Archive for the 'Vehicles' Category

dead headphonist

Car - Found

Published
by
dead headphonist
on October 22, 2008
in Funny, Local and Vehicles
. 4 Comments

I got my car back last night.  Certainly in worse shape than I last
saw it and with damage I couldn’t have anticipated, but we’ll get to
that in a moment.

The story goes like this : yesterday, we got a voicemail from a dude
calling who reported (to us) that there was a silver Nissan parked in
their drive and that they had dug through it looking for a phone
number because it had been sitting there for a couple of weeks.  They
found ours on an oil change receipt.

We called the guy back and let him know that we had filed a stolen
vehicle report on it and that we had to get the GRPD out before we
could anything about the car.  We called the GRPD with the location.
They told us we needed to go there and confirm that it is our car.  We
drove over there (two blocks away from our house) and called the GRPD.
They arrived, took this story, and dusted for prints.

Exciting, I know.  Some of you (who might have seen me this morning), are probably wondering why then am I still riding my bicycle to work.  Now we’re getting to the good part.

A flashlight inspection revealed the following “interesting” scenario:
doors unlocked, no broken glass (I religiously lock my doors).  The
ignition wasn’t punched.  The column wasn’t broken.  The car stereo
FACEPLATE was stolen (irony, I know, but it was a $75 stereo).
Couldn’t see anything else that was stolen other than I think they
took some change I had between the seats.  Weird stuff, but it gets
weirder.

The roof was caved in from what appears to be multiple people JUMPING
on it (good shoeprints… I don’t wash the car).  The hood is in the
same condition.  Yes, people, someone stole my car so they could ditch
it in a random student housing parking lot two blocks away and JUMP ON
IT.

I wish I could make this shit up…

I drove the car home and parked it. It started, car was in the off
position, doesn’t appear to have been hotwired, but I can’t be sure.
It wasn’t out of gas, but was as close as I had left it; floating near
E. In the dark, I can’t do an electrical inspection to try to figure
out how they got it started so I don’t trust going anywhere in it
until I determine that the wiring is still safe.

Un-fucking-real… that’s all I have to say.

Anyone want to buy a 97 Nissan Altima with a caved in roof and a hood
that looks like crumpled up paper?  Needs a little work, but it
runs….

dead headphonist

And the third day was better than the previous two…

Published
by
dead headphonist
on February 27, 2008
in Rants and Vehicles
. 0 Comments

Current Mood:On Ice emoticon On Ice

So it’s obviously been a hectic couple of days around here.  If you’re following Char’s blogs, you’ll get that her car broke down again (second time in two weeks), Char got a ticket in Kentwood for the license plate being in the back window, a building blew up a couple of blocks away from our house yesterday, and we are finally getting around to having the drywall in the east bedroom fixed up so we can move Clare out of her smaller room and make it into an office for Char.

Me?  Well… it’s good you didn’t ask yesterday.  I’d have recommended hand-grenading the whole freaking place.  Today is better, though.  The drywall guy showed up this morning and got the drywall in.  He’s coming back on Friday to sand and settle up.  I got Char’s brakes back under control (another broken brake line) actually in record time; it took me only about 30 minutes.

I took the day off, so I’ve been spending some time playing guitar and generally chilling out.  The day off will at least make this week less stressful overall, which is good for me.

charmaspice

Headache the size of Montana!

Published
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charmaspice
on February 26, 2008
in Rants and Vehicles
. 0 Comments

Current Mood:Angry emoticon Angry & Angry emoticon Angry & Violent emoticon Violent

MontanaWhy did I choose Montana - I don’t know, all that I know is that I think my head is ready to explode into many little pieces after my week that only began yesterday.  So, my car is still broken, Brad ordered the part to fix the brake fluid leak last night and I was able to get it today.  I am hoping, praying, and even beseaching a higher power that this will fix my car and I’ll be able to be on my merry way again soon - VERY SOON!  I hope.

However if my day finishes the way it’s been it wouldn’t be too big of a suprise to me if my car doesn’t get fixed because of something else.  So, the day began by hauling my tired booty out of my warm bed to bundle up and take Brad to work.  Clare and I came home, watched some tv, and I snoozed on the couch to help catch up on my lack of sleep from the night before.  The door bell rang, I assumed it was the pestery people that come around every time it snows wanting to shovel my sidewalk for $3 - however it wasn’t.  Brad had found a drywall guy to come give us an estimate on fixing the wall in the room that is to be Clare’s, and this was him.  He told me it’d be a couple hundred dollars, and that he might be able to get me in later this week.  SWEET!  So, with any luck Clare might be moved into her new room by Springtime. 

