Posting useless automotive diversions to distract from mindless jobs since 2004
I love that it's already custom painted in Statutory Grape.
Edit: I appreciate the upvotes, but felt compelled to mention this expression came up in a lot of old Jalopnik threads, so it's basically a mini-meme.
Bonus: The first time I saw it mentioned was when the Challenger first came out (remember those days) and they offered purple as a color. The commenter was pretty cynically accurate about Mopar's target customer base at the time. IMHO, of course. 
First off, huge thanks to everyone involved in starting this site. I don't want to overshadow that at all, but...
What in the hell, G/O? I didn't get an email or anything about saving my posts. 12 years and probably 25k posts (including hundreds of threads and all of my Oppo satire pieces) are just gone?
Anyone willing to fill me in a bit? All I can find online is that the Herbs finally shut down a lot of the sub-blogs after a year of false threats. I couldn't visit Oppo for a while because it wouldn't even let me log in, so I waited until I got a new browser this morning to try again.
THANKS A LOT, BIDEN!
Edit: I didn't realize I disappeared right after my daughter was sent home from school for a sore throat. Weird coincidence. And it happened again in October, but apparently the school's Covid fearfulness has paid off since the kids have been able to stay in school at least 2 days a week since September (with a long virtual break from Thanksgiving to Christmas to prevent spikes). All good in the hood!
The kid was amazed at the mechanical handbrake and joystick. ‘98 Passat GLX, V6 5MT, Eibach Pro System, some other stuff…donated a couple years after this pic.
Looking through some CDs. 1 in the dash and 10 in the trunk. Ballin!
Fast forward to yesterday. Now we build trebuchets and pneumatic tennis ball cannons together on our porch. How the time flies. Adam Sandler once said that with kids, the days are incredibly long, but the years are incredibly short.
And the cat's in the cradle til I fire this gun, watch him get up and then scramble to run. When he's coming home, dad? I don't know when. We'll shoot another then. I know we'll have a good time then.
EDIT: the instructions we followed. About $85 in parts at Home Depot (damn inflation!)
https://www.instructables.com/Compressed-Air-Tennis-Ball-Mortar/?amp_page=true
Hey peeps! Work and life have been busy AF for the past several months, and I don't have copy/paste privileges on this site, so I apologize for the lack of non-textual content. Our work restrictions are pretty random, with site blockages and copy/paste limitations (I had the same issue on Kinja, too).
Car search: Still driving my 2001 Passat wagon. Now I'm just going to keep it thanks to the used car market insanity...hopefully it will die down later this year because I'm itching to get into something I can drive without fear of it falling apart any more than it already has (the Germans' secret ingredient for ensuring the integrity of interior components is: dust!)
We strongly considered a travel trailer, so I know more about towing capacities of SUVs and trucks than I ever wanted to...but hey. Now we're reassessing our needs and not likely to take the RV route, but along the way I fell in love with the Jeep Grand Cherokee Summit Edition -- with Hemi, leather dashboard, air suspension, etc -- which is basically like a Range Rover for half the price and twice the reliability (note: twice the reliability of a Range Rover is still half as good as the rest of the market).
Got the Covid vax as soon as I could, then lived a semi-normal life with a summer beach vacation and not wearing a mask indoors. That's over now, apparently, thanks heavily to my rural neighbors who are still convinced that vaccines might have long-term effects.
However, we are still planning to hit Colorado in late September with the kids AND my parents. Flying to Denver and immediately driving to a nice rental house up in Estes Park. Planning to hit Rocky Mountain NP for 3-4 of those days, plus daytrips to Ft. Collins and renting a modded Jeep Gladiator for a day so we can do some light/moderate offroading in the area. Extremely excited -- that's Elk and Moose rutting season, so they're supposedly all over the place. We won't have any real time in Denver thanks to our flight schedules, but TBH I could take or leave almost any large city. I'm there for the mountains, anyway
How's everyone doing?
Ash
My issues with Carmax go back almost 10 years and 4 cars (1 bought and returned, 3 nearly bought before rust or mechanical defects were found). I'll go into more detail some other time. This is more of a rant about how bipolar an experience can be depending on how it's handled.
Issue: Wife thinks she might have left her purse in a test drive vehicle. We scour the house, retrace our steps, and make a call to the salesman (we had just returned the car a few hours earlier). Salesman calls back a couple hours later and says he couldn't find it.
