Posts filed under 'Misc'
So I resisted for a long time from creating a Facebook account. A number of months back I finally took the plunge, created an account and started adding all the people I ever came in contact with as a friend. I suddenly found it a lot easier to upload a few pictures or post something quick/simple to Facebook instead of here on the blog. Well, the newness is gone, I’m not getting too many friend requests any longer, and I now only log in every now and then when I get bored or someone comments on something that somehow triggers an email that I get. The funny thing is, I still find it easier to post something there than I do here. I must have been tainted by the easiness of uploading photos and posting quick comments. To be totally honest, it’s easier to get a targeted audience when I post something there too.
Well, no man can server two masters they say. Perhaps I’ll ditch both efforts, launch a twitter account and then just have my blog and Facebook automatically track that.
January 17th, 2010
I just had to write this down. Here is what happened today at church.
1) Dallin’s 1st tooth came out. I sent him to swish some water at the drinking fountain.
2) I got released from being the Webelos Leader. I was surprised. Nobody told me about it.
3) The bishop pulled over the counselor and talked in his ear for 30 seconds or so.
4) I got unreleased from being the Webelos Leader.
5) The counselor did some other releasings and then said the High Counselor had some business.
6) The high counselor got up and said the our ward counselor already released the person he was there to release so he didn’t have anything else.
7) We had a baby blessing. The baby spit up all over his dad on the way to the front. Everyone laughed. He took his coat jacket off.
I think after those things, church was more normal but we sure got off to a funny start today.
November 2nd, 2008
Sometimes, things are just meant to be. Here is a little story that happened a couple weeks ago to illustrate the point.
Last month we bought a suburban.
2004 Chevy Suburban. Not the greatest picture, but Peggy has been bothering me to post one.
We’re satisfied with the “burb”, but after a short bit, I noticed the receiver hitch for hauling trailers had been removed. Hm?? Why would anybody do that. I was slightly disappointed that we were going to have to buy a replacement which would end up costing more than we’d like to have to pay. We got a pretty good deal on the burb though so I figured oh well, we’ll get it fixed up when we actually need to haul something.
So anyway, Last week on Friday I came home from work to find Gayla not feeling all that great. Instead of waiting for her to find the energy and will to make something to eat, I packed up all the boys and headed for Subway.
About the time we got to Pleasant Grove, I noticed that I hadn’t actually headed for Subway. Instead, I ended up near Hogi Yogi. For some reason, I didn’t want subs from Hogi Yogi, but wanted Subway instead. So I said to the boys, “Where is a Subway guys, I forgot?.” I remembered there was one in American Fork.
Back to American Fork we headed. All of a sudden Scott yelled out, “Dad, there is a Subway over there..”. He was right. Turns out there was a Subway in Pleasant Grove, I just was a couple blocks off.
We got a few subs.
You might be wondering what all this has to do with trailer hitches. Well, it turns out that the Subway in Pleasant Grove happens to be next door to where the guy I purchased the Suburban from works. After I came out of Subway, he came running out and said, “I thought I recognized that suburban!”. Turns out he had the trailer receiving hitch right there in the back of his pickup! He had forgotten our number or lost or whatever and hadn’t contacted us to get it.
See. It was just meant to be that we had a receiver hitch for our Suburban. Now we just need a trailer!
November 2nd, 2008
Today, Scott decided to make an ice-bowl. He used a balloon to freeze water until it was about 1/2 inch thick. Then the boys enjoyed their frozen water treat.
Scott’s ice bowl
August 10th, 2008
We had a busy week. That is somewhat of an understatement. A more accurate depiction of our week would be to list all the things we were supposed to get done and then line item all the things we didn’t get done because of the activities we were participating in. Amongst all our business however, I was able to get the Webelos together to build a catapult on Tuesday, and then attend the Jeremiah Johnson Camp Saturday. I thought I’d mention a little about how we did.
Before I write about the catapult competition, I thought I’d mention that the boys had fun participating in a wide variety of activities and making progress toward a lot of activity pins. We learned things about planets and stars, slingshots, bows and arrows, BB guns, engineering stuff and even made some miniature catapults.
The leaders guide for the camp said if we wanted, we could bring a catapult to shoot a tennis ball. They said they didn’t want something too terribly big, but something that you could bring and generally not have to assemble when you go there. Here is what we built Tuesday:
Actually, Tuesday we got the frame and most of the work done to where we could launch something but I had a little touch up work to do Saturday morning. Saturday, I put some caps on the end of the axel and screwed a few more screws into the frame so it wouldn’t fall apart. I also added an extra bungee cord so we could get a little more distance.
We won the distance part of our competition by quite a bit. I think we were shooting around 40 or 50 yards but nobody was measuring. (That counts how far the ball rolled after it hit too.) One time, our ball hit some kinds of bump or ditch and bounced backward. It rolled backward for a ways and was still quite a bit further than the nearest ball from another catapult.
For our efforts, we won a bag of jolly ranchers that the boys enjoyed!
June 29th, 2008
For a while, we’ve had our eye on a larger TV set. The old 21″ tube that we received from Gayla’s parents was just a little out of date. We decided we’d spend some of our tax refund on a new flat screen LCD TV. For the last while, I’ve been researching all the different options for receiving digital content and I thought I’d write it down for whomever is interested.
We ended up getting a refurbished TV instead of purchasing one locally. After the shipping costs, we still saved about $160. Pretty much any flat screen TV you purchase these days is going to have a wide screen ratio of 16:9. Most older TVs have a 4:3 ratio. When you rent a movie formated for 4:3, it usually says “This movie has been formatted to fit this screen” or something similar. Now, since all of our movies and TV are still being played in that ratio, we have black bars on the sides instead of on the top and bottom!
