Stupid Things I See While Running

Tags

cars, lawns, Running, stupid

Stupid thing # 1 – I’m out on a three miler. I pass a couple arguing over who is going to mow the lawn while the gas powered mower is running. I had seen this coming as I approached the house.

The wife is mowing the lawn.

Husband is sitting on the front steps hurriedly putting on shoes as though he was supposed to mow the lawn but fell asleep or something.

Wife spite mows the lawn.

Husband hustles to mower where he and wife begin to argue. I can’t catch any of the conversation/argument because the lawn mower is running spewing fumes and noise as though it wants to have a say in who wins the day and the grand prize of mowing the lawn.

Most of the lawns in my neighborhood are the size of your living room. Push mowers, electric or battery mowers would do the job just fine but we seem to addicted to making noise and waking up neighbors when we mow.

I keep running and never catch the end of the fight.

Stupid two – I’m running loops at a local park and part of the loop takes me through parking lot. The loop is only 3/4 of a mile so I circle at a fairly regular and uptempo pace.

I see a white Mercedes in the parking lot. As I approach I can see the windows are all closed ( tinted of course) and the engine is running.

As I approach the car and prepare to swing around it I notice a woman, not picking on females, men can be just as stupid.

She is standing outside the car smoking a cigarette while the car’s engine is running and presumably the air conditioning in said auto is running.

Wouldn’t want to get the smell of tobacco in the fine hand crafted leather upholstery now would we?

I flash her a dirty look as I run by but I doubt she senses my aggravation and so I let my anger pass as I head around for another trip around the park.

The next time I’m at her location she and her car are gone.

Momma Don’t Understand It

Tags

cars, dirt roads, James Taylor, songs

Points and prizes if you can give me the tune from I’ve swiped that line. Well, no points or prizes but you do win an award for having the sort of memory that can recall a phrase from a song that’s 50 years old and you probably haven’t heard either in 50 years.

Meanwhile you’ve misplaced your phone, keys, wallet, glasses and so on.

But that’s not why I’m writing this.

This is about driving slowly down a country road.

An unpaved road, dirt and gravel.

When I was a kid we used to visit my uncle’s place in Jersey and he lived on a dirt road. His house was on a dirt road, my uncle did not live on the why don’t we do it in the road?

On order to keep down the dust the county or township or boro would send a tank truck filled with oil and the truck would spray oil on the dirt to minimize dust clouds.

I don’t think or at least I hope they don’t do that anymore. Seems like a really bad idea.

The next time you find yourself on a gravel stretch of road I suggest the following if it’s at all practical.

Stop the car, roll down all windows and roll along at about 3 miles an hour. You’ll hear music.

Fat soft rubber rolling on pieces of hard stone.

We’re all so used to hearing our cars barrel down asphalt and concrete streets that tire noise becomes just that – Tire Noise which might have been a good title for this piece.

I would have be some sort of natural born fool to wanna pass this way again.

Parking Lots

Tags

cars, courtesy, driving, idiots, parking lots

Now that we’re all back driving again I’d like to point out a new and exciting way to thread your way through a parking lot at your local supermarket.

It’s a new game and anyone can play – I call it:

” The Parking Lot Cut Across Lanes Without Looking Slalom Game.”

It’s fun and easy.

Here’s how it works. You simply drive to your local large parking lot, you know the ones with lanes clearly marked, stop signs and shopping cart return islands.

Then ignoring all decorum, politeness and simple courtesy you pull in and out of parked cars seemingly at random but you know where you’re going – OR do you?

You don’t need a destination. Why wait at those silly stop signs? Yields are for sissies. And merge, my middle name is merge and I’m going first.

Honestly, why look left and then right and then straight ahead when all you need to do is blast forward in a straight line. At the sight of a Nissan Armada folks will get out your way abandoning their groceries, kids, walkers and canes while they dive for cover. Besides, in your car/tank you’re sitting a good six feet off the road anyway. You won’t get hurt.

It’s fun, it’s easy and since most cars are made of plastic anyway – no harm, no foul.

Driving was more fun when no one else was on the road.

We’ve returned to pre-pandemic levels of traffic, rudeness and outright aggressive driving.

Oh, and if you come up behind while I’m at a red light, I’m no longer turning right on red since I got nowhere to go and all day to get there.

New About

Tags

baseball, cars

Since I have neglected writing, posting and blogging for almost full year I need to compose a new about.  Here goes…

I can’t stand my phone or this laptop anymore.  All I read is crazy news about crazy people who somehow are in charge and that makes me crazy.

