Month: October 2015

My wife and I usually celebrate five-year-incremental wedding anniversaries by taking a trip.  Five years ago we went to Las Vegas and ten years ago, to Disney World.  Our daughter-in-law has to be in Washington next week for a conference.  Our son flew here a couple of days early to visit.  So, instead of a more elaborate trip, my wife and I will join our daughter, our son and his wife in Washington on Saturday night for a family dinner.  On the day our son called and told us he was coming, I was looking into taking my wife to London for a week.  So, even though a weekend in D.C. isn’t cheap, this is saving me a ton of money.

My wife usually drives our new Hyundai.  Most people get less than the EPA estimate for around-town gas mileage.  So does she.  I’ll be driving it to Washington and I’ll be interested in seeing what kind of gas mileage it gets on the highway.

Silver, gold, ruby, sapphire, diamond?  Why are there no traditional wedding anniversary presents for guys?

Last night, I found an anniversary card that tells the woman recipient that marrying her is the smartest thing her husband ever did.  Of course, I bought it.  I’ve been saying that to so many people for so long now that even Hallmark knows.

While our son is here, I’m going to get him to help me carry two old, metal radiator covers out to my truck so I can recycle them.  I never liked them and I recently replaced them with wooden covers I built myself.  I stained them to match the wood trim in the house and they look much nicer than the old ones.

It now appears that Paul Ryan will be the next Speaker of the House of Representatives.  It’s hard to imagine why he wants it.  The Republican caucus in Congress is fractured.  A sub-group, the Freedom Caucus, is very conservative and disinclined to compromise, so being Speaker is a job that is a lot like herding kittens.  Plus, since he ran for Vice President in 2012, it’s reasonable to surmise that Ryan has designs on the White House.  The last Speaker of the House to become President was James K. Polk who was President from 1845 to 1849.  Polk was, in fact, the only Speaker to go on to be President.  It’s an awfully high ranking dead-end job, but if Ryan becomes Speaker and wants to be President, his most likely way to achieve the Presidency is if both the President and Vice President die.  It’s relatively little known that the Speaker is next in line to the Presidency after the Vice President.

If California Congressman Kevin McCarthy withdrew from the race to become the next Speaker of the House of Representatives to keep rumors of an extra-marital affair from becoming widely known, that didn’t work very well at all.  For the record, I read those rumors in the newspapers, as most people did, and have no idea whether they’re true.

Verizon wants you to update the software on your computer that interacts with your Verizon cell phone.  So, they send updates, a lot of updates.  And, in the lower right-hand corner of your screen, a little dialogue box appears urging you to install software that’s been downloaded.  The box doesn’t tell you what software or carry a Verizon logo.  Until I found out what it was, I would never touch it, even though it nagged me.  I did update once, but it’s still nagging me.  I can tell it to install later, and it asks me again multiple times a day.  Eliminating the nagging is more important to me than updating the software.  If Verizon doesn’t change its ways soon, I’ll just uninstall the software to end the annoyance.

I used to think I had made two mistakes in high school:  I thought I was the only person that awkward; and I thought I’d get over it.  Turns out I made three.  I also thought I’d eventually be too old for pimples.

It should go without saying around here, but let’s go Mets.  Okay?

I’ve got a solution to the California drought.  All we need to do is get everyone in the state to wash and wax their cars on the same day.

A deranged young man shot up a community college in Oregon.  Nine dead, not including him.  In Tennessee, an 11-year-old boy got his father’s shotgun from an unlocked closet and murdered his 8-year-old neighbor because she wouldn’t let him play with her puppy.  I don’t pretend to know the answer.  I hope someone smarter than me knows what to do to make this situation better.  But I do know what I’ve told my kids since they were little:  If what you’re doing isn’t working, try something else.  More mental-health initiatives might help.  Holding gun owners responsible if they don’t secure their guns from their kids might help too.

From the latest Arby’s TV commercial:  “Bacon is a present pigs give you when you’re good.”  I never thought of it that way before, but, yeah.

