I regret to inform you all that there will be no more photos of cool cars passing by the windows of Sign Wizards, Inc. I got fired today. My former boss sat me down this morning and handed me a written warning about my job performance sliding, and me not paying attention. So I wrote her a long email in response, airing my many grievances: overworked, no support, no leadership, micromanagement, other employees quitting and adding to my workload, and my previous complaints and requests for a change of position going unanswered.

Twenty minutes later, she was asking for my key.

But that's not what pisses me off.

What pisses me off is that yesterday, I had Ripley in the office with me, and I was trying to talk on the phone to someone, and she wouldn't stop whining and barking, so I yelled at her to shut up. Apparently one of the new hires took offense to that, and told her I was being "abusive" to my dog. The rescue dog that we took in knowing she had massive health problems, have taken care of and loved for over a year now, nursed back to health, and love unconditionally. And who is not the first rescue we've taken in and cared for for the rest of their lives.

You can't call ME abusive to animals, you stupid fucking cunt. I just got upset and yelled at my dog because I was trying to straighten out some fucking mess that you dumped in my lap after another employee had the good sense to quit. And I regretted it immediately, because it wasn't Ripley's fault. How dare you. How fucking DARE you.

Mostly I'm just relieved. Suddenly, none of those idiotic projects that were making me dread going to work are my problem anymore. Never again will I have to park in that sorry-ass excuse for a neighborhood and worry about some homeless person doing something awful to my car. I'll never hear that stupid fucking doorbell again, or have to cringe every time I see a Slack notification from my other boss, the one I never could fucking stand.

Good. Fucking. Riddance.

Now if you'll excuse me, I gotta go file for unemployment while I look for something else...

I think it's safe to say that it has been a period of adjustment since Tribeageddon. Not only have the refugees had some trouble finding their feet, but the rest of us have occasionally gotten annoyed by the barrage of posts that aren't typical material around here: what's your favorite car/here's my favorite car, the polls and the posts complaining about the polls, and so on. It does get to be a bit much. And it's clear that the Drivetribe crew were far, far younger than I think a lot of us realized.

And it occurred to me this morning that that age difference explains most of the disconnect. We're the same; we're just at different points on the gearhead timeline.

When I was a kid, I thought about cars all the time. My dad had subscriptions to Road & Track and AutoWeek and I devoured them. I read every road test, memorized every performance stat, gazed longingly at every photograph. And then I talked for hours on end with a few friends who were as car-crazy as I was, debating which was better: the Mustang GT or the Camaro IROC-Z, whether we'd go for a Ferrari or a Lamborghini if we ever got rich, making grand plans for what we'd do to modify certain cars if we ever got them. We drew pictures of cars and car logos all over every notebook cover. Our other friends, our families, a complete stranger at the grocery store just trying to load a bag of cat litter into the back of her Renault 18i Sportwagen, got really sick and tired of us endlessly blathering about cars. Sound familiar?

The difference is that we didn't have the technology available to endlessly blather at strangers about cars from thousands of miles away. We had to keep our blathering local. And our fresh supply of automotive news and reviews came in the mailbox, a month at a time, so we weren't constantly flooded by new information that we simply had to share immediately.

Now I see that Drivetribe was Road & Track for the young'uns here. Not only that, it was also the seat on the school bus where you showed your friends the review of the latest BMW sports sedan, and the notebook cover where you doodled pictures of cars, and even better, it wasn't you and two other weird kids talking about this stuff at lunch; it was thousands of car-loving people, all over, who not only listened to you blather, but who blathered back. Honestly, if such a thing had existed when I was 15, I would have gotten even worse grades than I did. I'd have been on it constantly.

But there's something you need to know about that car-craziness: it mellows out. It doesn't go away; I think most of our spouses and friends would say that we still talk about cars too much, but it changes focus. Once you start driving, and get a car of your own, you start focusing all your mental energy on that car, not just cars in general. You don't have time to debate which manufacturer's shade of green is best, because you need to have your dad show you how to do a tune-up, or you're making plans for a road trip to the beach, or tring to figure out why the damn thing won't just start already.

After that, when you have a couple dozen years of driving under your belt, and have owned a fair few cars, you just stop keeping up with the latest and greatest, unless you're actively searching for a new car and need to research it. And all those supercars you used to daydream about might as well be on the moon for all the good they'll do you.

And instead of blathering about new cars you'll never own, you blather about old cars you used to own. And start posting lots of photos of your dog.

