Once upon a time I worked on my own cars because I enjoyed it, and it saved me money.
Nowadays I'm OK with paying someone else to do it.
This post brought to you by brake work. Front on the Jeep and rear on the Mustang.
Several years ago, mostly to spite a doctor, I got myself on a low carb diet and ended up losing about 50 pounds in total. Unfortunately since then, altogether due to my own actions, about 40 of them have managed to find me again.
Since Mrs Hades stopped teaching, she's gotten into gardening and now she has an app on her phone to track calories. She is now participating in a diet plan based on that app, and she is seeing positive results even though her new job is less physical (chair work instead of standing all day and chasing kids at recess).
Even though I am not actively participating in her dietary changes, I am nonetheless benefiting from them as well. I got on the scales today, and I have managed to lose eight of those 40 pounds, and that's measuring in the middle of the day. I have not significantly changed my lifestyle at all to see that loss.
I'm not saying I'll go all in on Mrs Hades diet plan, but if I continue to benefit from it, perhaps I'll start paying a little closer attention to myself as well.
I am no longer a Subaru owner.
Way back in 2019 the motor spun the rod bearings (totally my fault), so I bought the Jeep. In 2020 I found a motor for the Subaru, so I put it back on the road. About that time Eldest Son needed a car due to deer, so he took it for a while. Of course, he hit another deer with it, but fortunately it wasn't horribly difficult to fix. A little over a year later he gave it back, and it needed transmission work.
I haven't really been driving it much, so the neighbor has had it on long-term loan for a couple of years (yes, I said years, as in about two of them). He brought it back a couple of months ago because it needed a clutch, and since it was my car, of course he expected me to pay for it.
I told him then that either he was going to buy the car or I was going to take it back, because between the clutch, a set of tires, and the AC work that I had done to it in the past two years, along with the license and insurance, I was spending about a grand a year on a car that I wasn't driving. He thought about it for a while, and when I offered a really good deal on it he decided to take it. We finalized the deal on the 7th, fifteen years to the day since I bought it in 2010.
Last week I took the Jeep in for some AC work. I don't really use the AC, but when it's hot and raining I have to have the top on it and the windows fog up, so it would be nice to have it. It worked fine when charged, but it wouldn't even hold the charge for 12 hours. I spent more on the Jeep than I collected for the Subaru, but Friday they said it was done and I took it to work.
They replaced the compressor since it was leaking very badly from the front seal, it was making a lot of noise and wouldn't build pressure very well. I checked it as I drove away and it seemed to be fine, but I drove it to work with the top off since it was a nice day. It looked like rain overnight so I put the top back up while I was at work.
Saturday morning I started it up and turned the defrost on to clear the windshield, and the AC didn't work.
Yesterday evening I dropped it of at the shop again, and they found a leaking condenser (the part in front of the radiator, not the hard-to-get-to part in the dash) that had not been leaking with the old compressor since it couldn't build the pressure. They agreed to replace the part and recharge the system for the cost of the condenser only, no labor or shop costs (mostly R134 freon). Hopefully that will cure what ails it, I guess I'll find out this week.
Last but not least, the poor Mustang has been sitting outside (as have all the rest of the cars) and the clear coat has bubbled and peeled on the passenger door and rear fender. I'm going to try to get it in the paint shop over Beach Week (another week and a half from now) and get that taken care of. I haven't driven it much since Mrs Hades and the pups have come into my life, we usually take her Explorer whenever we go places because it has more room.
That should take care of my vehicular issues for a while. It had better, because now I need to rebuild my auto expense account back up. Between the Jeep AC work and the Explorer needing brakes (not to mention it's registration season for the Mustang so it needed an inspection and tags), it has drawn down to nothing, and I had to put some on the credit card.
And to think, I just got that credit card all paid off. (I rewarded myself by buying fun stuff.)