We turn the house and car upside-down several times over the following week. I monitor credit card activity closely for anything odd, but nothing comes up. This adds to the evidence that the purse is in our possession somewhere (fyi: The kneejerk cancellation of credit cards is a big PITA unless you're SURE the purse or wallet is gone).
Almost 2 weeks go by, new credit cards ordered, old ones canceled, all of our documents are in order for a REAL ID license replacement, and I make one more call to Carmax and manage to get transfered to the back office.
"Yep, we have it right here."
My 5 minutes of relief is quickly overcome with anger. Despite my wife's oversight in the first place, we did our best to make calls and locate it. Even if the salesman missed it, how did everyone else involved think "I wonder who this belongs to?" when there is an ID right there inside, belonging to a customer who had JUST returned the car? You have our phone numbers. You just chose to do nothing.
On the flip side, had they called us, I'd probably have them at the top of my list now. Instead, I've been forbidden from ever talking to them again
Followup: Never in any of my 20+ years of work would I have failed to try to contact the owner of something left behind at my workplace...especially in any customer-facing roles where your assistance can so easily translate into sales and reputation. You can't pay people enough to do the right thing. You have to hire the right people in the first place.
Sorry if this comes across as a rant, but I want to talk facts and economics for a second.
As I think we all agree, gas prices -- for the average consumer -- are usually a much larger topic of discussion than other costs because we see them plastered on every street corner in 2-foot letters. It's something we can all complain about, then people in California can get trumped by Canadians who, in turn, get trumped by Norwegians and so it goes. This is not intended to downplay the role these prices have in the lives of long-distance commuters, especially rural dwellers, whose portion of their household budget had very little room for the increase. It's devastating. But that's beside the point here.
However, one thing I don't get is the common media formula of gas prices ruining (or limiting) people's vacation plans. Granted, if you have a 3,000-mile road trip planned this summer and you're camping every night along the way, gas prices will play a huge role in your plans.
However, for the average family taking a week-long summer trip of a few hundred miles, fuel costs are typically under 10% of the total. Yes, they've doubled since last year. But with rental rates, admission costs, rental cars, and food/supplies all going up, the relative contribution of fuel to the total trip cost isn't changed that much.
To put it another way, who is canceling a multi-thousand dollar trip because they have to spend an extra $100 in fuel?
To borrow the closer from another Oppo, do comment your thoughts below!
Day 1: Let's just pack up everything and move here!
Day 2: Well, I think we'll come back next year at least!
Day 3: Have you noticed all the vagrants and weirdos?
Day 4: Why are houses so overpriced?
Day 5: Did you really need to book the whole week just to save 10%?
Day 6: You can pack your own sh*t, I'm not talking to you.
Day 7: It's a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there.
Rinse and repeat with 1-2 years in between.
(every place with a decent tourist infrastructure has amazing lipstick for their pigs. I love to look deeper and observe how the service people live and act, that tells you a lot.)
Only 22”? What is this, 2011?
/s
@Urambo-Tauro “Be careful…the force is strong with this one.”
Obvious take: if they hadn’t have killed Oppo, I’d still be visiting Jalop 100x/day.
Is this what the Herbs had in mind?
Seven Nation Army is the Smoke on the Water of the 2000s. Nothing fancy, but it’ll never go away.
“Cirencester”
It’s right on the border of the Midlands where the Norman/French influence met the traditional Norse/Welsh populations and historically had people in the same town arguing over how to say it. Like, in recent decades.
Today it’s mostly phonetic (siren-cester) but has gone through “sissister” phases, and even siren-chester because of the “cester”/“chester” cutoff line. Very similar to the “wich”/“wick” suffix on many towns.
In short, it’s crazy over there 
@svend is your best source on this insanity, since he lives up north where the cultural intermingling has been most intense.
@facw I have an unhealthy love for the Dash 8. They're common in Charlotte, which is a big hub that serves a lot of small cities around the SE/Midatlantic region. Ramps are pretty common thetoo. Fancy!
@Wrong-Wheel-Drive What can I say? I like the cars I chose enough to keep them, mod them, maintain them, etc.
Plus the idea of 30% depreciation every 2-3 years sounded horrible to me, and we definitely could never have afforded it when I was younger. Today I can afford it, but I'm wiser
95% of the show was the MST3K-style, often subversive video commentary. IMO, everything else was just filler.
I remember seeing the first movie in the theatre and was trying so hard to like it, but just couldn't.
Wow!
All I know is that every time I try to plan a trip, it’s 3 flights and an overpriced rental, and the road might be open for 2 months during the peak season…and that was pre-covid!
Epic. Count your blessings that you’re so local.
