Itinerant Air-Cooled Greetings From Maryland
Posted: Mon May 07, 2018 10:11 am
Yes, Maryland, via Florida to Alabama to Georgia to Tennessee to Kentucky to Ohio to Pennsylvania to New York to New Jersey to Pennsylvania to my cheesehead appointment in Maryland. Then back to Florida in one dopey-tired marathon of semi-rig dodging.
We left off here April 26th early morning when I dropped off the BobD and picked up the Lexus. That was the first 360 mile leg, only 2743 miles to go!
Whisperjet Alexus'd to Cincinnatti OH. Photo stamp said "Apr 27 8:41AM"
Whisperjet Alexus'd to Columbus OH. Photo stamp said "Apr 27 10:21AM"
Made it to Albion NY some time around 7:30PM, 959 miles after leaving the storage unit, 1,785 miles to go! It was so pretty and warm, wow, that is so unlike upstate New York, must have been 75*. Took my dearly anticipated walk with Cindy up the prettiest road in the world. We were only 20 minutes late to dinner.
Sure, next morning was so very very much like upstate New York. Rainy drizzle 44* to go check my poor cars in the barn. By the time I arrived at the barn April 28th 10:06AM, it was raining hard pellets drumming on that tired corrugated tin roof. Smelled like cow poo, mold, tractor oil, pesticides, dirt. The Lexus already looked like a farm truck with muddy tires and bug splat. The Plucky Little Squareback said "no, I will not start." I snaked jumper cables through the rear hatch to the battery under the seat, and sat in the Whispersplat muddy Lexus and listened to that hushed V8 hold 2,500 rpm while we charged the Squareback's battery:
With a far friskier starter, the Squareback said "no, I will not start." Like all of you and all of humanity and all lab mice everywhere, I went directly to the last known reason it would not start, the breaker points. Yes, they had a gap. Yes, the coil fired off some nice purple sparks in the dark drumming damp barn. Put it back together and wished that it might start just because I fooled with it. The Squareback said, "no, I will not start." Half-heartedly tugged at wires and fuel injection (so not good). Finally decided to prime the engine with a GumOut capful of stale gas, stolen from the sediment bowl of the tractor yonder in the dark damp other corner of the doody smelling barn. The Squareback said, "OK" with a cough and a good stable idle right off the bat.
Yes, the lights were still as bright and clear as they were the day the car was assembled. Good gaskets and grommets go far:
The brakes were frozen in place, of course. The leaky roof has wet the floor and is accelerating the rust of my chariots. But, the car sprung free and I drove it back and forth several dizzying times to heat up and clean off the disks and drums. No mouse pee smell in the interior or the engine! Yay! Parked it next to the Lexus, and uncovered the Lincoln. Attached the battery terminal to the post at 10:23 AM. It started right up, always a moment of great guilt:
Tested lights, windows, vacuum door locks, turn indicators, vacuum trunk release, all fine:
So, the mice had said, "forget the Squareback, this place is perfect."
But, the bait trap in the engine compartment had done its terrible deed:
So had the mice:
I drove back to Cindy's and got some carpet cleaner, the world's worst portable car vacuum ever, and accidentally left the car-cleaning water jug I was to top off there. Temperatures had noticeably dropped, and now it is wet rainy doody moldy muddy mousie pee rainy drumming on the roof miserably mucky. The car vacuum couldn't hold its plastic receiver bucket, so it fell off and dumped mouse poo several times. Eventually, I just shampoo'd the carpet and reloaded the trunk and moved on, because that is what you do when you are almost sixty years old and cold. Used my fresh drinking water plus Chlorox to clean all car interiors. It is all gross in a damp barn. It just is.
The Mercedes fired right up, another pang of remorse. Did the light check, horn check, turn indicators, and found the foglight switch after 23 years of ownership, April 28th 2:10PM. Yeah, who knew? You turn on the fog lights in a 1978 Mercedes Benz 450 SEL by rotating the rotary light switch as you normally do . . . then you pull the rotary knob out, towards you. Who knew?
