Snap Crash Phhhhfft Thud

Tuesday is trash/recycle day in our neighborhood. It is also yard waste pickup day. If you have leaves or lawn clippings or tree trimmings all you need to do is leave them on the street where the city picks it up and takes it away. Usually in the fall they will come around a couple times wit h a big vacuum truck, but most of the time it is with an open top trailer with a claw arm like you see at the carnival where you waste a lot of money trying to pick up a small stuffed animal.

Over the weekend our next door neighbor cleaned the last of leaves out of his back yard and lined them up along the curb. When we came home, we couldn’t get to our driveway because the truck was parked in the middle of the street. We waited a few minutes, but you could tell he was going to be at it a while, so we backed up a few feet and took a cross street and went around the back to come in the other way. Donna walked out and checked the mail. The guy was still at it. I took a rake and swept a small branch off the roof over the front door which Donna then took out to the street to add it to leaf pile. We went inside and read through the mail, both snail and e.

We were both changing from work attire into our “play” clothes when we heard a series of loud noises: Snap. Crash. Phhhhfft. Thud. Donna asked, “What was that?” Me, “I don’t know.” She goes to the kitchen window and says, “There is wire down in the driveway! Come look!” I say, “That’s the phone line.”1 Her, “The guy must have hit with his truck. He’s still there, go tell him.” Me, “Let me get some pants on first.”

By the time I get dressed, put some shoes on and open the front door, the truck takes off down the street. We go out to survey the damage. The phone line ran from top of the end of the house along the driveway to across the street. It is still attached to the eave of the house, but it has been yanked off the line over on the other side of the street and wrapped itself around the tree partway down the side of the driveway. That is when Donna points over to the “natural area” on the other side of the lawn and asks, “What’s that?” It is the lamp that was on top of the post in the holly bush at the end of the driveway. As she put it, “That wire decapitated2 the lamp post.”

I went back in the house and looked up the city’s Public Works Dept. phone number ion the web. The page showed that their work hours were 8:15 to 5:00. It was about 20 minutes to five so naturally they didn’t answer the phone. So I left a message to call me at home, hoping that they would call before the day was over. You know what they say, “Hope in one hand, $%&@ in the other.”

Wednesday moring I called the number at 7:45 to leave another message to have them call my work phone. Someone answered on the second ring. I told the nice lady my story and she said, “Hold on, I’ll go get the supervisor.” Two or three minutes later she come back on, “I see his truck, maybe he’s in a meeting. Could you hold on a little while longer? That is in the other building.” Two or three minutes later she’s back, “Let me transfer you.” I get a quik ring and the supervisor’s voice mail kicks in; I’m out of the office until Monday the 13th (which is next week), leave a message or for immediate assistance dial 642-extention.

That was the same number I dialed in the first place, so I called it again. A different woman, who has obviously heard my story from the first, picks up the phone and says, “We don’t start work until 8:15.” So I say, “I know, was just trying to leave a message, but the supervisor’s voice mail says he won’t be in until next week and I wonder who I should tell about this problem.” “He is here. Hold on I’ll go get him.”

Two or three minutes later she’s back with a male voice on the speaker phone. I tell my story again and the man says, “What’s your adress, I’ll go by and see what we have to do, then call you back.” Within a hour he calls back. “I couldn’t find a light just like yours at BBHIW #1 or BBHIW #2 or Ace Harware. Do you want me to send you some pictures and you can choose?” I tell him, “It really doesn’t matter much to me, just as long as it is similar, i.e. black, 4 clear sides, whatever.” “OK, I’ll get you fixed up.”

I took Donna home at lunch as she was taking a half day off and when we pulled into the driveway there was a lamp already on top of the post. It wasn’t lit up though, there was no bulb in it. About that time, a City of Aiken truck pulled up and our male voiced supervisor popped out. “I had to go get a different bulb because the original one I picked out didn’t fit.” While he was installing the bulb he mentioned that he had called AT&T for us so they could come out and fix the wire.3

The whole light assembly is smaller than the one it replaced, but doesn’t look too bad. The bulb they put in it is super bright, when I looked out the window this morning when it was still dark out, it looked like we had a lighthouse at the end of the driveway, just not rotating.

1. This is no great loss as we get our phone service through the cable company.
2. As it might have done to any humans standing in the driveway had the truck pulled away about fifteen minutes earlier.
3. I wonder how long it take for that to happen? See #1 above.

Old New Old Clutch

Astute observers would have noticed my statement yesterday about the Miata spending the last week mostly outside and knowing that the Miata normally resides in a garage would have been asking themselves, “What happened here?” Well, it goes like this:

Early on in the ownership experience with the CTBNL I complimented the previous owner, and my current fairy godfather, on his Miata modification choices as they closely mirrored what I had done to and wanted to do to The Emperor. He thanked me for the ego boost and said that if he had to do it all over again there was on mod he wouldn’t do and that was the lightened flywheel/clutch set-up.

