Holy crap! Glad you got away ok

/quick and dirty to make the best of it

We were packing up for a pre-Thanksgiving roadtrip to St. Louis and Nashville starting tomorrow. Lots of fun stuff planned, hotels booked, ready to go.

Meanwhile, last week my mom's OB-GYN says we need you to come in and get a new ultrasound. Fast forward, they find some ovarian cysts that are larger than the ones she normally has (congenitally).

So this morning she goes in for laparascopy...and they find a bunch more stuff and have to fully cut her open (1 main incision, plus 3 other smaller ones). 4 hours on the table, ovaries and fallopian tubes removed, lymph nodes removed, and they had to call in the GI surgeon to take out a few inches of small intestine.

It's been a morning.

Stage 2B Ovarian Cancer (ie, multiple sites, all abdominal, with a ~75% survival rate over 5 years).

They estimate 4-5 weeks of surgical recovery, then straight into chemo (Merry Christmas!). Ugh. Vacation canceled, but I'm keeping my time off to help mom and dad out around the house, as needed. This is our family's first direct brush with real cancer and we're diving in headfirst, I guess. A few days ago, my mom joked that it'd be her luck to get cancer on the parts she hasn't needed for 40 years...

Edit: Thank you everyone for the prayer and well wishes, it means a lot. Thankfully we all live near each other, and our medical care is pretty top-notch all around (most of our Oncologists have done plenty of rotations at Emory, Mayo, Cleveland, Johns-Hopkins, etc, over their careers). I got to visit with her for about an hour this afternoon. Apart from the morphine daze, she was doing really well all things considered.

My dad sent me this one and it's got a little bit of The Feels attached.

Circa 2001, just before I finished grad school, I drove my 1995 Golf Sport (the GTI for the years they didn't build a GTI) up to Maryland to visit the family. The deal was that if I gave my brother my car, my dad would bequeath his 1998 Passat V6 5MT to me as a graduation present/swap. They had just bought the 2001.5 wagon and didn't need the sedan anymore, since it was my dad's old company car. It was the only year we got full amber corners and a smaller passenger mirror (to reduce Cx down to Prius levels, no kidding).

The cool thing about this pic is that all three were bone stock and working great. The Passat was the nicest car of anyone I knew and I actually felt guilty driving it a lot. I had also never had a car that could hit 60 in about 7 seconds, which was a revelation

Fast forward a couple years and the Golf is in the shop about once a month. My Passat got dropped and I added a shortshifter, bigger wheels, and a few other things.

And several years later, we bought the wagon from them. It was the car that brought both of our kids home from the hospital and it's still my occasional daily, albeit in pretty rough shape.

Another time capsule factoid: From left to right, stock wheel sizes were 14", 15", and 16".

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.

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

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!

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

Oh, wait a second…

Hmmm

@RacinBob I love that a major news outlet is basically using air quotes to imply that something untoward happened.

Well, it wasn't untoward. It was toward. The ground.

/f this language

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.

For 99% of customers, that part of the wheel remains coated in dust all year.

Hope they make it right!

@Urambo-Tauro said in Did You Know: The 2nd Generation Ford Fusion Came With A Manual Transmission?:

@Arch-Duke-Maxyenko Well, it already looks a bit Aston-Martinesque on the outside, might as well make feel a little more like one on the inside too!

That's exactly what the world (including Top Gear) said at introduction. Sadly, the good looks got a little watered down by BEING EVERYWHERE.

Yep, IIRC it was a midrange "Sport" model. Still had the I-4, but not a stripper/economy version. (EDIT: The SE, since they were following the VW trimline nomenclature at the time....S, SE, SEL)

@Ad-absurdum-per-aspera said in No Maverick, You Can't Go Below the Hard Deck:

@facw -- Makes sense. After all, the F-5 is the gym-rat kid brother of the T-38, which I think the US still uses for advanced students in the fighter pipeline.

Yep, T-38 is still the secondary trainer, AFAIK. The Super Tucano (single engine turboprop; no, I won't call anything a "Texan" without a rotary engine) is the primary.

Vague source: being drunk on the beaches of NW FL a lot.

@LooseonExit I wonder if it's mitigated by a quick exit at partial throttle (ie, not "dead weight" on the pad). Just speculating...I know chopper drivers don't fully cut the throttle on insertions/extractions, so might be the same idea.

@pos_camaro My uncle was stationed at Rota in the mid-70s. Small world, I haven't heard that name in years.

“I’m not a Cat GPT, your honor”

See, Red Bull predicted this would happen, so they gave all their reps Mini Coopers modded to have even LESS space inside.

Sounds like a real jerk move to me. I understand it's hard to just raise prices, but smoke and mirrors tactics and implicating Honda just seems really sketchy.

99% chance this CEO flees the country or something.

All the brands they prefer are...Crustasian.