We had dinner. A simple salad with chicken thrown in. Then why did it take me an hour to wash all the dishes? We had to sit through a Michigan Trump rally instead of the White House Correspondents Dinner. Just so you know, there were two Trump adherents and three nopleasedeargodno Trump non-supporters. It was frightening. I did not pay attention to the words. But I did pay attention to vocal inflections and pauses and crowd responses. They were chilling.
Here it is, April 29th at 6:37AM. It is snowing. I am driving from Rochester NY to 60 miles south of Montreal to visit my folks:
I used to drive that Inner Loop in a Chevy van with squeaking u-joints at all hours in sub-freezing temperatures with a styrofoam cup of coffee perched on the dash to go fix furnaces. I have Been There, Done That:
How fast do you drive in snow flurries on wet pavement with summer tires and no traction control? Odometer here says we have just hit 1,180 miles in the Lexus since the day before at the storage unit in Georgia, and we are 1,547 miles since leaving Pensacola four days prior:
Beautiful, cold dreary wet:
Seven and a half hours later, it is still cold dreary wet and I am about 40 miles from my folks:
Then, the camera goes on hiatus. My soul is rocked. My mom is like I have never seen her. I am treated to a serious reckoning of an amazing life in so many ways, I know only that my heart has loved its way through brutal confusion to a steady rock of unshakeable comprehension, and its job now is to relax a little and prepare for yet another heartbreak.
Take heed, all of you precious little egos preening your way through your pretensions, Time will strip you naked in the end. Time is not to be trifled with. It is coming to get YOU, mark my words. It rewards you with panic and dysphoria and irritability and tears that clog your throat and a vast isolation of your very own making, it then rewards you with a terrible feeling of meaninglessness. All that.
For we who have been shedding all that we could not pull over on others, for those of us who admitted early on that this time on Earth is a journey towards all that we do not know, who apologized over and over again and then some more, who discovered that listening was far richer than prattling, Time is a terrible and exhilarating frightening reckoning with our assignment here on Earth. It drives us to Others, compels us to a service however we may execute it, it hones our listening, our embrace of All Of It, it triggers a greater hunger to learn more of this All. Time inexorably drives us to our humility with little slips into humiliation. And if you listen closely, you might get a taste of the Meaning of All Of It, and that may be the consolation prize for the increasing indignities and frights.
Did you notice how inartfully I wrote "you" in the previous versus "us" and "we" in the subsequent paragraph? Don't worry. I am so much closer to the former than the latter. Oh yes, it takes a fierce beatdown to get rid of the precious.
I next visited the very best people to visit after that shock of my mother, a visit to my longest friend on this Earth and her amazing and invigorating mother and her dad, the oldest man I know at 94 years, and the last person to insult me so beautifully, so affirmatively, an exquisite little slap against my precious little ego. We walked in the cold air the day after those rains finally let up. We shared notes on growing older, we shared notes on the State Of The Union, and I was fed once again, the best lunch ever.
1,668 miles on the Lexus one week in on this ten day banzai, I then took the errant almost-runaway Bard College student to dinner. I don't even recognize this newest generation of young adult, but I like what little traces I am able to perceive. I am awed by this spirit that emerged from the girl with whom I used to terrorize the local laundromat patrons and play Barbie Goes To Dinner in that trashy pink Barbie Mustang. I had to be "Bad Hair Barbie" (the unfortunate result of a four year-old trying to give a doll a haircut). She got to be "Doctor Barbie", and has grown to have a quiet self-possession that would make any real doctor proud.
At my Maryland call May 3rd 9:02AM, now the problem is heat. It is supposed to be a hot day 92* I am all aclimated to 40* snow showers. The Universe plays with me yet:
New Jopex Danish heat exchanger to replace the old Dansk Danish heat exchanger that lost a flange weld. Let's look at how far off the new flange is to the pipe underneath:
After hours of grinding through the stone grinding wheels and heating up that screamy little Dremel, I gave up here, don't want to make the walls too thin now, do we?
