car I had when I met my future ex-wife, and it was used to make at least a dozen 250-mile round trips from New London CT to Framingham MA and back to move her from her ex’s parents place or visit her friends. Many of those road trips were done to the Transformers: the movie sound track.
The LeBaron was replaced with a black and gold ‘85 Chevy S10 when I got out of the Navy in October 1990.
The first year out of the Navy was a total blur; I had like ten different short-term jobs, moved half as many times, and tried desperately to get my life in order between the economic hellscape of the early 90’s and my ex creating a lot of additional issues.
The S10 was replaced by an arrest-me red 1988 Nissan 300ZX turbo in 1992 after I landed a job at EDCON… But when EDCON laid me off later in the year I had to give up the 300ZX.
The 300ZX was replaced in late 1992 with a green late 70’s Ford LTD wagon that I picked up as a handyman special. I limped the LTD along until I landed a maintenance job at Townview Plaza in mid 1993. Townview Plaza was right across the street from Mile High Stadium, and I made friends with the owner of the towing company we used to haul off illegal parkers every home-game. He ran a used car lot on Federal and gave me first pick of anything I wanted for what he had in it.
I quickly replaced the LTD with a sketchy but functional yellow and black 1977 Fiat X-1/9. This was the car that we refer to as being ‘hippie powered’ because as a 2-seater Matt (Icedragon from the BBS) and I would drive up to pick up Noah (‘Shaman’ from the BBS) and he’d have to ride in the frunk (the x-1/9 is mid-engine and the trunk is actually in the front of the car). When we’d come to a stop in town, he’d stand up out of what looked like the engine compartment to stretch – and freak out everyone at the light.
The Fiat had vapor lock issues that I never could resolve, so in May of 1994 I traded a 1gig hard drive for a bronco-orange 1981 Volkswagen Rabbit and set aside the Fiat to be worked on.
The Rabbit passed on after a couple of months though. (the rod for the butterfly valve in the carb sawed through and dropped into a cylinder on I-25 – I was able to coast over to the side of the highway, which is where the car was left)
I managed to get the Fiat running well enough in July of 1994 to be a good trade for a burgundy ’84 Mercury Marquis.
This is what I drove when, in August of 1994, I left Townview Plaza to pursue what I was actually trained to do; computers. I had landed a job at Intelligent Electronics (I.E.) for third shift assembly, where I built IBM “EduQuest” machines all night. With this new job I moved across town to a mobile home in north Aurora.
While at I.E. I quickly went from line assembly to line supervisor, to Q.A., to I.T. – each with associated pay raises… I’d also gotten a roommate who also worked at I.E. and we were carpooling using his Jeep Wagoneer (a better choice in winter), so I sold the Marquis in March of 1995 and bought a 1972 VW beetle as a new project car.
In April of 1995 I was hired away by Action Computers on Colorado Blvd. to build their repair department with Matt (Chimles from the BBS). Fortunately, the Bug was in a state where I could drive it back and forth reliably.
During the time at Action Computers I dropped a modded 1600 in the bug, lowered the front end, took an inch out of the pillars, and repainted it with a metal flake deep pine green. I also picked up a 1974 Porsche 914 as the next project car as it and the bug shared a lot of parts.
In January 1996 I bail on Action Computers and return to Intelligent Electronics where I assumed control of their network operations, and I basically ran all of the technical aspects of the company until Ingram Micro decided to buy the place in ’97.
When Ingram purchased I.E. I was left with a choice; move to Memphis or find another job. I’d been talking to Scott (from FurryMUCK) for a couple of years and we’d even met up at a couple of conventions. The company he worked at, Amerind, in D.C. was looking for a network guy and Scott could put me up while I shopped around…
So, I sold off the Bug, the Porsche, and everything else I figured I didn’t need, boxed up the rest to ship to the East Coast, and hopped a flight to Maryland in June of 1997.
I worked at Amerind for a couple of months before Scott and I struck out on our own and formed “PFM Technologies”, where we created pure fucking magic for anyone willing to pay us. From our farm in Rhoadesville VA we created some really amazing things, such as the most advanced vending machine on the planet.
Given the stupid money we were making I picked up a yellow 1967 Ford Mustang to hotrod and a 28-foot Scarab offshore racer.
