Rants

Curiosity (Nearly) Killed the Mini (Part II)

When we last left our intrepid hero, he had just nudged the plastic case of the socket set enough to knock it off it’s convenient resting place and spill the entire contents into the engine bay…

Go back and read Part I first, I’ll wait.

After putting everything back in the case, turns out most everything had tumbled right through to the driveway below, but I was still missing the the 3/8 to 1/4 adapter and the 5, 6, 7, 8 & 9mm sockets. I could see a glimmer of one socket underneath the padding of an A/C line at the bottom of the engine compartment, but of course I couldn’t reach to get to it from the top. I was going to have to jack up the car to get underneath to look around, but that was going to have to wait as it was past suppertime and would soon be getting dark.

The next day I dropped Donna off at the gym in the Miata so I could have a couple hours to try and retrieve the missing socket set pieces. Of course the Mini has a whole different jack point configuration to prop it up. Minis have a heavy plastic walled open square thing to place your jack onto, but it isn’t shaped to hold the top of a v-shaped jack stand, which I have two of, nor is it the right size to accept to flat pad jack stand which I also have two of.

To get the Mini up in the air, I used the same method I use jack up the Miata. By placing an 18″ length of 2 x 4 centered under the door mirror and placing the pad of the hydraulic jack in the middle of the wood piece you can the the whole side of the car up in the air enough to place the jack stands. To keep the Mini up I placed the flat topped jack stands under the 2 x 4 near the front. When I was finished doing this to both sides, the car was resting on the back wheels with the front end of the car some 10 inches off the ground.

This nose high attitude shook loose two of the missing sockets and a quick crawl underneath let me retrieve the one socket I could see along with another one that was right next it. I discovered a couple of small panels behind the bumper that were held in by threes screws, so I removed them to see if that would help locate the rest of my missing pieces. Nope, nothing from one and all I got from the other was several ounces of car wash water. I crawled back out from under the car and placed the found sockets in their respective holes in the socket set case. I was still missing the 5mm socket and the 3/8 to 1/4 adapter. As I looked at empty spots in the case I realized that the 5mm space has been empty like forever, so really all I was still missing was the adapter.

I removed the grill hoping that it might help, but that just let me see the A/C condenser and radiator better, no other obvious nooks or crannies that would hide a shiny chrome adapter. I dropped the car off the jack stands and started it up.When this did not result in any loud metallic clanking I put it in reverse, dumped the clutch, roared back 20 feet and slammed on the brakes. Then put it in first gear to repeat that process going forward. I had the windows down and didn’t hear metal hit the ground, but got out and looked the length of the driveway in case. No adapter. The next step was a quick jaunt around the neighborhood throwing the car into several 90 degree turns with abandon. The windows were still down and I never did hear any rattles or see anything fall off.

My guess is that the adapter is wedged somewhere really good and the next owners will discover it in a far future engine rebuild or the damn adapter was, like the 5mm socket, AWOL before this whole episode started.

Briefly A Citizen Again

In 2014 I renounced my citizenship in the Red Sox Nation. I was going to watch the games on MLBTV instead of listening to them on the radio (which was a perk of RSN membership.) The first year I watched the TV games in between innings they would have silence with a screensaver style image in the background. Coming from radio where you heard the actual WEEI commercials, the lack of that “entertainment” was jarring. It actually bothered me. The quiet made the three minute breaks seem like ten. By year two I was used to it.

During year three they started throwing up random MLBTV highlights in between innings. I now found the sound from these images jarring, especially since the volume level for them was 30% louder than the game audio. Compounding the misery was there were only 4 or 5 “highlights”, so over the course of a nine inning game you’d see them each about 25 times. Up until now I was just listening to the NESN TV broadcasters do the game and while Dave O’Brien was a decent voice, he didn’t have the chemistry with Jerry Remy that the newly departed Don Orsillo had, so I went back to listening to the radio announcer sound over the TV pictures.

