I took Finley out and scored a new hood for the CR-V Saturday morning. It’s no surprise Jen was feeling self-conscious about the old hood; it was really ghetto.
The clearcoat had begun delaminating a few years ago and it’s gotten so bad at this point that there’s only a little bit of it left on the hood itself.
The area in the upper right is the original clearcoat. Everything you see below that and to the left is bare paint.
Finn and I jumped in the CR-V and drove through glorious Glen Burnie, through trailer parks and high-end estates, and found ourselves at a quiet auto salvage yard fronted by tall fencing and a tired trailer. Inside we talked to the salesman who directed us back outside to the hood they’d pulled that morning. It was in OK shape but had obviously taken a ride in the back of a yard truck and gotten scraped up along the way. We placed it next to the fender of the CR-V and found it was almost indistinguishable–the only difference being the greater amount of metal flake in the used hood. I got the guy to come down $25 on it and stuffed it into the back of the car.
Back at the house replacing it was a matter of loosening 4 10mm bolts. I had Finley help me pull it off, and together we had the new hood on in minutes. After a quick scrub, it looks presentable:
I have to pick up some rubbing compound and polishing discs for the buffer my Dad gave me a few years ago, and hopefully we can get the scratches out of the hood and some other areas along the sides of the car. I’ll have this hoopty shining in no time!
But by the hand of God, you and the people running your shop are the most ahistorical, smegmatically incompetent and fuckstumbling stewards of an essential informational resource since, well, since Wall Street analysts and their slobbering chain-newspaper fetch-monkeys drove mainstream journalism into a ditch.
This quote isn’t the point of the article, but I just love the way David Simon insults Jack Dorsey over his ethically bankrupt stewardship of Twitter. Even if you don’t know what’s going on, the whole thing is worth a read for the wordsmithing alone.
Over at Deadspin, now that the football season has begun, so has the annual NFL Dick Joke Jamboroo. Always a highlight of the season, even if I’m only seeing games peripherally.
We did a round-trip into Ohio over the weekend for a funeral, one of Jen’s extended family. His name was Floyd and he was a funny man, extremely nice to me when I met him, and he and his wife always sent us Christmas cards. While we were there we saw Jen’s sister Annie and her son Scott, as well as her father and the larger Ohio contingent of her mother’s family. It was a long trip out and a long trip back, my second in a month, and I don’t think I need to go to Ohio again for a while.
While that was happening, our refrigerator decided it was going to go wonky (probably in protest of the small upright freezer Jen bought and installed in the basement). Jen had emptied and defrosted it after moving a pile of stuff to the new freezer, but when we plugged it back in the temperature in the fridge section wasn’t staying cold enough. We packed up a bunch of food and brought it to our brother and sister’s spare garage fridge the night before we left; hopefully we haven’t lost three dozen eggs and two gallons of milk. On our return from Ohio the fridge was cooled properly, if not slowly, so we did some recon on the tail end of the Labor Day sales to see what’s out there.
Most of the new model fridges have things like TV screens and cooling drawers and lights that come on when you knock on the window (yes, they have windows). Most of them are bottom-freezer designs, which I like. They are larger, taller and deeper than ours because they were made for modern kitchens. Ours is a smaller traditional top-freezer design. It’s hiding out in the old hall closet under the stairs, tucked into a hole hacked in the wall. Because of the angle of the stairwell above, I’ve only got a certain amount of width and height I can work with, and the closet is only so deep. Most modern units are 70″ high by 36″ wide, and I think I can make a hole big enough to squeeze one in there. I would have liked to have the weekend to cut and trim the walls to test my theory before making a $1500 purchase, but didn’t have enough time, so we will miss out on Labor Day sales. I’m betting our fridge will probably last another couple of months, especially now that the heat and humidity has left, and we’ll look at a new one in late winter when money is more plentiful.
Meanwhile there’s a hurricane blowing in this week, and we have no idea what it will do to this area. I bought a submersible pool pump from Amazon for delivery tomorrow, and I’ll go out and shore up the defenses after work tomorrow night. I would also have liked to clean the gutters this weekend, but I guess I’ll deal with what I get when it gets here.
This is a full recording of Tycho’s 2018 Burning Man set at sunrise. Excellent stuff.
Wow, I actually knocked a lot of stuff off the 2018 to-do list. Tires, Hagerty insurance, and Hydroboost are all some big accomplishments compared to years past. I’m feeling pretty good about everything, and Peer Pressure is running strong. Still, there’s more that can be done:
- Buy a new aluminum radiator and install it. Climbing the hills out of West Virginia I noticed the temp gauge climbing perceptibly, something I’ve never seen it do since I replaced the water pump 9 years ago. The overflow bottle isn’t hooked up because the nipple at the filler neck came unbrazed years ago, and the cooling system needs a flush anyway.
- Oil and gear oil change. It’s been 8 years since the first one, and even though mileage is low, she could use some new fluids. This time I’m going to put Rotella 15W-40 diesel in, for the additional zinc.
- Sandblast, paint and install my spare set of valve covers. I’ve got a truck valve cover set with a long filler neck, and now that the Hydroboost is installed I can actually use them. This will make the addition of oil easier (and cleaner).
Buy caster shimsand install them. There’s more work to do to fix the new steering issues.- Fix the heater linkage so that the heater actually shuts off. The valve in the engine compartment is stuck open, and needs some work to loosen up.
- Fix the windshield wiper motor mount and linkage. The wiper arm on the passenger side is too low and strikes the edge of the windshield, and the whole thing is very slow.
- Buy a 4×10 speaker and install it in the dash. So that I can hear the stereo at speed.
- Re-route the speaker wire. This has been needed for 9 years.
- Rebuild the spare carburetor (finally).
- Buy a hood gas strut and install it. It would just be so much easier to open and close the hood this way.
→ This is a syndicated post from my Scout weblog. More info here.
I’m pleased to premiere another WRI video I produced for the New Climate Economy program, on the heels of the one I shot and produced in London; this one was made here in D.C. but the logistics were almost as challenging (without spending 2 hours in London traffic sweating the schedule). And Jen was able to come and help me with the shoot!
I look at it and see things I would have done differently but overall I’m pretty proud of the whole thing. This is the long version, and I’ll post the short version when it’s available. Tonight I’m going to drink some beers with the team, who launched the report at the U.N. yesterday afternoon.
Here’s a 360˚ video of the ride home from Ohio in the Scout. Click and pan around within the movie as it plays.
→ This is a syndicated post from my Scout weblog. More info here.
You can’t listen to “Dance the Night Away” without feeling good. This should be the hold music for suicide prevention hotlines.
On Vulture, Chuck Klosterman ranks all 131 recorded Van Halen songs. Overall I agree with many of these choices but there are a few I would argue with. “Dirty Movies” at 61, above anything on A Different Kind of Truth? “Right Now” at 58, above “Poundcake” at 35? Come on.