My day isn’t sounding so bad you say - oh you just wait!  So, Clare ate lunch, and we got ready to go to school.  As I was driving down Breton I noticed a cop in the left hand lane, I wasn’t speeding so I wasn’t worried.  Oh no, he pulled me over - in the school parking lot!  I’m grumbling, wondering why I was pulled over.  He asks for my license, registration, and proof of insurance.  Since this is no longer my car I am rumaging through papers in the glove box.  I found the registration, but no proof of insurance.  I couldn’t even find the expired one for this past year, as I knew that I had this years on the dining room table.  Apparently having the old license plate on the car (even though the new plate is in the window) is considered having an expired plate.  COME ON!  It’s not even my car!  I explained that the old plate is still on there because it’s been on there since Brad bought the car in 1997, and the screws are rusted into the car.  Oh no, apparently they come off he says.  He was kind enough to not give me a ticket, however I need to take the proof of insurance with me to the Kentwood courthouse to prove that I have it within 14 days or else I get a $150 fine for several years.  What bull s$%#!  Gee thanks officer.  I think I need to go make some brownies.

Edited to add:  Thanks for taking the $125 from me city of Kentwood!  YOU SUCK!

charmaspice

Cars Suck!

Published
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charmaspice
on February 25, 2008
in Rants and Vehicles
. 0 Comments

Current Mood:Martini Mood emoticon Martini Mood

carSo, this is a picture of my car (not my exact car, but my car type) - I love this stupid car.  It’s the grocery getter station wagon I never thought I’d want.  But alas, with a husband, a child, a dog, and places to go - I needed a big car to haul our stuff.  And haul she does.  I have packed more stuff in this car than ever thought possible.  For the most part she is reliable, and gets me around town and accross the state, and sometimes even accross the country.  That is until today when she couldn’t even get me accross town.  Once again my brakes went out.  I was on my way to take Clare to school, and I got close to half way there when my brakes went out - yet again.  UGH!  I called Brad, he had a meeting this afternoon so he was unable to help me out.  I made my way home, I had enough brakes to get me there without dieing.  Unforturnatley I had to keep Clare home from school with no way to get her there.  I felt like such a failure as a mom, not able to get my own child to school for an education.  I ate the remaining 4 sugar cookies with chocolate frosting in a binge to help me feel better - unfoturtunatley it didn’t work.  Instead I settled for a nap on the couch while Clare watched some tv upstairs.  We did do something educational though by working on our “Math Box” activities. 

The “Math Box” is good and bad wrapped into one.  Every month the teacher sends home a sheet of some activities to do at home with parents, and they have to return the calendar with 10 activities or more written on it.  I think it’s great to have a clue as to what they are working on at school, and to be able to help Clare with improving her math skills, but when things get busy around here I tend to forget about the “Math Box”.  Which means we always seem to cram in those activities at the last minute.   Ah well, with any luck we’ll improve in our motivation and get them done earlier in the month.

Now we just need to fix my stupid car.  The part is in, tomorrow I’ll get it, and with any luck I’ll be back on the road by the end of the week.  Happy Freakin’ Monday!

dead headphonist

Auto Atrocity

Published
by
dead headphonist
on January 10, 2008
in Rants and Vehicles
. 0 Comments

Current Mood:F%@k It! emoticon F%@k It!

brokencar.jpgAs many if you probably know by now, I abhor cars.   Well, it’s really a love/hate relationship I guess.  Cars get me places I want to go; like the beer store.  But I still hate them.

With all the rain and high humidity from the warm weather and melting snow, my car decided to start acting up.  Perhaps it was because it hadn’t had a tune-up since before Clare was born.  Perhaps it was because it is in fact as sentient as I sometimes believe and it hates me as much as I hate it.

Either way, it was idling fine, but then began sputtering when I gave it gas; worse when it was in gear.  I began to think it out as some kind of fuel problem.  I did my usual reading and research and was set to buy a fuel filter and a new injector; something the car has needed before when things like this happen and probably should get again anyway.

For some reason I didn’t make the purchase though.   Something told me to go home and to really pay attention to what it was doing.  So I did.  It idled fine.  Gave it gas and it sputtered like crazy; and backfired.  Ahh…  ELECTRICAL.  So we went to the store last night and bought all the usual tune-up essentials; cap, rotor, wires, and plugs.  I picked up an air filter because I didn’t know when -that- was last changed.

This morning, I went to move the car into the driveway and nothing; no sputtering, backfiring, or anything.  It’s got cold again and is completely dry outside.  I think I got it.  I replaced the wires and plugs (and the air filter), but found that the desk jockey at the autoparts store gave me the wrong damned cap and rotor.  Nothing can ever go right.

