Summer Reading

This is what occupied most of my dad's free time for the last several years of his life. The family genealogy project. I had promised myself that I would finish this for him.
He had amassed all kinds of information, most of it from his mother's side of the family. On his father's side, his great-grandfather Daniel Harrington arrived from Ireland around 1840 when he was about 6 years old.

Research into any history prior to that was hampered by a fateful turn of events. In 1916, the Irish government ordered all churches in the country to submit all birth, marriage and death records to the Public Record Office of Ireland for safekeeping.
During the Irish Civil War in 1922, the Records Office was destroyed in a fire. A thousand years of family histories, land records, court documents...all lost. I think that's when they coined the phrase "Luck O' The Irish".

At any rate, dad has done a lot of research, obviously. I've seen bits of pieces of it before, but I now have all of it in here with me. I'm trying to read through an envelope a night, to get a sense of what's here. I hope I can start putting some of it together to share with relatives later this year.

Finally

I was able to drop the car off yesterday for the new navigation unit. Everything went fine this time, and it was done in plenty of time for me to pick it up after work. The repair cost was about $192, which is the total sum of all repairs I've spent on my last two Hondas. Hopefully this unit will be trouble-free, but just in case it does have an additional 12 month warranty. Sadly, this one doesn't have a Mr. T voice option either. Sigh.

Next time I get a car, I'll probably pass on the Navigation, as the hand held units are so much cheaper than they were 5 years ago. Back then, finding one for less than about $700 was rare. Now you can probably get them in Happy Meals.

But with the credit crunch and gas prices where they are, I'm not in the market for a new car. I think we'll hang onto it for a few more years. And now once again I can talk to the car, instead of swearing at it.

Water

The joy of homeownership…I feel like some kind of idiot scientist…performing experiments to see what works, or doesn’t to keep water out or the basement. And my only testing method is waiting for the rains to come.

Our driveway, which was re-poured a couple of years before we bought the house, is evidently sloped ever so slightly towards the house. This must be a fairly recent development, as we never had water issues in the area of the basement until last year – that’s now where the majority of the problem is.

I learned this by standing out there during a downpour to see where the hell the water was coming from. The water ran off the driveway’s edge and formed a pool by the base of the chimney that quickly disappeared once the rain stopped. It was sneaky.

Another smaller issue was the runoff from the car shelter is now directed right into the bed between the driveway and the house at the upper end. I’ve drylocked the interior walls, so the water is less of an issue there, but I had to deal with that as well, as the water will pool there alarmingly just a couple feet from the house in heavy rain.

So anyway, onto the fix(es)…

I called 2 companies that do concrete leveling. But apparently they have all the business they can handle right now, as 2 calls with promised call backs and nothing else is as far as I’ve gotten. So until I find another reputable company, it’s up to me.

I figured that the water by the chimney, while a large volume, isn’t under any pressure. If I can stop the runoff at the edge, that low spot will fill to a point and then the water will either run off the other side or down the steep slope which begins just a few feet away.

So, my temporary fix…composite fiberglass edging, which is water and rot resistant. I bought one section (16 feet) and installed it so that it was flush with the edge of the concrete slab. For the seam between the two surfaces, I used a butyl rubber caulk intended for gutters and flashing. I put a nice thick bead along the whole thing, so it would expand outward forming a raised edge as it dried for a waterproof seal. I’ll have to keep an eye on it to see how long it lasts, but even if I have to replace the caulk once or twice a year, that’s definitely preferable to having water in the basement.

For the shelter, I bought a few sections of open channel gutter, and placed it so that the edge of the shelter falls directly into it when water runs off the lower lip. I angled it slightly so that the water will run off at the far end of the driveway. It looks better than I thought. I trimmed a couple of inches off the bottom edge of the tarp so that when the wind blows, it can move freely, but won’t get caught on the outer lip when it ‘flops’ back to vertical. I want to secure it to the shelter’s legs with plastic ties, but it hasn’t budged over the last couple of breezy days, so maybe I should leave well enough alone for now.

So far, so good…the rain we had Monday morning stayed where I wanted it to, and the surrounding ground was dry to the touch afterward – bone dry. I’ll have to see how these do in a heavy rain before I can declare a temporary victory.

Mo Basement Fun

We had huge amounts of rain over the past 2 days. Not at all like some other places had, but we saw at least 5 inches in our end of town.

