Sometimes you think you’re badass. And then something bad happens and you’re just an ass.

Worked on the van: Drain coolant, replace thermostat, remove coolant tank and expansion tank (Vanagons have a radiator, a tank, and an expansion tank), clean the tanks all nice and shiny (20 years of nastiness in there…), pull the distribution unit (big plastic junction, requiring removal of four hoses) so I could get to the hose that goes to the radiator. Because it’s been leaking in drips and drabs.

Now, at this point, everything’s apart. This is the perfect opportunity to replace the last remaining bit of fuel line. I’ve been wanting to get this done for quite a while, just to finish out my complete re-do of the fuel system. And the only reason it hadn’t been done is because it’s such an awkward place to get to unless everything beneath it is pulled. So I decided to do it, even though I had a bad feeling about it.

It’s a two-inch-long piece of rubber hose connecting a plastic nipple on the firewall to another plastic hose that runs up from the fuel pump and filter. Two inches! I wrestle with the little nipple fitting thingie, which is there purely to make it easier for VW to manufacture the vehicle, and I wrestle with the hose clamp, and then I wrestle with the other hose clamp, which I have to cut with mean-looking cutters.

So far so good. Cut some new hose to length, put on the fancy new gentle-on-hose clamps, put it all back together, good to go.

Reassemble everything, pour in some coolant, pour in some water (distilled water from the grocery store)… The moment of truth!

Turn the ignition on without starting the engine. Hear the fuel pump whir. Look under the van for leaks… None. Start the engine, look for leaks… None.

Start pouring in more water and coolant as it’s drawn down. This is how you’re supposed to do it, by the way. Hum-de-dum. Check for leaks… None.

Wait, what was that? Turn off engine. It’s a puddle of gas. A big one. This is exactly the leak I was trying to prevent by replacing the 20-year-old hose!

It turns out I crushed the plastic hose by overtightening the clamp. The fix is to cut the plastic hose short and put on a new piece of hose, or just replace it with a full run of rubber hose. But now it’s night, and it’ll wait until tomorrow.

I’m an ass, though, because I made a huge gas stink throughout the house. Landlady not happy.

Time waster extraordinaire!

No instructions given, but if you can’t figure it out, you won’t enjoy it anyway.

Source:

[..] As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil at the summons of war,
Let women now leave all that may be left of home
For a great and earnest day of counsel.
Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.
Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means
Whereby the great human family can live in peace…

[..]

Anna Jarvis started the crusade to found a memorial day for women. The first such Mother’s Day was celebrated in Grafton, West Virginia, on May 10, 1908, in the Andrews Methodist Episcopal (now United Methodist) Church where the elder Ann Jarvis had taught Sunday School. [..] In 1914 President Woodrow Wilson declared the first national Mother’s Day, as a day for American citizens to show the flag in honour of those mothers whose sons had died in war. Nine years after the first official Mother’s Day holiday, commercialization of the U.S. holiday became so rampant that Anna Jarvis herself became a major opponent of what the holiday had become. Mother’s Day continues to this day to be one of the most commercially successful U.S. holidays.

I’ve got a mother. (“Really?” you ask…)

She’s currently living with my dad in a motel room, because they’ve got contractors gutting and rebuilding their kitchen, and she doesn’t want to breathe in the fumes of repainting or the dust of cut concrete. She says she likes to watch the people come and go from the motel, and to see the children playing by the pool.

She’s actually pretty amazing. Her church is about to build a new wing to house the programs she started. And there’s a solid rumor that the new building will be named for her. She’s a writer. She just got a publishing deal for a youth-market historical novel, and hopefully that will bear fruit soon. And all of this is occurring in, shall we say, her Golden Years.

And really, I don’t know what else to tell you, my ‘blog audience. She reads this, so leave a comment.

BettyDoesLife commented that some of what I wrote made her breathless, and while I dig the compliment, it reminded me of that scene in ‘The Thin Red Line,’ when the Marines are landing on the beach at Guadalcanal, and one of the soldiers says, “You’ve got to remember to breathe! ARGH! ARGH! ARGH!” Then they all run out of the landing craft, and there’s no enemy.