Last year, the fourth, the MLBTV highlights were replaced by those annoying Chevrolet “Real People, Not Actors” commercials. They were made even more annoying by the fact that there was just one of them played like three times during each break so you got to see the same thing like 50 times a game. The radio sound with TV picture worked pretty well against it until somewhere in the second half of the season while watching the games on the Roku box they figured out how to override the radio commercials with the audio from the Chevy commercials (along with the typical volume increase.)

This year I decided to to drop MLBTV entirely and go back to the Gameday Audio. I just couldn’t abide by paying $120 and still having to listen commercials. Well why not join the Red Sox Nation again? For the same $20 it costs just for the radio broadcasts I can get that and a few other perks, so I signed up on March 20th. I didn’t get a chance to listen to a broadcast for several days and when I did I could hear it on the radio but, when I tried using the At Bat app on the phone I couldn’t get access. I could hear using the Roku box, but not on the Kindle.

I contacted MLB Customer Service via email to ask what the problem might be. The first email told me to go to settings and login with my credentials – well, no shit Sherlock, already tried that. Next email from them told me to uninstall the app, restart my phone, install the app and sign in. Even though I already done this once, I did it again. Emailed back to tell them that it didn’t help. MLB emailed back with, “We will contact you via phone.”

The actual customer service person I spoke to started to run me through some corrective attempts, but he must have been in training because at nearly every step of the way he would have to put me on hold for a minute to find out what was next. It was an excruciatingly slow process and when I realized we were doing the same two emailed scenarios again I hung up in frustration. While I was on hold with the CSR I went online to the Red Sox Nation web site and found a contact phone number there. It wasn’t an 800 number, the area code was 617 (Boston, MA), so I dialed it and got an answering machine.

I got a call from that same phone number a few minutes later and when I told the woman what my problem was, she explained that the Red Sox Nation Gameday Audio thing only applied to computers, not mobile devices. She could offer me my money back because I was unsatisfied with my membership, so I took it. Then waited a day and purchased the At Bat app on my phone and not only can I use it on the phone, but on both computers, the Roku box and the Kindle too.

Curiosity (Nearly) Killed the Mini (Part I)

Last week I mistakenly thought the falling pine pollen was through for the season, so I decided to wash the several levels of yellow that had accumulated on the Mini. When drying the car off afterwards I raised the hood to towel up any water that might have settled under there and might drip down the exterior when next driven. Because this is like only the third or fourth time I have had the hood up, the first couple were battery related, I looked around a bit.

The battery sits on the left side up against the firewall, under the windshield, and to see it you have to lift a plastic flap. Well, there is another little plastic flap on the driver’s side too. Hmmm, I wonder what’s under there. I unsnapped the top and there was a small reservoir. Looks like it could be for windshield washer fluid. I unscrewed the cap and as I was lifting it off it slipped out of my hand and dropped down. It wasn’t for washer fluid, it was for brake fluid. This became obvious to me when I looked down to find where the cap was, it was tucked neatly underneath the brake booster.

In every other car I have owned or worked on this would not be a problem as the master cylinder and booster have been there in the wide wide open space in front of the firewall. In the Mini there is an enclosed area that runs along the whole firewall that hides the battery on the left and the brake componentry on the right. There was no way to retrieve the cap through the small opening of the flap, there was barely enough room to unscrew the cap.

The plastic cowl cover is in two pieces. The passenger side piece where the battery sits is about 1/3 long while the driver’s side piece covers the remaining 2/3. It tucks under the windshield at the back and at the front it snaps into the plastic front wall of the enclosure and a rubber gasket is pressed onto that to seal the elements out. This picture is not of the Ladybug, but it close enough to show what I’m talking about:

To get in there I needed to pull off the rubber seal, undo the two nuts that hold down the cowl on the driver’s side, separate the top plastic piece from the front one by pulling up hard to unsnap them, then squeeze my arm down in between to blindly poke around hoping to find the errant cap. There was just enough room to get in there, but not enough to get to where I needed. To do that I was going to have to remove the driver’s windshield wiper.

