Thanks, guys. With three granddaughters...6, 3 and a newborn...being their Pop-Pop is quite the experience. 
The good news thread
- Thread starter Westtown Willy
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Thanks, guys. With three granddaughters...6, 3 and a newborn...being their Pop-Pop is quite the experience.
Good lord, the amount of estrogen that's going to be in that house. I don't know who daddy is, but I think he's going to need some help later.
Good lord, the amount of estrogen that's going to be in that house. I don't know who daddy is, but I think he's going to need some help later.
I'm gonna have a sign made for his house: "ESTROGEN ACRES"
alittleoff
TJ Addict
Congratulations Sir.
But now is the time to decide which Lil Lady gets the prized vehicles that you own.
One of my Nephew's wants my Raffle Jeep and the other one wants his Uncles TJ.
And I believe that my Grand Niece would strive for World Peace.
The Best to the New (again) Mom & Dad and Grand Parents.
Edit to, which to which.
I'm smarter than auto-correct, I think...
But now is the time to decide which Lil Lady gets the prized vehicles that you own.
One of my Nephew's wants my Raffle Jeep and the other one wants his Uncles TJ.
And I believe that my Grand Niece would strive for World Peace.
The Best to the New (again) Mom & Dad and Grand Parents.
Edit to, which to which.
I'm smarter than auto-correct, I think...
Last edited:
Down in Danville Illinois this morning getting the motorhome alignment done.
Magazine rack in the waiting area. Looks like I came to the “right” place!
Magazine rack in the waiting area. Looks like I came to the “right” place!
Owen is rocking a Santa/Bob Belcher look for Christmas this year.
It's going to be nice, or strange, having all the grandkids here next week. One surly teenager, one hulking 11 year old that's taller than the 16 year old, and two 8 year olds that argue like an old married couple. Lauren tries to micromanage Owen. Owen just tunes her out and drifts offs to Owenland.
It's going to be nice, or strange, having all the grandkids here next week. One surly teenager, one hulking 11 year old that's taller than the 16 year old, and two 8 year olds that argue like an old married couple. Lauren tries to micromanage Owen. Owen just tunes her out and drifts offs to Owenland.
the subie enters uncharted territory for me, she's in year 11 of service from the day she rolled out of the showroom, longest car kept from new of my life, may she serve another 11 with me at the helm.
Oh & the TJ is now old enough to drink
Oh & the TJ is now old enough to drink
I'm sixteen years ahead of you, Willy. I've mentioned this before many times on here, so I'm probably a broken record, but my daily driver is a 1998 Impreza. I bought it well used and abused in 2004 with 125k on it. Now, over two decades later, it has 406k on it. We also had a 2002 Legacy purchased in 2012 with 55k on it. My wife drove that one until the head gasket went at 211k in 2021. I was never fond of that car, so instead of pulling the engine and rebuilding it, like I would normally do, we bought her a new base Impreza in 2021, and that's her ride today. It's nice to have a low-mileage car for her.
My experience has been that maintenance got pretty serious with both of those boxers at about 175k, so if you don't want to do heavy repairs yourself, keep that in mind. Also, both of them had the inevitable boxer-related head gasket issues at about that mileage. I'm convinced it'll happen to every Subaru boxer due to the horizontal cylinder centerlines that mean a vertical head gasket. Oil pools and gravity drives it into the gasket where the acidic pH eats the gasket and aluminum block/head just enough to create small leaks.
The good news is head gasket failures are not usually catastrophic. The second time it happened on the 98, I didn't want to fix it right away, so I drove it for about 10,000 miles with a head gasket leak. It just burned a small amount of coolant, so I kept the overflow bottle topped off. The downside of abusing it that badly was that the head got "welded to the block" from the constant wetting of the corner stud. I cracked the block beating (no hyperbole - I beat it with a BFH) the head off. Fortunately, one of my neighbors builds aluminum big block mud-drag motors, and he's experienced with TIG-welding repairs to those. He welded it and re-decked the block for me, and back into service it went!
