Our current fleet here at the Lockardugan Compound has gotten quite out of hand lately. With the addition of the CR-V, we’ve now got four cars clogging the driveway (three, actually, because the Scout is still in the garage) but our plan was always to ditch the least practical of the remaining three. Because the Jeep and the Scout both have two doors, an equal amount of cargo space and similar gas mileage, one of them has to go. I don’t think I have to tell you which one is nominated. (It’s the one without its own website).
I thought we might have a buyer lined up when we bumped into a friend at the coffee shop the day we bought the ‘V and happened to mention we were going to sell the Jeep; three weeks and two snowstorms later she took it in to her mechanic for a once-over, and came back with some disappointing news. He claimed it needs a new catalytic converter to pass inspection, as well as new front tires (we knew this) and pointed out an interesting bug with the reverse lights—they don’t work. She decided to pass, so we’re back to square 1 for the time being. Which suits me fine, because there’s more snow coming this week, I can’t get the Scout out of the driveway without moving the other three cars, and I’ve got at least three trips worth of garbage in the basement to be hauled to the dump.
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Here’s a great primer on how to add an FM modulator to a crappy stereo in order to run an iPod on the down low. The Saturn has a giant, oversized (and thus unreplaceable) CD player, the CR-V has a giant, oversized CD/cassette player, and the Scout has a $20 Wal-Mart cassette deck held in with sheet metal screws. So this is definitely on our radar.
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Last week, before the deluge of snow, I happened upon this gloriously stock Early Bronco (a close cousin to the Scout in offroad capability, spartan utilitarian design, and tendency to rust at the drop of a hat) in my otherwise boring city parking garage. Virginia plates labeled it a one-day tourist, but its condition made me smile: straight sheet metal, clean paint, an unmodified interior of steel and vinyl—an east coast rarity alone for its presence in the face of road salt, but an even rarer example to have escaped a lift kit, fat tires, or cut fenders.
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My plans for the weekend were pretty simple. I was going to get a few supplies, turn on the TV, and listen to football while I installed some window balances, recaulked the bathtub, and finished cleaning up the mess of wiring in the basement. Sunday morning was bright, warm, and clear, so I pulled the Scout out of the garage for the first time in three weeks, fired it up, and headed to the hardware store.
Unfortunately, my trip was cut short. The temperature gauge went from you’re fine to you’re fucked in about two minutes of idling through downtown Ellicott City, so I pulled off into the International dealer’s lot at the top of the hill to let it cool down (fitting, I know). The radiator cap was cool to the touch, but when I loosened it, a great mass of burbling steam rose from the depths of the radiator and hissed out the top. While I waited for it to cool down, I went and did a little snooping up the hill where the dealer parks the vehicles they have in progress, and found that a diesel Mr. Scout had found almost abandoned off of Rt. 40 is now hopefully getting a new lease on life.
After waiting a half an hour and calling Jen, I crossed my fingers, prayed I’d make the lights going back through town, and pulled back onto the road. Luck was with me, so I made it up the hill to Dmitri’s (a strange Greek-ish restaurant perched on the side of a hill) before the needle told me to pull off for another half-hour. After making it to the Candlelight Inn, I had my ladies come to pick me up, and we did some errands while it cooled off long enough to make the trip home.
I have a long history of ownership with cars that overheat; from the CRX that disliked idling in traffic (requiring full-blast heat in the middle of July) to the Taurus that resisted all repair attempts to the coolant system (and very nearly derailed our rehearsal dinner with an ill-timed coolant failure on the way back from the caterer’s) to the Saturn’s recent troubles, it seems like my lot in life is to sit on the side of the road waiting for the engine to stop ticking. What was going to be my first water pump replacement will now be handled professionally in order to ensure things are done correctly, but I was really hoping to avoid that repair bill.
Upon our return, I started removing the caulk from around our tub in order to hunt down the odor of mildew we’ve been noticing lately, and found a surprise I wasn’t looking forward to at 6:30 on a Sunday night:
The area next to our tub, where water sometimes runs down—especially after Finley pulls the shower curtain open to say, “Hi!”—has been wet for some time now. I pushed a screwdriver blade into the drywall and it felt like peanut butter. As I dug deeper, it got nastier, and the reason why it’s been smelling like mildew became more evident: When the bathroom was last “remodeled”, new sheets of drywall were nailed up over the old tile and tileboard, effectively sealing an airpocket inbetween the two layers of wall. When water got in there, it had a whole lot of dark room to grow mold, so when I pulled off the outer layer, the tile was splotched black and the adjacent wallboard was damp. I kept pulling until I hit dry wallboard and then I pulled another foot beyond that to make sure there’s nothing left, and what you see above is what remains. That thick wooden stud to the immediate right of the tub is original, and got a nice bleach bath once I was done cleaning the dust. The tile is straight-up 60’s stuff, an off-white with gold speckle. I’m glad it was hidden, and I’ll be even more glad to rip that shit out, along with all three layers of wallboard, nasty mismatched linoleum tiles, poorly milled moldings, balky light fixtures, broken concrete slab, and the ancient, crumbling sink. I admit, it took a lot of willpower to put the crowbar down last night. But for now, the plan is to dry it out, put some green wallboard (moisture-resistant) back in, smooth out the seams, repaint and make it through the holidays.
