For now though, these old rims have been boxed up and stored in the barn…
Old Wheels — See You in Winter!
Image
Reply
Daily Archives: June 16, 2004
Old Wheels 1
Image
So here is the type of rim that Vanessa used to wear. Come winter these rims will be put back on with new winter tires, so as to preserve the health of the chrome rims.
New Wheels 5 — Close Up
Image
That mishappen creature reflected on Vanessa's fender is yours truly.
New Wheels 4
Image
Love the gloss on that paint job, like a mirror.
New Wheels 3
Image
Next major mod to Vanessa will be chrome bumpers and a chrome billet grille. Won't she look smart!
New Wheels 2
Image
These pix taken at a scenic location in Mount Elam Cemetery in Fitchburg, MA.
New Wheels 1
Image
Here's Vanessa sporting her new Kazera KZ-S rims… very dressy! Nice shine on her finish too!
Busy Weekend
This past weekend was very full but very satisfying as we got a lot accomplished. It was clean-out-the-garage weekend. An all-weather car cover for a PT Cruiser is like $200, so a cheaper alternative would simply be to clean the garage and keep the car in there. We opted for the cheaper route…
I went out at about 10 AM Saturday morning and mowed the lawn. I hate mowing the lawn, and it shows… the grass tends to get a bit tall before I cut it. (Note: this special definition of “a bit” means “about a foot”.)
By noon the lawn was done and I was ready to call it quits for the day, but there was much left to do. Patty got a tarp laid out for Neya's new pool, inflated the top ring, and started filling it.
Then began the long process of cleaning out our garage… here's what it looked like before we started:
 |
 |
As you can see… fulla junk. Our garage is actually a barn with a loft, and much of the junk-we-might-want-to-save ended up going into the loft which was otherwise empty. In the picture on the left you can also see the hanging platform which dangles from the ceiling on the ground floor. It's kind of an elevated shelf in the middle of the room… added storage space. Some stuff ended up going there.
The theme song from Clean Sweep played in my head throughout the day as we removed stuff from the barn and separated it into a keep pile and a toss pile. We startled a few mice here and there lugging stuff around, but after a long day's worth of effort, the stuff we were keeping was in the garage, and the stuff we were tossing was covered by a tarp in the corner of the yard to be delivered to the curb over the next few trashdays. (Too much at once and the trash guys may refuse to take it all.)
My house was built right around 1900 so it is at or over 100 years old now. It was originally the farmhouse of a large farm from which surrounding land was sold off in lots for development. Because it is so old, Pat and I often find interesting old things hidden away in the house. Several years ago we found some yellowed newspaper headlines in the barn's loft. Headlines from the bombing of Pearl Harbor and so forth. Pretty neat.
I figured when cleaning the garage I was sure to find something interesting, and I was not disappointed when I found what appeared to be an antique mercury tilt switch in an unmarked box under the stairs to the loft. The switch consists of a glass tube containing a blob of mercury, and two wires which connect to a pair of electrodes in the tube. When the tube is tilted, the mercuy rolls down and closes the circuit between the two electrodes. Such switches were once used in all sorts of devices, thermostats, irons with automatic shutoffs, and so forth. Anything that needed to function differently when tipped. Mercury is poisonous of course, and you can't just toss it out, so after marveling at the silvery blob of metal, I put the switch back in the box.
 |
 |
Once the garage was cleared Lynnea chipped in by sweeping up the place, earning some allowance money for her next trip to the toystore. Then, the moment of truth, I drove Vanessa into the barn. She fit great and now I can finally stop worrying over what all the rain, pollen, and so forth has been doing to her finish.
 |
 |
 |
All in all a very productive weekend. By Sunday, I was wasted, so not much got done that day. I felt little guilt however, I was feeling far too sore from the prior day's backbreaking labor!
Other sites consulted for this article:
Goody Week!
Yippee! It's goody week! First of all, Vanessa's new Kazera KZ-S 17×7 chrome tuning rims arrived today! Secondly, yesterday, Comcast dropped by my house and installed new cable boxes for digital cable, and high speed internet! Wahoo!
Nessa's Racy Wheels…
The rims arrived at my office about an hour ago, and Vanessa is at the garage two doors up the street from where I work, Banks Automotive (245 Great Road) having her new rims put on. I hope everything goes smoothly. ::crossing fingers::
When I cracked open the boxes and took out the first rim, I was surprised by how lightweight it was. I wasted no time running around the office showing my new wheels to anyone who would look at them. 
They look awesome!
Shortly after dropping the car off, Banks called, and I nervously answered figuring they were going to tell me something was wrong, but they just wanted to know where the lugnuts were. No problem! All the lugnuts where in one of the boxes in a taped-up envelope… they had been expecting each boxed rim to include the necessary lugs, so they were surprised when they cracked the first box and found no lugnuts.
So anyway, wish me luck please! I am really anxious after having spent $950 on these rims to see them get on the car without incident. I'll post some pictures later if everything goes smoothly.
EDIT: Everything went smoothly. 
Click the image below to see more pictures…
High-Speed Internet / Digital Cable…
The technician was great. He got my machine hooked up to the cable modem pronto, and then helped me get my wireless router up and running so my wife's laptop would also see the internet.
A new cablebox went into our living room, and a second one upstairs into our bedroom for our other TV. That was pretty cool, we've never had cable up there. On Demand looks pretty awesome.
