By Robert Emslie
You know, some communities are no fun at all.
Last Call indicates the end of Hooniverse’s broadcast day. It’s meant to be an open forum for anyone and anything. Thread jacking is not only accepted, it’s encouraged.
Image: AcidCow
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Jeff Glucker
This is exactly the sort of common sense advice that our own LongRoofFan would dispense. I can hear him saying it in my head right now, even though I’ve never heard him speak.
This olelongrooffan is gonna take this as a compliment, I think. Sometimes common sense and I don’t always seem to meet up. But then again, other than “Something will work out, it always does,” as thejeepjunkie contends, my other motto is “Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time.” And after meeting another fellow Hoon today, let me see if I can work out that whole hearing my voice thing.
As an aside…..delivering this car tomorrow….1952 Sterling Stein…
It was absolutely meant as a compliment. I presume the Sterling will be trailered to its new owner? I can’t imagine you driving it to him but, if you are, you certainly have landed well.
Nice car that I’ve actually never of. Looks sweet, though.
Are those 1939 Ford headlights?
http://1-photos.ebizautos.com/used-1939-ford-deluxe-coupe-9423-6344518-1-640.jpg
I believe they are from a 1940 Ford truck. My buddy thekenman has the same ones on his 39 street rod. That Sterling is one of one. Built in 1952 as a prototype and the builder died prior to getting more of them built.
Well, I was close at least…
Thanks for the correction!
Your new job sounds like a pretty sweet gig, what with neat prototypes, and awesome old tractors and whatnot.
I’m jealous.
Been a while since I’ve posted here. Need to get back into it. I’ve been helping moderate the Regular Car Reviews subreddit for a while and subsequently been spending my free time there.
So a lot has happened to me the past two months. On the bad side, a friend of mine got hit by a truck at his job a while back, and since then I’ve been helping him get to his physical therapy appointments since I’ve been struggling with work and have nothing better to do. And on top of that, my beloved 13-year-old cat developed something resembling kidney failure early in July and have been taking care of him during the same period.
On the good side, my cat isn’t showing any other signs of kidney failure (As of now, it’s just a high creatinine level with a near-healthy BUN level) and he appears to be getting better (His appetite’s back, he’s not throwing up as much, and his creatinine level is still going down, so YEAH.) My friend is getting a MIR next week to check out his injuries, which means the lawsuit he filed against the trucking company is going to be dealt with very shortly and he’ll be on the mend, and I got a decent full-time job today. (Seasonal Groundskeeper for the city.) So, go me.
Were your comments always so succinct and information-packed, or did you learn that while moderating?
I had a 15 year old cat put down recently and the doctor said cats either die quickly under a car or a fox (or a car called a Fox) or they take for-bloody-ever to kick off on their own. It’s the curse of being such a resilient creature: long, lingering, painful deaths of organ failure with lots of drooling and cramps. Yuck. And they’ll purr all the more if they’re feeling pain so it’s difficult to know when they need to be put down.
Mine had a rare melanoma (inoperable, pointless to treat) in his throat that didn’t affect his appetite or hobble his legs, but once he started drooling blood and tearing his fur out I felt he wasn’t going to enjoy life much anymore.
I wasn’t dealing with an injured pal when that happened, though. I hope your friend’s injuries are just flesh and bone, and he’s young enough to (pardon the term) bounce back.
I learned to be succinct from my gig as a reporter/writer for a local arts-and-entertainment magazine, in a round-about way. Before an editorial change, I tended to pad my reviews and write out full interviews to hit my magazine’s lengthy word count, and then keep going because I got into a groove. Outside of that, I try to keep my writing short and to-the-point.
Thankfully, my cat isn’t there yet. He’s still eating, drinking water, using the litter box, and he’s still energetic. I’m doing the subcutaneous fluids (pumping IV fluid under the skin) and he’s taking it in stride; not fighting at all.
My friend didn’t break any bones, but his hip is not good. He’s got a bad limp, even with therapy, and the medicine he’s on just takes the edge off. He’s pretty sure surgery is inevitable.
My last cat (Oscar) died at 3 from kidney failure. What my vet and I figured out was that he was extremely sensitive to the binders or something in dry foods, causing crystals to form in his kidneys, blocking them up, subsequently causing high blood toxicity (and creatinine levels.) Unfortunately by the time we realized that’s what was happening, it was too late.
Hope your cat gets better. Losing a cat to illness is hard. Most of my cat deaths were from them just outright disappearing, so Oscar’s
was extremely hard to deal with. I don’t know what was harder, watching him slowly die, or having to watch my parents subsequently dig his grave in the rock hard early spring ground, in freezing cold rain, while bawling my eyes out.