Mostly, I  just want to drive west.  The car’s radio is busted.  How can this happen in this the 20th, 21st, whatever century we’re in.

When I complained to the service guy about the no longer working radio he said something like … Well, things go bad you know.  This was his attempt at shirking any and all responsibility for fixing the radio.

I took the car to a car stereo joint.  They told me to find a radio online or in a junkyard, buy it, have it shipped to my home address, bring it to them and then they would install it.  This is not customer service as I know/knew it.  Do I want a radio from a car that’s been involved in  wreck in my dashboard.  No and neither do you.

The radio picks up a couple local stations and I get a scratchy distorted sound through the speakers.  It’s fine.  The local professional major league baseball team airs on one of the local channels that still works.

The season starts in a few weeks and runs to October.  Baseball on the radio.

Oh, and the heated seats still work.  Once they go I’m going car shopping otherwise Batter up.

 

A Big Yellow Mustang

Tags

California, cars, driving, Gordon Lightfoot

With apologies to Joni and her old man.

Spell check thought I was going for Big Yellow Mustard but I said no so fast buster.

I recently spoke over the FB pages to a friend who is on her way to Los Angeles, not for the World Series ( Trademark registered, MLB & all rights reserved) but for a vacation and a drive from southern California to northern California and San Francisco.  I suggested she keep driving until she got stopped at the Canadian border.

I also suggested that her rental car ought to be a ( see title ) A Big Yellow Mustang with 6 on the floor and my reasoning is the following:

How many times are you going to get to do something like this??????

I say go for seven or eight on the floor, make sure it’s a convertible too.

I once made the drive from San Francisco to Arcata, CA and if my fuzzy brain recalls correctly I rented a manual transmission in a dark blue Opel.

I’m open to suggestions to correct my faulty memory as to if Opels existed in California in the 1980’s and if they were part of rental stock.  Those were the days.

I should have kept driving to the Canadian border and told the border agents that I knew Gordon Lightfoot and I was on my way to see him perform.

I bet if my friend plays the GL card she gets into Canada no sweat.

 

A Word or Two about Words OR Old Man Yells at Cloud

Tags

brains, cars, commercials, driving, free advice, observations, phones

When you are a fan of the National Pastime on the radio as I am you get get used to being flooded, bombarded and inundated with commercials.

Today’s lesson kids is about car commercials.

Recently I’ve noticed and maybe this goes back further than I can recall but marketing cars today has spawned some strange new words and phrases that I’m not entirely familiar with although I was able to figure out who’s who and what’s what.  For example:

Car company A has an auto that carries onboard Lane Drift Alerts.  Stay in your lane buddy or there will be consequences.

Company B preaches the wonderfulness of a “Pedestrian Avoidance” system and not be outdone it also has some kind of gizmo called ” Collision Alert.”

So, basically your new Oldsmobile is a riding and rolling radar unit emitting who knows what kind of gamma and x-rays in all directions to make sure you don’t run over anyone or smack into that Pierce-Arrow that just slammed on the brakes in front of you.

Maybe there should be a ” Put down your cell phone” minder in the car too which would alleviate the need for all the above mentioned gadgets and wizardry.

Oh yeah, turns out we also have our own onboard pedestrian alert, lane drift and collision avoidance system already built in.

It’s called your “Brain” so open your eyes, put down the phone and take those buds out of your ears Bud.

And now back to Ted and Larry with the play by play…

 

A Mechanical Failure in the First Degree

Tags

anti-freeze, cars, heat

If you live in my time zone, the eastern quarter of the country you know today was a pretty warm day.  Warm as in people moaning about the heat and seeking any air conditioned refuge in sight.  So, yeah it was hot.

I’m standing on the corner of North Market and West Orange Streets.  Our fair town actually boasts a corner of Lemon and Lime. The location is not at all famous like that corner in Winslow, Arizona.

As I prepare to cross the street waiting for the light a car pulls up and proceeds to back into a parking space.  The car is a late model sedan – Is that still a relevant description or is it a throwback to ” Highway Patrol” or ” Dragnet?”

The driver deftly pulls up and whips his car into the spot.  I notice wisps of smoke wafting from the grille.  As the car stops a sudden steady drip of green liquid starts to pour from right under where I know the radiator sits.

I motion to the driver to turn off the engine and take look at the puddle of trouble forming on the asphalt under the engine compartment.

He turns off the ignition and comes out to look at the front of his car saying ” That’s just air conditioning condensation.”

I’m no car mechanic and I don’t play one on tv but I am not color blind neither and I can see the difference between greenish/yellow as in anti-freeze and clear as in water.

