Minor rant thread. Post your rants o' the day here!

 

I know. I want a 2500/3500. But even most of them have E36 M3ty 6.5' beds, and the search engines are terrible at getting me relevant results. I don't want to filter through 100 trucks to find maybe 20 with long beds.  And the pictures only help if they're from the side.

Don’t forget half the time (all the time) the person entering the information doesn’t have a clue what it is. 6.5ft looks long so it must be a long bed. 

It seems like half the cars  listed as manuals are actually autos, people don’t have a clue

In reply to Mr_Asa :

Pretty sure she's advertising them..  Which is even worse..

Mr_Asa said:

eastsideTim said:

In reply to Pete. (l33t FS) :

The farther north or inland you go in Florida, the farther south you are.

Yup.  Good rule of thumb, more than 20 miles away from the coast and it'll start getting pretty rednecky.  Closer to the coast and the more yankee you get.

True, most cities in the panhandle are closer to the Alabama/Georgia state line than the coast.  I like to call Tallahassee South S. Georgia.  If it wasn't the capital it would be.  I'm 18 miles from the state line and 36 from the coast.   

OK, I probably dodged a bullet on the last one and yet another, even better, version of my dream bike comes up for sale. These things are total kickass and rare. Two in one year is unheard of.

So I send him an email in the following format.

Hi, I have three questions about the bike.

1

2

3

Thanks.

He answers one.

 It's niche, exotic, difficult to ride, and very expensive, which is why I was probably the only email you got about it today. FFS. I'm willing to pay a lot of money for a happy ending here. You could at least put a little effort into it.

Chinese for lunch as a reward for eating healthy the last few weeks. 

It is SERIOUSLY pissed i ate it. Clocked out early. 

Dusterbd13-michael (Forum Supporter) said:

Chinese for lunch as a reward for eating healthy the last few weeks. 

It is SERIOUSLY pissed i ate it. Clocked out early. 

That made me chuckle. Thanks!

$9,000 for a wedding reception? Wipe out half our savings for a 4 hour party? Sure, 10:00 at night when I'm dog E36 M3 tired is a perfect time start hardcore planning.  I'll be your Huckleberry because I think this is insane. 

If you  need me,  I'll be outside smashing my head with a hammer till I see sparkles. Its far less painful.  Motherberkeleyer. 

In reply to Appleseed :

It's entirely possible sadly.

Luckily my wife and I agree that spending a lot of money on a wedding is stupid. We rented a small Victorian mansion for a little over 1k that came with housing for a few of our guests for a week. Our band provided the music obviously so we saved there too.

9k is waaaayyyyy too much

In reply to Appleseed :

I think we spent less than that on our whole wedding.

If I had known then what I know now, we'd have run off to Vegas and had Elvis do it.

In reply to ShawnG :

The Scotsman in me is having an aneurysm.

Our wedding was $20 at a lawyers office on the way out of town. 

My parents rent their yard for weddings. Ever seen what $50k in flowers looks like? I have. The stupid amounts some people spend would buy the couple a nice house. 

In reply to Appleseed :

Shop other venues. That price is nuts. 
 

Old married guy advice... Is the future Mrs. Appleseed a princess, or can you have an adult conversation?  Money is the #1 cause of divorce in North America. Spend some time and effort to get on the same page and understand each others money habits. If you can't have an adult conversation about this, then you have bigger problems than a poor choice of reception venues. You may want to consider pre marriage counseling.
 

Good luck! 

I think we spent around 9-10k on our reception back in '03.  The biggest chunk was the catering but we got a pretty sweet deal on the venue since they had a cancellation and we were pretty flexible.  Had a really neat jazz band instead of a cheezy DJ, beer and wine for everyone, a fairly controlled collection of flowers, and the cake was both gorgeous and delicious.  I forget how many guests exactly, but I think we were in the 200 range so not huge but not tiny.  We had our disagreements through the process, of course, but in the end we both gave a little and got a little the way it should be.  I think the worst part for my wife was the florist.  The original proposal he had for us was four digits and may have even exceeded the cost of the band.  I didn't mince words about what I thought about the pricing structure and I may have made some presumptive statements speculating about his genealogy.  Looking back, we've never regretted a penny spent.

In reply to Appleseed :

Self uniting marriage certificate, backyard BBQ, BYOB. We're coming in about $1300 for our wedding after food, drink, and new clothes. But, no priest, no fancy venue, no dress clothes, cause that stuff isn't "us".

There was some resistance from her parents until we priced a traditional wedding and reminded them that we're not religious, and that if we do it our way we can pay out of pocket.

Of course our whole relationship has been backwards compared to most people. She got pregnant early on, we coparented for a few years then finally got together as a couple couple, bought a house, now we're finally doing the marriage thing.

We also don't really have friends, if everybody comes and brings their kids we're looking at maybe 40 people. That helps a ton.

