We’re not getting our usual milk delivery on Wednesday, what with the Second Horseman of the Apocalypse about to bear down on us (there was no mail service today and I can’t even find the milkbox on the front porch), so we felt it would be prudent to stock up on some before the snow starts flying again. Luckily, there were a few half-gallons of organic left at the bottom of the racks, so all is well. Everybody seemed to be in pretty good spirits while I was there, too.
Snow fell last night in a perfect stillness, in contrast to the howling subzero winds we’ve been suffering through since mid-December. In the early morning light, it was all still sitting on the smallest branches and twigs, shining brightly as the sun rose behind the trees. Shoveling off the cars took about three seconds, as the snow was the most fluffy, dry powder I’ve ever encountered on the east coast. It was so light, I could have blown it off the car with my breath, had I been so motivated.
This morning I dropped Finn off at daycare so that Mama could run some errands and take care of a doctor’s appointment. Our route takes us down I-95, where one section crosses over a valley of the Patapsco State Park at high treetop level. Everything in sight was dusted with snow in the perfect natural approximation of a Bob Ross painting, and for about an hour, Maryland was the most beautiful place on earth.
She’s a little blurry, but that’s because she hasn’t stopped moving for three days. Happy holidays, everybody!
I had some time to kill Wednesday afternoon (I was out of the office), so I decided to try to hunt for a Saturn taillight at our not-so-local pick & pull down in Jessup. I find junkyards in Baltimore rather depressing, quite honestly; there’s an air of desperation and mistrust at the local chain I frequent, starting with the uneven, haphazard, crowded parking lot (where squeezing into the wrong spot on the north side will guarantee one’s car joins the others inside the wire to be stripped) to the bunker-like entrance adorned with hand-lettered signs stating “The Customer isn’t right, WE Are” and “It’s OUR way or the HIGHWAY”. Once a dollar is offered, a name is scrawled on the entrance waiver, one is free to roam the wreck-littered field of stock, tools in hand, careful to avoid being run down by the giant wheel loaders roaming the lanes.
I always seem to visit right after a large rainstorm, so the fields are usually muddy and infested with mosquitos, who thrive among gaping, swamplike trunks and moldy upholstery. Wednesday was temperate and cloudy, which meant I wouldn’t be squinting to identify makes and sweating as I tried to remove frozen bolts with vise-grips (Rule #1: the object you need to remove will always be held in by a fastener for which you are left unprepared), but the usual lake-sized puddles surrounded whole rows of cars, making navigation treacherous. Helpfully, my predecessors usually create elaborate bridges out of tires, door panels, tailgates, and sheet metal, so it’s not so bad for the fleet of foot. Just don’t try retracing steps while carrying that engine block.
The first section visible after entering is all GM product, so I threaded my way through the rows to find a suitable Saturn donor. There were plenty of correct-vintage sedans and even a couple of recent models, but no coupes. I did find a mid 60’s Corvair 4-door in reasonably good shape for Maryland (no visible rust and a mostly intact engine), a cast-off Cadillac stretch limo of 90’s vintage (no bar set, no TV’s) and several late-model minivans that had suffered horrific accidents among the hundreds of carcasses. But there were no Saturns of the proper model to be found. (Rule #2: there’s a 25% chance the model you need will actually be present.)
Switching to plan B, I crossed the footbridge to the second field where SUVs are collected, and found a Cherokee with gas tailgate struts that matched our model; installing these ($6.60/ea) ensures the tailgate won’t land on Jen’s head again as she unloads the stroller from the Jeep. Strangely, it’s been hard to find a Cherokee of our vintage, while there’s at least one Grand Cherokee of every model year in each row awaiting the crusher. I passed delivery trucks, a mid-80’s customized van with its fiberglas shell top peeled off carefully like a sardine can, several Land Rovers brought low from their days as Starbucks delivery vehicles, and battered pickups of every shape and size.
Having fulfilled one of my two missions, I figured I’d spend some time browsing the rows for other interesting finds, and came upon an interesting survivor in the Chrysler rows: a 1955 Nash in reasonably good shape for its age. It took some sleuthing to figure out what it was at first; the instrument pod form the dash was already gone (drat!) while the combination badge/trunk release proclaimed “Rambler” in script. On the dashboard, in helpful black lettering, were the words “FASTEN SEAT BELTS PLEASE” centered over the ignition key; I think the promise of danger may have been wishful thinking, given the tire-screaming fury of an 82hp straight-six under the hood. It was the kind of car I wish I had a garage for, honestly—it’s odd enough that almost nobody has one, and it was in good enough shape that it might have been worth buying and dragging home to slowly clean up, given that most of the hard-to-find items were still intact. As it was, I took one shiny hubcap, emblazoned with a script “R” and left the rest behind to the vultures.