Then the tech bubble burst in 2000, and Scott and I moved to the yacht we had in Balitmore. I gave the Mustang to a business partner and traded the Scarab for a burgundy 1991 Chevy Caprice to move my worldly belongings in. The Caprice went from Baltimore to Marianapolis Prep in northern Connecticut, then to Denver, then to Vail, and then back to Denver…
I had that Caprice through January 24th, 2004, when I gave it to Robin and Tad to help them out of a jam. It was promptly stolen out of their driveway about a month later…
The next car was a blue ‘87 Honda Civic I picked up on my second ill-fated sojourn to Virginia. This time it was February 20th, 2004 and the plan was to take over a tech school – which fell through in spectacular fashion…
Dan, who was financing the endeavor, knew that I’d basically sold everything I owned and flew across the US to try and make his school idea go, so he gave me the car as a bit of an apology I think. Anyway, I signed the paperwork for the Civic and its more than 170,000 miles on March 15th 2004.
Unfortunately, the Honda was pure mechanical crap. Luckily, three days before making my escape from Virginia Dan swapped it out for a forest green 1994 Toyota Corolla. I signed the papers for the Corolla on April 26th 2004.
The next car came from helping Scott escape Virginia a year and a half later. I flew out to Richmond on December 26th of 2005, hopped into his ‘spare’ black 2004 turbo PT Cruiser, and arrived with him in his ‘other’ black ‘GT’ PT Cruiser at 9am on December 28th. For this (and getting him a job where we still work) he signed over the ‘spare’ PT to me, and I signed over the Toyota Corolla to Jae, my roommate at the time, as a Christmas present.
The PT was a really great car, but it wasn’t so great in winter and Scott had ended up on dialysis three times a week – so I decided to pick up something guaran-damn-teed to get to Davita despite Colorado’s wacky weather.
Enter the 1976 Jeep Cherokee I affectionately named “The Warwagon”. I picked it up for $2000 on November 16th 2007 in a functional but ‘needs work’ state. The Warwagon would become a big-block V8 powered, two feet of ground clearance, three ton monster during the time I owned it.
On January 10th, 2010, the PT was totaled by a lady in a red Jaguar in far too much of a hurry.
I ended up in the hospital for a day to get checked out, and was ultimately okay. I sold the PT for scrap and sold the Warwagon to buy a red soft-top and half-door 2010 Jeep JK Rubicon in March of 2010 – my second “new” car.
The Jeep was great, but I hooked up with an old flame in 2012 and she didn’t like it, so exactly two years after buying the Jeep I traded it in on a much more stylish pearl white 2012 Chrysler 300 ‘S’.
The 300 lasted about a year longer than the relationship before it was traded in, in March 2014, for a far more economical, inexpensive, and entertaining white and red Fiat 500 ‘Abarth’
I modified that Abarth into a 1900-pound, 230 horsepower track-day monster… It was quite possibly the second most entertaining car I’ve ever owned.
Then I had my midlife crisis in January 2017, and, on a whim, decided to purchase a ‘magnetic black’ 2017 Nissan 370Z Nismo.
The 370Z also got a serious wrenching from me, and while less bonkers then the Abarth was still a stupidly quick and agile car. The biggest problem the 370Z had was it was so achingly pretty I was almost to paranoid to drive it anywhere… I’d have to park it amongst mere mortals on occasion, and I dreaded coming out of a store to a scratch on it.
The bigger problem was that I now had two fire-breathing racecars in a state that spends over half the year covered in snow and where all wheel drive is really a requirement… And I just purchased some property down in southern Colorado where the roads absolutely require ground clearance.
So, I succumbed to adulthood and sold the Abarth and then traded the 370Z in for a pearl white 2018 Nissan Murano AWD “Midnight Edition” in July of 2018…
I was pretty happy with the Murano. It was still fun to drive, but also got 40mpg on the highway. It was stylish and full of super comfy leather and advanced electronics, but still extremely capable in any weather and road surface…
Then the zombie apocalypse happened in 2020 and the Murano wound up sitting in the garage for the next year and a half, where it didn’t quite fit because it was pretty huge. Then in 2021 we got a new regime in Washington and the economy went tits-up…
One of the side effects of zombies and the economy was that top-trim models of used cars had suddenly become worth as much as they were when they were new, so I decided to down-size in July of 2021. Nissan gave me $6000 more than I owed on the Murano in trade for a smaller and more economical 2021 Kicks SR.
I took delivery of the Kicks a month later on August 18th, 2021.
In my typical fashion I got the top-tier model with all of the bells and whistles, and I’m pretty happy with it.
Currently gas is over $4 a gallon, but the Kicks will go about 400 miles on 10 gallons – so I’m spending about $40 a month in gas even with the insanity going on… Not bad.
Here we are, the day before the Thanksgiving holiday. It’s a 4-day weekend for me starting tomorrow, so I might actually get a chance to muck about with the new expansion for World of Warcraft over the next few days!