The thought bubble over the guy’s said reads ” Whoops.”  He thanks me, hops back into his late model coupe, fires up the engine and as he does a fresh quart of coolant gets deposited on the street and he zips out into traffic.  I figure he’s got maybe two blocks before his engine either stops, seizes, throws a rod, overheats and commits harikiri.

He’s doomed, the engine is doomed, the late model whatever it is is toast.

I don’t know why he chose to ignore the obvious but it looks to be a long walk home.

I think it was a Hyundai.

It’s A Clean Machine

Tags

cars, carwash, kids, old days

There used to be a local PBS show kicking around these parts called” Things That Aren’t There Anymore.”

It was a loving lament to the good old days of Pennsylvania’s amusement parks or Mom & Pop restaurants where you could get the best burger, shake or cup of coffee and by goodness it was cheap and wonderful.

You get the point – things change, people and tastes change and things that were once important and part of your life’s fabric one day go away.  And you miss them.

Which leads me to this:

Had my car in the shop for some work and as always happens when I’m there I receive a voucher for a free ” LASER CAR WASH.”  It’s a blatant attempt to turn me from a freeloading car wash customer into a paying car wash customer.   It also forces me to drive to through the Mercedes lot to cash in on my free wash.

I get to look at all the cars I will never own.

No humans involved in the operation, mostly a giant Robbie the Robot that hoses down, scrubs, rinses and dries your car in about 4 minutes.  I did not see any lasers in action although at times the windshield was covered with soap so maybe one slipped in there while I couldn’t see.

I’m not a big fan anymore of keeping the outside or inside of my car clean.  No, it’s not a clean machine.  I work. It’s a working car. We work together. We have this understanding.

But whilst sitting inside that Wash -o -Matic Tunnel I recalled when washing cars was not a product of some mechanical or industrial revolution but an honest to goodness family adventure project on a warm and sunny Saturday afternoon.

Remember when we all got decked out in bathing suits and filled buckets with soapy water and sponges the size of a loaf of bread?  Washing the family car was fun.  This was when we all only had one car.

The cars in my family had names and personalities probably because they were the first cars my our parent’s ever owned.  Owning a Chevy was a big deal.

Cars were still a luxury item on the way to becoming a necessity for the post war new middle class. My Mom and Dad grew up during The Great Depression and The Second World War.  Life was no picnic for those kids who became our parents.

It was a big deal to watch the odometer flip over to 30 or 40,000 miles.

We’d all crowd over the front seat and watch those little plastic wheels work their mileage magic.  This was while the car was in motion.

Washing the car was a big deal.  We kids mostly got wet, did no work, got bored and left my Dad to clean up our mess.  He  was responsible for waxing the car – Simonize anyone?  That was hard work and you had to do it in the shade.

Only the well to do could afford to pay to have someone wash their cars.  Which brings me and us to last week and the car wash.

Washing the car is one of those things that’s not there anymore.

My current car has no particular name or personality except that it’s a beast in the snow which I like and my last 4 cars have all been named ” Millenium Falcon.”

Cars, they come, they go clean or otherwise.

One of these days I’ll tell you about that ’67 Karhman Ghia…Now that was a car.

 

Seven Words

Tags

cars, repairs

The seven words you don’t want to ever hear if you own a car and those words are:

” Your car needs a new head gasket.”  Let me count them up to be sure.   Yup – that’s seven alright.  I think it would be cheaper to put a new head gasket on my real head.

Or as my service advisor said : “You could ignore the leaking oil and coolant and drive the car until the engine seized.”

Problem solved – no need for a new head gasket.  Why didn’t I think of that?

 

 

 

 

No Right Turn On Red

Tags

being polite, cars, red lights, traffic

An observation on the power going out downtown today and what happened when all the traffic lights went dark.

Somebody hit a pole or something but the end result was that power was cut to a section of downtown.  The city ran cops out to control major intersections and traffic moved smoothly.

But on the smaller streets no longer controlled by stoplights an interesting thing happened.  Public works dropped off four foot high stop signs and placed them at intersections where police officers were not stationed.  And then something pretty cool happened.

Drivers politely stopped at the stop signs, looked left and right, made eye contact with other drivers and pedestrians and everyone took turns driving through the intersection.  Traffic ran smoothly, there was no stop light grand prix getting from light to light since we all knew that we’d have to stop anyway.

Amazingly, I got across town faster than I would with traffic lights in normal operation.  Right turn on red was no longer a take your life in your hands situation.  Pedestrians rejoiced.

All on a beautiful, windy and sunny November afternoon.  Have a great weekend and be careful out there.

There’s a lesson somewhere in this I’d say.