The wires were showing rust through some of the joints and the plugs were basically gone.  Likely that’s probably most of the issue, but the cap and rotor will still need to be replaced.  I’ll be making an exchange this weekend.

Fun times.  And the exhaust needs to be welded up again.  That’ll have to wait until spring.

dead headphonist

This Ol’ Domicile Saga : Day 1.25

Published
by
dead headphonist
on September 15, 2007
in Housework and Vehicles
. 0 Comments

Current Mood:Chillin emoticon Chillin

So the guy never showed yesterday to look at the roof.  I’m a little tired of the contractor and I’m going to find someone else to help us.  I need to get on fixing the wall and ceiling upstairs.  This is starting to get stupid.

Tomorrow we’ll be getting our Ebay stuff together in order to start getting the funds together to pay for all this.  I’ll post with what we have for sale in case anyone’s interested.  It’ll probably be a lot of computer stuff and I’m considering parting out my project motorcycle if it comes down to it.

Today I managed to actually complete something on a car in one day.  I got the busted brake line on Char’s car replaced with really little incident (other than racking my knuckles, which is completely normal).  It was actually a lot better than I first thought it would be.

charmaspice

Thursday Quiet

Published
by
charmaspice
on September 13, 2007
in General, Rants and Vehicles
. 0 Comments

Current Mood:Martini Mood emoticon Martini Mood

Down HillThis morning has been relatively quiet around the Eastowners’ house…..and might I add it’s sweet bliss.  Yesterday was far too hectic of a day for me, and I needed a day to clear my anger out of my head.  Yesterday started out okay, I got to sleep in a bit…..Clare ate breakfast, as did I, I surfed my usual blog reading with the help of my handy dandy Google Reader, and it went down hill from there.   Before I go down hill I would like to share with those readers of our fine blog exactly what Google Reader does for me.  If you have (or want to create) a gmail account (googles answer to e-mail), you have access to their Reader.  When you go to Google’s page, look in the upper left for the More tab, click on it and you’ll see Reader down under it.  Here you can subscribe any and all blogs you read on a daily basis.  It tells me when my pals have posted a new blog, I read them….comment if I choose to…..and then I move on up the line to the next blog.  I find it handy especially as a busy mom that has to read a sentence 10 times before I can get through a blog post, and this way I’m not clicking all over creation to find the blogs I read the most.  I come downstairs every morning, open up my laptop, click refresh, and I read to my hearts content.  It’s a great way to manange your blog reading if you do a lot of it.  I’m sure I’m not even using it to it’s fullest potential…..but I would have to say I LOVE it!

Back to the down hill slide of yesterday that put me in such an utter bad mood I felt like crying.  I did my reading, and decided to take a shower before getting Clare to school.  Clare asked if she could get a shower too…..I said yes, thinking if she got in there first I could slip in after her and she could get dressed while I showered.  I got wrapped up in folding towels, and then it took Clare far too long to get dressed.  Okay fine, I thought I’d take her to school, come home grab a shower, and have a relaxing afternoon.  We got through lunch with the help of the timer (we’ve been using it A LOT as of late to help us in our time management), and headed out the door with time to spare.  Sweet, I don’t have to speed accross town to get her to school on time!  Well, not 3 blocks from our house my brakes blew out.  I stopped, thankfully, called Brad immediately ready to cry, crept my way around the corner and barely stopped in front of our house.  Brad came home, gave me his car and he tried adding brake fluid to my car…..I immediately saw the leak, brake fluid gushing out by my rear passanger tire.  He told me to leave, and had a coworker come pick him up to take him back to work (thankfully he works only 2 miles away from home).  Clare was 10 minutes late to school, I felt aweful.  I’ve been telling her all along that we need to be to school on time because now that she’s in Kindergarten it counts if she’s tardy, and if we’re late too many times we end up in the Principal’s Office.  The office staff, and her teacher were very kind in saying don’t worry about it……I thought to myself, I wonder how many stories they hear when people are late.  My brakes truely did go out though.  The only stipulation for taking Brad’s car though was that he wanted me to check the oil in it, as he thought it was low.  I said, “Well, why don’t I just take it for an oil change since that hasn’t been done in almost a year.”  While I was out he was able to find a part for my car to fix the brake line in the back, so I figured I’d go down to Delta Imports and pick it up because the sooner I have the part the faster my car gets fixed (in theory anyway).  By the time all that was said and done I only had a little less than an hour before having to head back to school to get Clare, and I was still showerless and very cranky.  I came home, read for a bit, and then left to get Clare.  Dinner wasn’t so bad, something new Eggplant Parmesean sandwhiches with a side of rice.  IT was actually kinda yummy.  Brad made me a drink to help ease the pain of my day.  We sent Clare to bed early as the toll of school has really given her some attitude issues, and we settled down to a night of DVR & drinks. 

