It’s the cleanest thing on the Scout, and it’s hidden in the engine compartment.
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Saturday afternoon we made time to run to a showroom to look over some cabinetry for the new bathroom. After perusing all of the styles and colors, we settled on a nice white design that’s not too far away from the kitchen pattern, and will look good with the tile/wall combination. My big concern has always been cost, and after the consultant drew up some plans that we both liked, he clicked and clacked on his calculator and showed us a number that made me sigh with relief.
Then we did the same for the front wall, which will have a large cabinet for linens on the left and two lower cabinets under a counter for other items, with a cutout for a chair in between. We hemmed and hawed over the placement and drawer setup, because the windows are lower than standard counter height, but I think we settled on something everyone likes. I braced for a much larger price tag but after he clicked and clacked I sighed with relief again.
Don’t judge based on these shitty scans of shitty prints; I think it’ll look really good when they’re in there. The cabinet brand we’re going with is one our friend Brian recommended, and it’s quality stuff. It’ll even have fancy soft-close hardware, which I’m told is an HGTV requirement.
So I applied for a home equity loan and we’re waiting to hear back from the bank on that. With the balance of that loan we have the room to do a bunch more things (or one big project) and Jen and I talked over a couple of possibilities:
- New dining room windows to replace the outside pair and the inside pair, which are still roughed in.
- A new gutter on the roof of the new bathroom, which wasn’t replaced with the main roof and is a sagging, clogging wreck
- Caps on the other gutters so I don’t have to climb up and possibly fall off and break my neck
- Some kind of heat source in the kitchen
- Siding: we’re dealing with the original sheathing on this house, which is solid 3/4″ wood, covered in ancient crumbling tarpaper, then covered in cedar shake. Over that is the aluminum siding, which dates back to the Johnson administration, I’d wager. Having the house wrapped in Tyvek and covering it in a faux-shake siding would go a long way to lowering our energy bills, making the interior feel more cozy, and improving the curb appeal of the house.
Saturday morning I made a pile of hash browns for the family, cleaned up the kitchen, and ran a bunch of tools out to the garage to get a long-awaited project started: installing a new aluminum radiator.
I’m always conscious of starting projects that I might not be able to finish in a weekend, and this time I was under the added pressure to getting it done by the afternoon, because we had family plans for Sunday. Additionally, I’ve got an appointment next Saturday across town to have the caster correctors installed, so I wanted to have everything road tested and ready. I have anxiety about having a broken-down truck sitting in the driveway with an appointment on the horizon.
First, I drained the coolant. It came out relatively clean, a little milky from age but not black. I got about two and a half gallons out from the stopcock and the lower rad hose into an old cat litter pan. Then I pulled the lower hose and the upper hose, disconnected the shroud mount and pulled that apart into two sections, and loosened the body bolts. Everything came off smoothly; nothing needed PB Blaster (although I used it) to get started, which was a blessing.
Once that was done, the old radiator came out easily. The bottom was getting corroded but it wasn’t as bad as my spare, where the bottom rail is disconnected from the frame.
Then I pulled the new one out of the box and slid it right in place—this time I stood and straddled the fenders to drop it in from the top. Hand-tightening the body bolts, I put new hoses on above and below. The lower hose needed a 2″ trim to avoid a bad kink in the bendy section but other than that they both slid right on. Next I hooked up the overflow tank for the first time since I’ve owned it: the old radiator was missing the brazed nipple on the cap valve. Then I installed and adjusted the shroud mount and shroud itself, tightened the body bolts down, and checked all of the fittings.
The only thing I didn’t have were two blockoff bolts for the automatic transmission inlet/outlet, so I ran around town to find a set and found them at Advance. They’re brass but I wrapped them in Teflon tape and tightened them into place.
Finally, I put about 2 1/2 gallons of new 50/50 antifreeze in the system, topped off the overflow tank (I need a new one, because the plastic mounting brackets have both snapped off), said a prayer, and started her up. I idled in the driveway for 15 minutes, pausing only to cap off the radiator once the bubbles stopped, and let her get up to temperature.