NOTE: The appointment with the paint shop has been made and the applicable decals have been purchased. What the hell, I didn't need a zero balance on that card anyway (besides, it gives me another chance to pay it off again and reap another reward).
Following up from my last post, today I took a couple of pounds of tomatoes, an onion, and some garlic from the garden and made tomato sauce. I then sliced a zucchini lengthwise into thin slices and made a zucchini lasagna.
I didn't raise cows for the cheese and meat, and I used store-bought spices because we don't grow basil (something Mrs Hades has resolved to change), but the rest came from our garden. I think it turned out pretty well all things considered.
We're going to experiment with the sauce to perfect the recipe, but then I anticipate not having to buy tomato sauce or tomato sauce based things (like spaghetti sauce). It's kind of fun seeing what we can get from the garden, and Mrs Hades is having a good time with it now that she has time to spend on such things.
I have said before that most of my cooking is done with pre-made ingredients, and that eating healthy means having to cook. It's even better when you do your cooking with things you grow yourself.
Mrs Hades has green things growing.
Today we chopped up a zucchini and cooked it with chicken. Then we went out and harvested onions and scallions. I have several large red tomatoes on my window sill getting redder.
Part of our gardening experience has just been seeing what we can make grow. There is a surprisingly large amount of things you buy at the grocery store that you can harvest seeds from and grow on your own. Among the other things we are now growing are cantaloupes, spaghetti squash, spinach, and garlic.
We also have blueberry bushes and grape vines. We had Muscadine grapes growing wild and there is a persimmon tree in the front yard, but we planted Concord grape vines and we have a couple of bunches of those growing nice and big. There is also a blackberry bush in the back yard that has grown up by itself. We also have various spices such as rosemary, sage and peppermint.
There is something pretty satisfying about eating produce you have grown yourself.
In my last post I was complaining about FedEx. They did finally deliver, and so did UPS. I spent that next weekend happily assembling my first upper.
I should stop here to mention that since the last range day I paid the local gun shop to rebuild the troublesome 6.8SPC with an AR upper to go with the AR barrel, leaving the M4 upper surplus. The packages I was talking about in my last post were the parts to go along with that surplus M4 upper to build another complete upper in 5.56. I went with 5.56 because I really didn't want another caliber to have to buy reloading equipment and supplies for, otherwise .300 Blackout would have been on the table. But I digress.
Anyway, all went well until I discovered that putting the hand guards on is nigh unto impossible by yourself. I finally had to have Mrs Hades put the hand guards on while I held the delta ring down. There has to be an easier way, I thought... and indeed there is. It is humorously listed on Amazon as a "Steel Wrench Removal Tool with Vinyl Coating for bike repair (1 Pcs)." Just as well, I needed sights, too. So an order was placed, then received. The sights were installed and then range time was scheduled.
(No I had not been to the range since I last posted about the 6.8. Yes, that really was February 2023. Yes, I know that's way too long. No I have no excuse. But at least I have been dry-firing. In fact, for Christmas, Mrs Hades and I bought ourselves a Strikeman dry fire system with both 9mm and .45 ACP cartridges. We have yet to take it out of the box, but we have it.)
But first... when I had the 6.8SPC upper built the shop put both front and rear sights on the picatinny rail atop the upper, and I was given the reason that vibration may throw them out of alignment if the front sight was on the gas block. I thought that was a BS reason, so I relocated that front sight back to the gas block again.
My thought is the farther away the sights are from each other, the better the aim will be. Perhaps I am wrong, but it makes sense to me, and I need all the help I can get. So, when the sights arrived for the 5.56 upper, I put that front sight on the gas block, too, for the same reason.
Did you know that the gas block picatinny rail isn't always the same height as the upper picatinny rail? I didn't. I do now.
The 6.8SPC upper has the Adams Arms piston system installed, and the rail on the gas block with that system is the same height as the upper. Not so on the standard gas system that I had on-hand (it was taken off of the 6.8 upper when the Adams system went on it). As a result, the 6.8 upper sighted in with nary an issue, but the 5.56 upper shot way high. Like, off the paper and onto the cardboard way high.
