I am the emotional support animal for three cats and three dogs.

Tailgater < tail gator.

What do you do with a dead blade for one of those big wind turbines? Here's one idea (might be kind of important to orient it correctly with regard to prevailing winds, though)...

Location and landscaping make it hard to get a good angle on the house itself — it kinda vanishes, which is how we like it — so by way of apology here's the back-courtyard water feature and some hungry bois coming up for their lunch.

Judging from the size of the rocks that make up the waterfall, it was probably put in as the house was built ca. 1964 and certainly before the now big trees grew to a truck- and equipment-blocking level of maturity.

I haven't gotten a jury summons in years and years! The last one was pre-printed with "Do Not Forward Outside Alameda County." I got it, of course, at my new address in the next county.

Previously I'd been kinda in rotation for several years. Once I was in the jury pool for a complex civil case—a business-law matter, that, they warned us, was likely to last all summer. (Not a sequestered jury, which is expensive and onerous and really not very common. Just a long trial.) The judge wanted to start by filtering out people for whom that might be a severe hardship.

Well, my unusually public spirited workplace gave fully paid jury leave, so I was okay on that point, and the case sounded kind of interesting. But I accidentally sabotaged my chances in voir dire.

The case was a suit and countersuit between an auto mall and an individual dealership that had pulled out of it. One of the attorneys wanted to know if I'd ever been to an auto mall.

"No."

"Why not?"

"Because I like cars, and it would amount to betting twenty thousand dollars that I could swim across a shark tank with a fistful of hamburger."

When everybody quit laughing I was thanked and dismissed.

@Gabriella -- You're basically living a roman-à-clef spec script for a reboot of "House, M.D.".

Seriously, what you describe as "not particularly unusual things" (for you) are in fact unusual things—kinda scary ones at that. If your doctor isn't coming to grips with it, is a new doctor, preferably one who can give a well directed specialist referral or two, at all feasible?

So I was in a hotel parking lot and a Chrysler 300 comes in making a horrible tire related noise. which turns out to be just that. Four kids pile out.

After a while they're still there, along with some local friends. I wander over to be helpful and give them a Harbor Freight giveaway flashlight, of which I still have plenty from the old days.

Their problem, besides lack of light except from cell phones, was that the factory scissors jack couldn't lift the car high enough to clear the 22" rims, even with the obligatory banana peel tires.

I found some pieces of concrete block in a conveniently located pile of remodeling rubble so that they could put something under the jack.

Then one of them remembered that it's important to loosen lug nuts before jacking... whereupon they realized that the really long styled lug nuts were too deep for anything resembling a standard lug wrench. Fortunately one of them had a deep socket and a foot long breaker bar.

Unfortunately whoever had installed the damn things used a torque wrench whose dial only went to 11. I couldn't budge 'em, and I can budge pretty hard when I have to.

Which was just as well because their spare tire was already on another corner of the car.

I pulled out that second-to-last refuge of a scoundrel, a can of Fix-a-Flat, but after its ordeal the tire was not retaining air.

A thousand miles from home and the tools I would have used to solve such a problem, I went up to my room to call it a night, feeling vaguely nostalgic for once having been that age and making the mistakes of youth on my own first cars. When last seen they were discussing among themselves how one goes about summoning AAA...

"Tastefully modified while retaining originality"

There is more than one word that does not mean what he seems to think it means.

He took a car that, as an aesthetic object, the factory hit out of the park on their first swing, spent time and money detracting from that from bumper to bumper, and wants $50k for the result?

I don't even know where to start, though "on the whale tail, with a Sawzall" might be a good answer.

@CB -- Supposedly they're going to convert some of those old radial-engined Beavers to electric, partnering with a company in Washington state called MagniX, though (all together now) supply chain problems have caused delays.
https://www.futureflight.aero/news-article/2022-05-20/harbour-airs-ebeaver-electric-conversion-program-slowed-supply-chain-kinks

They also missed an opportunity to call it the Electric Aircraft Gas Engine Replacement, for EAGER Beaver.

Honestly, I'm not sure what conclusions it is safe to draw from just a list without further details to be drilled down into. At first glance it looks pretty similar to the most popular cars and light trucks. The interesting part is whether some models are disproportionately repo'd, and why.

@HammerheadFistpunch -- Is this a stealth announcement that you've bought a conversion van and an airbrush?

