Saturday morning, I let Finn talk quietly to herself in her crib while I snuck downstairs and got her breakfast together. Weekends are my days to wake with her while Jen sleeps, and she knows the routine well enough now that when I’m the one who opens the door, she’ll whisper, “Mama seepin” and stay quiet all the way down the stairs. While she ate her breakfast, I sipped coffee and planned out our route based on the yard sale signs that appeared Friday evening. After she’d finished and we changed her diaper, I dropped her in the backpack and we slipped out the door.
The first one was right around the corner, and it was the best of the day. For $11, I found a tricycle with a training handle, and three Melissa & Doug puzzles in fantastic shape. We ran them back home and then continued on into town for breakfast, stopping off at four more sales along the way. There were some interesting items and some total crap, but nothing we really needed, so we picked up food and turned for home. By the time we got back, an hour had passed and Mama was awake, so we sat together and enjoyed a quiet morning before the day got started.
Finn is getting more and more comfortable in the pool as the weeks go by. She tried jumping into my arms from the edge of the pool last week, and it’s now one of her favorite things to do. We try to stay in the water as much as possible, though, because they have the place chilled down to arctic temperatures for some unknown reason. Usually by the end of the session, she’s shivering even as she’s laughing, so we try to bundle her up into the locker room as quickly as possible. We’re actually going to look into switching facilities for that reason, because we don’t want to give up on swimming with her.
She passed out so completely on the car ride home that I had to scoop her up like a linguini noodle and pour her into bed without any lunch. While she slept, I joined Jen and we cleaned the house like a couple of tornadoes straightening up everything in sight for our dinner guests: S. and D., whom we haven’t seen in ages. They were kind enough to bring over a metric ton of awesome sushi, so we started pouring stoli & tonics and dug in. Finn stayed awake long enough to eat two full meals: a standard Finn dinner and an entire plateful of kid-safe sushi (cooked and vegetarian choices). After she went to sleep, we stayed up and almost killed the bottle. Thanks for a great evening, guys!
Sunday morning Finn and I repeated our quiet ritual and snuck out right at eight, hiking into town under a big umbrella to stay out of the drizzle. After picking up breakfast, we took the long way home, waiting for rainclouds to give way to blue skies. Finn chattered in my ear the whole way, making sure to say “seeyoulaterbyebye” to fire trucks, concrete trucks, pickup trucks, dogs, people, planes, flowers, and every person walking the other way. We took a new route and explored a whole area of the ‘Ville I’ve never really noticed, which was interesting.
At 11, after breakfast, we walked down to the center of Catonsville to take in the first day of the weekend Farmer’s Market with our friends J. and A., and we were pleasantly surprised by the amount of people who were there and the amount of people we knew. It was enough that for the first time, I actually felt like we were part of the community and not just people who owned a house in the neighborhood. The market itself was smaller than the weekday version, but with the turnout they had, I’m sure it’s going to grow quickly. We visited with friends, took in the stands, and picked up a wide assortment of sundries: A bison delmonico steak, six tomato seedlings (and one zucchini), a pound of organic strawberries, and one chocolate-on-chocolate gourmet cupcake.
With the new motor installed
In the afternoon, while Finn napped, we split up to attack different projects: Jen worked in the garden to plant seedlings and finish the back beds, and I started pulling the headliner out of the Saturn to get the sunroof closed. Following the directions I’d found online, I got the entire thing disassembled and down within about twenty minutes. Before I continued to page three, where it said pull eight bolts and remove the entire sunroof assembly, I decided, in a rare and uncharacteristic moment of intelligence, to plug the spare motor I’d pulled from the junkyard into the switch to see if it worked. To my surprise, it did—so I bolted it into place and closed the sunroof. At that point it was a simple matter to clip the headliner back up and bolt everything back into place.
