Cracked Windshield Repaired

Some of you have been bugging me to get my cracked windshield on my van fixed for maybe five years or so. Two separate objects hit my windshield and the cracks have been slowly growing toward one another. It's actually slowed considerably since I started parking in my garage at night, though.

In the past few months, KE4UVJ has been following me all around campus, shouting at me that I haven't gotten it fixed yet. He's even stopped by my office twice and that's only counting the times I was there. Loads of people have reminded me that glass companies often come out to wherever you are and fix it while you're at work. Well, I finally scheduled an appointment on-line. SafeLite, recommended by A Better Wrench, came out to my van yesterday and replaced it.


Some people thought that the glass companies wouldn't even need my key to replace a windshield. Fortunately, that isn't correct. You can see Aaron, here,using an oscillating power chisel thingy, from the inside, in order to remove the old windshield. I say "fortunately" because otherwise there would be all these people impersonating glass companies and breaking into people's cars that way. My Second Most Faithful Reader took these great photos and he said that removing the old one looks as if it's a tremendous amount of work,because it's very difficult to remove the old gasket.
Here Aaron is puting on the suction cups so he can pick up the new windshield.

A powered caulking gun is used to heat and apply the new adhesive.

Once he put a bead of adhesive all the way around the edge, he had six minutes to put the new windshield in place.
Isn't it beautiful? I'm very pleased with it. On Monday, all the area's gravel trucks will change their routes in order to match my commute. You can seen even more photos here.

Van Bambi

Well, my dad drove the van to Vann Mann, in Charlotte, this morning and the van doors naturally started working normally as soon as he got there. That figures, doesn't it? They are going to mail me a replacement chip that apparently has less of a propensity for getting into funky states. Hopefully I won't have any more problems before it gets here.

The deer are getting a tad bolder at my house. They were just outside the guest room window while I was eating dinner this evening. There were actually two fawns wandering around chewing on everything green in sight. There were several wandering around my yard this weekend, even while I was outside.

This is all she did after she started eating the forsythias and got yelled at through an open window. She moved one of her ears. She couldn't have cared less. For a mere $19.95, you, too, can come over one evening and have your ego deflated. I accept paypal.

Happy, Hideous, Lovely and Refreshing

Saturday night, my van decided that it didn't want to open the automatic doors anymore. My dad spent rest of the weekend taking everything apart, trying to determine why. The motors in the doors were fine. The limit switches were fine. Unfortunately, he wasn't able to figure it out, but a signal is being generated constantly indicating that the doors should close. My dad is planning to drive it to Charlotte to get it fixed. Ordinarily, this would drive me up the wall, but since I recently drove over 1700 miles within a week and a half, I don't mind it so much. From that perspective it's really good timing. I'm also very happy that this didn't happen while I was on my trip!

I haven't seen any sign of the skink.

The Flying Fish is no more. It was actually bought out a couple of months ago and is now called the Gulf Rim. They pretty much have the same menu, with a few additions. They also painted the interior of the restaurant a hideous shade of orange. Granted, I think most, but not all, shades of orange are hideous.

The Thai Cafe has finished their renovations for their new addition and it looks lovely.

On their current menu, ACME Food and Beverage Co. has a shrimp and crawfish pasta served with heirloom tomatoes sauce that is both beautiful and delicious. This past weekend, they also had watermelon sorbet as a special, which was delightful. My dad thought you might as well eat a slice of watermelon, but I thought it was even more refreshing and certainly colder.

Objects in the Mirror...Wait.. What Mirror?

Ok, I have a lot of news to report!

First and foremost, I received actual e-mail from N. Todd. Wow. That may surpass my meeting Itzhak Perlman when I was 6.

A couple of days ago, I got e-mail from PW, at Vosges, who read my post about their new line of bacon chocolate, and is sending me a free sample! That's is very exciting, indeed. I will report as soon as I taste it, or perhaps even while I'm tasting it.