This is a great topic, we had a family friend tell us about this horrible reception they went to a few years ago and after we drove away my wife and I looked at each other and laughed - it was ours. We were right out of college and both had good jobs but really that's not what we wanted to spend lots of money on. I think it was $2500 all in. We don't even remember it lol

Our biggest problem the biggest is guests. We have a lot of family and friends. They have all helped us over the years and are not about to start chopping people out. All or nothing. SWMBO and I agree on this one thing. 

We'd need a place that can hold 200 people.  Probably less, but this is the absolute most that will come. We'd  like booze and dancing. That almost rules out backyards and parks. 

The biggest problem last night was...last night. I worked for 12 hours and was Mr. Mom with the hellspawn for 8 more hours. DogE36 M3 tried is not the time to lay heavy duty thinking on me. That coupled with a ridiculous argument over something stupid a half hour earlier set the tone for the inevitable E36 M3show. 

Tonight will be different. It has to be. 

Truck tires are stupid.

The RV has 5 8r19.5 tires that are just getting to 6 years old and one that's 3ish.  Due to an error in front axle airbag inflation by yours truly, one of the tires got excessive shoulder wear and really needs to be replaced.  Fortunately, it's one of the older tires.  After I did my annual inspection the other day, I discovered that two of the other older tires are starting to show a little cracking.  One of them is of moderate urgency, the other will be fine for a while yet.  So I need at least two tires, really.  Of course the 8r19.5 size isn't really made much anymore, but I can go to a 225/70R19.5.  It's an inch smaller (plus or minus a couple millimeters), and I can't really make my headache move to the side long enough for me to think about what that does to the gearing and if that helps or hurts but I think it means that it's going to spin faster at highway speeds.  Does that mean climbing hills gets easier or harder?  I can't hold it in my brain long enough to come up with anything. 

Regardless, I can't put the two different sizes right next to each other, so I can either put two of the smaller tires on the front and move the good front tire to the rear axle, I can replace the four rear tires and pick the best of the current tires to move to the front, or I can just replace all 6.  At $235/tire, I think I'm going to just do the steer tires for now.  I'm still flirting with the idea of selling this rig and while I know that not immediately needing new tires will add to the value, I also know that adding $1500 worth of tires right now won't add $1500 worth of resale value.

We went the crazy route, courtesy of my MIL. I wanted to do it at the fairgrounds and order pizza and some kegs. That was "trashy", apparently. Why it would have been trashy is beyond me. 

If I got to have a re-do on it, I'd tell my wife and MIL that they can either let me handle everything - and I can pay or you can, not a big deal - or you can handle everything and you can pay, but I'm not involved in the planning or funding of it at all. 

Appleseed, check out Lake County Fairgrounds, Forest Preserves, some of the cheaper golf courses (Brae Loch, Countryside, Chalet Hills)... 

In reply to wae :

The lower overall height tires will shorten the gearing by about 2.5% and mean correspondingly higher RPM and speedo indication for a given road speed.  It will, however, improve acceleration and climbing ability to some extent.

How wide is the 225 versus the 8s on it now?  Will dually clearance be an issue?

In reply to Appleseed :

The venue we picked could have done 250 outside or 50 inside. 200 people does make it a lot more spendy though for catering and the like.

Ours was very different though. It was at a Victorian mansion and the bridal party came from 3 countries ( Australia, Canada and America), our wedding photos include a shot of us running away from a photoshopped T-Rex. She walked down to a version of the Jurassic Park theme that made everyone cry. The rest of the wedding party walked up to Electric Wizard, Doom Metal FTW. One of my groomsman made the cake. Our band played. It was totally us and it wasn't that spendy. It was basically a week long celebration too

In reply to Duke :

Thank you for thinking for me.  The 15 degree per day temperature swing here has my sinuses ready to explode and my head feels like it's in a vice.

In reply to wae :

You're welcome.  We've all been there.

Double check the overall heights for the actual tire make / model you're looking at, because that 2.5% may be more like 3%-4%, depending.

In reply to wae :

You might also want to check the load rating on the smaller tires. When I bought my class A it had tires one size too small on it. They were rated at 600# less than the factory size or about 3600 pounds less total. That's a fairly significant amount and it put the tire load rating very close to the GVWR. Closer than I was comfortable with. After buying 2 of the too-small tires for the steer axle, I ended up buying another 7 to get my rating back and have a proper-sized spare. 

Dear super-secret government entity. I can't program your operator without an Android device of some sort and a Bluetooth adapter. Even with the armed guard, you won't let me bring a cell phone and Bluetooth adapter into the room where the operator is located for "reasons." We are at an impass. 

Seriously, if the computers in there can be hacked with a 5 year old cell phone and a Bluetooth adapter, your super secret computers might need some updating. 

And the price is so high because at this point I have no choice but to replace the entire operator with one that can be  programmed manually. Or would you rather me install one that is steam powered?

In reply to Appleseed :

Ours was about $10k for 200 people. We spent extra on a few things but had a cash bar which saved a lot of money and let us have one of the few weddings on my wife's side with no cops.  Fortunately I was in a position to work enough OT to pay for it and an over the top honeymoon in Disney so I enjoyed going a bit crazy.