I had to stop at that point for dinner and other family stuff, so Sunday morning I took a 20 minute ride around the neighborhood to shake the hoses around and see how things held up. I chose a route that featured lousy roads (there are no shortage of those) and lights to stop at and some long stretches and banged her around a bit, and I didn’t see any leaks or steam. The temp gauge stayed pegged to the left side of the horizontal bar. Success!
Should I have flushed the system while I had it open? probably. In the fall I’ll have Jiffy Lube do it for me when I get the oil changed. Could I have saved money mixing antifreeze myself? definitely. But I was in a hurry and I had nothing else to mix it in.
Special thanks go to my pop, whose tools I inherited, which made everything much, much easier. Happy Father’s Day, Dad.
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Celebrating the fact that I got paid this week, I promptly ordered a prehung closet door from Home Depot for the new bathroom. It was a little tricky to find something that fit the style of the rest of the house but HD had what we needed in the size we wanted. And as luck would have it, the door was on sale this week so delivery will basically be free. The only downside is that it won’t be here until the end of the month. I’ve been stalled in the bathroom on trimwork waiting for this door and for movement on the cabinetry, which is wrapped up in a larger ongoing discussion about other project priorities and how we’ll wrap those into a home equity loan. I think I’ve identified what my maximum loan payment will be, which obviously caps the amount we borrow, so it’s now a matter of filling out paperwork and getting the loan started. Meanwhile, I haven’t been able to nail down my neighbor the electrician to finalize the wiring, so we haven’t fired up the heated floor yet.
Once the door is hung I can continue with the trim surround all the way to the shower and start putting kickplate in permanently. The next big trick is going to be adding 3/4″ shim around the inside of each doorjamb so that the casing will sit flush with the wall. (I left the sheathing intact on the walls, which may have been a mistake, so there’s sheetrock over top of that; thus the jamb is generally 1/2″ too narrow. But what’s done is done). Then I can mill and install casing around the back door. The front door will get done toward the end of the project, once the cabinetry is all in place.
The greenhouse is looking great, although one of my Roma plants has developed blossom-end rot. This is due to a lack of calcium in the soil, which means I’ve got to amend it quickly before I lose the whole plant. I’ve got some products coming from Amazon to combat this and hopefully we can catch it before all of the fruit is damaged. Two of the cherry plants have grown taller than the ceiling and are still producing flowers, so I know everything else needs fertilizer too.
Strangely, half of the marigolds Finn and I planted are happy and blooming, and the other half are 6-8″ tall and continuing to produce new leaves but no flowers. I’m going to give those another week to bloom, and after that I’m going to toss them. Apparently I let them get too leggy too early and didn’t pinch off new growth soon enough. Honestly I think the cheaper seed is doing better than the expensive stuff.
Finn was having a problem booting up one of her favorite apps after school yesterday, and I had to sit down and troubleshoot the issue. I locked down a ton of different settings when I set up her iPad so it took me a bit of time to go through the list and figure out what was blocking her (the app icon didn’t even show up on her desktop). When I logged in as her parent it was visible to me, and I spent a bit of time in the Restricted Apps section wondering why it didn’t show up. It wasn’t until I looked closely at the app itself and realized it was rated in the App Store for 12+ and I had her iPad blocking everything 9+ that I realized what the issue was. As soon as I switched this, it showed up fine. I was initially a little annoyed at Apple, but once I understood how the system worked, I appreciated the ability to switch these settings from my iPhone so much more.
Peer Pressure has been running strong and smooth the last couple of weeks; I’ve had her out every weekend since the top came off. She’s hauled bags of dirt and mulch from the store, garbage to the dump, and run multiple errands around town—basically whenever I have an excuse to go out and get something. I’ve been poor at shooting any pictures, because I haven’t ranged far from home, so the sights are all the same. But I’ve got some plans for her in the next couple of weeks, stuff that’s making me excited. The first thing is replacing the old radiator with the new aluminum unit I bought back in March.