Also had to devote some time to opening up the outlet flanges and re-rounding the fresh air pipe holes.
Let's look at the last craftsman's efforts to stick on a fresh air pipe:
There was a hidden zip screw stuck underneath the clamp. Did I see it? Nooooooo. But I did not get tough on it, we just dropped the exchanger with the pipe stubbornly attached. Nowadays, you have to step back and consider all the creativity that is running amok on these poor cars. A Once Upon A Time Round Hole:
Here is cheesehead cleaning up her $Tangerine$ Custom $Exhau$t System.
Shortly thereafter, I had to abort the removal of the left exchanger. That's right. The self-locking nuts which I despise, had eaten into the left studs with a vengeance, and they forced me to remove a stud with the nut. Well, the Dansk exchangers and their casual flange dimensions (and the fact that those already on the engine had never been drilled out) meant that the stud was under serious side pressure as I removed it. The next lock-nut attacked stud refused to loosen from the head at all at a torque that I refused to exceed. We had arrived at my red line. I told cheesehead that the left exchanger was still serviceable, let's leave it alone and be read for major extraction warfare next time. The cardboard box of hand tools in Alexus wasn't gonna cut it:
It was still too late . . . I could not safely get that one removed stud back in the slightly offset hole, but I could not loosen the others sufficiently to pry the exchanger to center the hole. Then I could not get a valid torque reading due to the vile thread friction up in the Raby Head That We Do Not Screw With. First start included an exhaust tick. Sent cheesehead out on her errands in the Prius instead of the triumphant usual Clementine Test Drive, and I set to work to try to save the day:
Could not figure out the acceptable torque. I heard creaking, like a lug nut around 17 ft/lbs. That should do it. No. Can't go further. Will come back with NaranjaWesty with nut-crackers and a TimeSert. I hate self-locking nuts that are too aggressive.
We drank beer and discussed life:
Was in Pensacola twenty four hours later at 3,103 miles in ten days.
Colin
We left off here April 26th early morning when I dropped off the BobD and picked up the Lexus. That was the first 360 mile leg, only 2743 miles to go!
Whisperjet Alexus'd to Cincinnatti OH. Photo stamp said "Apr 27 8:41AM"
Whisperjet Alexus'd to Columbus OH. Photo stamp said "Apr 27 10:21AM"
Made it to Albion NY some time around 7:30PM, 959 miles after leaving the storage unit, 1,785 miles to go! It was so pretty and warm, wow, that is so unlike upstate New York, must have been 75*. Took my dearly anticipated walk with Cindy up the prettiest road in the world. We were only 20 minutes late to dinner.
Sure, next morning was so very very much like upstate New York. Rainy drizzle 44* to go check my poor cars in the barn. By the time I arrived at the barn April 28th 10:06AM, it was raining hard pellets drumming on that tired corrugated tin roof. Smelled like cow poo, mold, tractor oil, pesticides, dirt. The Lexus already looked like a farm truck with muddy tires and bug splat. The Plucky Little Squareback said "no, I will not start." I snaked jumper cables through the rear hatch to the battery under the seat, and sat in the Whispersplat muddy Lexus and listened to that hushed V8 hold 2,500 rpm while we charged the Squareback's battery:
With a far friskier starter, the Squareback said "no, I will not start." Like all of you and all of humanity and all lab mice everywhere, I went directly to the last known reason it would not start, the breaker points. Yes, they had a gap. Yes, the coil fired off some nice purple sparks in the dark drumming damp barn. Put it back together and wished that it might start just because I fooled with it. The Squareback said, "no, I will not start." Half-heartedly tugged at wires and fuel injection (so not good). Finally decided to prime the engine with a GumOut capful of stale gas, stolen from the sediment bowl of the tractor yonder in the dark damp other corner of the doody smelling barn. The Squareback said, "OK" with a cough and a good stable idle right off the bat.