So I was going to find that on youtube, but I couldn’t. However, I did find this clip, which amply illustrates why it’s one of my favorite movies ever, and might actually be #1 on my list. The movie is poetry. It’s a poetic war movie.

I don’t wash the van as often as I should, because it requires a ladder. But today I did.

I took off the front spoiler, cuz it was spoiled. Yes, my van has a SPOILER. An air dam. Ground effects in effect, yo! It doesn’t look quite so dorky with the spoiler, but still pretty dorky. And that’s OK, because I’m a dork and it’s my van.

But I took it off because it’s crumpled in the corners, on the driver’s side in particular, where there was a minor fender-bender. The fender-bender is what ruined the bumper, and so this plastic air dam thing has basically molded itself to the distorted shape over time. I’m going to experiment with sticking it in the oven for a little while to get it straight again. Maybe. Or not. Or maybe use a hair drier on it, perhaps. Just to see. Replacement cost new: $200. Not that important, I’m thinking.

So eventually the spoiler, along with the grille work and the rear air intake grilles, will get painted black. Sing with me now: I see some grille work and I want to paint it bla-ack…

‘Melancholy’ is too evocative a word to mean what it means. It’s too much like ‘melody’ or ‘holy.’ The word sounds like a little song, a ditty, a derived-from-the-Greek trip across a rainbow. Maybe the term is set up as a sort of rhetorical seratonin uptake inhibitor, its fluid beauty describing its own cure.

I’m not especially melancholy at the moment, just connected to something akin to a sadness for the world. Sort of like if you found out that your son or daughter just made a bad decision, and you know they’re going to get stuck, but it would be wrong to change it for them. It’s not disappointment, just a kind of love that leaves its object to make mistakes, even though you grieve their future suffering.

Sometimes I really open up to these feelings, based on some kind of global tempo I really don’t understand. I sometimes think that a big part of the reason I’m as hyperintellectual as I am is to mask away this sense of floating on the surface of the wide and deep collective ocean. And I think a lot of other people do the same sort of thing, and that’s part of what’s so… shall we say melancholy? Or put another way….

I remember the first time I mourned for the suffering of the whole world. I was angry. It made me really, really angry to think about how the world was screwed up so much that my only recourse was to get completely frustrated. I dared to hate the world for making me feel bad about its situation. Which is pretty funny, actually. Not at the time, though. Of course. At the time it was all Very Important, because when you start out, it’s really hard to know what to make of it. One must, really and truly, begin at the beginning, and anger and fear are easy responses. (When you’re not starting out any more, it’s still really hard to know what to make of it, but at least you understand that.)

The fear and anger don’t really work, though, because it’s really tiring to be angry, and when that pulls away you’re left with fear, which means you’re fearful of…. everybody. And the exercise doesn’t start with the anger or fear, it starts with caring. If you don’t care, you didn’t start mourning the suffering of the world in the first place. You can’t be either angry or fearful if you give a shit, so the fear comes from something else. Where is that?

In my case, just not knowing. Just not knowing how I was supposed to deal with my own problems, when it was clear that no one else really knew anything about how to solve theirs. Existential vertigo… It’s all ignorance, all the way down!

And so on and so forth. This kind of thing is boring to read (for me, at least), but much more interesting to do for yourself. Sort of like free jazz. Does anyone listen to free jazz anymore?

Anyone want to go to a chimposium? It’s only a drive to Ellensburg on a Saturday…

39% favor impeaching President Bush.

“Few serious observers think things will ever get to actual impeachment. And yet the American public seems more open to the concept than many imagine, according to a new national poll,” wrote Matt Towery, CEO of InsiderAdvantage, which commissioned the poll.

Just who are these ‘serious observers?’ Why are they considered ‘serious?’ Why are the American people not considered ‘serious?’ Why do the ‘serious observers’ not seem to care that Bush is incredibly vulnerable, having dipped down to a 28% approval rating recently, with a victory comeback to 33%? 4 in 10 want to impeach the guy! (And I count as at least one of them.)

And, as usual, what he said.