I’ll sign off with a little humor at the expense of my daughter: Don’t drink and drive.
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As noted yesterday, I put the soft top on the Scout over the weekend and drove it in yesterday with the windows down and the back panel rolled up. This morning, taking advantage of the mild weather and predictions of sunshine, I drove it in again but left the windows rolled up and the back panel zipped down mostly because I was running late. I’m pleased to report the fumes were almost nonexistent in the cab, which is a huge improvement over yesterday’s ride, and even having the top completely down.
This happened in my first Scout too—the aerodynamics of the body trap a lot of exhaust behind the tailgate and when braking it tends to creep forward into the cab; the fact that the carburetor is poorly tuned and leaking around the gasket to the manifold doesn’t help either. I think that having a proper set of door and tailgate seals will help keep out a lot of the exhaust from the rear (as well as soundproof the doors somewhat) and having the carb rebuilt/replaced will help with the smell of raw gasoline.
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I drove the Scout into work today for the first time in two weeks. Now that the soft top is back on, I’m noticing its glaring deficiencies-velcro stays that have dried up and come off, plastic snaps that are bent, and milky windows. I’ll have to invest in a boat snap repair kit and do some field modifications in order to keep the flapping and billowing to a minimum.
Otherwise, it was a great ride.
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There’s forward progress on several fronts at Lockardugan Industries, much of which I’ll be keeping under wraps until the contracts are signed and the checks are cashed. As I’ve gotten older, I find I’m more superstitious about good news until long after it’s proven itself out, for fear of someone or something suddenly snatching it away from me with no advance warning. I think overall I’ve had a very lucky experience on this earth, but I’m still careful not to tempt fate, spit in the eye of karma, or bring bad juju on myself by jinxing good fortune before it arrives. At the risk of fucking things up, I’ll share the following with you:
The hot, sticky weather has lifted itself from the Baltimore region, leaving a balmy 81° sunshine in its place, which demanded a ride in the beast this morning. Plans are afoot to go on a recovery mission with several Scout friends to salvage a derelict and a huge cache of parts this Sunday; there will be trailering, jacking, lifting, and towing involved, and it should be loads of fun. I will, hopefully, walk away with a clean rear bench seat, a clean windshield frame, salvageable inner fenders, and a few other assorted goodies, which makes me happy.
In other vehicle news, we did some further research into the Cash for Clunkers program, comparing it with buying a comparable used vehicle off the lot at Carmax, and found that buying used was indeed cheaper, even factoring in a $4500 check from the gub’mint. Because I have an account with USAA (thanks, baby), we can get a great loan rate, and in addition to a chunk of money at signing, I think we can finagle a monthly payment of around $200 for a slightly used four-door 4WD baby-hauling vehicle. My new target is the CRX/RAV4-sized class, where we can fit more than a breadbasket in the cargo hold and have two (that’s right, two) children in the rear seats. Gas mileage won’t be on par with the Fit, but maybe we can get one of those as a replacement for the Saturn. Saturday afternoon, we’re planning to do some test driving to see how we like the available choices.
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The National Weather Service claims we will be inundated with heavy rain, thunderstorms, the possibility of hail, and other unspecified biblical plagues. On the basis of their advice, I left the Scout home for the second full week and played it safe. However, my morning commute was full of sunshine.
We’d better get some category 5 hurricane shit up in this mutha by lunchtime, or I’m going to be pissed.
Early Afternoon Update: I’m officially pissed.
4:30: We got showered upon, and now the skies are sunny. Radar shows the worst of it is off to the east and there’s nothing on the horizon. Still pissed.
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After about four months of suffering through a faulty email setup, I got tired of manually marking and deleting junk mail every half an hour. So today at lunch I finally nuked my main account and set it up from scratch. The way mail.app handles IMAP accounts is confusing, to say the least, and Apple’s explanation of how it interacts is pretty thin on details. (Most searches, predictably, focus on setting up Gmail for IMAP on mail.app). I’m still having some hiccups here and there but all seems to be better in my email world now.
Finding a decent video encoding scheme for Flickr has been a huge nightmare. I’ve found that the default encoding from our Canon SD900 (AVI format) works flawlessly, while almost every encoding schema for Flip video footage processed through Quicktime Pro looks like garbage. I’ve got a ton of footage that gets pixellated and blocky as soon as it hits Flickr (or, alternately, bonks out with a yellow “This video cannot be processed” message). I’m going to keep working on this and hopefully find a solution I like.
The heat has returned to Baltimore, and with it, our peculiar pattern of hot, muggy sunshine in the morning, cloudy afternoons, short, violent thunderstorms towards the evening commute, and unbearably humid evenings. I may have to put the full soft top back on the Scout in order to drive it to work once a week; nothing sucks more than driving home in the rain.
This next clip is sheer genius. I was confused, at first; I hadn’t realized Sarah Palin’s “Speech” was so disjointed and illogical until I read the actual transcript.
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