After the tracks were down but before the glass went back in
Pleased with my success, I hurried to get everything cleaned up, then ran inside to give the newly-woken girl a snack, strapped her in the car, and hustled up 695 to the bike store to look at helmets and rear panniers before they closed for the evening. We wound up talking to the manager of the store, who was very helpful, and ordered a 1-3 y.o. helmet for the girl as well as a wicker and leather basket for the front of the tandem. We’ll have to return the pannier I bought—the whole point is that we got a free child’s bike seat at a yard sale that’s designed to snap onto a metal pannier, but the way this is constructed it won’t go on completely. So, back to the store I’ll go. (I found it hard not to be thinking about upgrades to my other two bikes while we were there, but we’ve got to get Mama something to ride first).
Dinner was quiet and delicious: leftover sushi and a garden salad, followed by our cupcake, split three ways. Finn has also learned how to clink glasses for a toast, drink a bit, then put her cup down and say, “Ahhh.”
When it was time to lay down, we wrassled on the bed in her room and made her giggle by kissing and tickling and zerberts, and then read a book until her eyes got heavy. She repeated, “Iluboo” as we closed the door and then quietly murmured herself off to sleep.
Holy Mary, Mother of God, this 1954 Hudson Hornet Special is beautiful. There really isn’t anything bad about this car, even though the paint is peeling, the upholstery looks like it was dug out of a casket, and the engine resembles a 1950’s robot monster. I would drive it exactly as you see it.
Wow, here’s a fantastic new repository of info for a shade-tree n00b like me: Secondchancegarage.com. I followed a link for interpreting a vacuum gauge and stayed for Let’s Create a Carburetor!.
→ This is a syndicated post from my Scout weblog. More info here.
File this under “horrendous timesuck”: Steam for Mac goes live. I will eventually sign up for this, when they release the Half-Life Yellow Box.
From Jalopnik.com, a bit of timely information: How To Rebuild An American V-8 Carburetor. I’m in the process of buying a couple of 2-barrel Holley 2300’s for rebuild and tinkering so that I can become both familiar and adept at working with them.
→ This is a syndicated post from my Scout weblog. More info here.
This is gonna be one of those weeks where Friday suddenly appears and I don’t know what happened to the previous four days. It’s already the end of Tuesday and I feel like it was the middle of the weekend a few hours ago-and I still haven’t gotten enough sleep.
Our neighbor is a real nice fellow, and his driveway faces our backyard, so we usually see him at least once during the weekend—usually as we’re humping bags of mulch or dragging hose from one end of the yard to the other. Saturday afternoon he flagged me down as I was mowing the lawn and asked me if I was a “fixer”. When I asked him to elaborate, he asked me if I like to fix things. I pointed back at our house and said, “Well, if the house counts, then yes.”
He pulled a huge green bicycle out of his shed and asked me if I could fix it, and if so, would I like to have it. I took one look and fell in love.
It’s a two-seater Columbia tandem that’s at least forty years old, if not more. When I guided it onto our back lawn, it was covered in dust, grease, bird droppings, and a light coating of surface rust that begged for a scrubbing with some brillo. He’d mentioned it had problems shifting, and that the front chain had a tendency to drop off the sprocket, so they’d laid it up in the shed, and there it sat.
Sunday afternoon I gave it a quick scrubbing with some auto detergent and a shoprag after airing up the tires. The dust came off quickly, and most of the rust scrubbed off with a little more work, so steel wool should shine up the chrome almost immediately. I tightened up the chain tensioner at the bottom, returned the front chain to the sprocket, oiled the running gear, adjusted the brakes, and took her out for a quick spin on a flat stretch of road across the street. Like butter! It shifted through the gears effortlessly, and the front brakes gripped almost immediately. The rear brake is a setup I’ve never seen before, and it took a minute to recognize it for what it was: a big CNC’d drum.
Jen came outside after changing into some warmer gear, and the two of us took it for a spin around the block. Riding/driving a tandem takes some getting used to, and we developed an alarming wobble early on until we got our pedal synchronization down. The other major issue is that of mass and speed: the bike itself weighs a ton, and with the two of us onboard it takes a lot of effort to slow down. So some upgraded brakes are in order. As is a basket for the front handlebars, and a child seat off the back fender for Finn. I have a vision of the three of us pedaling down into town to the Farmer’s Market on the weekends for vegetables, bread, and other goodies, and it makes me smile.
Here’s some fascinating reading: The complete history of the Fallout Shelter sign.