Back in 2012 or so I started watching a goofy YouTube show called Roadkill, about two guys who would drive somewhere remote to find a junky car, fix it up, do some burnouts, and drive it somewhere else. It was pretty popular, and eventually the two hosts—who then were both editors of Hot Rod magazine—quit their jobs and hosted Roadkill full time. A couple of years ago it was put behind a paywall at MotorTrend, and I missed the show.
Last week, deep in Week 3 of working from home, I was actually on the “buy” screen for a year’s worth of MotorTrend On Demand, but for some reason I never pushed the button.
This afternoon, I got an email from Hagerty announcing they were giving us members a free year of MotorTrend On Demand as part of our membership. I’m looking at several days at my desk making edits to WRI’s Annual Report, so this gift could not have come at a better time. Bravo, Hagerty, you just made my quarantine 100% more bearable.
I spent most of a gray rainy weekend at my desk working on WRI’s Annual Report, flowing new copy in where the old was and researching photography to place the FPO stuff I’d dumped in there last week. It all came together pretty well, and I’m hopeful the team will have only minor edits to things from this point forward. We won’t be getting a physical proof before printing for obvious reasons, so I’m a little worried about how it will print, but I’m determined to stay cautiously optimistic.
Planting update: I’ve got about 5 Chef’s Choice, 10 Cherokee, and 4 cherry tomato sprouts, as well as 10 lettuce sprouts germinating in the basement under the grow light, which is a lovely treat to watch every day. I’ve been turning the light on at 7AM when I let Hazel out for the first time, and shutting it off at 11PM, so they’re getting a full 16 hours of light daily. This evening I pulled the plastic cover off for the first time and we raised them closer to the grow light to keep them from getting too leggy. The question now is how to get them from tiny seedlings to healthy plants and then out into the greenhouse without frying or killing them. For a total investment of about $15, I’d say this is an experiment worth trying until I figure it out.
Governor Hogan says, Don’t Call It a Lockdown, but it’s pretty much a lockdown. Good to know that we can still go shopping for liquor when the stocks run low. Seriously, it’s about time the dumb fucks in our neighborhood leash their kids instead of letting them run around in packs, which I see daily from my front window. There’s no possible disease vector there, no sir. Downside: I can’t pick up the bathroom wood trim that’ll be available on Monday.
Teleworking has made me an expert on switching between seventeen different videoconferencing applications in one day. Zoom, one of the most popular, was outed as being completely scummy several years ago. It’s still pretty scummy. Apparently it likes to send data to Facebook without your consent. Unfortunately, it works better than Skype for Business or Microsoft Teams, so lots of our teams use it. I’m just thrilled to death about sharing everything with Facebook, can you tell?
I got a very heavy package delivered to the house yesterday: a shiny remanufactured starter motor from AC Delco. The weekend forecast is for warm weather but showers and thunderstorms, so I probably won’t be able to take advantage of the time to put it in.
Top: original crusty starter motor pulled in 2011. Bottom: sexxxxxy new reman unit. Y’know, I think I’m going to bust out the pressure washer and see if I can clean the old one up.
One of the things I’ve been thinking about are the points of failure and wondering what they might be. It’s been so long since we pulled the last unit, I don’t remember what the issue was—if it was making the same noise, stopping intermittently, or something else.
There’s the possibility that there are missing teeth on the flywheel, based on the sounds the engine is making when I turn the key. It could be that the solenoid isn’t working correctly, and getting stuck could be the reason I get a grinding sound. It could be that the contacts aren’t clean enough, which means there isn’t enough juice getting to the starter (the single biggest current draw on the whole truck). One other thought is that we didn’t get the bolts snugged tight enough in 2011 and they’ve come loose.
Once the contacts are clean on both sides, and the new starter is in place, I should be able to walk through the rest of the symptoms and figure out what’s happening. And hopefully, there will be no more grinding.
→ This is a syndicated post from my Scout weblog. More info here.
I’ve been on an XTC kick for the last couple of days. This is one of my favorites, off Oranges & Lemons, from 1989.
The idea that we’re on the brink of a return to normalcy is flatly insane. We’re barely saying hello to covid-19 in its mild and moderate mercies.
This reporter, in Kansas City, thinks he probably has a mild to moderate case of Coronavirus. He can’t tell for sure, because there are no tests available. He doesn’t know how he got it, because he works from home and took all the precautions. He’s been dealing with the symptoms for nine days, and says it feels like getting hit with a ton of bricks.
Finley was assigned a book to read over the quarantine, John Christopher’s The White Mountains. Grudgingly, she picked it up yesterday and started reading it after she’d slogged through a pile of homework. By dinnertime she was on the last five pages, and had a giant smile on her face. It’s been a while since I’ve seen her sit with a book—a story, and not a book of lists or facts—and devour it with singular focus; she’s been too obsessed with Gacha videos and her iPad to want to read anything. The Tripods trilogy is a gripping series of books. I remember reading it after I’d caught the BBC series when it played on public television in the mid 80’s. Hoping to keep her interest in the series, I wiped her old Kindle of games and installed Overcast, the library eBook sharing app, then downloaded the second and third books using her library card. She’s currently laying on the couch digging in to Book 2.
The tulip tree in front of the house is in full bloom right now, and my desk at the porch window faces it. I’ve been watching people walk, run, ride, and mosey by the house for the past two weeks, and it’s amazing how many people are pausing underneath the bright pink leaves to look up at the canopy in awe. It makes me wish I’d set up a camera to capture pictures of everyone that’s stopped; I’d have at least 10 from today alone.
With three weeks in the rear view mirror, it looks like I’ve got idiotking moved completely from my old webhost to new, and it seems to be a bit zippier in terms of pageloads and updates. It took some digging to understand what the new hosts’ migration directions were, and a couple of pokes to their customer service desk to get what I wanted, but everything is where it should be and working faster than it did before.
I drove to the Howard County General Hospital yesterday for a CT scan and my regularly scheduled cancer checkup. I was, understandably, nervous about driving downtown to the main Hopkins campus, so I’d been in contact with my oncologist the previous week about where to meet. We shifted everything to our local hospital and scheduled a video chat for the consult. The CT went fine but neither of the labs had any record of my paperwork, so I couldn’t have any bloodwork done. However, the scans all came back negative for any new passengers, and the video conference went pretty well other than video issues on his end.