We spent three hundred-something-odd dollars on Jen’s Saturn this weekend, fixing a problem with the ignition lock, (ridiculous, really, on a car with 60,000 miles) replacing the two rear tires (we needed to do that last year) and figuring out why the sunroof was leaking (a pox on the Saturn engineers, who did not design the drain tubes to clear themselves. This led to inches of water inside the car and an unpleasant smell.) She called me this afternoon from work to tell me the car wouldn’t turn over. I drove down, got lost, picked her up, got the jumper cables from the Scout, drove back to the Saturn and got it running. This makes twice in a week’s time the Taurus has served as chase-vehicle (I left the lights on in the Scout at the movies the other night- duh) which is sort of humorous, considering that the other two vehicles actually have working turn signals, decent tires, don’t stall at idle, or steer like barges on the Mississippi. When you have to depend on the Taurus to get you out of a jam, it’s time to make friends with Larry the salesguy down at CarMax.
Meanwhile, the exhaust pipe from the headers to the muffler on the driver’s side of the Scout split the other day, right in front of the muffler, so now with one of two mufflers inoperative, you can hear the Scout coming in other zip codes. I have to drive into the local Mineke down the street and see if there’s any way they can re-attach the pipe without having to custom fabricate a whole new exhaust. Fun!
Update 3:45 PM. Saturn claims it’s going to cost somewhere around the GDP of Romania to fix the alternator and replace the battery in Jen’s car. I think not. One call to our friendly auto guy and we have an appointment with a wrench planned for tomorrow night. Grrr. Stupid dumb cars.
Remember, when you’re having a bad day, sushi and Sapporo make everything much better. Or pizza and Corona.
OK, having seen it twice in three minutes (yeah, that’s local TV, thanks so much) I have to be the one to ask this question: How could two of the most image-conscious, brand-aware companies I know of allow such a sucktastic song to go along with their marketing campaign? (And don’t write me to tell me you like it. It sucks. Period.)
Update update 10:18 PM. Not another word about cars. Not again.
→ This is a syndicated post from my Scout weblog. More info here.
nash rambler, 6.28.03
I boxed up a ton of stuff last night; my entire living room, front bedroom, office and dining room are packed, stacked, and ready to go. There are no pictures on my walls, there’s nothing on the shelves, or blankets on the front bed. It’s beginning to hit me finally.
Here’s the list for the rest of the week:
- Break down both tables and prepare for transport.
- Move all boxes and containers from basement to dining room.
- Move all boxes and containers from front bedroom.
- Break down front bed, dispose of (anybody need a 20-year-old Queen mattress for cheap? Free Hollywood frame!)
- Break down futon in basement and move upstairs
- Buy some more Rubbermaid bins for bedding, clothes, computer gear.
The objective here is to not pack anything I need in the next two months, and to get stuff moved in where we can get to it if we need to. Luckily, there’s a whole empty area in the front of the house where we can store everything while we clean, paint, sand, and restore.
Thanks go to Todd and Heather for lending us their wedding archives; they did a ton of legwork for their wedding and gave us the information they collected in a binder. We started really considering what we’re going to attack first, and made a preliminary guest list. One realization: When we start adding extended families, we wind up with a LOT of people.
Mike Lee writes a pretty good roundup of the reasons he’s going to sign up for TypePad’s new service. I too have been longing for some updates and enhancements to my log, which currently is powered by nothing other than BBedit and Samba. I’d like to add some basic functionality to the site, like a search feature, an automatic calendar, RSS feed, etc; in the long-term, I’d love to be able to simply edit from a browser and not be dependent on my Powerbook here to update. Plus, the new templates feature will essentially kick me into learning standards compliance and moving away from nested tables.
Additionally, Jen and I are slowly getting our wedding plans together, and instead of having all our stuff in two places, I’d love to be able to have multiple weblogs- one for the wedding stuff, and one for the house stuff. It would also be great to have guests (e.g. Jen, my sister) drop by and add stuff to my log, or just simply add comments. Jeez, the photo album feature alone would sell me on the service.
I guess the most daunting task is going to be how to get three years of archives into the new format.
Seen on the way in to work this morning: A Baltimore cop, waving to a woman on the street from their cruiser. As I got closer, I realized he and his partner were wearing Groucho nose and glasses. Unfortunately I was driving, and I didn’t have time to bring my camera to bear.
Hopefully tonight, Jen and I are gonna go see Pirates of the Caribbean. I’m looking forward to it. Yarrrr!
I may have already linked to this, and I’m too lazy to go searching for it, but I think this will be a Christmas present for Bill this year. The Slim Devices Slimp3 is a networkable MP3 decoder for your stereo—you connect your computer to the SLIMP via Ethernet, and your SLIMP to your stereo through RCA jacks. The SLIMP takes care of the rest. A fine solution to getting all the CD’s I’ve burned back to the stereo, which has more power and sound than my computer’s speakers.
Then again, there’s the 30GB iPod with an FM transceiver to broadcast all those songs-and playlists-to any FM stereo within 30 feet or so. Yeah, I think maybe that’s a better solution. But that SLIMP device is slick.