After the cable technician left, I went onto RegisterSite.com and modified all of my e-mails to forward to my new Comcast account. The transition was seamless, which is one of the major reasons why I use RegisterSite. If I don't tell my friends I switched to Comcast, they likely wouldn't notice.
The speed is –stunning–… very very cool! Goody week rules!
Oh, as a total aside, Robert's Chrysler called the other day to tell me Vanessa's replacement window pillars are in, so I can go in and have the streaky ones replaced with new ones. Yay!
Doin' Science…
This past weekend, my wife and I set up a new pool in our backyard (mostly for our daughter, but I'm sure we'll use it too.) It's an Intex Easy Set circular pool, 12 feet wide by 36 inches high and it holds 1700 gallons of water…
The liner is essentially a large bag with an inflated plastic ring on top. As you fill the pool, the rising water lifts the inflated ring.
We started filling the pool from a garden hose at about 2 PM on Saturday. After 45 minutes, there was a couple of inches of water in the bottom which Neya had cajoled us into letting her splash around in.
“Daddy?” she said, “How long will it take to fill the pool?”
“That all depends on how fast the water comes out of the hose.” I explained.
Hearing this, my kid picked up the hose and placed her thumb over the opening to make the water squirt out faster. I smiled.
“No honey, that makes the water come out faster, but at the same time it lets less water out of the hose, so it will take longer.”
“Well when will it be finished?” she demanded to know while dropping the hose.
I honestly had no idea, we had never filled a pool this size before, but there had to be a way to figure it out. I cast about for a moment and then spied the 1-gallon jug sitting by the pool.
“I think we can figure it out.”, I said taking off my watch.
“How?”
“Let's do an experiment. We can time how long it takes our hose to fill this one gallon jug, and since we know how many gallons it takes to fill the pool, we should be able to calculate the amount of time needed to do it with this hose.”
Neya's only in first grade, so I'm not sure she got it, but she was willing to give it a try.
“Here,” I said, “put the jug down here, and when I say go, put the hose in. GO!”
Neya put the hose into the jug and we watched it fill… pretty quickly as it turned out. Once the jug reached the fill line I stopped my stopwatch and checked the time.
“Okay, it took 14 seconds to fill this jug. That means our hose sprays one gallon of water every 14 seconds. Times 2 is 2 gallons every 28 seconds, times 2 again is 4 gallons every 56 seconds. 56 seconds is almost a minute, so our hose delivers about 4 gallons a minute.”
I'm sure Neya didn't follow the computations, but she seemed to understand the idea that every minute, 4 more gallons was being added to the pool.
“Now, ” I said, holding up the jug, “this is one gallon. Our pool holds seventeen hundred gallons… so it would take seventeen hundred of these jugs to fill this pool.”
That got a bug-eyed but silent response as Neya tried to imagine seventeen hundred gallon jugs, all full of water. I'm sure it was a boundless image, since beyond 100 or so, numbers get sketchy for her.
“Since we know the hose delivers 4 gallons (enough for 4 of these jugs) in a minute, then if I divide seventeen hundred by 4, that should tell me how many minutes to fill your pool.”
As always, when no calculator is handy, I did the math in parts.
“Well, a thousand divded by 4 is 250, and 400 divided by 4 is 100, 250 + 100 = 350. So a quarter of 1400 would be 350. 300 divided by 2 is 150, divided by 2 again is 75, and 350 plus 75 is 425. So according to our little experiment, your pool will be filled in 425 minutes.”
“Is that a long time?”
“Well, there are 60 minutes in an hour, so 425 minutes would be, about 7 hours.”
“Is *that* a long time?”
“It's a pretty long time.”
“Long long or short long?” 
“Jeepers Neya… ummm we started filling the pool at about 2 PM so it should be filled at about 9 PM.”
“9 PM?”
“Bedtime, kiddo.”
“The pool won't be filled until bedtime? Awww! When am I supposed to play in it?”
“You're playing in it right now honey! Don't worry, you'll get to play in the pool tomorrow. Tonight your mom and I will add the chemicals to keep the water clean, and by tomorrow your pool should be ready. But it won't be full until 9 tonight.”
“Well, it will take longer than that.” she said, knowingly.
“Why?” I asked.
She pointed to the jug, “That water didn't go into the pool, it went into the jug.”
I surpressed a chuckle and tousled her hair. “My bad.” *sploosh* I dumped the jug's contents into the pool. “There you go Neya, you got your 14 seconds back.”
“Thanks Dad!”
The pool was almost full by around 8:40 PM when Pat decided to stop filling it. It was on slightly unlevel ground, and therefore she was concerned that if it was filled to capacity its shape might deform. But our little experiment was pretty much on the money. Go us!
After Neya went to bed we hooked up the filter and added the various chemicals to the pool. Ever read the directions on those chemicals? Scary stuff!
Wash hands immediately after use. Do not eat, wipe eyes, touch food, or go to the toilet without first washing hands. Remove clothing and wash after handling these chemicals.
And I'm supposed to let my kid SWIM IN THIS? 
After predissolving and then adding the chemicals to the pool, we put the cover on, and started the filter. On Sunday morning I went out and tested the pool for chlorine, bromine, alkaline, and pH, and everything checked out.
Thus far the pool has been a big hit with Neya. Maybe I'll even get to try it out myself at some point! I have no idea how much of the math Lynnea got, but I hope she at least got the idea that you can figure things out if you really want to know.