Last night I went to a new restaurant, Piazza Italia, in Brightleaf Square. I believe it's where the old CD store, Millenium Music, used to be. One of fine characteristics of the restaurant is that it's connected to their gelato store. The restaurant is also huge and nicely decorated. I ordered Mezzaluna Al Zafferano, which was effectively ravioli filled with shrimp and salmon mousse in a creamy saffron sauce. It was delicious. For dessert, we shared a serving of gelato with three flavors: green apple, pineapple and kiwi. The pineapple and the kiwi were the best and had the strongest flavors. The prices seemed reasonable and I look forward to going there again. Somehow I had completely missed that they have a spinach salad with "large chunks of lobster sautteed in a warm buttery garlic sauce" for only $11.


Today, when I left work, I was startled to see that my parking tag had fallen off. It took me several seconds to notice that my entire rear view mirror was also no longer there! My van has really good side mirrors and I didn't really miss it until I passed a bicyclist on 751 and looked up to see if I could see him him behind me. Oops.. Well, I didn't hear anything unusual.

Living on Crackers

My dad fixed my van last Saturday night. It turned out that it was possible to access the adventurous bolt while the lift was folded up and then he put the joint back together. He took it to Triad Mobility on Monday where they did some routine maintenance to check everything out. They also replaced the bolt, which was somewhat stripped.

That night, my parents and I went to the Flying Fish and I tried a duck quesadilla special. It was pretty good, but very cheesy. That's what one expects of a quesadilla, but I didn't really notice until I tried to eat it cold, for breakfast, the next morning.

Last Sunday, DS and I went to Target, which was loads of fun. I've liked Target more each time I've gone there. Of course, I think I've spent less and less money each time, too. After a visit with HS, we had dinner at Kemp's. They had excellent oysters, as always. DS made the suggestion that I should get a combination platter that combined oysters with something that warms up better. In my opinion, oysters are pretty awful the second time around. Well, I got flounder and only ate the oysters. I ended up having three additional portions out of that one dinner.

Here you can see 'February Gold' daffodils that have been blooming in my yard. As I recall, it is fairly normal for that variety to bloom in January here.

Monday night, my parents and I went to ACME Food & Beverage Co. I believe that I had forgotten just how spicy the calamari with Asian slaw is, because I ordered it. It is very good, but it's just a little too hot for me. For dessert, we shared an enormous piece of ginger cheesecake with pear-ginger-caramel sauce. It was one of the best desserts that I've ever had at ACME, or anywhere, actually. I'm not a huge fan cheesecake, although I do enjoy it on occasion. This was absolutely wonderful. If you live in the Triangle and you like ginger, you need to go before they change the menu.

Tuesday, I had dinner with Annette at Chai's, which was a nice way to unwind after a super-busy day at the office. I had the udon noodle soup, with tofu.

Wednesday, my mom made fried chicken and I got to visit with FIFO again. My mom's fried chicken is delicious. Hopefully I'll learn to make it someday, if I'm brave enough to try again.

Thursday, we were supposed to have some sleet and freezing rain. We had snow instead. It was very pretty and I got to work at home, which I appreciated. Early in the morning, I got to see a pileated woodpecker on one of the trees in my yard. That was exciting. Of course, my faithful red-bellied woodpecker, provided me with a cacophony of crashes and bangs outside all the windows of the house.

Friday night, after guitar practice, we went to Vin Rouge. I had a watercress salad special with duck liver and proschiuto stuffed figs . It's was interesting, but not something I would ever order again. In fact, I may avoid duck liver in the future. I also ordered a side order of fries, which were very good. We shared some little neck clams and oysters gratin as appetizers and they were the best part of the meal.

Last night I went to a party at the G's and had long conversations with several people. As always, the food was great. I think I've been finding their vertical-windy-terrifying driveway easier to negotiate every time.

We've been having sleeting and freezing rain all day. Everything around here is lightly coated in ice, but it should warm up and melt during the night. I got to play Desktop Support this afternoon. My mom's laptop spontaneously decided to display everything rotated 90 degrees and she brought it over to my house for me to take a look. After looking and various settings (not the useful ones), I used the Google to determine which setting to change. It made sense that it would be the configuration for the graphics card, but it behaved differently depending on which user was logged in. While it's fine now, I think the machine probably needs to be re-imaged, because it doesn't even want to reboot half the time and the screen randomly goes blank. (Thanks to CF for her background image.)