OK, now that I got your attention…

Just a little while ago, I uploaded a photo. And I’d like to walk through exactly how I did it, because it illustrates that Xanga is held together with duct tape. Hopefully someone will hear my tale of woe and make this better.

I noticed that sean had commented on a photo, and I wanted to add another photo to be more clear, and then link to it (which you can see I eventually did).

The Mac side was easy: Hold the thing up to the Mac’s camera, use PhotoBooth to take the picture, rename the file.

Now, from the link above, I clicked on Upload Photos. Every time I used that page to upload a photo Safari crashes, and this time was no exception. I thought maybe I’d race it to the inevitable, and see if I could upload before the crash, but no avail. It works in Firefox. Oddly enough, it also works in Konqueror.

So, to get around the ‘Upload Photos’ page crash, I start a new weblog. Then I click on the ‘Photos’ tab. Then I click on ‘Choose File,’ navigate to the picture, click ‘OK,’ and then click on ‘Upload.’

Then wait a little bit, and then I’m supposed to be able to pick the uploaded picture out of the row of thumbnail images. Only 90% of the time, the new photo isn’t in that row of images, even though I just uploaded it. Clicking around on the ‘Upload,’ ‘Choose,’ and ‘Link’ tabs, I’d hope that the row of images would refresh itself, but it never does.

Now, since in this example I’m not making a weblog entry, this is no big deal. But if I were making a weblog entry, I’d have to click on ‘homerthebrave’ in order to leave the ‘blog entry page. It asks me, “Are you sure you want to leave this page?” and I tell it that yes, I am very sure. Then I’d make *another* weblog entry, go to ‘Photos,’ and then ‘Choose,’ and then the image might be there. If I decide to add another image in mid-post, I can upload it, but I have to save the entry as private and then re-edit it in order to get the new photo to appear in the row of thumbnails.

Which brings us to the Photo Manager: Absolutely useless in Safari, for anything other than clicking through to an individual image. It’s impossible to click in a checkbox in Photo Manager. Nothing ever gets selected.

I’m done griping for a while.

Read an ad on craigslist for a Vanagon fiberglass bumper for $200. And if you know anything at all about Vanagon fiberglass bumpers, it’s that they’re not actually made of fiberglass, they’re made of unobtainium, and a $200 bumper is like a $50 Rolex, except it’s actually a Rolex. The cheapest new-condition Vanagon fiberglass bumper in the US is $750.

I called the dude, and he told me all kinds of stories about how a dozen people from all over the country had emailed or called about it, and I was the lucky one, because I was local and had cash in hand. I don’t doubt this part of the story at all.

It is in good shape, although I doubt it’s actually brand new like he says. Dude says: “You can just paint it black with Krylon and then paint your other bumper, too, and it’ll look good.” Uhm, no. The proper color isn’t that much more expensive than Krylon, and will be just as easy to paint, and it won’t look like crap when it starts to flake. Because it won’t. And even if I did just save maybe $500, there’s no need for it to look cheap.

But now I’m thinking about selling it. I could make $150 easy. Even though he was less than honest about the condition of the piece, he did admit that he lowballed the price just to get rid of it. I wouldn’t even have to unload it from the van; just list it on craigslist and it would be gone before the weekend. Hmmmmm…

So this all took place in Issaquah, and on the way back, I stopped at the Goodwill on Rainier. And then I needed gas, so I went down to the Duwamish industrial area where the nearest gas happens to be, and since I was so close, I went to RePC.

And at RePC, I got this:

That’s an Apple Quicktake 150, state-of-the-art digital camera from 1995, which I photographed with my laptop’s built-in camera that’s smaller than a postage stamp. You see, things advance in 12 years, which is one of the reasons the grease pencil writing on the camera says ‘AS-IS $2.00.’

It’s funny, because I’d have to set up my old PowerMac to download images from it. But it shoots RAW! 640×480! w00!

It’s also funny because the advantage of the Quicktake 150 over the Quicktake 100 is that you can hook it up to a Windows computer. And I bet a current Windows machine would both a) have a serial port, and b) run the software to let me download the images… O irony.