Yes, the lights were still as bright and clear as they were the day the car was assembled. Good gaskets and grommets go far:
The brakes were frozen in place, of course. The leaky roof has wet the floor and is accelerating the rust of my chariots. But, the car sprung free and I drove it back and forth several dizzying times to heat up and clean off the disks and drums. No mouse pee smell in the interior or the engine! Yay! Parked it next to the Lexus, and uncovered the Lincoln. Attached the battery terminal to the post at 10:23 AM. It started right up, always a moment of great guilt:
Tested lights, windows, vacuum door locks, turn indicators, vacuum trunk release, all fine:
So, the mice had said, "forget the Squareback, this place is perfect."
But, the bait trap in the engine compartment had done its terrible deed:
So had the mice:
I drove back to Cindy's and got some carpet cleaner, the world's worst portable car vacuum ever, and accidentally left the car-cleaning water jug I was to top off there. Temperatures had noticeably dropped, and now it is wet rainy doody moldy muddy mousie pee rainy drumming on the roof miserably mucky. The car vacuum couldn't hold its plastic receiver bucket, so it fell off and dumped mouse poo several times. Eventually, I just shampoo'd the carpet and reloaded the trunk and moved on, because that is what you do when you are almost sixty years old and cold. Used my fresh drinking water plus Chlorox to clean all car interiors. It is all gross in a damp barn. It just is.
The Mercedes fired right up, another pang of remorse. Did the light check, horn check, turn indicators, and found the foglight switch after 23 years of ownership, April 28th 2:10PM. Yeah, who knew? You turn on the fog lights in a 1978 Mercedes Benz 450 SEL by rotating the rotary light switch as you normally do . . . then you pull the rotary knob out, towards you. Who knew?
We had dinner. A simple salad with chicken thrown in. Then why did it take me an hour to wash all the dishes? We had to sit through a Michigan Trump rally instead of the White House Correspondents Dinner. Just so you know, there were two Trump adherents and three nopleasedeargodno Trump non-supporters. It was frightening. I did not pay attention to the words. But I did pay attention to vocal inflections and pauses and crowd responses. They were chilling.
Here it is, April 29th at 6:37AM. It is snowing. I am driving from Rochester NY to 60 miles south of Montreal to visit my folks:
I used to drive that Inner Loop in a Chevy van with squeaking u-joints at all hours in sub-freezing temperatures with a styrofoam cup of coffee perched on the dash to go fix furnaces. I have Been There, Done That:
How fast do you drive in snow flurries on wet pavement with summer tires and no traction control? Odometer here says we have just hit 1,180 miles in the Lexus since the day before at the storage unit in Georgia, and we are 1,547 miles since leaving Pensacola four days prior:
Beautiful, cold dreary wet:
Seven and a half hours later, it is still cold dreary wet and I am about 40 miles from my folks:
Then, the camera goes on hiatus. My soul is rocked. My mom is like I have never seen her. I am treated to a serious reckoning of an amazing life in so many ways, I know only that my heart has loved its way through brutal confusion to a steady rock of unshakeable comprehension, and its job now is to relax a little and prepare for yet another heartbreak.
Take heed, all of you precious little egos preening your way through your pretensions, Time will strip you naked in the end. Time is not to be trifled with. It is coming to get YOU, mark my words. It rewards you with panic and dysphoria and irritability and tears that clog your throat and a vast isolation of your very own making, it then rewards you with a terrible feeling of meaninglessness. All that.
For we who have been shedding all that we could not pull over on others, for those of us who admitted early on that this time on Earth is a journey towards all that we do not know, who apologized over and over again and then some more, who discovered that listening was far richer than prattling, Time is a terrible and exhilarating frightening reckoning with our assignment here on Earth. It drives us to Others, compels us to a service however we may execute it, it hones our listening, our embrace of All Of It, it triggers a greater hunger to learn more of this All. Time inexorably drives us to our humility with little slips into humiliation. And if you listen closely, you might get a taste of the Meaning of All Of It, and that may be the consolation prize for the increasing indignities and frights.
