Neanderpundit

today, for Ed Hering and his mom, who seems to have suffered a stroke.

I loved to play in snow.

I was 8 during the winter of 67, and what a great winter playground THAT was! Snow forts, snow tunnels, igloos you could park a car in! My neighbor’s dad actually made a big rectangular igloo and parked his car in it for quite a long time, that winter.

of course he drove a Nash Metro. You could park it in a fitted sheet.

But it was not to be, for me. See, the first morning of the blizzard, my neighbor Gary cut my eyelid almost off with a spade.

So the very best memories of my youth were taken from me by a goofy neighbor kid; that’s where it all began.

Two years hence I was relegated to shovel duty for real. I was expected to get the sidewalk and the driveway pad clean; dad used the plow on the driveway proper. At no time did I enjoy these duties.

Fast forward thirty years, and I have a 4wd truck and a snowblower. Life, in winter, is a lot nicer. No longer required to shovel snow, I can actually make it through a winter without a major coronary.

Still doesn’t make it fun.

XRT, which was a cool radio station about thirty years ago, used to run these spots, which I enjoyed a great deal. Me, I’m thinking of moving someplace warmer. It will get me prepped for my final destination, so to speak.

Last week for a while in hatheg-kla Pontiac. Hope to make the most of it.

I should really trust my work. Came home friday with a slight wobble in the front of the sploder, and feared my inner tie rod end had come loose. I just replaced it last weekend, and I thought, perhaps, I hadn’t gotten it tight enough.

Well, dammit, I got it farmerr tight, it shouldn’t have come off, and it hadn’t. I pulled the bellows back, and there it was, tight as a new shoe. Must just have been the crappy pavement on I-55.

That reminds me, I need to check tires before I leave.

When I changed the inner, I didn’t have the cash for an alignment, so I did what I usually do, I bungeed a laser level to the rear rim and used a tapemeasure to measure the distance between the front and back of the front rim. It works pretty well, and it gets you close enough that you don’t have a lot of tire wear, though the sucker will still shimmy a bit in the 85 mph range. Still, and Exploder wasn’t meant for sustained highway speeds of 85.