Today has been relatively quiet.  I was able to get my shower, breakfast, and do my blog reading all the while having a quiet morning.  Let’s hope our afternoon is equally quiet!

dead headphonist

This Ol’ Domicile Saga : Day 1

Published
by
dead headphonist
on September 12, 2007
in Housework and Vehicles
. 1 Comment

Current Mood:Tired of Everything emoticon Tired of Everything

The contractor was here. He didn’t bring a ladder and is the Vice President of the company anyway (which is contractor speak for “I don’t climb no freaking ladders”). He’s sending a guy out on Friday afternoon to look at the chimney and the guy is supposed to bring a bucket of tar with him. Hopefully it’ll only cost us a couple of hours of time for them to fix it up right.

So as I said, we got put down on our plans for a home equity loan, so we’ll be listing some of our more tangible good on ebay in the coming week to try to come up with the extra cash needed to do the interior work (and maybe we’ll get enough to do something about the bathroom as well).

On top of it all, Char’s car bursted a brake line today. It’s not a huge deal. I found the culprit, a piece of rubber hose that connects the rigid brake line to the caliper on the passenger-side rear. I called Delta. They had the part. $38 later, we’ll have it all fixed up… at least that’s what I hope. This is work I’m pretty confident at.

Hopefully I won’t have to bleed the brakes. The brake fluid reservoir isn’t empty, so I’m hoping I can get away with it. I don’t have book on it and I have no idea how to do it. It’ll be a call to Auto Sports to ask them.

Anyway… it’s been an interesting day. It’s not even 3pm.

dead headphonist

Progress on the veedub.

Published
by
dead headphonist
on April 29, 2006
in Vehicles
. 0 Comments
Here’s the car up on stilts. It seems I’ve collected the needed tools to get a car up in the air safely.
This is what is under that mysterious maintenance-free tranny pan. Notice that I still hadn’t removed the filter seal, but the filter is removed and I’ve tried to clean up most of the mess.
Here is the nastiness that was in that mysterious maintenance-free tranny pan. You can see the old filter discarded in the yellow drain pan in absolute disgust. This was a messy messy job, but I did get it done; as a matter of fact, much faster than I expected.

Everything is back together and the tranny is refilled with fresh fluid (almost 5 liters of it). I took it for a five mile run around the city and everything (with two exceptions) checked out. The first exception is that I drastically need to replace the 100% water coolant non-mixture with a refreshing 50/50 mix of coolant and water… water was boiling, but it was a short ride, so no worries. The other exception is that I think the shift position sensor (or somesuch) is dorked up. Here’s the scenerio…

I drive the car, stop, put it in park (confirming that it’s in park and not in any other gear). I shut the car off and pull the key. When I put the key back in and turn on the ignition, the gearshift indicator says it’s in Neutral and it refuses to start. I turn the key off (leaving it in… not taking the key out). I shift through all the gears going from Park to 1st and back to Park. Then the car starts without issue… the gearshift indicator says the car is perpetually in Drive or it says it’s in all gears. Probably not the best situation. I gotta give the guy at Autosports one more call and ask him if that’s the issue. If so, guess I’ll have to get a new sensor (or whatever).

The good news is that there is no longer increasing amounts of funk in the coolant and the tranny seems to be behaving… at least for now.

dead headphonist

a little progress

Published
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dead headphonist
on April 23, 2006
in Vehicles
. 0 Comments

I got out this morning and got the transmission cooler changed before it started to rain. Sorry there aren’t any pictures, but it was the threat of rain kept the camera inside. Besides, it only took me about 25 minutes to change it. Now I have to drain and fill the tranny and do a final flush and fill of the cooling system. Hopefully, the weather will allow me to get this done early this week. Should have done it yesterday, but I had to buy a bunch of stuff and by the time we got home, there wasn’t any time before dinner (see previous blog entry).

Both sides (the coolant and tranmission) of the cooler was full of the creamy tan muck that you’ve by now seen plenty of pictures of. The interesting bit is that the cooler I have has a plastic sleeve inside where the banjo bolts go in, the one I got from Autosports is all metal (and a slightly different shape). It bolted right in with no issues, so I think it’s going to be ok.

Maybe it’ll clear up later in the day and I’ll get back out there.