Did you notice how inartfully I wrote "you" in the previous versus "us" and "we" in the subsequent paragraph? Don't worry. I am so much closer to the former than the latter. Oh yes, it takes a fierce beatdown to get rid of the precious.
I next visited the very best people to visit after that shock of my mother, a visit to my longest friend on this Earth and her amazing and invigorating mother and her dad, the oldest man I know at 94 years, and the last person to insult me so beautifully, so affirmatively, an exquisite little slap against my precious little ego. We walked in the cold air the day after those rains finally let up. We shared notes on growing older, we shared notes on the State Of The Union, and I was fed once again, the best lunch ever.
1,668 miles on the Lexus one week in on this ten day banzai, I then took the errant almost-runaway Bard College student to dinner. I don't even recognize this newest generation of young adult, but I like what little traces I am able to perceive. I am awed by this spirit that emerged from the girl with whom I used to terrorize the local laundromat patrons and play Barbie Goes To Dinner in that trashy pink Barbie Mustang. I had to be "Bad Hair Barbie" (the unfortunate result of a four year-old trying to give a doll a haircut). She got to be "Doctor Barbie", and has grown to have a quiet self-possession that would make any real doctor proud.
At my Maryland call May 3rd 9:02AM, now the problem is heat. It is supposed to be a hot day 92* I am all aclimated to 40* snow showers. The Universe plays with me yet:
New Jopex Danish heat exchanger to replace the old Dansk Danish heat exchanger that lost a flange weld. Let's look at how far off the new flange is to the pipe underneath:
After hours of grinding through the stone grinding wheels and heating up that screamy little Dremel, I gave up here, don't want to make the walls too thin now, do we?
Also had to devote some time to opening up the outlet flanges and re-rounding the fresh air pipe holes.
Let's look at the last craftsman's efforts to stick on a fresh air pipe:
There was a hidden zip screw stuck underneath the clamp. Did I see it? Nooooooo. But I did not get tough on it, we just dropped the exchanger with the pipe stubbornly attached. Nowadays, you have to step back and consider all the creativity that is running amok on these poor cars. A Once Upon A Time Round Hole:
Here is cheesehead cleaning up her $Tangerine$ Custom $Exhau$t System.
Shortly thereafter, I had to abort the removal of the left exchanger. That's right. The self-locking nuts which I despise, had eaten into the left studs with a vengeance, and they forced me to remove a stud with the nut. Well, the Dansk exchangers and their casual flange dimensions (and the fact that those already on the engine had never been drilled out) meant that the stud was under serious side pressure as I removed it. The next lock-nut attacked stud refused to loosen from the head at all at a torque that I refused to exceed. We had arrived at my red line. I told cheesehead that the left exchanger was still serviceable, let's leave it alone and be read for major extraction warfare next time. The cardboard box of hand tools in Alexus wasn't gonna cut it:
It was still too late . . . I could not safely get that one removed stud back in the slightly offset hole, but I could not loosen the others sufficiently to pry the exchanger to center the hole. Then I could not get a valid torque reading due to the vile thread friction up in the Raby Head That We Do Not Screw With. First start included an exhaust tick. Sent cheesehead out on her errands in the Prius instead of the triumphant usual Clementine Test Drive, and I set to work to try to save the day:
Could not figure out the acceptable torque. I heard creaking, like a lug nut around 17 ft/lbs. That should do it. No. Can't go further. Will come back with NaranjaWesty with nut-crackers and a TimeSert. I hate self-locking nuts that are too aggressive.
We drank beer and discussed life:
Was in Pensacola twenty four hours later at 3,103 miles in ten days.
Colin