I figured it out by shooting at the bottom of the target, and finally hit near the center of the paper. I then took a close look and saw the problem, the gas block rail is about a quarter inch lower than the upper rail. I moved the 5.56 front sight back to the upper rail and then was able to sight it in.
The verdict... both guns now shoot flawlessly. The AR 6.8 barrel feeds perfectly from the AR upper, as it should, and of course the M4 5.56 components work perfectly together, too. I can't really say which one I like the best. I like the 6.8 for the bigger caliber which will allow me to use it for hunting if I so desire, but the 5.56 is the first one that I have built both upper and lower from individual parts (I did build the 6.8 lower), so I have a sentimental attachment to it.
I found a gas block height flip up front sight for the 5.56 and ordered it, so sometime in the future I will install that sight on the gas block and re-zero the rifle, but it's just fine for now. Mrs Hades insists that the next time I take her with me to the range, she was quite annoyed that I went on her work day.
I also acquired that .357, a Smith and Wesson 340 PD. That's the scandium framed 5 shot snubbie, and it is every bit as painful to shoot with full power .357 loads as I remember it being. I put a full box of .38 through it and found that it shoots about 3 inches low at 15 yards, which is still within an acceptable strike zone. Aiming high center mass will still get you a hole somewhere in the torso, and with full power .357 loads that should be plenty close enough to carry the message.
What's really nice about it, in its pocket holster it slips unobtrusively into a front pocket and is so light as to be un-noticeable... until you try to put something else in that pocket, that is. I tried the round type speed reloaders, but I was actually faster with the strip type, and the strips fit inside the cargo pocket on my right side (yes, I wear cargo pants. Deal with it).
I carry two reloads in strip clips, which gets me as many rounds as one magazine in the Glock 19. I hope to never have to find out if that is sufficient. It has become my EDC carry, but much like the friend from whom it was obtained told me, if I ever need to use it I will try really hard not to shoot them to death, because I would rather beat them to death for making me shoot it with full power loads.
And that's it for this range report. I promise it won't be two years until my next one.
Three packages from Palmetto State Armory were supposed to be delivered to me today via FedEx.
I saw the FedEx truck a few doors down from me when I was driving home.
Three packages from WalMart were on my porch when I got home.
Needless to say, they weren't mine. But I'll say it anyway.
I loaded the packages up and took them the aforementioned few doors down to the correct address, where the FedEx driver was just leaving after telling the proper recipient of said packages that they must not have gotten loaded onto the truck.
He sat there in the driveway as I went to the front door, knocked, asked if the occupant was in fact the proper recipient, and went back out to the car to unload the packages. Then he drove away... in the opposite direction of my house.
My packages are now scheduled for tomorrow.
I wonder if the driver is smart enough to realize that the three packages I took out of my car as he sat in the driveway were the same ones that he left on my porch.
Part of me hopes that he's not, and that FedEx has to pony up for the cost of the contents of the three packages that they miserably failed to correctly deliver.
Anyway, my packages will get delivered too late for me to play with before I have to go to work this weekend.
They damn well better show.
I have two packages (one from PSA and one not) that are due to arrive tomorrow via UPS. Let's see if they do any better.
(The status for the PSA package says that UPS is not yet in possession of it as of this posting, so I will be very pleasantly surprised if it shows tomorrow. I'm guessing Monday at the earliest on that one.)
UPDATE: On Friday, UPS delivered and FedEx did not. Once more, on the truck out for delivery, delivery not attempted, try again tomorrow. On Saturday they finally delivered. Two days late, but I guess better late than not at all.
Now I have the barrel, the delta ring assembly, the gas block and tube, and the forward grips. I also have the armorer's tool. I can assemble what I have, and then I'm only waiting on PSA to give my bolt carrier group, charging handle and flash suppressor to UPS so the final parts can be delivered. Then, I'll have another toy to play with.
