Almost

..into a new year around here and we made it through the holiday madness relatively unscathed. CP had a good time with her grandparents and seemed to enjoy opening her presents from Santa and family. We did manage to get a tiny Canon Elph camera for her to use. She loves playing with mine, so we figured a small ten year old point and shoot from eBay would be good.....and we were right. She's already working on filling the little CF card with photos of her feet, her mother, and the cats.

The LW cooked enough green bean casserole to feed 100 on Christmas day...no, really....and we took that and a ham from Costco down to the place where the Giving Tree was having their Christmas week edition of Project Feed. It's a good thing and the people that run it work hard to help everyone that she can.

Yesterday was leaky diesel day. After the car almost not starting due to a pump distributor o-ring leak, I decided that 68 degrees was warm enough to work on the TDI. I almost got a sunburn out there in shorts and a t-shirt. I got the parts a while back from Jim at dieselgeek.com and the little kit that he sells is great. The first time through the procedure I pinched the o-ring and the pump wouldn't prime....plus it was leaking worse than it was originally. The second time through, which was faster than the first time, I sprayed some silicone lube on the seal and it worked fine. I hope that this will stand up to the switches that we make back and forth from B100 to ULS D2 in the tank. We ran all summer on B100 whenever we could and one tank after switching back to D2, it started leaking. There was so much diesel on the engine, the whole car was beginning to smell like an old tractor. It starts much easier now too - I think that there was just too much air being let into the lines.

B&B ...or a Hotel in the GGGG..Ghetto

We looked up some places for the parents to stay today and found a really nice B&B that's close to our house and run by a former chef. Mmmm....breakfast. Well, my parents aren't accustomed to B&Bs where you meet the owner and stay in a nice personalized space - they like chain hotels and staying next to 400 other people that they don't know in questionable areas of town, so they didn't like the idea of a B&B. I called my mom and asked her if there's a "Stay in a crappy part of Tucson" website that they search to find the places that they stay..... This time, it's a chain hotel for $110/night down by Irvington and I-10. I guess they will be close to a Honda shop and an RV store that's in bankruptcy. Sheeeshh....

Why...

...I sometimes really can't f(*$#ng stand people. I spoke to a kindly old gentleman in the Wild Oats a few minutes ago and had the small passing type of conversation that you have in the veggie isle.... then sonofabitch hands me a jeezus pamphlet and wants to debate his delusional creation story with me. I stopped it when he moved too far into my personal space. One thing was funny though, how quickly he turned up his nose and dismissed the creation stories of various other cultures when I brought it up. What a f(*$#ng $hitstain. He was handing out a pamphlet to everyone in the store too. Why is it that I just want to pound on a$$holes that do this...?

Pendant Lamps

You wouldn't really think that pendant lamps would be an issue to fight about, but in my house, you'd be wrong. It was shaping up to be a really nice Saturday morning until I picked up the latest issue of Ready Made magazine. Well, the light section discusses how to make a pendant light and this is where it all begins to go south. I see the pendant light cord that they show with a two blade plug on the end of it and say, "Hey, we could just clip that plug off and tie it into the wall fixture that's vacant".

It gets ugly here. Evidently the wife has done some extensive and time consuming research out there on the interwebs and found that you void the UL stuff by doing that and is completely, and rather ferociously against it ....and against me all of the sudden for even having the nerve to suggest it. Well, we live in a 1960s house that was a rental for a llllllllong time. The furnace fan runs on an extension cord with electrical tape and all of the outlets have 3-wire fixtures even though the whole house is still just two-wire. I guess having these is the limit for her UL voiding level of comfort. I eventually got told that someday "in my house" that I could have whatever I wanted.

After a half-hour of searching, I found a place that sells 18/3 shielded wire for pendant lighting and they probably have the fixtures for the bulb as well as the cover place and stress relief pieces for attaching it to the wall. Man, I really just wish that whoever built this tiny house had put in cieling fixtures instead of wiring things to the sides of the walls.

The wife just piled the baby into the car and left the house in a huff with a slam of the door. Ahhhh...Saturday.

Movies

Recently we watched two really good movies: Spirited Away and Porco Rosso They're Japanese animation, but have been dubbed with the voices of American actors. I happened to pass a person in the library who was picking up a copy of Porco Rosso and he recommended it highly...and now I do too.