So how have my New Year's resolutions been going? Well, I've had mixed results. I haven't kept up with practicing the guitar and lifting weights. I have, however, taken my vitamins every single day since the beginning of the year. That's actually exceeding my goal. I don't believe that I've "broken" the other two resolutions, because I an opportunity to start the habits anytime. In the meantime, I'm happy to have some default nutrients, so I can live exclusively on Jacob's crackers and peanut butter.

Caffiene Free Post

Yesterday morning, my van lift died. More specifically, the lift would not close. I guess this is slightly better than other situations I've had to deal with, because I could actually get out of the van easily. It's hard to drive around with the doors open, though. When the lift folds itself up (normally a nice feature), it jams. My dad thinks that there is a loose bolt in the gear box. Unfortunately, the gear box is welded shut, so even though he can see it, there's not much he can do about it. I think he's going to work on taking what he can apart this evening. I scheduled an appointment for the van to visit Triad Mobility on Monday morning, regardless.

It's frustrating, particularly since this is a three day weekend. I hadn't envisioned sticking around the house very much. I did get to spend some quality time with FIFO last night, which was nice.

This morning, I was looking forward to drinking a nice cup of real coffee. Unfortunately, I appear to have left coffee in the pot since last weekend. Both the pot and the filter are molded. Since I want to scrub that thoroughly, I guess I'll be drinking tea instead.

Before the Fourth

On July 2nd, my Dad and I tried out the BR-3 OBDII cable that he'd ordered for my van. I'd been having trouble with my Service Engine Soon light coming on and we weren't entirely sure what the problem was. When he took my van in to be serviced, they just cleared the code and didn't seem to think it was worth worrying about. It's nice to have one's own equipment to read and clear the code, instead of paying $40-$60 each time, especially when it comes on every few days. This one hooks right up to my laptop, which is pretty nifty. We'd thought that the code it might be the oxygen sensor, but it was the mass air sensor. Over a couple of months, my van started running more and more roughly and wasn't very peppy. My dad read later that you can actually clean the extremely tiny sensor, which he did last weekend. That seems to have done the trick. It's running very smoothly and it likes merging into high speed traffic again. The trouble light hasn't come on again since he cleaned it either.

After playing with the van that day, I organized more elderly photos and made some earrings for AE, for her birthday. They turned out rather nicely. My parents and I went to ACME Food & Beverage Co. for dinner. I had a "small plate" of fried oysters followed by superb caramel and cinnamon bread pudding with cherry compote sauce and whipped cream. It was so good.

When we got home, we watched my second Netflix movie, Walk the Line. It was about the lives of Johnny Cash and June Carter and I thought it was quite good.

That Monday, several of us struggled to find a place to eat lunch, since it was so close to the holiday. The Refectory was only serving coffee. Twinnie's was closed. We went to the Loop, but due to Bryan Center Walkway construction, the only way to get in was through the Great Hall and through seemingly thousands of TIP kids and campers. We did make it, though, and I had a bean burger that was pretty good.



I met AE for dinner and we'd planned to go to Chai's, but it and everything in the complex were closed. We went to Shanghai and shared a serving of Orange Shrimp, which was excellent. A guy stopped by my table, G, who I'd known from the Duke Crafts Center metalsmithing class that I took twelve years ago. That was cool. Afterwards, AE and I went to Kroger and I bought a few things, including a pint of Cherry Garcia Frozen Yogurt, which I have yet to open. I'm just not one to snack in between meals and I need to remember that when I go shopping. I need to invite over hungry people to help me clean out my freezer. Any volunteers? I promise to *try* not feed anyone anything over a year old. I guess I better eat that turkey before November.

Belated Tale of an Alarming Day

I should really just post what I'm thinking at the time rather composing full chapters or volumes.For example, I wrote this about ten days ago and then saved the draft. I should have just posted it.

I took this cool photo of the moon over Duke Chapel just before I went inside to work one morning.



I was vanless for almost two weeks while my van was in the body shop. This was fairly traumatic for me. I had to remember what I used to do before I could drive. I had to get rides to and from places. The horror. That is way more complicated.