I swear I still see him rubbing his tail on things out of the corner of my eye.
I still really well remember the evening when I was about 10 that we had to put down our big grey w/ white tummy & feet, neutered-tom “Spatter” (named for his feet.) My parents had him since about when they were married, but he was remarkably tolerant of me & my sister when we came along later. He got some kind of kitty cancer that affected his breathing, and my dad eventually decided we needed to put him down with a .22LR to the head rather than let him continue to suffer. That was 1/4 of a century ago and I still can get emotional about it.
My first proper gf’s cat started looking really sick and it had miserable days around age 15. The post delivery car ran it over right outside the property. It was the worst thing that could have happened in my gf’s world back then (don’t remember – I think we were 15-ish ourselves), yet it might have spared the cat a lot of suffering.
I hope you get your cat back in shape and good luck with your new job! 🙂
Unfortunately, it’s mankind’s profit motive driving many a kitty to kidney problems.
Dry food has many a grain in them…rice, corn gluten, wheat gluten, etc…and kitty livers can’t process carbohydrates. As a result, kidneys get the job, and they suck at it.
Fillers make pet food easier, and therefore less-expensive, to process. And hey, they’re just pets….
We thought we were doing right by our two critters with higher-end dry food, but the black one, Fonzie, my cat, wound up with the beginnings of kidney problems when he was about 13.
After reading up on this, we stood in Petsmart for a solid hour, reading every can of wet food they had, looking for those either without any grains, or if they were there, they were near the end of the ingredient list.
As a result, we found Friskies makes four which come packaged in a 24 can box…Turkey & Giblets, Ocean Whitefish (IIRC), Mixed Grill, and Salmon.
Fonzie not only tested fine three months later, but he’d also dropped about 3 lbs. from his chunky 20 lb. frame.
His brother is still with us, just turned 17 earlier this month. He’s fine.
Fonzie died due to a deep tumor which the doc couldn’t do anything about, but I think it was unrelated to his diet.
House-kept cats would have better kidneys if they drank more. Our vet said that wild cats don’t drink where they eat, and suggested to put at least five feet between food bowl and water bowl. Worked for our (80% outdoor) cat, he’s drinking more at home now.
So, who wants to be Boss Hogg?
http://i.ebayimg.com/00/s/ODAwWDYwMA==/z/zxkAAOSwDNdVwSFQ/$_27.JPG
http://www.kijiji.ca/v-classic-cars/edmonton/1970-cadillac-diville/1093095222?enableSearchNavigationFlag=true
http://pics.imcdb.org/0is78/dukeseps111116zh.924.jpg
Shouldn’t this be more than $2500? Especially since most parts seem to be working.
I just binge watched the last week of Jon Stewart’s tenure as host of The Daily Show. I’m all verklempt. I have mixed emotions about New Jersey. I wouldn’t want to be Trevor Noah.
took the Volvo out of the garage after letting it roll down a hill and violently crash, breaking a fence, wrecking the exhaust, and banging the hell out of the underside.
i drove it for a while, then parked it up to replace the brake cables, which was the most frustrating thing imaginable.
not only do the new parking brake cables still not hold it on the driveway, but whatever’s been making it run rough has gotten ten times worse in the week or two it sat. it’s been a real rollercoaster and i’m back at the bottom. i fucking hate this car but i keep dumping money into it because i remember when i didn’t.
hashtag first world problems, i know. i’m lucky that this kind of thing is what gets me down. and it’s just a car – i really shouldn’t let it get me down. but it gets me down, man. it all feels like time wasted.
Very understandable frustration…not an option to let it go, get another/a different one? How did the original mayhem happen?
i really don’t want to let it go. buying a Real Car feels like growing up and i’m not ready for that. plus, when this car is in good shape it’s pretty danged nice.it’s comfortable and fast and holds all my stuff.
the original mayhem happened when i stepped out to place the chock under the rear wheel without having put the car in gear first. it just rolled away from me extremely fast. i’m lucky that my garage is directly across from a fence, but the rear wheels hit the curb, the car went up, it came back down on the curb…hard.
