Dude, how sweet is Super Monkey Ball going to be on my iPhone? I will most certainly pay money for this.
The Saturn’s vents are blowing warm air, which prompted this research: How to Fix Your Car’s Air Conditioner. I had no idea it was possible to recharge R-134a myself.
Just so I don’t lose the damn bookmark again, here’s a store featuring misting systems, water sprinklers, & mist and irrigation supplies. I’ve ordered from this vendor before and had great service.
The driver’s side window has been busted on the Jeep since last summer. We were on our way to the St. Mary’s Crab Festival, a hot afternoon, and when Jen tried to roll the window down, it just…stopped. by the time we got to the parking lot, the window had slid all the way down into the door like a drunk at last call. She was horrified she’d broken it, but after I pulled the door apart with a borrowed screwdriver, I found it wasn’t hear fault: A worm screw attached to the electric motor housing is held into place by a $.05 piece of plastic, which picked that particular day to commit suicide. Simply replacing the broken plastic part is out of the question, because it’s an integrated part of the motor assembly, and I’d have to pull the whole thing apart to replace it.
It was with great interest, then, that I recently Iearned Crazy Ray’s, the local Mobtown pick & pull, has a location nearby as well as the one I’d been to over on the East side of town. Gathering my tools about me, I called Mr. Scout to see if he had some time to kill this afternoon, and he did.
The parking lot at Crazy Ray’s is a mirror of the interesting personality types lurking inside the fence. There are the import tuner guys, in tricked-out, wildly colored sports cars; there’s the taxicab and livery crowd, who hover over junked Crown Vics and Town Cars like ants at a picnic. There are the pimps, who roll up in late-model Cadillacs painted day-glo colors on huge shiny donks, looking for god-knows-what. There are the workingmen, who rumble up in wheezy pickups and vans, looking for parts to keep their livelihood running. Professional pickers circle the yard with tools on homemade carts, eyeing the new arrivals like buzzards. All of them return from the field with their prizes like hunters on safari: door panels, bucket seats, steering columns, leaking fluid and coolant and oil on the hot cement.
Into this sea of crumpled steel we wandered, toolbox in hand, looking for the white whale: a 97-02 Jeep Cherokee with electric windows. I was told when I bought the Jeep that “the earth is littered with them”, and my advisor was not mistaken. However, today’s survey revealed only earlier-model Cherokees with incompatible regulators, or Grand Cherokees with completely different components. Nothing in my date range, and no parts to strip.
In the middle of this wasteland, however, we found an odd and unexpected bird: a middle-vintage Scout II which had lost its wheels but little else. After making the rounds of the lot, we circled back and took stock, noting an exceptionally clean engine compartment, decent plastics, and two intact wheel hubs. Mr. Scout tried to beg off, telling me he’d come back to pick it over later, but I convinced him to pull the radiator and shroud, which were in almost perfect condition (intact fan shrouds being very rare and pricy), as well as some plastics and the rear-view mirror, while the iron was hot. After a half-hour’s straining to reach all the proper bolts, we finally freed the fan and pulled our prize from the beast: several hundred dollars’ worth of parts for the kingly sum of $92.
The plan is to return early next week to see if the hubs, lights, and alternator are still available; meanwhile, I’m going to keep searching for the right Cherokee in the hopes that I can find what I need without calling the local dealer.
Update: Mr. Scout found a ’98 4-door Cherokee in a yard in West Virginia and pulled the window assembly for me on Saturday. Pray it will fit in the 2-door model (or that I can use the parts to make mine work correctly).
This is what an hour’s work with a crowbar and a David Sedaris CD will result in; much of the floor here is in great shape, which makes me wonder why the ever covered it in the first place.
Wayward Alzheimer’s patients foiled by fake bus stop. I love this idea on so many levels. This is inspired problem-solving at its best.
One of a basketful of wild cherries we got off the trees in the side yard, after getting smart and wrapping branches in netting to fend off the birds.
Versions is a Mac Subversion client, which is supposed to make using source control easier. We’ll see how that works.
I haven’t written to you in two weeks, and I’m sorry. Your father hasn’t been in much of a writing mood lately—there are about six unpublished fragments in my Movable Type queue that don’t relate, have no beginning or ending, and have no narrative structure. I think that it must be summertime-related, because I’ve been strangely unmotivated to do anything these last two weeks, whether it’s writing, taking pictures, working on the house, or just being. Strangely though, I’ve been able to focus on work pretty steadily, which is good news for your diaper fund.
You have been very active these last two weeks, which is great to see. We’ve been sitting on the bed watching you bump yourself around and making your mother’s belly wiggle and move. It’s better than TV. If you’re as active as this after you’re born, we’re doomed. When you do finally show up, we will have to have a serious chat about your shyness around the camera. Every time I turn it on to shoot some video of your mother’s belly, you stop moving around, and as soon as I put the camera down you start shaking your booty again.
We are no closer to finding you a name than we were last week. We have looked at three thick tomes from the library which claim to contain names other than “Kaitlin,” which makes Mommy and Daddy want to punch someone in the neck. In looking through each of these books, though, I get tired and overwhelmed pretty quickly. One of the books seems to have the same fifty or so names re-arranged in different lists throughout each chapter, and then finds it helpful to list the names of famous Hollywood progeny, as if calling our child Blanket, Kal-El, or Speck would be a good idea. Another has a list of names “so old they’ll never be new”, like anyone is still considering the name Zebediah.
Your mother’s been doing the bulk of the baby research for us over the last few months, and from what she tells me, there’s a huge industry out there geared towards scaring the everloving shit out of expectant mothers. I’m looking through one of the delivery method books now, in preparation for our upcoming classes. The first three chapters have been a repetition of the same basic idea: HOSPITALS BAD, DRUGS BAD, DOCTORS=UNTRUSTWORTHY. The authors also don’t pull punches when comparing their method to the other big method, dissing philosophy and practice, which begs comparison to the old East Coast-West Coast rap feuds of the late 90’s. It all gets to be a little tiring after a while. I understand why the authors need to hammer their points home, but I’m ready to just skip ahead to the birthing part now.
We’re wary enough at this point to hire a doula to help the two of you with this thing, even though I’m going to be with you two through the whole process. All of the books I’ve read do this strange thing where they spend an entire chapter ratcheting up the fear quotient, and then when they refer to the actual birthing process it’s all puppies and sunshine distilled into a three-sentence paragraph. Maybe I haven’t gotten to the meat of the whole thing yet, but this is feeling eerily similar to a lot of the computer programming books I’ve read, which alternately treat me as if I’m a genius and an idiot in the same sentence. So a doula will help with all of the things I may have read about but don’t really understand, and be a more informed advocate for you and your mother where I may not be. Besides, it’ll be less freaky for the nurses to walk in the delivery room and see the doula massaging your mother’s girl parts instead of me.