@Britishvillaininatl said in I've been living in The States (Georgia) for six months, how does driving compare to the U.K.?:

8. There are a lot more older cars in regular use here
9. Far more cars have aftermarket mods here and there are many more car parts stores

Besides the factors you mentioned, the very idea of a nationally uniform MOT-style inspection would inspire armed insurrection here. As with many things, we leave how to do a safety inspection, and in fact whether to do it, to the individual states. Many have none at all, and in many of those that do, it has the reputation of being cursory.

Although police in some jurisdictions have a bee up their butt about certain modifications (window tinting is an infamous example), to a good first-order approximation, if you come from a rather lax jurisdiction, you may drive the most amazing piece of junk anywhere unless you stay so long that you have to change residency.

(from Wikipedia, "Vehicle inspection in the United States")

@415s30 -- I was gonna say, he is going to remove that magnificent Rorschach of a wax job?

I think it's a Sheepipede, myself, but could also be an Otterpiller.

Seriously, that could be in an art museum. "Dune by Moonlight" (wax on painted metal, 2022)/

@ClassicDatsunDebate -- Slight improvement on something that needs major improvements, although how far they could go without running afoul of several regulatory bailiwicks is a good question.

@DipodomysDeserti said in Everythings fine:

Cheapest gas I bought this year was $3.20 and that was in the middle of nowhere on the Navajo reservation.

Interesting. It would have been exempt from the Federal gas tax (though I think the tribe imposes an 18¢ excise tax earmarked for road work, comparable to Arizona's own tax).

The lack of a boondocks surcharge, a combination of higher transportation costs and "you need it, we know it, you know it, and we know that you know it," is a bit more surprising, but depending on just which nowhere it was in the middle of, it might have had modest transportation costs from the couple of refineries in northwestern NM.

@HoustonRunner -- @Zaphod's Heart of Gold identified the weights-and-measures sticker as Humboldt County, CA, so... a distance surcharge on a baseline of California prices. Even the Costco in the relative metropolis of Eureka is a bit over $6/gallon at the moment, according to gas-price tracker sites.

@Long_Voyager94 said in Random Thought on EVs:

Why focus on obnoxious futuristic designs that are polarizing to boast it's an EV?

There was an interesting discussion of this at the jello picnic a few years ago. One of the regular commenters, I forget who, maintained that at first there was good marketing reason why EVs and hybrids should be distinctive looking (I think we were talking specifically about the robot armadillo era of the Prius, which as you'll recall first came to the US as more of a Corolla or Echo like car), because they were selling the idea as well as the car and thus distinctive branding was important; but that as they gain acceptance they can and should look more and more like conventional ICE cars of their segments.

I might add in counterpoint that the differently shaped and basically smaller power plant can point to a different design logic that offers new opportunities. (And there are some different constraints arising from the rather heavy "fuel tank." )

I don't always entirely welcome our new robot overlords either, but it's interesting to see what people can do when a largish ICE engine and all its accoutrements, and a many-speeds gearbox, are no longer dominant factors...

@Darkbrador -- And some time late we learned that there are 30,000 pounds in a truckload.

(Supposedly the hapless driver's family did not like that song.)

@WasGTIthenGTOthenNOVAthenGTInowA4 @HoustonRunner-- I too feel that a corporate-lease refurb from a place you trust can be a very good thing, especially if it was from the maker's professional range. The difference between that and the consumer line from the same maker can be considerable, often in ways that don't show up on the spec sheet.

A battle we used to fight at my workplace, probably a commonplace one, was persuading people that the good stuff was worth it. Eventually, with some nudging from the support people about the need and ease of repairs and lifecycle costs, management "got it" and the list of suggested purchases now has better-grade Windows-oriented machines as well as Macs (whose price looks a lot better when you make a fair comparison like that).

Don't get me wrong, there's a place in the world for value-line laptops, but that doesn't mean somebody who travels almost every week and plugs into a big monitor when at the office will still be happy about the purchase a year later...

@ash78 said in DOTS 29 September 2022:

Both the Eclipse and the 3000 remind me of how much wheel gap we all had in the 80s/90s. Back before manufacturers figured out the "shorter springs, soft dampers, big wheels" aesthetic combo

As a rule the fourth or fifth owner of your average Eclipse has long since addressed that issue.

Hot take: I file the hellaflush aesthetic under You Do You, but some adjacencies like the disappearance of sidewalls from mainstream cars (never mind the sheer cost of the tires that go with it) are just plain bad. I don't need or want to feel every tar strip with my kidneys, or give the wheels curb pox if I misjudge by a millimeter when parallel parking, just so an ordinary passenger sedan can push its skidpad numbers a little further into the realm of Pareto's law.