UPDATE II: UPS has my package, the final pieces should be here Wednesday. I'm going to have a busy weekend...
Cooking is messy, and if done right it takes a long time. Most of the time taken in cooking is in the preparation. It takes a while to do things like chopping vegetables and preparing base ingredients.
Case in point, I just spent the entire day boiling a cut up whole chicken to make chicken stock, which is used as a base ingredient in many recipes. For a good hearty chicken stock, the whole chicken is cut up, left on the bone, and cooked for several hours in a simmering pot with various spices, celery, carrots and onions. Most of the ingredients in that stock are prepared, cooked, and then thrown out. They are never used in the final product at all, but are essential for the proper taste of the stock.
Of the chicken itself, about half of it is discarded and the rest of it is shredded off the bones to be used later, often in the same recipes that call for the chicken stock it was used to make. The bones are essential for the flavor of the stock, but they are also discarded after cooking.
At the end of today, after six hours of preparation, I have about 2 1/2 pounds of shredded chicken and a couple of gallons of stock. I will use about half of the chicken and a couple of quarts of the stock to make a chicken vegetable soup that will last us for several days (and will probably have to be frozen because there is only the two of us). The rest of the stock will probably also be frozen and the remainder of the chicken will be used in another recipe. The fruits of my labor today will result in several days of healthy food for me and Mrs Hades.
Cooking is a chore if you don't like doing it. That is why we have canned ingredients and instant meals, loaded with things that JFK Jr heartily disapproves of, like HFCS and preservatives and carbohydrates. These prepared foods makes cooking a lot easier and quicker, and leads to the conundrum that one of the biggest health problem among the nation's poorest people is not malnutrition, but obesity.
I like to cook (mostly because I like to eat, which is a whole 'nother problem), but I don't usually put this much time into it. I would usually use chicken stock off the shelf and maybe a rotisserie chicken from the deli counter at the local grocery store, but I took the week off this week for a factory shut-down so I had the time. Just for fun I looked at the ingredients for a store-bought chicken stock... and then I bought a whole chicken, celery, carrots and onions and made my own.
If you want to eat healthy, you have to cook. But this is not about that. This is about life.
Life, also, takes a lot of time and preparation to do right, and it is
often messy, with ingredients that are discarded when their usefulness
is at an end. Things like hate and regret, for instance, that serve no purpose but to sour the rest of the ingredients and so ruin the entire dish.
I got my love of cooking from my mother, who has been gone for a whole year as of last Monday. I've thought of her a lot as I prepared my chicken stock, reflecting on the time and effort it takes to prepare hearty meals like she did for the six of us while we were growing up. When we went through her recipe books we found recipes from her mother (my aunt has that book now, as is proper), so it is a family tradition.
In many ways my mother was still the simple Nebraska farm girl at the end of her life as she was at the beginning of it. She didn't concern herself much with the things she couldn't change, but the things she could change she went after with the unwavering determination that was her birthright. She tended her garden (with us as her plants) and prepared her ingredients with all the skill and determination that eighty years of existence affords, and at the end of that existence the presence of so many lives that she touched in positive ways came to bid her farewell.
I am an amalgamation of my parents. I will never be as good a man as my father is, and I share a lot of characteristics (both good and maybe not so good) from my mother. In the end, I can only hope that I have had as much of a positive influence on those around me as my parents had on those around them.
I miss my mother every day, but even though she is no longer here her presence is everywhere.
In Memoriam
Elizabeth Ann (Roberts) Card
August 11, 1943 - December 2, 2023
Here in NC the State Health Plan board of trustees has voted to raise insurance premiums on some state retirees.
Retirees. Those who served the State under the promise of future benefits.
Yet another example of how much value government promises have.
(Note that the premium increases were brought about by changes in Federal regulations.)
A friend of mine just buried his mother the Monday following Easter Sunday.