It was way more complicated when NC and I were going to take my dad's car from the library over to the the American Tobaco Campus for a meeting. It was particularly complicated when we discovered that his car had a car alarm. Let me state, for the record, that it does. Neither of my parents nor I knew that the car has an alarm. It's very loud. My dad ran over from his building and figured out how to shut it off for us. We tried to recreate the problem in my garage that night and it seems as if you repeat the convoluted steps that we did that it goes off about 25% of the time. Note that it seems a lot louder in an enclosed space. In any case, that was a fairly hilarious (but loud) portion of the day.

Almost Forgotten Highlights

I would like to think that very little exciting happened last week, because I don't really remember it.

I did get to have lunch with NP at the Refectory and that was probably the highlight of the weekdays. We didn't get to eat outside on an exceedingly warm day for March, but it was still fun.

I'm also chair of the sponsors and door prizes committee for the annual CIT Showcase, so I've been collecting door prizes and I got my first gift certificate, which was donated by Taverna Nikos. That was extremely exciting. Maybe that was the highlight.

I also went to the Visualization Forum on Friday and saw an interesting presentation by Michael Nitsche, from Georgia Tech. The idea was to enhance educational content putting it the 3D world of a game. I would be interested to know whether or not it truly engages students and whether it is more or less effective than traditional methods. In any case, it certainly looks cool. That, too, was a highlight.

My weekend was certainly busy. Friday night, I had dinner with AE and GM at Chai's, followed by yet another pleasant evening at Shade Tree Coffee. They were incredibly busy, which was great. It was a little hard to hear, but I'm very happy that they are doing well. We talked about toilet paper and neutrinos. ..among other things, of course.

Saturday, I went to visit FIFO.


That night, AE and GM came over to watch Duke vs UNC game. It's the process that's important. It was sad that Duke lost, but I enjoyed watching it, at least most of it. I was playing my guitar during part of it and trying to provide a soundtrack. I need to learn more 7 chords to convey angst. I made tuna salad for dinner and that turned out well.

Sunday, I headed over to GM's to watch live-action Tick episodes and a Pink Panther episode with GM and AE. JH came over and we went to Cracker Barrel. JH told us about TiddlyWiki, which I think has enormous potential. It's a wiki contained within a file, which uses things like javascript to provide the functionality. It was apparently written up in Make. I need to see if I can borrow that magazine from my dad occasionally.

Some of you may be wondering about the welfare of my injured van. Well, I took it in for an estimate last week, but it can't be worked on until the end of this month. Meanwhile, my dad's temporary fix using epoxy and coathangers seems to be doing the trick.

Ok, so maybe I do remember last week.

Two Days

Last night, I didn't leave work until 8:30 pm and then I watched a TiVoed American Idol results show. I was pleased that the "pen salesman", Jon Peter Lewis, was America's choice. I like it when American people vote and I agree with the results. It happened with Clay Aiken in last year's wildcard vote. It happened this time. Let's hope it happens in November.

I've had so much work to do lately and it doesn't feel as if there's an end in sight. Of course, by some respects, this is a good thing. It's a little tiring, though.

My dad drove the van to Kernersville (near Greensboro) to get everything checked and lubricated. He vacuumed everything inside before driving it over there, so it's nice and clean. It's always comforting to have things checked, because occasionally they have found broken bolts and other problems. This time, it was fine.

Tonight we had takeout food from Neomonde I mostly ate labneh, pita and tabouli. It was delicious.

Yesterday, my parents went over to see the new house. They said all the sheetrock is up. The coolest thing is that they apparently used stilts for attaching it to the vaulted ceilings. That must have been neat to watch, but they weren't using them while my parents were there. I'm looking forward to going over there this weekend to see how it looks.

Van, Faucets, etc.

I got my van back this evening! That's the most exciting news for the day. It cost a small fortune to have it fixed, but I would rather get it done than have it break down on me while I'm trying to get somewhere on the freeway.

In the past week, I have heard from two people that I haven't seen in 11-14 years and have only communicated with very sporadically. That's always wild.
Anytime you hear from someone and you were half your age when you last saw them, it's pretty remarkable. If those two people have the same birthday, that's remarkable, too.