Try as I might it wouldn’t come free. So instead I pulled the passenger side of the cowl off hoping to free the left end so I could get just a little more room. That is when I discovered that the front plastic piece could be lifted off enough from the left side that I could actually slip my arm in to grab the cap. At this point I was bleeding in a couple of places on each arm from scratches with only one requiring a band aid.1

With the cap back on I was no longer swearing under my breath, and occasionally out loud, about selling the %#$!@% car. Then, when I went to reach for the 13mm socket wrench to put everything back together, I nudged the plastic case of the socket set just enough to knock it off it’s convenient resting place on the exhaust manifold shield and spill the entire contents into the engine bay. Double %#@$!

To be continued… in Part II

Ailuropoda Velox

Because it was a little after 1:00 PM as we got back to Aiken, after Saturday’s Coffee and Cars we thought maybe we should get something to eat before going home. As we were verbally ticking off places that we might like to eat at, Donna suggested Panda Express as it was about 500 feet right in front of us. I said sure.

The Panda Express is our fair city’s newest dining experience. As with any new restaurant in town, the place is packed for the first two months because everyone in the entire city has to eat there as quickly as possible so they can brag to their friends that they have done so. And true to form, whenever we have been over that way, be it lunch or dinner time, the parking lot has been jammed and the drive-up line practically circled the building.

Neither of us had eaten at a Panda Express before, so we wanted to check out what was meant by Chinese Fast Food. The Aiken store had been open since around the first of the year, so it had been awhile, but we were still surprised to find that there was nearly no one in the drive-up line nor in the dining area.

As it turned out, fast Chinese food is another way to say “controlled portion” buffet style. All the dishes are pre-cooked and sit in warming trays behind a display case and an employee dishes out a measured spoonful of the meal of your choosing. Donna selected chicken and green beans, I picked the Peking beef, we got fried rice as our side and we added one egg roll to split.

Let’s just say, this is the first and last time we will eat at a Panda Express. Our food was dished up by a less than enthusiastic employee and the food matched. Everything tasted like 3 day old leftover take-out where all the flavor had been absorbed by the baking soda at the back of the fridge. It was luke-warm in temperature and the rice was so dry you were lucky to keep more than a dozen grains of it on the fork at a time. The egg roll was hot enough, probably by random chance, but there was no hot mustard or orange sauce packets anywhere to be found.

This probably explains the uncrowdedness of the place on a Saturday at lunchtime. Everyone else in town had already eaten there, had a similar experience as us and discovered that eating here once was more than enough?

VRBO

A niece is getting married in Lake Tahoe in May and instead of flying out, attending the thing and then flying back we are going to make a long vacation of it. We are going to drive out, spend a week at Lake Tahoe and then drive back. Instead of staying at the Holiday Inn Express for $200 a night or $125 for the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino we thought we’d rent a house or a condo for something in between to have the ability to cook our own meals, etc.

When we found out Donna’s youngest brother was coming down with his wife and kids we thought maybe we’d get a big house that we can all share. They were agreeable to this idea so we went looking for places that had at least 3 bedrooms and two bathrooms. We started with VRBO because that had worked out so well when we rented a cabin on a lake near them in 2015.

We found a nice place in a condo development less than 2 miles away from the wedding venues and requested a booking. We had to give VRBO our charge card number to get the process going and they got their $130 fee right then (refunded if the owner doesn’t confirm the reservation within 24 hours) while the rest of the total would be going to the owner once confirmed. Not long after that the owner wrote back and asked a couple questions, we swapped a few emails and then waited for the next step. And waited. We started to worry.

At about hour 28 the owner emailed us and said although she felt she responded to VRBO within the proper time frame, they did not and we would have to cancel and rebook. The VRBO’s $130 was already listed as pending on the charge card, so I called the VRBO customer support line to make sure that that charge wouldn’t go through because I had cancelled the reservations. I was assured it would not. So, we started the booking process all over again. This time when filling out the request, VRBO’s cut was listed as $129. Why the dollar difference?