So don't be offended if no one cares about which Porsche you like better, or answers your poll of which shade of orange is better. It's just that we've been there and done that already. But stick around; it's going to be interesting to watch you all be able to officially join the party.

A while back, my dad asked me what I wanted for Christmas. I told him, "I don't really need anything, and the only thing I would want is a QuickJack."

Well look what turned up today...

Of course, the delivery driver left them out in the rain, at the bottom of the driveway... Oh well, at least we don't have a porch-pirate problem in this neighborhood. I'll just drive the truck down, load em up, and drive back up.

Truck battery is dead. Great. Ok, fine, I'll drive the Toyota back down, cram them in somehow, and drive back up. With the passenger door open. In the dark. Good thing we're on a dead end street so there's no traffic...

I won't have time to do anything with it until probably Christmas, because of life stuff, but expect some unboxing and setup photos when I dig into it.

I mean, it is a hatchback, after all...

It's a nice day out, and after my comment about the F40, I figured I'd better put my money where my mouth is. The old girl is running just fine, too...

We lost Leeloo tonight. She spent last night at the emergency vet and just crashed. My wife spent the afternoon there, talking to the vet and trying to decide what to do. By the time I got there she just... wasn't there anymore. Her breathing was ragged and she was shaking and she barely knew I was there. It was an obvious decision. But not an easy one.

Poor little bunnybear. This was just last week. It happened so fast. They think it was pancreatitis or liver failure or some combination of the two. They said by the time symptoms show up, it's already bad.

If you've got a fur face nearby, give'em a scritch on the head from me. And Leeloo.

You've all seen it; it's in the background of every DOTS photo I post from my office window at work. I've talked about its successes and failures, posted photos of it with silly stripes on it (now gone, by the way), complained about how boring it is, even threatened to replace it for a while last year. It's grayish-brown, or brownish-gray, depending on the light. It has over a quarter million miles on it and only cost me $500 to purchase. Yes, it's my 1995 Toyota Corolla, my daily driver for two years now, seen here yesterday during the inaugural test of my Quickjack.

It started out as a necessity, or near enough: I just couldn't drive the truck to work any more. It was killing me on gas, and it's such a pain in the ass to drive in heavy traffic that I was coming home annoyed and tired every day. I spent three months trying to find an appropriate beater, working under a mandate from my wife that I not spend more than $1000 on a car. In the Before Times, this was still possible, but not easy. This ugly beat-up little Toyota won out over a '96 Jetta that would have been OK but sold while I was researching the cost of fixing some problems it had, a truly terrifying '93 Ford Probe with a Crown Royal bag for a shifter boot and no exhaust, and a '99 Suzuki Swift that I really wanted but the owner ghosted me after I test drove it. I bought the Toyota on the day the CDC declared COVID a pandemic, which means it might have been the last good really cheap used car sold in America.

It has been good, and it has been cheap. It's also about as exciting as plain oatmeal. But over 12,000 miles of commuting, I've determined that excitement is overrated for a daily driver; what you really want is something you can ignore.

You need something you can not worry about bashing over potholes or parking next to the shopping car corral or getting a little accidental curb rash on the wheels. You need to be able to park it in your dirty sketchy neighborhood at work and not obsess over what's happening to it during the day. You need a car that already has dents and scratches and shitty paint, and looks just about the same clean as it does dirty. You need to neither know nor care what caused a stain like this to appear on the door.

But it takes a truly competent car to live this life. A scruffy car you can park in sketchy neighborhoods is useless if it won't start so you can leave the sketchy neighborhood. Being able to thread the needle between cars on the highway and assert the "shitty car goes first if it wants to" rule requires that the "shitty car" in question be in tip-top mechanical shape. But cars like this are never in tip-top shape, so it has to be a car that can act like it's in tip-top shape even if the alignment is buggered up and it's perpetually a quart low on oil.

And that's where this little Corolla shines. I can ignore it, neglect it, fix it with cheap or used parts (or duct tape), and it just does its thing. I don't care how it looks, and as long as it keeps getting me to and from work, I'm happy. And if something catastrophic happened to it (wrecked, stolen, piston decides to take a vacation out the side of the block, etc) I'll be annoyed, but not really upset; I'll just go find another crappy old Corolla. Or something.

Having a cheap ignorable car around is really handy. I highly recommend it.