It looks as if I may have my faucets picked out for the house. That was pretty easy, because the builder marked what he normally puts in a house and that was fine with me. I like clean and simple styles, so that helps.

Almost Forgot Today

While trying to watch Alias and label photos on Ofoto, I almost forgot that I hadn't posted anything here today. This morning, I added comments from Haloscan in case anyone has any anything to add to my posts.

Almost nothing eventful happened today. My van likely won't be ready until tomorrow (Monday) evening, so I spent another day at home. I finished uploading pictures, paid some bills, had a couple of good phone calls and watched a Duke basketball game on TV. One of the calls was with my builder and we started thinking about the possibilities for the tiles in the shower. It's nice to know that there's yet another spot to put a little creativity.

Excuse me, but my mother is getting a little too excited about correctly predicting something in Alias.

Snow

It snowed about one to two inches here today, so I slept late and worked from home. Now that we have DSL, thanks again to my brother, it's actually possible to be productive and stay home. Not being able to work well from home is something that has tormented me ever since I started working in 2000. It's still somewhat difficult, in that it's harder to work if you've got a dog's head in between you and the laptop's screen. There are a lot of other distractions here, but many aren't too much worse than conversations that normally emanate from neighboring offices, friendly co-workers or meetings.

I haven't heard anything about the van. I'll probably have to call the Chevy dealer tomorrow.

I found out tonight that this blog has another regular reader. This one is actually outside my immediate family! She made an excellent recommendation and that was to refer to people by their first initial. I will probably start doing that in the next post that mentions people, but I will use my old convention one more time. Thanks, Owner of NMI!

Everything was beautiful after the snow with white powder collecting on the tops of all the branches. The pond was nice and glassy today, reflecting the winter's elegance. It's supposed to get really cold this weekend, though, so we will continue to board Shadow at the vet's. He's recovering from having a fibroid tumor removed, so we didn't think he should be outside, even in his heated bed on the porch, when it goes down to 9F tomorrow night. Actually, I've just been watching Nova episodes on Antarctica and that's starting to sound pretty warm.

RSS Feed and No Van

I've been spending most of the evening trying to get an rss feed. I've looked into various things, but so far feedster.com seems the most promising. I think I need to tweak my blogger template a little more before it's ready for prime time, though.

My van is in the shop, unfortunately. It has a leaking intake gasket, water pump and a failed egr valve. Hopefully it will be ready by tomorrow, but there aren't any guarantees. I'm so used to driving that I'll be suffering from separation anxiety before too long. When riding in the passenger seat of a sedan, I feel as if I'm about to go off into the ditch. I'm also not controlling the brakes. Eeek!

Excitement and Earth Shattering Dilemmas

On the way home from work this evening, my van sounded as if it might stall while it was at a traffic light. The temperature gauge seemed high, although it wasn't in the red zone. My dad has wondered whether my radiator hoses might need replacing, since it has recently been possible to smell antifreeze after I've driven. We're going to take it to the shop in the morning. That, yes, that, was the excitement for the day.
I also wrapped a baby gift.

So, there are two earth shattering dilemmas that have come up in recent months. 1) Do I get cable or satellite? 2) Do I wire the great room for surround sound?

I have lots of trees around my new house, so it may take a effort to get satellite. I'd certainly have to put one on a pole and even then, it's not clear that I'd have a good view of the southern sky. One of the reasons that I was leaning away from satellite, even though I love the DirectTV service that I gave my parents last year, is that you can't use it to get high definition signals. I just read, however, on a link off of Gizmodo that RCA will be releasing a DirectTV receiver in February that receives high definition signals. That sounds interesting. If they would make a receiver that handles high definition AND TiVo, then that would be something.

I don't know what to do about the second issue. I'm going to have my TV flat against the wall in the corner of a square room, which I've been told is unacceptable. That's where it's going, regardless. The kitchen counter will be across from it. I'm just not sure it's worth it. I don't even have a stereo. If people want to hear great sound at my house, they're just going to have to bring their own headphones.