I’m still getting the hang of it. This one was almost a throwaway; I was working on it without even thinking about it, and it turned out to be the best one from last night. There’s something about getting to the place where the brain stops thinking about making art and simply becomes the conduit. I need more moments like that in my life.
I was too old to give a shit about Saved By The Bell, but this epic review of Dustin Diamond’s memoir makes the author sound like a mentally unstable, insecure douchebag.
I’ve been waffling on the decision to ditch AT&T and move to Verizon for a new iPhone. Here at Lockardugan Headquarters, we’re trying to lessen our monthly burn through capital, and one of the ways we might accomplish this is through a family calling plan. Mama is in the first quarter of a 2-year contract and I’m on month-to-month, so I could jump ship at any time. Today I waited for a very important phone call and was able, through chance, to connect with the person I needed to talk to, who then informed me the two messages I’d left last Friday had come through garbled. On my way home from work, in the middle of Frederick Road, my call dropped. Two of the last five outgoing calls I’ve made started with the deafening sound of a garbled dialtone, which then meant I had to hang up and dial again.
AT&T better have a sweet fucking family plan, or I’m history.
The Wal-Mart radio that came with Peer Pressure was OK from a sleeper point of view. It worked fine (once I’d added speakers) but it was a lot like a Chevette: You’d never go through the trouble of actually trying to steal it. After using it for several months, I remembered why analog tuning sucked so bad back in the day: stations went in and out of tune with alarming speed and frequency.
Thus began the replacement process. I pulled the old unit out and put it aside. A dremel wheel attached to my corded drill cut most of the hole for a DIN-9 sleeve, and an angle grinder trimmed the hole to fit. Once I’d made an allowance for the radio, I needed to get a constant power source to it in order to supply power for the memory and presets. Fortunately the new positive battery cable I’d added when the starter crapped out had a pigtail right from the terminal, so I soldered a 14 gauge wire to a male lead, fed the wire through the firewall at the heater wire, and soldered a 5-amp inline fuse to the end. Once I got everything connected to the radio, it all went back in with a snap, and I took the extra time to replace a couple of bulbs in the speedo (the ones I could reach, at least) before replacing the dash panel. Voila! Digital tuning, iPod accessibility, a CD player, and a detachable face.
New head unit
It looks like I’m going to need to drop the A/C ducting in order to get anywhere near the underside of the dash, which is a drag, but I won’t miss it since it doesn’t currently work. Plans for another day…
My next short-term goal is to POR-15 the seat mounts and put a rear seat back in; I’d like to use one of the nicer benches I’ve got so that I can get the other two out of the garage, but that’s going to take an afternoon of adjusting that I don’t currently have.
→ This is a syndicated post from my Scout weblog. More info here.
I had a long list of stuff I wanted to get done written up on Friday evening. Somehow, I was able to cross a lot of stuff off that list, accomplish a bunch of other stuff, but I’m laying here feeling like I didn’t make any progress.
The floor in the den got hand-sanded one last time to remove any of the residual paint spatter, and this afternoon got a final coat of polyurethane down on the whole thing. We tried a light blue on the ceiling but decided against it after noticing that it lowered the top of the room, so I touched up a bunch of areas and knocked out the final punchlist.
Beyond that, the normal household stuff got accomplished—lawn mowed, weeds edged, floors vacuumed, etc. I tried to make some headway in cleaning out the basement and garage, but the dust kicked up as I moved around the basement aggravated my already sore throat to the point where I had to stop. Back inside, I cleaned up the front porch, and dragged a refrigerator box inside to carve out a castle for Finn.
The Fourth of July is bearing down on us quickly, and I still feel like there’s a ton of stuff left to do.
There is too much awesome in this car: 1950 Tatra T600 Project. The Tatra was a Czech-made cousin to the Volkswagen Beetle, and about ten times cooler-looking. Any car that resembles the Rocketeer’s helmet is OK by me.
Last night’s studio went pretty well. My ratio of “good” work vs. bad was lower, but I’m getting more comfortable with the brush and moving around the page to add shading, instead of overworking one section.
I haven’t gotten much done with the Scout lately, but I’ve been slowly amassing parts. One thing that has been crawling closer to completion is the radio install, but we’re not quite there yet. The DIN sleeve is in the faceplate but it needs to be trimmed a little more to fit. The head unit itself needs a source of constant power to retain the programmed memory, so I have to find a way to get a 12V wire from the battery to the dashboard. Thankfully there’s a female pigtail off the battery connector that I can tap into, so I’m going to pick up a length of 12 gauge wire and a box of connectors, pull the inline fuse from the old radio, and run it into the dashboard. I also have to rewire the rear speakers with something heavier.
While I had a little time with Finn Sunday afternoon, I replaced a couple more bulbs in the dashboard, but the one I swapped out for the left indicator light isn’t working. It also happens to be the most difficult to get in without disassembling the entire speedo assembly.
→ This is a syndicated post from my Scout weblog. More info here.