A little background: When my grandpa moved from his small farm outside of Great Bend, Kansas, into an assisted living home in the early '90s, we had to clean out the farm. The house, the big barn, and five more outbuildings were full to bursting with miscellaneous bits of machinery, old cars, disassembled tractors, airplane parts, and boxes and boxes of, well, just stuff. Half of it he didn't even know why he had it. He was an engineer, an inventor, and a tinkerer, and every bit of junk in those buildings was something he had some grand idea for at one time, I'm sure of it. But the intervening years had hidden that purpose, and now it was just stuff. He referred to them as "nugatory contrivances," a Word-Of-The-Day way of saying "useless gadgets."

(My cousin and I even found a car he didn't remember buying: a late-Sixties Plymouth Belvedere wagon, slant six with a three-on-the-tree, parked in the weeds behind the barn. It had the keys in the ignition and ten-year-expired tags on it.)

In one large crate, we found about fifty of these little devices, and none of us could figure out what they were. It's a cast-aluminum housing, about four inches square, with a mounting flange on the side, a clear plastic cap on the top, and an electrical plug on the bottom. Inside is a weighted pendulum on a gimbal. The bottom of the pendulum is concave, and a small ball on a spring-loaded arm sits in the center of it. The arm presses against a normally-open microswitch inside.

Now, here's where it gets interesting. If you whack it with your palm really hard, the pendulum will pop off of the lever in the center, and allow the arm to snap up, closing the switch. You can then re-set the mechanism by moving the arm down with a screwdriver, letting the pendulum re-center, and letting the arm go. So obviously it's some sort of shock trigger. A sharp force or blow trips the switch, sending a signal to... what, exactly?

That's what we couldn't figure out. There are markings on the case: "SIGNAL CORPS - US ARMY - SWITCH BOX BC-706". It's made by Walter Kidde & Company, of Bloomfield, New Jersey. (Yes, the smoke detector people.) There's a date stamped on the flange: April 24, 1943. OK, so now we have an age.

My dad, my uncle, and I took one apart, turned it this way and that, played with the mechanism, made wild guesses as to its purpose. An impact sensor to trigger an alarm? Possibly. A bomb trigger? Less likely, because it can be reset, and besides, bombs create shock waves, they aren't triggered by them. I took one with me, and it has traveled around for years. I almost forgot I had it, until a few weeks ago when I was cleaning out some old boxes of my own.

Since we now live in the Information Age, I decided to just Google it and see what I found.

Any guesses?

Last chance.

OK.

It's part of a radio, but a very specific part of a very specific radio. It is part of the IFF (Identify Friend or Foe) radar transmitter for a WWII bomber, likely a B-17 from the info I found. This is the thingy that sends out a signal to the radar stations on the ground to let radar operators identify the friendly blips so they don't shoot at them. Handy piece of tech, but disastrous if it fell into the wrong hands. Therefore, the IFF radios had self-destruct mechanisms built in. There was a manual button (two buttons, actually, you had to press both at once), but if no one could push the buttons, this was the trigger for the self-destruct in the event of a crash landing. Plane crashes, this little gizmo is triggered, and a thermite bomb turns the radio to slag before the Germans or the Japanese can get their hands on it.

So it is a bomb trigger after all. Just a very specific, very small bomb. Neat, huh?

My grandpa worked for Boeing in the '50s, there were probably boxes of old war surplus stuff like this lying around. Maybe he thought he could use the switches for something, and grabbed them out of a dumpster.

And now I know what this funny paperweight I've had for all these years was for.

...with her Masters degree! She graduates in May with an MS in Communications from Purdue. I'm so proud of her.

Three years ago today, I asked my wife to hurry over to Troutdale with $1200 cash and exchange it for the keys and title to a crusty old pickup truck. I had test-driven it the day before, as had someone else, and the seller said it was first-come, first-served, and by God I was going to be first, even by proxy.

She agreed, and did me one better: she took it for an emissions test before she handed over the money, just to make sure it would pass. But she didn't think much of the truck.

To be fair, it was a sorry sight: dirty, with garbage and leaves in the bed, and the interior stank of cigarettes and old food. It had a taillight out and a low tire. But it ran just fine, everything worked except that one taillight, and it ticked all the boxes I was looking for: standard cab, long bed, manual, AC. The fact that it was 4WD was a bonus, and its Forest Service colors upped its cool factor. We went and picked it up after work, aired up the low tire, drove home.

I spent the whole next weekend cleaning it out. There were empty (and occasionally not-quite-empty) food cartons under the seat from Panda Express and (I think) some barbecue place. Fortunately it was winter, so nothing was living in any of them, just fossilized Orange Chicken. I Febreezed the almighty hell out of the seat cover, but couldn't get the cigarette smell out, so I knew the seat would have to be re-upholstered or replaced. I found an upholstery kit from LMC Truck for $250, and it turned out quite well, thank you.

