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

wlkelley3 said:

In reply to BoxheadTim :

Ouch!! I spent most of the winter recovering from Plantar Fasciitis. Hurt like h-e-double hockey sticks, especially walking. Had to get special insoles for all my shoes. PT and special exercises along with this special "Straussberg" sock to wear when I sleep. It goes up to below my knee and has a velcro strap fastening kinda loose but tighter than the calf so it doesn't pull down and another strap going from the toes to the top of the sock restricting foot movement. Keeping the foot level or pointed slightly up towards the knee. Apparently pointing toes down stretches the Plantar Fascia muscle in the bottom of your foot. If I don't use the special insoles my foot will hurt fairly quickly. If I overdo it my foot will ache a bit. The physical therapist told me this is a from now on forever thing.

Sorry to hear that. I'm still wearing heel cups from the achilles tendonitis incident a couple of years ago. I feel your pain...

Gout is much worse but can be controlled. Have friends that have had it. Too bad about beer.  Excuse to go the the hard stuff now? 

Well, that's one option, although not a good one. You're supposed to cut out/cut down on alcohol (not that I drink a lot - a sixpack usually lasts me 1-2 weeks) anyway, but beer is worse than wine due to the brewer's yeast.

On top of that it looks like I also get to cut out the Kombucha as its acid nature interferes with the body's ability to get rid of uric acid.

I've changed my diet back to what it was a few years ago when I wasn't traveling as much, mainly to boost my intake of fiber (which is supposed to help a lot). My main concern is that that diet isn't going to translate well when I'm traveling. Which is of course what I kinda do for a living.

My oldest kid (28 year old male) lives in Boston for the next 15 months finishing up a 2 year post doctorate research position.  This is the second time a "sorry I hit your car, call me" note was under the wiper in the past 7 months in bean town.  Passenger door and now the rear bumper.

I might be sicker to get his picture texts than the actual damage.  

I wouldn’t move to Boston without buying a disposable car I planned on abandoning as soon as I could move away. 

Boston and NYC are park by touch.. at least NYC is a lighter touch than Boston. Beantown also requires the sound of crunching plastic or metal

Some dude is across the street kirkin' out and Kung Fu fighting the shadows of his life. I could call 911 for a welfare check but I've had two beers so I won't. Hopefully he'll tucker himself out by the time I go to bed.  I'm not hopeful. He's pretty juiced up.

Sod it. He's not getting any better. Of course as the fire truck pulls up for him he takes off. No win there. 

In reply to nutherjrfan :

Drinks and a show! 

Hey, at least you tried. That's more than most people would do.

Duke said:

I wouldn’t move to Boston. 

FTFY

I have never paid this much for auto insurance in my entire life​​​. Not even when I was 21 and had a high powered, rwd convertible that was financed (an insurer's worst nightmare I'm sure).

$296/month for a nine year old Kia with liability only is straight up insulting. Since I'm in Florida, most companies only offer 6 month policies, which contributes to the high premium. I've been with my current provider for 17 years with no tickets, accidents or claims.

Now I'm trying to insure my Transit Connect. And since it's financed, it must have full coverage.

I've been shopping around. Progressive is in the lead with $322/month for full coverage on the van and liability only on the Kia with the same coverage limits as I have now. That's only about $30 more per month than I'm paying for just liability on the Kia through my current provider.

The Kia costs nearly the same with just liability as the van does with full coverage. Its ridiculous.

I gotta bug the seller of the van to mail me the title so I can mail it to my credit union so they can mail the registration forms to Florida so I can register my van. As soon as it's good to go, I'm getting rid of the Kia.

What a giant PITA 

I needed the big Racing Beat 1 1/8" front sway bar for my car, so I ordered one at $170 on Saturday and got the shipping notice recently. Today, a used one showed up for sale locally for $100. Grrrrrr.

A convoy of vehicles just drove by my front window tooting their horns and ran both stop signs ( very small block ). Each one had a poster of a stop sign saying ' Stop the Killing.' 

Plumbing. 

I despise it. First, we had a drain clog (outside the house) that had apparently been there for weeks or months, causing dirty water to overflow to the swampiest part of my yard. 

That was the end of 'flushable wipes' being flushed in this house...