It makes me miss my mother more than ever.
The trip to Iowa was uneventful. The funeral was Monday, December 11th. There were a good number of people and Mom was remembered fondly. The trip back was likewise uneventful.
And now we resume our regular routine, with a Mom shaped hole in it.
This time no one is liking what the docs are saying.
UPDATE: I just talked to Brother, who is NOT an hysterical basket case like Elder Sister, and got the full story.
Overnight, Mom's blood pressure dropped, and the medicine they gave her pulled the blood from her extremities.
Unfortunately, the stoma (which is medspeak for the hole they just made to attach the colostomy bag) is an extremity, and being newly formed, it died due to the lack of blood flow.
So, Mom is going back into surgery to fix that, and anything else they find, and then hopefully we will be back on the road to recovery.
Everything seems to happen when I leave to go back home. I guess I will just have to stay this time until she is on her way back to Iowa.
My father has it.
I have been constantly amazed at my Dad, sitting at the bedside while the other half of his soul lies there. When it was me, I wasn't nearly as tranquil.
He sits in the seat of his walker, holding her hand, and prays. Even when she was at the worst point in her stay, he was calm. Now that she is obviously better his faith is sustained.
I have said it before but it's worth repeating; my father is a much better man than I am.
And I want to be just like him when I grow up.
I would like to say, for the record, that most medical professionals are indeed professional. During my mother's previous stay in the hospital for her hernia surgery on Thanksgiving Day the staff was excellent and they took very good care of her.
This was not the previous stay.
First, they had to put her in an overflow room. Then the attending physician seemed to be undecided and uncertain as to what needed to be done. The nursing staff paid scant attention to her, treating her as if she were just an old lady that was constipated, and when they moved her from the overflow room to a regular room they went from scant attention to downright neglectful.
To the point where they removed the oxygen monitors on a patient who was receiving oxygen and having problems breathing. Or more to the point, they took them off to move her and then never put them back on.
When we left the hospital that evening there was some concern. There had been a lot of talk and conjecture, but no action. The core problem was she was constipated, which was causing everything to back up to her stomach, which was slowly filling with fecal matter.
They were feeding her laxatives and performing enemas (or attempting to anyway) and getting next to no results. There was talk of inserting tubes to pump her stomach out, but that was never done. We told them to call us if anything changed and then we went to Favorite Niece's house for the evening.
The next morning my brother (who is also a nurse) called from Iowa raising hell because Mom was in the Critical Care unit and why hadn't anyone told him??? He had called her room to see how she was doing only to find out she had been moved.
We went to the hospital to find out that the night nurse had noticed Mom's O2 levels dropping to the point her hands and feet were blue. She had been agitating to get her to the CC unit all night, but no one listened to her until 7:30 that morning.
They moved her, set her up with monitoring and inserted the tube that had been discussed but never implemented the day before. Then they drew 1300 CC's of fecal matter out of her stomach, on top of the 600 CCs or so that she had already vomited up. Her breathing issues were due to the fact that her backed up bowels and distended stomach were pressing against her diaphragm.
At no time were we contacted.
My sisters (both nurses) immediately leapt into action. One went for the Patient's Advocate office while the other went to the Director of Nurses office. Within the hour exploratory surgery was planned to see if they could figure out what was going on.
What they found was a tumor causing a blockage to the lower colon, and a tear in the colon which had caused massive infection in the abdomen, neither of which would have been caught during the previous surgery for the hernia, nor were they new conditions.
The happy news is the tumor was completely removed, the infection was cleared up, and the colon was cleared. She had a colonoscopy that can be reversed in 6 months, meaning she will have to deal with a bag for a while till everything heals up but then she will be back to whatever passes for normal for her.
As to the tumor, it is at the pathologists to determine if it deserves further attention, but either way it has been completely removed so it shouldn't be an issue in and of itself, so that's good. We will know something within the week.