I liked the engine responsiveness from the lightened flywheel. I didn’t like that the clutch required a bit more leg muscle to operate and a lot of finesse to get a smooth start when backing up or from a standing start. I figured I would adjust, six months later and I still hadn’t. I guess the almost 27 years of using a stock Miata clutch was too ingrained to overcome, or that adage about old dogs and new tricks has some basis in fact.

After enough of my constant herky-jerky backing out of the garage, the Bogardus Enterprises CFO told me to go ahead and investigate the cost changing the clutch/flywheel out. That’s when I had a great idea on how to eliminate having to buy any parts. I thought Steve at Panic Motorsports could find a new home for the ACT Street-Lite flywheel and ACT performance clutch that had a mere 8 thousand miles on them. The sale of that would be enough to buy the replacement new OEM components. flywheel, a pressure plate and clutch so I would just need to cover the labor for the job. He thought so too, so a deal was set.

We dropped the car off at Panic in west Columbia last Saturday and just picked it back up. It was actually done last Thursday but circumstances prevented us from retrieving it until yesterday. Judging by the pollen layer on the car it probably spent since Thursday outdoors in the densely pine tree’d area where the shop is.

All Clean

I’m not sure if pine pollen season is entirely through, but both vehicles got a wash this afternoon. The Purple Whale had gathered a nice little coating of the stuff and today’s light rain washed some of it off, but the rest was redistributed in a somewhat ugly design. The C.T.B.N.L. has spent the last week mostly outside and mostly stationary so it too had a relatively thick coating of the yellow stuff. For now they are both clean, but for how long?

Welcome to the Twenty-First Century

This afternoon I joined the rest of mainstream American and bought a Smarty Pants phone. With Donna retiring at the end of the month we would no longer be in the same place at the same time, so we thought it would be prudent to be able to contact each other if needed whenever our hips were disconnected. We still have the “old school” 25¢-a-minute flip phone which will become hers and I now have what they call a mid-range smart phone, the Alcatel Idol 4 from the folks at Cricket.

I got the Basic 3GB data plan with free unlimited talk and text and if I knew my number I’d put here so you could call me…

The phone came with its very own VR Goggles just like the ones you got for your Galaxy S7 last Christmas. They are still in the box though and they will probably suffer the same fate as the 3D glasses that came with our DVD player did, used once for 5 minutes, said that’s cool, then put back away.

That reminds me, that DVD player is broken and is sitting in the garage awaiting the next time the city does a trash pick up for electronics. Maybe I should go get the glasses out of the draw in the TV stand and toss them on top of the player.

Twenty Seventeen

Didn’t do real good on that though of writing on Wednesday did I? Well, I have a good excuse. After I got finished polishing this turd, I thought maybe I could do the same for the MMC’s website.

WordPress usually adds a nice shiny new template as an option with each major release of the software. They typically name it after the year of release, so the latest is called, unsurprisingly, Twenty Seventeen, an man is it cool. The page opens to a large image (or video if you are so inclined) and then you scroll down to the next page and there is an image to transition across to each new page. Check the demo page, then come back.

I downloaded a a program called InstantWP which allows you to install a portable version of your site on a USB stick. Not as simple as it sounded, I had to tweak a couple of PHP files to even get the Club’s large database loaded. When I finally got that sorted I fired up the web site. The side bar is on the right and we have it on the left, that was a project in itself. Countless internet pages later I got that sort of working. Several widgets didn’t work as they did before, but I thought maybe I could work around them or find substitutes.

But one of the widgets killed the whole deal, the calendar plugin that we rely on for event planning would not work at all. Sigh. I knew this day was coming, the plugin was last updated in 2009, but at least it still works on the current site. It is the next one that is really worrying, there will probably come a day when an update to WordPress itself will cause it to stop working. Look like finding a replacement might need to get moved to the front burner.

Wheel Watcher

As usual when I run into one of these blogging avoidance streaks, I come back and make up for lack of content with a new design for the site. I’d like to blame the empty week of posts on how hard I’ve been working on the coding that creates the blog, but that would be a lie, it took about an hour. I downloaded a template I liked, added the header picture and tweaked a couple colors. Done.

And believe it or not, I have been blogging practically every night since my last post. We’ve gotten into a routine here at Casa de Bogardus that goes something like this: wake up, go to work, come home, have dinner while watching Mike & Molly reruns, cussing under our breath during the evening news, watching Wheel of Fortune, Jeopardy and then some inane network shows before retiring. Usually somewhere in there I’ll pull out the laptop and surf a few of my favorite haunts then open up the Life of Brian. I hit the New Post button and compose a little something about my day in my head. Then mentally edit a bit to polish it up and then close the window without ever typing anything.

Maybe tomorrow, I’ll actually write something.

Sniff, Sniff

Like a good boy I got a flu shot back in November, but for the last few days I have been under the weather with what is obviously the flu. I’d ask for my money back, but it wouldn’t do any good, not because of the usual “we thought we knew what strain would be prevalent this year” disclaimer, but because it didn’t cost me anything, my insurance company paid for it.