Then last night, i slipped and bumped the toilet upstairs. The entire thing twisted sideways because the metal ring on the toilet flange had turned to rusty flakes and the only thing holding the toilet in place was gravity. (the pic below is the same flange as was originally installed). 

Worse, this is the second flange to fail in the exact same way. It's a terrible design. (the all-plastic ones are worse though, because they just fatigue and break, 

Last time, I got some stainless steel replacement ring sections and installed them where the red ring had been. This time, I went to my local hardware store and pondered life for a while sitting on the floor of the plumbing aisle looking at the different options for repair. I could get another ring (but would have to do more with the plastic plumbing to replace the whole piece because even though it said "NOT GLUED" in Sharpie... it wouldn't budge. 

There was a metal plate that bolts to the floor around the pipe and provides slots for mounting... interesting, but even though it seemed more substantial than the red ring... it will have the same end result. Nothing in stainless or brass, unfortunately. I'd think a brass ring would be the best way to go. But nobody would pay for that!

So I found this:

Made by Danco, includes mounted stainless (maybe?) studs, and sits above the wax ring. So at least in theory, no metal should be exposed to water. Compared to a repair plate and new set of bolts, maybe $5 oor $6 more... but I like good engineering. I want to support good engineering. I hope I'm right and this doesn't end up with some other weird failure mode. 

And now we are back to our full complement of working toilets.

Until the next incident of... plumbing! (picture me saying it like Captain Kirk says "Khan!")

If a dude has a FOX shocks logo sticker on his truck, it's 95.6% likely to be driven like a total dick.

Appleseed said:

If a dude has a FOX shocks logo sticker on his truck, it's 95.6% likely to be driven like a total dick.

Also about 75% likely the truck doesn't actually have FOX shocks.

In my defense, the truck came with the fox sticker on it and a set of blown Bilsteins. I just can't get the damn sticker off. 

Appleseed said:

If a dude has a (...) truck, it's 95.6% likely to be driven like a total dick.

(note: tongue in cheek here.  Stay calm)

Needs a sticker removal thread. There's a stupid Rottweiler one on the SVT glass. 

In reply to nutherjrfan :
Isn't that why God invented single-edge razor blades?

In reply to Duke :

I'll admit I haven't tried in a while. Heck for all I know someone has broken into the garage and stolen it off the jackstands. One can wish. I'm actually going to go over there now because I think that's where my cheap obd scanner is. 

Dunzo. Funny until very recently I've never had the need to own a single edge razor blade. But I was getting sick of using my keys to scrape off sexually vulgar political hate speech around the city. 

At least that got rid of some of the ugly.

I leave for ohii at 4am. Stipl have a long list of E36 M3 to do before bed, and im still at work, and today was supposed to be a half day. And tge system just went down for maintenance. berkeley.

In my department at work, we have four sub-departments. Lighting, Carpenters, Audio, and AV. All of the supervisors for the sub-departments are pretty cool except for ours in lighting. He can be a true dick, but they won't get rid of him because "he does so much". He also racks up 10+ hours of OT a week doing his job that the other supers can do in 40 because he is computer illiterate, and the silly E36 M3 he wants us to do daily is just out of hand.

He has us all in at 5am tomorrow to prep for a super easy show on saturday. I am a night owl, I work evenings.. going from 4p to midnight everyday to 5am to 1pm for one screws me up something awful.. now my sleep schedule is going to be out of wack for days.

100 miles into my vacation to ohio. Lost steering in the truck. Aaa just denied to tow me due to having stuff in the bed. Im berkeleying LIVID.

In reply to Dusterbd13-michael :

Were you using the truck as a truck?  What were you thinking?  

That seems like a BS reason.  Was it the driver who denied you or the phone operator?  If the phone, I'd call back and get another operator. 

Ugh, the one place that I thought I could get one more wheel of my apparently unobtanium bronze Sparco Terra wheels just emailed me.

Their supplier cannot find one. Anywhere.

I knew that buying a set of three wheels that were on clearance at the Tire Rack carried some risk, but damn, these things just don't exist anywhere anymore.

Now I'll have to order one of another color and either have it powder coated to match the other 3 (difficult to get right because of the bronze color) or have the 3 wheels powder coated to match the one (more money).

I still need TPMS sensors and tires.

It's just money, right .

In reply to John Welsh :

Stupid of me, but yes.

We limped to a service station and are swapping out the box