It's been a ton of work keeping the 98 running, but I'm very attached to the simplicity of that car. If I could buy a new one exactly like it, I do it "every day and twice on Sunday."
damn that's some dedication, I don't know if I'll be willing to go that far with it, certainly not doing the heavy work myself, my skills are at best suited to the TJ, when I look under the hood of the Subaru I tend to just want to stick to the basic maintenance things. I've got a really good local shop that specializes in Subarus, they build high performance ones but also handle day to day crap, if they prove to be reasonable on bigger ticket items when I need them I'll go that route. Mainly I'm just not at all impressed with new cars, not their design, not their complexity, not their ridiculous amount of tech, and certainly not their price tags. Though, I'm not sure that last part is going to last much longer, I believe these greedy fucks have overstepped in a big way & now they're all eating inventory like no time I can recall in history. It's not uncommon for dealerships to still have 'new' 2023s still on the lot much less 2024s all of which are now side by side with 2025s. They fucked themselves with these silly ass prices and people to a large extent have said no thanks. I'm one of those people, which is the whole basis of my post above, under normal circumstances I'd have dumped the subie last year at 10 years old for new Honda or Subaru had the world not turned sharp left into the funny farm in 2020, but as it stands I've turned my usual guaranteed once a decade new car purchase format into a once every two decades purchase as a direct result of their collective shenanigans, they can all blow me & millions more like me while they're at it.
I long ago gave up on new cars. The COVID-induced current pricing is just the most recent issue. I like simple vehicles for daily drivers and long ago realized that all the electronic new features are cost-adders, weight-adders, complexity-adders, repair-adders, etc. - in addition to being convenience-adders. Too many cons for that one single pro.
Thirty years ago, buying new every few years made sense, for me. Repairing an old vehicle to keep it running wasn't cost-effective. In the last two decades, that has changed, in large part due to all the new features every year. Because I enjoy working on vehicles, I save a lot of money by keeping old vehicles running. Subarus definitely are higher-maintenance than Hondas or Toyotas. However, replacement parts are relatively cheap, and the all wheel drive is very refined, and I like all wheel drive.
My wife's Impreza is likely the last Subaru she'll drive. It's the last generation of manual transmission Subarus. I can't buy a base Impreza with a stick anymore.
I long ago gave up on new cars. The COVID-induced current pricing is just the most recent issue. I like simple vehicles for daily drivers and long ago realized that all the electronic new features are cost-adders, weight-adders, complexity-adders, repair-adders, etc. - in addition to being convenience-adders. Too many cons for that one single pro.
Thirty years ago, buying new every few years made sense, for me. Repairing an old vehicle to keep it running wasn't cost-effective. In the last two decades, that has changed, in large part due to all the new features every year. Because I enjoy working on vehicles, I save a lot of money by keeping old vehicles running. Subarus definitely are higher-maintenance than Hondas or Toyotas. However, replacement parts are relatively cheap, and the all wheel drive is very refined, and I like all wheel drive.
My wife's Impreza is likely the last Subaru she'll drive. It's the last generation of manual transmission Subarus. I can't buy a base Impreza with a stick anymore.
sadly sticks in general are going the way of the dodo bird which really sucks particularly in tandem with the proliferation of CVT transmissions, it's as though the manufacturers all got together & said hey, let's replace nearly bullet proof manuals and pretty damn good automatic trannys all with over-priced one-size fits all temperamental CVTs that no one likes, but they allow us to squeeze 1 extra mpg to satisfy mother government's ever increasing CAFE standards AND lets us charge 9 grand for a replacement, win win, except for the people buying this crap.
I enjoyed my 10 year rotation because after a decade in the same seat I'm usually ready for a change of scenery, and the car usually had really good residual value at that point so I wouldn't have to add a ton more to buy my next new one cash after selling the old one. But the world's Covid-brain fucked up my mojo on all those fronts & here we are.
Eli and Owen are still being Eli and Owen though a bit more refined.
Eli is now 5'6" at 12 and 150 lbs. He also eats like a horse. I took him to an all you can eat pancake and sausage breakfast at the local American Legion this morning. He put away 4 pancakes and 10 pork sausage links. I think I got my money's worth. He's in soccer practice during the off season and plays bucketball. He's the tallest kid on the team and not their best player. At all. He's developed an interest in music and theater. He also got a note from a girl during a play rehearsal, apologizing for "staring at him too aggressively". Also has an advanced sense of humor. One of his teachers handed each student a slip of paper and asked each kid to check off who would win the Super Bowl tomorrow. He crossed off both the Chiefs and Eagles and wrote in 'The Refs'.