It’s hard to imagine living a better life than baseball great Yogi Berra who passed away last month at age 90.  He served in the Navy during World War II, aboard one of the small rocket boats that bombarded the French coast on D-Day.  He was one of the best catchers ever to play the game, a fabled bad-ball hitter, tremendously clutch, managed both the Yankees and the Mets to the World Series, played and coached in more World Series than anyone else, was married for over 60 years, was successful in business too.  Although his funeral was in Montclair, NJ, Timothy Cardinal Dolan traveled from Manhattan to celebrate Yogi’s funeral mass.  Considering what baseball players make these days, it’s astonishing to realize that Berra was never paid more than $65,000 as one of the best players around.  And the unintentionally funny way he twisted the language kept him in the public eye even after he retired from baseball.

It probably helps Garmin technical support to reply automatically to emails, based on key words.  But, their replies would be more useful if they had some human read the requests before answering.  I got a lengthy answer from Garmin recently.  Lovely.  It contained lots of information, except it didn’t answer either of my questions.

Also, a suggestion for Garmin:  If someone is trying to get to Washington, D.C., I think it would be good if the software would accept that, as well as “District of Columbia” when it asks for state or province.  It took me a while to figure that out when looking for directions on my next trip.  I know how to get to D.C., but I don’t go very often, so I still need help navigating around once I get there.

I recently bought a lightly used 2014 Hyundai Santa Fe Sport.  The Sport has five seats.  The Santa Fe minus the sport has seven.  So far, I like it just fine and my wife likes it too.  She drives it more than I do.  But, if you’re an obsessive-compulsive type who needs to make sure locks are locked, you might not.  The front doors have a button and a handle.  If you have the proximity key with you, the button locks and unlocks the car, while the handle unlatches the doors.  The hatch just has a button that locks, unlocks and opens the hatch.  So, if you close it, lock it and want to be sure it’s locked, touching the button to try to open the hatch unlocks and opens it, provided of course the proximity key is in your pocket or purse.

The car came with a free trial of Sirius/XM radio.  I’m not sure how many channels it has, but I basically listen to two.  I like it, but don’t spend enough time in the car to justify paying what it costs to subscribe.

I’ve gotten pretty used to the proximity key to unlock, start, and lock the car.  However, when I leave the car, I still try to pull the non-existent physical key out of the ignition.

Do you know what a counter-balanced hood is?  It’s a car hood that uses springs to hold it open, instead of propping it up with a rod or stick.  The Hyundai has a counter-balanced hood.  I don’t remember if I bought the last car I owned with a counter-balanced hood in 1987 or 1980.

My 2008 Nissan Frontier has generally been reliable, but when it hasn’t been, the dealer has been good, but the parts that have broken are expensive.  While it was still under warranty (thank God!) a seatbelt sensor failed.  To replace that, you have to replace the whole seat assembly.  That just reeks of poor design to me. You ought to be able to fix something without replacing other, expensive things that don’t need fixing.  In the past two months, I’ve had two tire pressure sensors fail.  The dealer charged me $115 each for the sensors.  And the dealer’s shop manual says it takes an hour to replace one.  I didn’t stand and watch, but I doubt it does.  I’m not sure if that’s the going rate for sensors.  I couldn’t find any OEM sensors, but I found some in the range of what they cost for other cars, around $40 each, and the most expensive one I found outside my dealer’s shop was about $80.  I know tire pressure sensors have been required on new cars for more than a decade, but it just doesn’t make sense to me.  Each one (and a car has four) is a lot more expensive than a tire gauge (and you only need one of those).  Plus, even with the sensors, you still need a tire gauge to tell you whether the tire is actually low on air or if one or more of the sensors is broken.

If the tire pressure sensors on my Nissan truck continue to fail at the rate of one every two months, I’ll be selling it and getting something else before the end of this year.  I hate buying cars and generally keep each one way longer than the average driver does, so if I buy two cars in one year, that will be a record for me.  One a decade is more typical behavior on my part.