This should be a straightforward procedure. I don’t have any extra cooling gear hooked up to what’s there right now (no transmission cooler, although adding one eventually would be a wise move) so it should be a matter of draining the block, pulling the hoses, detaching the shroud and shroud mount, and unbolting it from the body. Hopefully it’ll pull out without any fuss. Next I flush the block with a kit I bought and clean everything out. Then I put the new unit in and bolt everything back into place. Hopefully the shroud I fabricated will install with little fuss; if anything I’ll have to drill two new holes to adjust for the new radiator. I’ve got this coming Saturday blocked off to accomplish this, and I hope it goes smoothly.
Second, I’ve got an appointment with an alignment/front end shop over on the East side of town to put the caster shims in, as well as go over the front end and tell me what’s in need of repair. This will happen in two weeks, and I’m going to wait there while they work on it. Hopefully we won’t need to order out for any parts, but you never know. I have a feeling they’re going to find some bushings and other parts that are worn, and that will almost certainly require new parts. In which case I’ll just Uber home and wait for the work to be done.
With those two things completed I’ll feel much better about a drive out to Ohio for Nationals this year. I’m really hoping the caster shims help out the handling issues, because I miss having a Scout that tracks straight. If things don’t improve dramatically, I’m going to start saving up for some 16″ steel wheels I can mount a skinnier tire on, and I’ll have to take a loss on the wheel/tire combo I’m running right now. But that will come next year.
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Browsing through Spotify’s podcast listings I stumbled across a great one: Stay Free: The Story of the Clash, narrated by none other than Chuck D. of Public Enemy. A fascinating subject, produced expertly by the BBC, and narrated by a man who is probably more punk than I’d ever really realized. My only gripe is that it’s not available on my current podcast app (Overcast, highly recommended).
Saturday Karean and Zachary were coming over the bridge to hang out with us, so Finn and I went out and did some grocery shopping for lunch and dinner, came back and prepared everything, cleaned up the house, and organized our gear. Finn set up her lemonade stand while I was prepping food, and made about $10 in an hour and a half.
It was sunny and warm so we thought we’d take them to the pool. They have a set of built-in barbecue grilles there so that it’s easy to bring food in and cook it on the spot, so I figured some standard burgers and dogs and a salad would be perfect for the day. It was a little more crowded than our first visit but the kids hit the pool and stayed in while Karean and I caught up under an umbrella. It was great to catch up with them, and we have dates set aside for rock fishing on the Bay, some baseball games, and camping in the late summer.
We got sugar back on our menu on Saturday, which led us directly to bacon. Most bacon is filled with nitrates as preservatives, which we’ve always tried to avoid anyway. Some of the nitrate-free bacons have turbinado sugar added along with celery salt for their preservative properties, which meant even when we could have pork we couldn’t have bacon. It’s a cruel, callous joke. But Sunday was a banner day: I woke and made 4 lbs. of hash browns and nine links of bacon, and we had a fatty, starchy breakfast of VICTORY. Next up we get chocolate, which is awesome except for the fact that most chocolates have other stuff we’re not allowed to have in them, or are processed next to gluten and soy. I’m just going to pour the cacao and sugar directly into my mouth.
The rest of Sunday was slow and easy. We did some shopping to find Finley a new case for her iPad but struck out at all five stores we tried. Her focus was solely on a PopSocket, those round things that mount to the back of a phone; I think this was because she’d seen them on her friends’ phones and HAD TO HAVE ONE. So we dragged ourselves home, hit up Amazon and found her a case and the PopSocket she wanted and ordered them for delivery. After that I took a nap for about two hours in the afternoon; I was wiped out after navigating the newer, brighter, more confusing Target and crashing from the onslaught of starch and pork fat.
I got an email letting me know I could review my student course reviews while I was at the pool, and in a free moment I looked them over. Frankly, I was dismayed by the polarized feedback I got from the class; there were some folks who seemed to appreciate the class and some who had nothing good to say. Strangely the thing that got me the most was people complaining about having to print out their work each week and how expensive it was; this from students bringing $5 Starbucks cups into class on a regular basis. It’s a good time to step away.