Owen is still Owen. Still playing hockey and always smiling. He scored a few goals and is still the smallest kid on the team. Still stutters but not as much. Kind of surprised with his speech issues that he can pronounce each and every model of Lamborghini car and I can't come close. He's going to be a little Gearhead. He wants me to take him to more motorcycle races this summer.
As for grandpa, tomorrow will be one year since I broke my ankle doing fun but stupid shit on roller skates. Last Thursday night, I finally managed to get my foot into an inline skate boot and roll around for 90 minutes. While rolling around, there were a whole lot of people rolling around wearing big hair, shoulder pads, Lyotards, Def Leppard t-shirts, white suits, and other stuff in pink and teal. I skated up to one woman and asked if this was an 80s party. She said, "Yes. 80s woohoo!" I said, "Thank Ja, thought I was having a flashback."
At 69, I'm the oldest guy on that rink floor.
Eli is now 5'6" at 12 and 150 lbs. He also eats like a horse. I took him to an all you can eat pancake and sausage breakfast at the local American Legion this morning. He put away 4 pancakes and 10 pork sausage links. I think I got my money's worth. He's in soccer practice during the off season and plays bucketball. He's the tallest kid on the team and not their best player. At all. He's developed an interest in music and theater. He also got a note from a girl during a play rehearsal, apologizing for "staring at him too aggressively". Also has an advanced sense of humor. One of his teachers handed each student a slip of paper and asked each kid to check off who would win the Super Bowl tomorrow. He crossed off both the Chiefs and Eagles and wrote in 'The Refs'.
Owen is still Owen. Still playing hockey and always smiling. He scored a few goals and is still the smallest kid on the team. Still stutters but not as much. Kind of surprised with his speech issues that he can pronounce each and every model of Lamborghini car and I can't come close. He's going to be a little Gearhead. He wants me to take him to more motorcycle races this summer.
As for grandpa, tomorrow will be one year since I broke my ankle doing fun but stupid shit on roller skates. Last Thursday night, I finally managed to get my foot into an inline skate boot and roll around for 90 minutes. While rolling around, there were a whole lot of people rolling around wearing big hair, shoulder pads, Lyotards, Def Leppard t-shirts, white suits, and other stuff in pink and teal. I skated up to one woman and asked if this was an 80s party. She said, "Yes. 80s woohoo!" I said, "Thank Ja, thought I was having a flashback."
At 69, I'm the oldest guy on that rink floor.
My mom had two sets of twins from two different men. One set was sisters 2.5 years younger than me. And the 2nd set was a boy and girl from another man. Those two look like twins, but you can see the different personality's and attitudes.
not sure what made me happier this morning. The fact my generator fired right up and ran for 8+ hours after the wicked storms we had last night OR I hit the ROI for not having to replace the contents of my fridge.
Sold the office building 
Downsized to a rental one-third the size in a far better location with a lease term that roughly coincides with my projected offramp from the profession, bigly happy!
The weight lifted off my shoulders cannot be overstated; I feel like a contestant on “My 600lb Life” that somehow dropped four-fiddy overnight. I was very tired of being a building manager, landlord, general contractor, inspector, grounds keeper, trashman, gutter uncloggist, liaison for endless government inspections & related bullshit & 52+/- other pain in the ball-sack joys that go along with owning commercial real estate; all that in addition to my actual job.
Bonus, my young associate has completed his apprenticeship & is ready for live fire
I now only have thoughts of what can be, unburdened by what has been
Downsized to a rental one-third the size in a far better location with a lease term that roughly coincides with my projected offramp from the profession, bigly happy!
The weight lifted off my shoulders cannot be overstated; I feel like a contestant on “My 600lb Life” that somehow dropped four-fiddy overnight. I was very tired of being a building manager, landlord, general contractor, inspector, grounds keeper, trashman, gutter uncloggist, liaison for endless government inspections & related bullshit & 52+/- other pain in the ball-sack joys that go along with owning commercial real estate; all that in addition to my actual job.
Bonus, my young associate has completed his apprenticeship & is ready for live fire
I now only have thoughts of what can be, unburdened by what has been
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