Our garage looks shittier and shittier. I’m going to have to do something about that and the whole east side of the house this fall.
Peer Pressure rolled out of the Jiffy Lube on Saturday morning with new oil in the engine, pumpkins, and transmission, and… the transmission still sounds shitty. I was hoping $30 of new 50wt. racing oil would quiet the chattering in the box, but it was not to be. So, I called a transmission shop on the other side of town, who come highly recommended (who also replaced the throwout bearing in my Mazda B2000 about 25 years ago) and talked to the owner, who could not have been more accommodating. When I told him my situation (upcoming vacation, IH Nationals in early August) he told me to bring it in Friday before we leave town and he’d put it in a covered storage facility across the street where he keeps street rods and other customer vehicles that can’t be outside. While we’re away he’s going to look it over and let me know what’s going on. It’s not going to be cheap, but I’ll feel better driving 500 miles after the pros fix it correctly.
→ This is a syndicated post from my Scout weblog. More info here.
This is from the front lawn. The GoPro was set for video and not timelapse, so it crapped out before the job was complete.
This was shot from across the street. I used the suction cup mount on the front of the street sign and cropped in on the shot from there.
The difference from this distance isn’t that dramatic. In person, it’s a gigantic change.
There have been a lot of takes on the new season of Stranger Things. What It Meant, Was It Woke Enough, Was It As Good As Season X, Was it 80’s Enough, et cetera. These are all entertaining opinions to be sure. My own take on it is that it’s the best season yet, the characters have all grown and changed the way I expect they would in real life—and the writing is better too. Perhaps that’s because we know who these characters are now and we’re so invested in them. While I’m not as happy with some of the individual character choices as I’d like to be (Hopper was a bit more doofus-comical this season than I liked, and Mike was a dick to pretty much everyone) I thought their storylines were interesting, and I was happy to suspend my disbelief as far as possible to enjoy the action. In a cast as sprawling as this it’s hard to give them all something to do that’s integral to the plot but with a few small caveats they pulled it off.
By far the highlight of the series was the interplay between Steve, new character Robin, and our friend Dustin. Screenplayed has a great script-to-film breakdown of easily the best scene in the whole series, Robin and Steve having a heart to heart on the floor of a cinema bathroom after being drugged by Russian agents in a hidden bunker. This is awesome acting and HOLY SHIT THE FEELS. These two are easily the best comedy/drama pairing since Tracy/Hepburn and Ryan/Crystal.
Our CR-V is now 13 years old. Far from being worn out, it’s only got 130,000 miles on the engine, and after some careful maintenance, it still looks pretty good. One place its age was showing, however, were the headlights. Our Honda has plastic housings like most other manufacturers, and ours fell victim to the same affliction many others have: they yellowed and fogged over with age. When we drove up to Syracuse for my father’s service earlier this year, part of the journey was at night, and it was frightening how dim the lights had gotten, even with the highbeams on.
Jen has been asking me to get after this for some time, and I did some research for the best possible solution. I bought a 3M kit on Amazon last week, resolving to improve our situation. In about a half an hour, I went from this:
To this:
You can really see the before and after difference in the next picture:
It’s really pretty simple. With a standard drill, you start with a fine sanding pad and go finer and finer until you’re wet-sanding the plastic, and then finally you apply a buffing compound to clean up the plastic. Both lenses took me about an hour in total to finish (I went back and cleaned up the right-hand lens after I took the picture above).
EXPIRED
The A/V Club reports that Brian Vaughn and Cliff Chiang’s Paper Girls is set to become the next big Netflix streaming series. This is excellent news, because this series is fucking awesome. I have NO idea how they’re going to pull it off however.
Look what showed up in my Amazon Prime box this afternoon: an AMT Scout model.
I’m going to tuck this away for the cold winter months when I can’t get in the Scout and drive it.
Meanwhile, I’m looking at getting Peer Pressure in to the local Jiffy Lube for a fluid change this weekend. She’s only had about 12,000 miles on her since I bought her, but the last change was in 2012 and the transmission is beginning to make a disturbing clunk between 3rd and 4th gear. It could just be low gear oil, or it could be that the transmission is slipping. I’m going to try the $100 fix first before I have to deal with a $1000 rebuild, and we’ll see how that goes.
→ This is a syndicated post from my Scout weblog. More info here.
In the days since all of the electrical has been hooked up in the bathroom, I have to say a heated floor after getting out of the shower is AWESOME. It’s only set for 90˚ between 6-7AM, but it feels great to walk out onto toasty tiles. I’m going to turn it off completely tonight until the weather starts getting cold but I can’t wait to test it out for real this fall.
Jen and I picked a bunch of tomatoes from the vines yesterday. There were a ton of Romas waiting to be pulled, and two handfuls of cherries from all four plants. They all looked happy and healthy. The second Roma plant is still battling blossom end rot, as is (sadly) the Pineapple heirloom plant in back. On Monday there was one fruit turning a beautiful variegated shade of yellow/orange/red. Yesterday it went deeper read with streaks of orange, but the bottom was squishy so I had to cut it and a neighbor off the vines. The spray I bought doesn’t seem to be doing shit so I think I’ve got to add bone meal to the soil and try to salvage the rest of the season.
We are due to sign for our home equity loan on the 15th, the same day the long-awaited tree crew is set to arrive to remove the big silver maple next to the driveway. Both of these events mean big changes in our lives. The tree throws a hell of a lot of shade on the house and that shielding from the sun will be missed, but I’ll be happy to have a flat driveway and cleaner gutters. Having the loan in place means we can get a lot of projects finished, but I’m not looking forward to the monthly payment. Change always ramps up my anxiety, but I know these two things will benefit us in the long run and I’m itching to get them both done.
We made the journey into Baltimore to speak with a new doctor yesterday, one who specializes in blood cancer. To recap, my white blood cell count has been low for about a year, something I wasn’t really aware of even though Hopkins makes the results of all of my bloodwork available to me through an online portal. In hindsight, it’s been a pretty obvious fact but I assumed I was doing OK because nobody mentioned it before last month.
When we started the process of treating my tumor one of the many forms they had me sign was my acknowledgement that the chemotherapy could trigger follow-on cancer of varying kinds. One of these is an aggressive form of blood cancer called Acute Myeloid Leukemia. My oncologist hasn’t been too concerned with this up until the last checkup, probably because he was waiting for my levels to come back up, which they haven’t.
The new doctor asked me a bunch of questions and then turned to my labs, and did his best to put us at ease. Based on what he’s seeing, he’s not concerned about AML at this point, thinking that this is most likely something called lymphocytopenia, which is a condition where I have an abnormally low level of lymphocytes in my blood. This is usually a result of having a cold, viral or fungal infections, or more severe things like HIV (which I tested negative for), MS, and chemotherapy.
So I did another big blood panel, and we got the CBC results back this afternoon. Shockingly, many of the important things bumped upwards: neutrophils, lymphocytes, and my overall white blood cell count. We’re waiting on the results of some specialized tests—one for something called CD4, the T-cells which fight off bacteria and viruses. If that result comes in low, they’re going to put me on an antibiotic called Bactrim, which will help my system until my levels come back up.
So, in the larger picture, I’m not happy to be dealing with a lowered immune system, but if that’s the worst extent of it, I’m thanking whatever guardian angels I have for their continued watch over my humble head.