Beyond the SUVs was an entire wing of import vehicles, Japanese sedans mingled with German sport coupes and the odd Korean compact. Here and there, the empty carcass of a Civic peeked from behind models with no hope of street racing, including an inexplicably bright pink coupe that had been gutted to the floorboards. Off on the edges, diesel-belching Mercedes sedans pointed their hoods at the sky. Not currently owning any imports, I breezed through this section before crossing back over the bridge and checking out the Ford section to see if I could pull a pillar spotlight from an ex-police cruiser. It seems that the second thing enterprising salvagers yank from retired cop cars is the pillar light, right after they peel the “Police Interceptor” badge from the left side of the trunklid. I did find some interesting old Fords back in the weeds, including a mid 60’s Thunderbird dwarfed by a yacht-sized 70’s example; another stretch limo, an ex-taxicab with the plastic billboard cap intact on the roof, a cream-colored Pinto with the engine pulled (??!??!), entire fleets of ex police cruiser/taxicab/security vehicles, each wearing at least three coats of paint and the scars of multiple careers, discarded Lincoln limousines next to tiny stripped Focuses, and the odd clapped-out Probe, all glass smashed out, balanced delicately upon a pillar of tires for access to the transmission.
Exiting the yard is always a great time. After placing parts on a metal tray, a surly fellow leans out a small window and consults an inscrutable pricing sheet, then comes up with a random number for whatever it is you’ve dragged out of the mud. My struts and hubcap cost a total of $24 ($6 each, go figure), while the five ignition wires the guys ahead of me took were in the mid-40’s. Meanwhile, two or three other surly dudes are eyeballing everyone to make sure we haven’t stuffed an air cleaner down our pants or a bench seat into our toolbox. I’m sure this type of place sees its fair share of shoplifting, but I think the guy who threatened to smash my camera last year took his job a little too seriously; it wasn’t until that moment that I noticed the “NO CAMERAS ALLOWED” signage posted among the eighty other signs inside the office. So now I smuggle a point and shoot in my pants so that I can quickly snap stuff; next time I’ll have to remember to reset the ISO down from 1600, which is why everything above is so grainy. As much as the junkyard is depressing, I like to visit, only if to find something out of the ordinary.
This link to a visual guide to baby poop is making the rounds this week, which strikes me as funny for some reason. Jen and I get BabyCenter bulletins, and yes, we saw this, and yes, we looked at the poop. It’s surprising how analytical one gets about poop after having a baby.
I’ve been writing and rewriting a post to Finn about her birthday, but I’m not a good enough writer to say what I mean. Meanwhile, the last two weeks (well, the last month) have been ridiculously busy, to the point where I’m not getting a lot of spare time to organize my thoughts. I’ll keep trying.
A sunny morning walk with my bride and my baby, with plenty of dogs to meet along the way.
A 1-mile commute to work on an 80° day in a noisy, clanky convertible.
Wow, this is pretty amazing: Why I won’t be at my high school reunion. My high school experience wasn’t nearly as bad as this one, but I echo the sentiment at the end: Our kids will have some kind of kung-fu lessons and be able to finish physical conflicts on their own terms. I think that kind of self-confidence is essential in this day and age.
Monday night we spent a little time with some friends in the industry, trading gossip, war stories, and news, and it left me feeling a little sick to my stomach. I know that times are tough out there, but the more bad news I hear, the more discouraged I get. This business is cyclical in nature, and having lasted through three recessions since joining the full-time workforce (exiting college right in the middle of one, no less) I know that this will be the way of things until I retire or give up and go sell insurance.
This one has me more worried than the last two, and that’s probably because I’m wired into the scene a lot better than I was in ’93 or ’01, and a lot more knowledgeable about the economy, our country, and my insignificant place on the edge of the whole mess. Work is scarce, jobs are even harder to find, and the money that people are spending is net 120 at best, so I’m holding on to what I’ve got for dear life and hoping we can ride this one out.
Compounding my worry was a rough time I was having with a project at work, which seemed to be dragging onward with no resolution. I’d sketched and sketched and between fifteen or so pages I had three distinct approaches, but I was having a hell of a time getting them to flesh out onscreen. At times like this it’s easy to get into an “I suck” mentality, which becomes self-defeating (and self-prophesying), but I’ve learned the hard way over the years that time and a little perspective can be an ally. I came home, helped give the baby a bath, watered the garden, spent some time with Jen, and then took another look at what I’d done. Within an hour or so I felt the quiet, pleasurable shift of things starting to fall into place, and soon I had had one solution finished, the second on its way, and the elements of the third sorted out for the next morning.
I guess the upshot of all this rambling is that even though my chosen profession doesn’t have the stability of, say, law, banking (ha), or civil service, it’s more rewarding than anything else I can think of. That feeling of the gears meshing and elements clicking together is one of the best things in the world—I’d be hard-pressed to find something else so rewarding that I could get paid to do, even when it seems like the industry is groaning and creaking and imploding around me.
Nonprofit reverses plan to give injured veteran a home. Friends of ours spearheaded the effort to build and donate a house to an amputee veteran. But it turns out he and his family own two other houses and had a third built for them by volunteers in Georgia. What a sad, demoralizing story.