The basement, although not dry, held up fairly well considering the deluge. Thursday was the worst, we had close to 3 inches in just a couple of hours. The basement remained dry for that. It didn't leak until last night when we had another downpour, but I was able to clean it up in about 10 minutes. But then we had more downpours early this am, and I was awakened by the sound of water trickling into the floor drain. It's stopped seeping in now. But apparently 3+ inches of rain is the new breaking point -a step up from how it used to flood any time we saw more than one.
I've been able finally find the source of the problem -driveway runoff that all pools in one spot by the chimney. So I'm off to Lowe's to buy materials to hatch yet another cunning plan.

Great

Well, the appointment to have the Honda’s navigation system repaired was made for last Monday the 9th. And it was not quite what I hoped for.

I made the appointment early so I could drop the car off, get the loaner and arrive at work at a decent time. I drove the 20 or so miles to the dealer, and arrived at 7am. When I got there, they couldn’t find my paperwork for the appointment, which was a bad omen. They spent a good 10 minutes searching to no avail, and finally had to go back to the service office to print it out, as it wasn’t in their daily pile o’ crap to do.

It gets better…as the tech was walking over with the work order, I heard another voice telling him something about ‘backordered’. The part that I was supposed to have swapped out wasn’t there yet.

So why didn’t anyone tell me this prior to my arrival in the service bay? Good question. But I’ve learned not to ask questions I already know the answer to. Helps to keep my blood pressure at a relatively constant value.

Apologies ensued, and they promised a call as soon as it came in. Well, I got a call yesterday that it had arrived. They set me up for Friday the 20^th. This time I’m calling the day before to confirm everything.

Happy 1974

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

For years, Detroit’s Big 3 have churned out umpteen types of large pickups and SUVs, and mroe or less outsourced their small car programs - releasing half-assed attempts of their own, or selling rebadged versions of other cars from Suzuki, Daewoo, and others. If any critics ever questioned them about this long-term strategy, they blew them off and said that people will always need the trucks, and therefore, the market was pretty secure, so that's where they'll focus their business. So they continued to develop and market 12-mpg Suburbans and Expeditions, and hoped for the best.

People will always need something, and pay through the nose for it. Isn’t that what they used to say about housing?

It looks like May 2008 may have been a watershed moment in the auto industry. For the first time since the late 1970s, the best selling vehicle in the U.S. wasn’t the Ford F-Series or Chevy Silverado. Not even a Dodge Ram.

It was the lowly Honda Civic, with monthly sales of 53,299.

So the Ford was in second, right? Nope. Second was the Toyota Corolla, at 52,826.

Third was the Toyota Camry, at 51,291. Fourth was the Honda Accord with 43,728.

The F-series is back in fifth, with monthly sales of 42,973. The Silverado is down to 6^th, at 37,020. That’s less than half of what they were selling just a few years ago.

Mom went car shopping a few days ago, she had a hard time finding Hondas and Toyotas she could drive. No wonder.

Now, imagine how things would look if over the last 10 years, Detroit had taken at least some of the money poured into development of trucks and spent it on cars instead. I mean GM and Ford each have maybe one or two decent, competitive cars for sale. But that’s stacked against the dozen or so truck models each one has sitting in their showrooms.

This week, both companies have announced massive layoffs, and factory closings, in an attempt to counter the reality that they’re selling ice cream during a blizzard.

It would be sad, if they hadn’t gone through the exact same thing in the 1970s when gas prices spiked and they had showrooms full of full size vehicles that no one wanted to buy. The Japanese automakers, however, had showrooms full of fuel efficient cars for sale, and sold as many as they could.

All they could do was damage control - and close plants and layoff scores of workers, who paid the price for their employer’s poor business decisions. But then gas prices stabilized, and they decided to give up on the small cars that they had never really figured out anyway, went back to business as usual, and started the cycle all over again.

New Old Plants

At happy hour a couple weeks ago, a coworker of mine mentioned that she had several daylilies and hostas that she wanted to thin out - she said they were free to anyone who wanted to stop over and get them. I wanted more plants to finish off our front garden, and these would be perfect.
Now a job like this needs a truck, so I enlisted Gigamatt for help - he's the only person I know with a truck - and we went over saturday morning to get them. The plants were arranged around the edge of Cindi's deck, and had been there for at least 10 years. They were enormous. After an hour or so of digging, we'd taken at least a dozen plants - and even split in half, they were still about 2 feet wide.

By the time we loaded the plants, stopped off for mulch, had breakfast, and got back to my house, it was going on 1pm. Giga set off with a few plants for his place, and I decided it was too hot to start digging up the front. So I put them all in a shady spot, and watered them a few times the rest of the day.
The plants survived overnight, and I set out early sunday morning to get them in the ground. There wasn't space for them all up front - I planted 3 lilies and a hosta in a smaller bed by the back door. They took up a lot more space than I realized, but that's fine - I don't think we need anything else for this year. I can't wait until these really start to fill in!