The Murano just ticked over 13000 miles this morning, so I’m averaging right about 464 miles a month since July 13th, 2018. That’s down from the 555 miles/month I was averaging in January, so I guess that’s one up-side to zombies; the Murano is literally just broken in mechanically.
This week I deleted my last Google account, the one I was using to host a few YouTube videos, so I’m now a 100% free-range Internet User. I never really had a presence on Twitter, but I bailed on that back in January of 2018. And I’ve never had a Facebook account because I thought it was creepy from inception…
I also deleted my FA account this week; I never really used it save to contact artists for commissions, which I can do just as well without an account. See, FA is pretty much a porn site, and I’m just not into all that so I didn’t have much use for the place. That and while I don’t mind activism in-principle, I’m getting burned out on everything having to rub its HashtagYourCauseHere activism in my face 24/7… FA has been downing the koolaid at an epic pace for months now, and I got tired of it.
So, I’m down to just ye olde journal here for my ‘social media’ footprint.
I’ve been using the M1 MacBook Air for all things work for a week now. Performance-wise it’s tricky to spot the differences between the $1000 Air and the $5000 16″ Pro I used to use.
There are the typical bugs one would expect with such a major shift in architecture, but other than the Safari vs. Google Meet audio issue, I’ve been able to ignore most of them. And the Safari issue isn’t due to the M1 as it happens on my i7 iMac as well… It’s something to do with “Big Sur”, and it’s been reported extensively to Apple (myself included) — so I expect an update any day now.
I also ordered a case for the M1; it’s being made in Genève, Switzerland and should be here in a couple of weeks…
In other work-related news I got this year’s holiday card done and approved in record time; 5 hours total spread over two revisions. It was sent off to the printer and the 700 stamps were ordered yesterday. So, yay me!
Today I sold the Vespa that I purchased back in March.
It was a fun little experiment; I more or less purchased the thing to see if being on two wheels was just as fun as it was decades ago — even if traffic is ten times more plentiful and dangerous.
It is.
I put less than a hundred miles on the Vespa in six months, which isn’t much but with zombies and all there wasn’t much opportunity to really do much with it.
I ultimately sold it for more room in the garage; between the Jeep, Murano, tools, grill, and general storage there just isn’t room for a motorcycle. Well, there is — technically — but having to do car-tetris each morning to get to work got old real quick.
Here’s a picture for posterity.
Scott’s Jeep usually fills this spot from toolbox to garage door.
I’ll probably get another bike once I get moved down south — someday. I can see it being a fantastic addition down there where it’s 30 minutes to town on mostly deserted roads. 🙂
In accordance with my “10 Year Plan” I started in 2016, I traded in my 2016 370Z “Nismo” on a 2018 Murano “Midnight Edition” on Friday.
It looks like this:
The reason for this sudden outburst of adulthood centers on the fact that with all of the land and house stuff that will be going on soon(tm) down in southern Colorado, I needed a vehicle with less of an alergy to unmaintained roads. There’s also the fact that Colorado has winter and the 370Z is pretty much paralyzed when the pavement gets wet… And while I usually carpool with folks who own Jeeps and whatnot when the weather gets bad, I like to get to work about two hours before everyone else does.
Enter the Murano…
The Murano is pretty much an AWD spaceship, and coming from the wonderfully analog 370Z the Murano is something of a culture-shock; it has more radar than an airport that it uses to control everything from lane changes to cruise control, no less than five motion-tracking cameras that it can stitch together in this almost Star-Trek fashion to make it appear that you are looking down at the car when parking or pulling out of a spot, an 11 speaker Bose surround system, power everything, and the interior is all leather and looks like the bridge set for the Enterprise.
Performance-wise it does well enough to not have me regretting driving it anywhere as it’s a naturally aspirated 3.6L V-6 with enough torque to get the 2-ton beast moving fairly quickly, but the transmission is a CVT… I was a bit leery of the CVT as they tend to be very “squishy” and overly sedate, but the unit in the Murano is quite nice and can adequately fake being a real transmission. There are two up-sides to the CVT; one being that it can happily go all the way down to 0.38:1 and up to 2.41:1, so it can really make the car scoot when you put your foot into it, and the second is that if you don’t drive it like a racecar it’ll get 40+ mpg on the highway.
Ultimately though, it gets twice the gas milage of the 370Z and burns cheaper gas while doing it, the insurance is $150/6-months cheaper, the tires are about a quarter of the price of the litteral racing tires on the 370Z, rides a lot nicer for road trips, holds a lot more stuff (makes moving easier), and it has all of the latest safety gizmos…
The motion tracking cameras have already paid off as the typical oblivious pedestrian just walked out behind me as I was backing out at Microcenter; I mean as in the car is moving and is sticking six feet out into the lane when Joe Cellphone just strolled into the back of the car – and the Murano halted when it saw them… It’s a bit disconcerting that the car is in that much control, but I also didn’t flatten an idiot – so I’ll give it a pass.