Agreed, it’s a letdown having to buy a more modern car and be concerned about appearances etc. I sorely miss every single beater I’ve owned. Little mistake with an outsized outcome there…
yeah, there’s definitely that. but i think there’s more to it than that.
actually, i typed up a novel of a rant a week or two ago, and disqus ate it because i’m too lazy to make an account. the basic idea (and i’m being dead serious here) is that this exact car is one i’ve aspired to since i was too young to have a license, and now that i have the car, letting go of it for a “real” car would mean giving up a part of my childhood. i don’t have a family of my own, so one could argue that i don’t have any real responsibilities anyway, but contemplating moving on scares me.
i’m very lucky to have a good job and a secure future, so i could buy a real car no problem. but if i put all the bullshit projects away, then my life has basically nothing driving it outside of work. when someone says “what do you work for”, i really don’t have an answer for them. the cars are a good thing to put as My Hobby, but i recognize that they ultimately add nothing besides some CO2 to the world. giving up the car i care about means staring deep into the abyss of my empty soul. that might be a good thing, but i’m not ready for it.
it all sounds a lot darker than it really is. i have strong human relationships and am generally pretty happy, don’t worry. but sometimes things like our hobbies and how we spend our free time and youth are a lot more important than they seem on the face of it. giving up the car means moving on, and i don’t know what to. it all makes me realize how much of myself i’ve put into my cars. and part of me feels guilty for it, like i should buy a used prius and focus on making the world a better place instead of fixing some old steel and rubber contraption.
i don’t know. this has become another rant that disqus will eat so i’m going to cut it off here.
I’m happy Disqus didn’t devour your novel. You’re absolutely right about your anticipation here…I sold my last Volvo classic because we were to become parents, we have the house payments etc. It is a shameful thing how much of a void this left. Surfing the relevant parts of the internet while I watch my kids go to sleep (ie just now), is fun, but far from the real deal. The effect of not having my childhood dream classic anymore was to become even more of a (theoretic/dry dock) car nut.
Making the world a better place should not exclude devoting time and money to a cool ride though.
do you feel guilty about it? would not having made that sacrifice have made you feel better?
sometimes it seems like cars are such a childish thing for a grown-ass man to care about. when i’m in your spot, like, i think you made the right choice. not that i suppose that dulls the frustration of it, but i figure i’ll be in your spot someday, and i’ll probably do the same.
i guess the opposite applies to me. might as well buy a fiesta and save myself the frustration, right? makes sense on some level, but i can’t bring myself to do it, and i wouldn’t be happier if i did.
i just need to fix up my stupid car and i can stop being all angsty about it.
Haha, there’s a lof of soul-searching to be put in deferred maintenance, for sure. The base line should be to do what you want, as long as you can afford it. So finding out what you want is the clue, eh?
Not sure if I even regret “the sacrifice” as I haven’t had time to do much for myself for 5 years now. I just miss it. When the car popped up again for sale by it’s owner after me, and then again by a flipper, earlier this summer, I was tempted. But I didn’t want to invite more work into my house either…
I had a car with worn out parking brakes. Until I fixed them, I kept a brick in the driveway. Drive over it to park, and the car would not roll back on its own, but the engine’s assistance would let me back over it when I wanted to drive away.
i used to place a chock under the wheel, because the engine would hold it well enough to get it in there – two inches at a time it’d click backwards. then i crashed it.
NOT IF I DRIVE FAST ENOUGH!
Cycle Saturday: Assignment, Ride All The Motorcycles!
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-Yeceo3liC7Y/VcaMrmSp8RI/AAAAAAAADh8/UzXDZYQXHgE/s700-Ic42/5cycles07.JPG
Today I decided I was going to ride all the motorcycles in my garage, if they were roadworthy. This amounted to 5 out of 7. HoneyBunny is away, and HousemateJoe has a broken foot, so I’m the only able bodied rider in the house and by golly it’s my duty to take these bikes out for a stretch once a week, right?
The Bikes: L-R
2008 Suzuki DL650 V-Strom (a.k.a. Wee-Strom) Owner: HoneyBunny
2006 Suzuki DRZ400E (a.k.a. DirtBike!) Owner: Batshitbox
1997 BMW R1200C Owner:HousemateJoe
1994 Kawasaki EX500 Ninja (a.k.a. Ninja 500R, a.k.a. FreeNinja) Owner: Batshitbox
1995 Triumph Thunderbird 900 Owner: HousemateJoe
Riding impressions:
DL650: The highway star. An excellent touring motorcycle, most comfortable on the freeway. Weak point is it’s inexcusably large and heavy for a 650, not good for lane splitting, but easy to ride in city traffic otherwise.
(Both Suzukis, I noticed, had the best shifting transmissions of the bunch.)