This time we didn’t get anything right back from the owner. After 12 hours we emailed the owner. She apologized for the delay saying she is under the weather with the flu, we were all set. Donna and I were under the impression that when we agreed to payment terms and gave VRBO our charge card information that was all we needed to do. But according to her (and the rental’s VRBO page, which we didn’t notice) we pay everything except the $130 booking fee to her. We needed to sign some documents and she would send us an invoice over the weekend. It was now Friday afternoon, so we waited.

And waited. By Sunday approaching bedtime we had still not heard anything. After eighteen total emails between us, VRBO & the owner and 2 separate $130 charges pending we were not feeling comfortable about the process anymore, so we decided to cancel the reservation and start over with a different rental place. I went online to the VRBO site to fill out the form. Using up all but 18 of the allowed 1,000 characters I wrote this, and retired for the night:

We have been trying to book this property since January 9th. The first attempt (Reservation #HA-VZ80Y8) fell through because the owner told us she must have missed the payment deadline and we would have to cancel the reservation and try again, which we did on the 11th. I tried to re-book on the night of the 11th, but my credit card wouldn’t work online. I then spent 15 minutes with one of your Customer Service Reps on the phone trying to use it through her and it wouldn’t work then either. The CSR said you were having problems with a software update. The following day, the 12th, I successfully booked online with a charge card. The owner informed us that she would be send us payment information via email and documents. We have yet to receive anything else from the owner. We are now quite skeptical of this process and would like to cancel our reservation. Please refund the both the $130 for the 1st & the $129 for the 2nd reservations. Thank you, Donna and Brian Bogardus

VRBO had asked for a reason for the cancellation, not finding anything right on point, I picked something that was as close to how we were feeling about the process – Traveler’s reason: I ran into suspicious activity. So, when we got up on Monday morning, there was our cancellation confirmation email from VRBO timed about a minute after I entered it. And 5 minutes later than that an email from the owner who took umbrage at the suspicious activity reason. “She had been in business or 9 years and never had any problems…yadda, yadda, yadda.” Didn’t take her over 48 hours to respond to that though, did it?

Monday night we found a 3 bedroom, 2-1/2 bath place about $50 a night cheaper on Airbnb. Booked it and within an hour we heard back from both Airbnb and the owner confirming our reservation. Done.

P0455

Yesterday about half way home from work, the check engine light come on. Not on the Mini this time, but the Miata. Just like in the Mini though, there was no discernible reason for it and the car showed no drivability symptoms at all. When I got home I hooked up the bluetooth OBD2 scanner and read the code – P0455 – which translates to ” EVAP Emission System Leak Detected Large Leak.”

The most common cause is your gas cap is too loose. I opened the filler door and twisted the gas cap and when I did it may have moved just a tiny amount. I reset the CEL and we’ll see if it comes back.

On the forum, they say if you just tighten the gas cap and keep driving the light will reset after about 30 miles of driving, so I wonder if it takes 30 miles to show up. We filled up the CTBNL last Tuesday night, so it made 3-1/2 round trips to work and one quick run to the bike store on Saturday, which is roughly 30 miles, before lighting.

After The Beep

I had just really settled into my desk at work, it was couple minutes after 7:00 AM, and the desk phone rang. I glanced at the display and saw an 803 (SC) area code, followed by an entirely unfamiliar 7 digits, so I ignored it. I figured, wrong number, or if it was for me, they’d leave a message. No message.

Just after I had finished my sandwich at lunchtime, my cell phone started vibrating. I picked it up, flipped it over and saw a 706 (GA) area code, followed by an entirely unfamiliar 7 digits, so I ignored it. I figured, wrong number, or if it was for me, they’d leave a message. A couple seconds later the phone buzzed once, ah, a message. The Cricket visual voice mail app said, “Cannot display message.” I looked at the time the message used up, 1 second, so, no, no message.

I was just putting the cell phone back down when the desk phone rang. I glanced at the display and saw the same 706 number that had just called the cell phone. One ring and it stopped. No message again.

Spam? Scam? or just Shy?