Before:

And after.

The truck was my daily driver from April of 2019 (when I sold my Saturn) to March of 2020 (when I bought the $500 Corolla). But it just isn't made for rush-hour traffic. There's an enormous gap in the gears between first and second, most prominent at about 15-20 mph; you're either lugging it in second, or revving it high in first. And the worn synchros make double-clutching a necessity a lot of the time. And despite a full tuneup, and changing the tires from the oversized all-terrains that were on it to a brand new set of Michelin LTX road tires in the proper size, it still only manages about 13 mpg, despite being a six-cylinder. A better daily driver was needed. Enter the Toyota. (But I'll tell you about that next week, on its second ownership anniversary.)

But I am the sort of person who needs a truck around, so the truck stuck around. In the past two years, it has hauled lumber, potting soil, mulch, trees and shrubs, rented gardening equipment, and literally tons of rock and gravel (1400 lbs at a time) up our absurdly steep driveway to complete two massive landscaping jobs. And it will do it all again this summer, when we do the rest of the front yard.

In July of 2020, it got its fifteen minutes of internet fame, courtesy of our pal @David-Tracy. He wrote a Jalopnik piece about a very rusty Ford (I think) truck, saying it had "perfect patina." I disagreed, and emailed him a bunch of photos of my truck to agrue my point that patina isn't rust, it's texture and character from years of use. He immediately demanded more photos of the truck, and wrote an article about it.

The truck has also been used to get various vehicles unstuck from various parts of our side yard, before the landscaping and paving work was done. It has pulled both the trailer and my wife's 2WD Infiniti QX4 out of the mud.

It also rescued a Kia driven by a hapless DoorDash driver. I'm still not sure how she accomplished this. I had to pull it back up the driveway, and then I backed it out into the street.

It hasn't seen much use this winter, and as such, usually has a dead battery right when I need it. I have taken to disconencting the battery when I park it, until I can have an outlet installed on the side of the garage so I can hook it up to a battery tender.

The Dutch Brothers stickers it once wore are gone, replaced by my own decorations. And yes, I do have an Oppo sticker for it; I just haven't had a chance to apply it yet.

I'll probably never sell this thing. It's just too useful, and it's cheap to keep around when I'm not using it. Insurance is cheap, and when I'm not filling that 34 gallon tank every two weeks, so is gas. It's reliable enough for what I need it for, and I still love how it looks.

Happy anniversary, you big green lump. I owe you a wash and an oil change.

For the first time in my ownership (and probably many years before that), the MG is 100% electrically functional.

Up yours, Lucas.

@SamV8 You just need the right road for it.

@Dalton-like-from-Roadhouse "Yes... no... yes... no... yes... no... yes..."

@Highlander Daily the Land Rover; my half-Scottish wife would insist on it. The Crosstour is AWD, right? Gut it and rallycross it. Just to mess with people. And burn the Tesla while laughing maniacally the whole time.

@GibbsEmphasis I shoot for, and can usually get, 2-3" away. What sometimes throws me is if the car in front or behind is further away (or significantly wider than my car), which makes it harder to judge.

@FourMalibus First concert that I remember: Oak Ridge Boys, at Ravinia, a big outdoor music venue outside Chicago. I was probably 7 or 8 years old. We also saw Peter, Paul, & Mary there around the same time, and now that I think about it, I can't remember which was first.

First concert by myself: Def Leppard, at the old Chicago Stadium (I think?), in the fall of 1987. It was the tour that was in the round, with the stage in the center. Nosebleed seats, but I didn't care. Big thrill for a 14 year old, rode the train in with some friends, couldn't hear a thing for three days after.

@amoore100 I actually don't hate that.

@AkioOhtori Good to know! Yeah, those PDFs are... unfortunate.

@Zaphod-s-Heart-of-Gold We have an old truck and a small camper already. But yeah, I don't think my wife would go for it either.

Funny thing is, we don't have a big economic footprint, really. I could get away with a small job. No debt except the mortgage, which is less than what most of our renting friends pay every month for rent. We have a lot of stuff, I suppose, but honestly, after getting rid of everything twice now to move long distances, I'm happy with some clutter.

@Qaaaaa Yeah, it's about the only kind of retail work I'd want to do, but I can mix paint and make keys and help people choose the right weed killer. Plus, it's 10 minutes from home.