Finn is sitting next to me on the couch playing Roblox on her shiny new iPad Mini. This is a gigantic upgrade from her grotty 4-year-old Kindle Fire, which used to be my old Fire. She’s getting into playing games with her friends online, and while this is making Jen and I very nervous, we’re also not going to completely lock her social life in the basement. She had a friend over on Wednesday who has a new iPhone X—yes, you read that right—and they tried to play Roblox together. Finn’s Kindle kept crashing and needing restarts, and Jen texted me and told me she was getting frustrated.
I’ve been bumping up against the limitations of the Kindle since we set it up for her; Amazon funnels parents into a paid model for parental oversight on your kid’s device, which I was too cheap for. I disabled a lot of the functionality and made it so that she couldn’t do any in-app purchases or browse the web, and that seemed to work OK for what she was doing. But the unit is old, and slow, and the battery is weak, and it was two-year-old technology four years ago, which means there were games within Roblox that wouldn’t run properly, and that app isn’t supported very well on Android from what I can tell. And all the kids are playing Fortnite, which it won’t run at all.
Her laptop actually turned out to be harder to manage. I set up a very strict internet whitelist to start with: Baltimore County Public Schools, PBS Kids, dictionary.com, National Geographic, and about four other sites of the same quality. But because any and all of the pages BCPS serves pulls scripts and content from other domains, all of these have to be whitelisted—over, and over, and over again. I had to make a second account for her with no firewall so she could do research online, and monitor what she was looking at.
Bless her heart, our daughter doesn’t have tantrums or whine or act like a baby about shit like this, but Jen is great at staying tuned to her frequencies and knows when things feel wrong. We decided that she should be able to reach out and play with her friends online without feeling embarrassed by her gear. There are a lot of seismic social shifts happening right now, and we want to make sure we’re not holding her back, while also not pushing her too far forward.
So we had a family talk over dinner, and after setting some ground rules we all came to a decision.
Jen and I weighed the options of different devices first; any phone is out of the question, as she’s not going to have one of those for several years—I don’t care what all of the crazy alarmist parents around us say, she doesn’t need to get in touch with me during recess in the fourth grade. I considered buying a new iPhone and giving her my old one with cell service disabled (it’s a 6, and beginning to show its age, but still functional), but there are a couple of modern games that won’t play on it. I considered an iPod Touch, but I figure she’d lose that pretty quickly. I looked at all of the models of iPad and finally settled on the Mini for its size, capacity, and price. It sits comfortably in the middle of each segment, and I figure it’s got enough room to expand into a schoolwork device as she gets into middle school. It’s big enough that it’s easy to see and hard to lose. But it’s also smaller than a full-size iPad.
I had to do a little sleuthing to figure out how to set it up for her correctly; at first I logged in with my account but quickly realized I’d have to undo that after I set her up with a Family Sharing account. She’s now got a subaccount keyed to her age, and she’s not able to purchase apps without her iPad sending me a confirmation alert. It’s set up with three hours max of screen time between 7AM and 9PM, and I’ve gotten pretty granular with the other settings. (I’m hesitating with the whitelist so I’ve set it to Block Adult Content, and we’ll see how that works).
Overall, I’m impressed with how Apple has thought some of this stuff through; out of the box it has a lot of the features I wanted without having to pay extra for—that’s part of the premium price, I suppose. The real test will be how she butts up against the parental controls I’ve set up, and if we have to modify any of them. But for now, she’s over the moon, and already talking about what case she’s going to buy for it.
When I was a young boy, I was given this LEGO set for Christmas. I remember being fascinated with the little blocks, and for the rest of that day I put the set together and took it apart and put it back together. I loved looking at the instructions, printed in simple 3D side-view format, and I loved the ability to reform the set into some other creation that I imagined. It was the beginning of an obsession I harbored for years.
LEGO just released a new Moon Landing set, and the difference is staggering. The original was 364 parts; the new set has 1,087. I like how it’s now mostly to scale (I wondered how the giant blocky robots from the first set were supposed to fit in that weird blue capsule even as a young boy) and that they made special accessories for the minifigs. I also like that it’s more historically correct; the original landers were only made to fit two astronauts; the third orbited the moon alone in the Command Module. (previously).