Midlife crisis complete. I just picked up a 2016 Nissan 370Z Nismo with the tech package — in magnetic black.
The Abarth will have to live outside for a while as the Z is in the single-car part of the 3-car garage (the Abarth’s back seats are along the wall)… I’m sure it feels betrayed by me…
The Rubicon was nice, but I think I want something a bit less rocks, rivers, and pinecones — and maybe something that’s just a nice place to ‘be’ while in the car.
Enter my new 2012 Chrysler 300S I picked up March first.
It’s a super fun vehicle, and ultra capable… And a lot more comfortable on the highway than one would expect for a literal rock-crawler with locking diffs, disconnectable swaybars, and low-range gears.
And a shot of the loney roads out there in the badlands of Colorado…
About four weeks ago I paid off the PT Cruiser, got the title for it, and dropped about $1300 on new stereo gear and sound deadening in the interior!
And about three weeks ago I was involved in a car accident where the PT Cruiser was totalled by a lady in a red Jaguar who was in way too much of a hurry… I was pulling out of my complex here to make a left across Quincy (two lanes each direction with a median between them), and the traffic in the near lane had backed up at the light to make the right like they always do, but they left a break for me – so I pulled out.
Just as I did said Jag-Lady gets mad at the delay and floors it out of the right turn line in into the second lane to fly past the little people and then wedge back in at the light to make the right – and accelerates into the driver’s side front wheel on the PT at about 50mph.
This bounces my head off of the door frame and tweaks my neck pretty bad, and I end up at the hospital to get checked out. This is where the cop gives me my traffic ticket for ‘taking the right of way’ and a court summons.
Long story short they determine it’s her fault because she accelerated into my car (no skid marks) and told the officer that she was going to make the right at the light – from the left-hand lane… So it became pretty obvious what happened.
Anyway, I’m not at fault but I’m also not going to get anything from the insurance – so I sold the PT for parts, sold the Warwagon to a guy from Texas who showed up with a trailer, loaded it, and left me with a fist full of cash, and used that for the down payment on a bright red soft-top 2010 Jeep Wrangler “Rubicon”.
I’ve got everything moved in here at the apartment – just need things like furniture now.
I’ll be at E3 all next week. I’m pondering starting another blog here on LiveJournal specifically for my games industry insider stuff and my thoughts on the genera in general… Could be a lot of fun, then again it could be a lot of work. Dunno yet.
I’ve been driving the WarWagon around Aurora for the last few days and scaring the bajeebus out of the flatlanders. The old Jeep is basically a 6000 pound dragster at this point and I figure I’m turning close to 350 horses now… I’ve completely humiliated a 2009 Dodge Charger, a new Camaro, and a 5.0 Mustang since I got the truck down here – and several ricers – but those don’t really count when it takes more torque to tighten the lugnuts on the Jeep than your average Honda can produce…
I really need to get started on the suspension in the WarWagon. I’m still trying to figure out my ultimate plan – continue fixing up the “Cherk” or buying a mid-70’s CJ5/7 and transplanting everything into it.
I’m a big fan of the FSJ body style, but being able to take the top, doors, windshield, etc off of a CJ during the summer would be awesome.
The heater for my garage arrived today; an 85,000 btu/hr propane powered commercial heater…
I should be able to work on the WarWagon now even in the cold – as soon as I figure out some way to get it from the side of the house to the garage.
See, I had plans to do all of this work I want to do *before* winter hit and I had already taken the old carb off of it and just have a plate sitting over the hole. So it won’t move under its own power right now.
The problem is that the carb that was on it had two different adapters to get it to mostly fit (the guy I bought it from did a lot of strange stuff to the truck) and they won’t go back on without copious amounts of RTV and several days (at the current 20 degrees) to cure enough to work. So I might have to move the 6000 pound monster manually…
The parts I ordered for the WarWagon ‘arrived’ yesterday…
I found the four foot by two foot box lying in the snow under the mailboxes at the end of the road leading to the house. Aparently actually driving the half-mile to the house was too much for FedEx. Then again, it is a dirt road and the truck might have gotten a bit of dirt on it…
So, yeah, FedAxe just shoved the 50 pound box out of the back of the truck at the end of the road – $600 worth of car parts just sitting there.
Fortunately I live up here where folks are of a slightly better cut of cloth and the box was still there 6 hours later.