I must also say that seeing my sisters systematically dismantle the patient's advocates attempts at explaining away the medical malfeasance (there were two of them, and I got the impression they were used to dealing with non-medical people that they could baffle with bullshit) was truly a thing of beauty.
There was no yelling or screaming, just a calm rational discussion of protocols and standard medical practices for patients presenting certain symptoms. One of the advocates, herself a nurse as I understand it, tried to say that the standard practices depended on the symptoms, at which point my younger sister (who is the Director of Nurses at her job) went over the symptoms that Mom had been admitted for and then cited chapter and verse what the standard medical practice was for those symptoms.
I don't know if anything will be done, but I do know that they know that we know...things that we know. Or something.
At any rate, Mom will be in the hospital for a while as they administer doses of antibiotics for the infection and to head off any other issues. Five to seven days, said the surgeon, and then they can go home back to Iowa.
This will surely be a Thanksgiving vacation that the folks won't ever forget.
Thanksgiving day found my parents in Northern Virginia at my favorite niece's house (how do I know she's my favorite? Because she tells me she is). Mom had been suffering from a hernia for a few days, but she hadn't told anyone because she didn't want to interrupt her travel plans.
It got to bothering her, so she asked my sister (who is a nurse; all my siblings are nurses) to take a look at it. Sister freaked and wanted to call the ambulance, I don't remember the technical term for it but there was stuff poking out that wouldn't poke back in. Mom, true to form, refused to go anywhere until after dinner.
After dinner she went to the hospital, they admitted her and did the surgery on Friday morning. Everything seemed to be going swimmingly, so they released her that afternoon. I made it in to see her Friday, and went home on Saturday. Mom and Dad were staying in NoVa until Tuesday, and Sister had to go home on Sunday.
Today I got a frantic call from Sister. Mom is back in the hospital (at her own request, no less) with a pulse rate and blood pressure of just above dead. She and Little Sister (also a nurse) are getting in the car and coming back out most riki tik. Mom has requested all of our presence, so I'm packing up and getting in the Jeep.
If you are the praying type, I wouldn't look askance at a few.
UPDATE: So it looks like the pain meds the docs put her on after her hernia surgery dried her up and stopped her up. Translation: she's full of shit. They pumped some fluids into her and dosed her with Colon Blow to get things moving, kept her overnight for observation and we will see how things are going today. There might be some blockage or issues with her colon, but they wanted to get everything cleared out before drawing any further conclusions.
I'm not going to say everything is fine just yet, she is still in the hospital after all, but I will say I'm cautiously optimistic. She's a tough old bird, she will probably outlive us all.
Electronic locks are sketchy at best, especially gun safe locks. Let's face it, if you have an electronic lock the entire thing can just be taken off the door, and if the correct power is applied to the plug the damn thing will unlock.
BUT.
Yes, they had a warrant. For THIS GUY'S property, not for EVERY safe that is out there. But, thanks to their decision, every Liberty safe with an electronic lock is now compromised. Liberty should have shrugged and said "Why should we have this guy's combination?" and let it go at that. Instead, they chose to be the Bud Light of gun safes.
Let's see how that works for them.Mrs. Hades has gone back to school and so have I. Mrs. Hades is, of course, a teacher, and I am starting on my last class for the degree that I should have had 30+ years ago.
It's a C++ programming class, and I have to say that there isn't much beyond the syntax that is new to me. I had an earlier class in microprocessors that required some lower level programming (not quite on the order of bits and bytes, but actually pretty darn close), and there has been some other bits and pieces of programming in other classes (mostly using the Arduino IDE), so the course hasn't been very tough so far.
This is an eight week class, so by the middle of October I should hold an Associates in Applied Science in the field of Electronics Engineering Technology to go along with my Associates in Applied Science in Mechatronics Engineering Technology that I achieved last spring. Of the two, the electronics degree is the one that I wanted most.
I might even decide to walk the stage for this one.