DRZ400E: My favorite. Completely useless on the freeway, especially in a dirt bike helmet. Best handling in the city, lane splits like a greased weasel. Go-To bike for the Zombie apocalypse (unless they’re Fast Zombies). I’ll probably sell FreeNinja and buy some extra rims to put street or dual-sport tires on.
BMW R1200C: I swore I’d never ride this bike. When they first came out I called them the Wurlitzers because they looked like juke-boxes to me. This one has the added curse of polychromatic paint. Weird noises from the drivetrain, lots of clunking, but not worrisome, sounded like it was built that way. Cruiser footpeg locations meant I kept putting my feet on the exhaust pipes ans kickstand. Also, stupidest turn signal buttons ever. And the starter button. It’s all just weird, maybe if I rode more cruisers or BMWs it would be familiar.Lots of power, and surprisingly comfortable at 70 – 75 mph, wind-wise. Strangely stiff suspension for a cruiser, I rodeo-clowned it on a couple bumps.
Kawasaki EX500 Ninja: Best handling bike of the bunch. FreeNinja could use some help tuning it’s wee little engine, which wasn’t a monster even in 1994, so I’m not going to bitch about the power delivery. Lie a small sports car, what it lacks in engine it makes up for in handling. great apex hunter. The transmission is real snatchy, which I think is a Kawasaki thing, or I’ve only ever ridden worn out Kwaks. Comfy at 70 mph, ready to squirt up to 90 at any time. I wouldn’t want to ride this thing very long on the freeway, although I once rode one to Burning Man, maybe after some refurbishment…
Triumph Thunderbird 900: The smallest feeling of the bunch. You could imagine you were riding a scooter the way this thing disappears under you. HousemateJoe can’t decide if he wants to keep the BMW or this, but he’s a big ol’ galoot and the BMW is better for large format riders. The engine noise is almost airplane-like, with a lot of whistling and burbling. It may feel like a scooter, but it is definitely a 900cc triple under there, and it will get gone fast! Torque and power delivery were better than the BMW, which has some stupid engine mapping thigie. It didn’t feel as comfortable at 70 as the BMW, but I was going into the wind and having a wardrobe malfunction. Although the gears are widely spaced, it could use more top end gearing for freeway cruising (the BMW punched harder at 70), but that’s not what it’s for. This is a back road companion and looks good on the boulevard. With a bit more time in the saddle and less rise in the handlebars, I bet I could get it to handle almost as well as FreeNinja, but that’s what SpeedTriples are for.
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-F3nr2FihgXg/VcaMrFX3eqI/AAAAAAAADh4/2RLfAXreME0/s640-Ic42/5cycles00.JPG
Sounds like a productive Saturday! My sympathies for having to ride (or even look at) the 1200C. Worst thing BMW Motorrad has ever produced, IMO.
In truth, I was not forced to ride the BMW Cruiser. I did it of my own volition, just to have the experience behind me to back up my initial bad impression. It’s a motorcycle, it does motorcycle things, HousemateJoe seems to like it so I’ll take his word for it. I’ll ride it again as and when the other two motorcycles get on the road, just to keep my scorecard current.
I assume people here have seen http://11foot8.com
This seems like a safe place to tell this story.
For my current job, I drive a 5-ton truck. A couple weeks back, I was making a delivery in a hillside neighborhood when I turned onto a street and noticed the power lines were quite low and sloped downward from left to right. I carefully drove down the left side of the street until I saw the address I was looking for. Then, I cheerfully pulled over to the curb on the right side of the road.
D’oh! As I suddenly heard a scratching noise and my peripheral vision caught the bushes on the right being pushed forward, I remembered the overhead lines and jammed the brakes. I knew I had hit something. I backed up a little, slowly.
Thunk! The line fell between the cab and the box.
All I knew was not to get out of the truck. My smartphone suddenly felt like a lifesaving device. I looked up the power company and called. Then I waited, sweating, eating my lunch and thinking about all the things I’d do if I survived.
After an eternity, or about half an hour, a small army of utilities workers swarmed the quiet residential street. There were two cherry pickers, a big work truck and a smaller traffic control pickup. The first guy jumped out, walked up to me, looked up at the line, looked at me, reached up and wrapped his hand around the line.
“It’s just a data cable,” he said. “But you did the absolute best thing by calling us.”
Back at the shop, nobody asked why my deliveries took so long that day, and I did not feel the need to volunteer my story.
Sane reaction! So what did you come up with for the list of things you’d do?
Mainly look up more often.
There’s gotta be a Higher Power joke in here somewhere…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F03vnSb7lu0