But, to top off this story FedAxe still managed to mangle the carburetor that was in a box, inside of the box, wrapped in plastic, inside a form fitting plastic shipping mount. The G-forces applied to it were enough to shred the box it came in…
So now I have to decide if I want to send the carb back, where it will probably arrive as powder, or just attmpt to bend all of the linkages back in shape by hand and hope there’s nothing wrong with the internals…
Much to the chagrin of the universe in general – I’m still alive.
My leg is doing much better now and as soon as the infernal itching subsides I’ll be back to normal.
Over the weekend I took the upper half of the engine in the WarWagon apart in preparation for repair, someday when I have money. The fellow who owned the Jeep before me had switched out the stock Motorcraft 4300 4-barrel for a Motorcraft 2100 2-barrel – which is where things get weird…
See, the stock intake on the Jeep’s 360 was made for the 4300, which is a spread-bore design (think 2 2-barrel carbs of different sizes welded together in some unholy machine shop) and therefore will *only* fit the 4300 carb. So, the fellow who owned the Jeep before me used some “engineering” and put a 4-barrel spread-bore to square-bore adapter on the intake, then put a 4-barrel to 2-barrel adapter on top of that, then put a tired 2100D on top of that.
While this in and of itself is asking for trouble, he also used the wrong spread-bore adapter (one for a quadrajet), which in turn had the wrong gasket, and wound up covering half the induction area of the intake with gasket. This in turn caused all sorts of odd, uneven fuel-air mixtures in the cylinders.
But, the 360 is pretty bullet-proof and should be just fine once I put a new Edelbrock intake and 600 CFM 4-barrel on it. This will also have the effect of doubling my performance and dropping my gas mileage into the realm of “special use vehicle”.
Now all I need is the money to buy the parts…
Which segues nicely into part two of this post; how unbelievably expensive life is these days…
I remember back when I was a kid how my mother would buy $100 worth of groceries per month to feed four people… I spent $250 yesterday on about ten plastic bags of groceries, all of which were ingredients for prepared dinners and not box-meals. What makes this worse is, by my calculations this was roughly 7 meals… One *week* of food for four, $250…
Now, things around here are a bit more complex than my family was 30 years ago: Zeze is horribly picky and simply won’t eat what is prepared for dinner 99% of the time so the kitchen runs double duty every night – dinner is made and then Zeze fixes something. Max is about 1/2 as picky as Zeze and if the dinner contains more than black pepper in it (and that has to be pretty minor), he won’t eat it either. Meanwhile Kalira and I will eat anything that holds still long enough to be stuck with a fork… So most of the time food is made for four to keep the per-meal cost down but only 2.5 eat it…
Normally this means that there would be lunches taken care of from this, but Zeze again won’t eat it and therefore eats out at work every day and Max is about 50/50… Which is fine, it’s their money, but I wind up having to cover things that other folks should be at least helping out with because everyone is broke all the time.
So, in an attempt to allieviate this a bit I’ve instituted a new rule around here where every week a different person will buy groceries – hopefully this means that for at least 7 days out of every month folks will at least eat what is prepared.
Then there are the utility costs… When we moved in here the electric was about $80 a month, last month the electric bill was $180.
See, the supplemental heat here at Ravenwood is electric baseboard heat, which is crazy expensive to operate and therefore each room has a thermostat which ranges from “off” to something a bit warmer. The downside to this is that there is only one meter, so if someone turns on the heat somewhere and spins the meter off the wall, we all get to pay for it.
Well, two of us here are from cold climates; I’m from the Rockies and Kalira grew up in Canada so we just grab a blanket and keep on typing or if its realy cold we build a fire. Zeze and Max on the other hand are built from slightly less rugged stock and if it drops into the 40’s here they start to get edgy and reach for the mearest electrical warming device… Well twice now I’ve found the electric heat running and once it was the main bathroom (which only Max and I use) and that bathroom heater had been on all day when I discovered it.
The problem is that I have no way of isolating a particular (ab)user and saying “you’re a wimp, $100 of this electric bill is yours”, so there’s no direct correlation between running the heat and paying for it, which promotes running the heat and we all pay for it.
Then again, Max also runs his computers 24/7 and when he’s not using them they run “folding at home” which runs them at 100%, he also tends to leave his bedroom lights on all the time as well. But again, I have no way of quoting a hard “you used %X of the power and get to pay %X of the bill” so I just keep griping about the rising costs of running this place and hoping someone hears me.
And I’m not even going to get into gas costs… Zeze and I try to split the costs and each spend about $300 a month in gas to get back and forth to work.
But, as always it will work out. Though in this case it might not work out until my lease is up…