DTV Options
If you’ve seen standard definition programming on a high resolution screen, you might have noticed that it doesn’t look as good. You can see fuzzy edges and the whole picture looks slightly blurry. To get a nice crisp picture, you have to have high definition programming. As soon as I started looking around at different options for HD programming, I was dismayed at the costs. We currently have Dish Network. To upgrade to an HD receiver and HD programming, we have to pay extra for a nicer receiver, extra for additional channels (they don’t offer the family package in HD), and extra just for having HD. The entire cost comes to around $77/month. I’m unwilling to shell out $77/month for a bunch of crappy channels that I don’t care about anyway so I kept looking. I found out that the other options for purchasing HD programming are pretty much similar in price to Dish Networks. You can’t be fooled by Comcast’s triple play or any of the other offers out there. They give you a nicer rate up front but in the end, charge an arm and a leg.
The good news is that in most areas, you can get the local channels for free over the air. You may have heard about the February 2009 deadline for TV stations to broadcast digital signals instead of analog signals. This means that if you use an antenna to watch TV and you have an old TV, you’ll have to either upgrade your TV or purchase a set top box for around $40 that converts the new digital signals to analog that your TV can understand. If you think that stinks, the government will give you a $40 rebate toward the purchase. Many people are opting simply to upgrade their TV.
I want to distinguish between DTV and HDTV. Many stations are broadcast digitally but they are still in a lower resolution. The only difference with HDTV is that it is broadcast at a higher resolution. Usually, HDTV also has an accompanying 5.1 surround sound audio track being broadcast too. Either way, DTV or HDTV, you have to have a new TV or a set top box to receive it over the air.
Back to Bunny Ears
I decided to give the old bunny ears a try. Most of the shows we like are on locally broadcast channels anyway and we could get a Tivo to record them. (You can plug the antenna into a Tivo too.) I first bought a $15 pair of bunny ears at Best Buy. We seem to have a dead spot in our house around where the TV is. We could pick up a few channels OK but none of the digital channels. I took that back and picked a $30 version at Walmart that has an inline signal amplifier. It worked a lot better. We could pick up a few digital channels. They look great! We still have the receiving problem by our TV and I had to move them by a window to get results so I decided to go all out and by a bigger $60 antenna that you can mount inside your attic.
I had more trouble finding a spot to mount that antenna than I ever thought the result was worth. We could pick up 18-23 digital channels depending on where I could position that antenna but I couldn’t find a good way to route a cable from the attic to where our TV is. In addition, we should have been able to pick up more channels. I could find some in some places and other positions would get different ones. After cutting two holes in different walls (I still have to repair those), and trying different indoor and outdoor positions, I decided it just wasn’t worth it and took that one back too. I think we’ll just buy a nice outdoor antenna that mounts on the roof and hook it to the cable that our Dish Network satellite is currently connected to. We still have a few more months on our Dish contract so we can’t get rid of that just yet. I guess in the mean time we’ll have to deal with a not as high quality TV picture.
On the bright side, Wii games look great with component cables!
February 10th, 2008
For some reason, I keep thinking that it’s better to spend 8 hours working on a vehicle than to drop it off somewhere and pay someone over $200 to do some work.
Anyway, last time I changed CV boots, I had to do 3 of them on my truck. I got all the tools, the parts, and the know how back then, so I thought I’d just go ahead and pick up a new boot kit and do the work Saturday night. Well, as usually happens with my projects, I run into something along the way that makes things take more time. All this applies to our 1999 Hyundai Elantra. (So if anyone finds this by searching, they can learn from my experience.)
The first thing that happened was me braking two lug bolts trying to get the wheel and hub nut off. Who ever heard of lug nuts that won’t come off? I don’t know why they were froze on there. I think that last time I had my tires rotated, the studs were damaged. Whatever the reason, they were stuck on there hard enough for my big 1/2 drive tire iron wrench to just break them off instead of unscrewing them. (I really tried not to break them by the way but they just wouldn’t unscrew.)
The next problem I had was that I couldn’t get the drive axel out. There are 5 bolts around the inner cv joint that came off on my truck. I took those out on the car but the axel still didn’t come out. all my prying and wiggling didn’t change anything.
I decided to just go ahead and change the boot while it was on still attached. No problem because I was changing the outer boot anyway and had already separated the outer axel from the hub (which was pretty easy compared to my truck. I didn’t even have to separate a ball joint or anything). After removing the old boot, I again became stumped at taking the CV joint apart. I gave up and put it all together since it was 11:00 pm by this time.
On Monday, I bought a service manual. I immediately discovered 3 things.
- You don’t have to take out the 5 bolts to get the drive axel out. Instead, you just pry the joint out of the transmission. I did that and it wasn’t really even that hard.
- You cannot take the outer CV Joint apart. This is the weirdest thing I’ve seen yet. The joint is pressed together instead of clipped. To change it, you have to remove the Inner joint, slide the boot over the axel to replace the outer boot, and then replace the inner boot again.
- Buying the service manual is worth the $18.
Well, I had to head back to the store yet again to get more clamps and new boot grease for the inner CV boot. The extra boot clamps I picked up for the inner boot were the kind that you crimp on. Those are easy and go on real tight. Unfortunately, the clamps that came with the boot kit for the outer joint were those universal clamps that are variable length and supposedly you pull tight with a pair of pliers while pushing with a screw driver. Those things really stink. If I wasn’t so tired of driving back to the auto store, I’d have gone and got some more crimp-on clamps. Instead, I wasted an extra 1/2 hour or so until I finally got the dumb universal clamps to work.
Well, this morning (Tuesday) I drove the car in with only two lug nuts holding the front wheel on. The service manual says that you have to have special tools to get the hub apart (which I would have had to do to replace the lug bolts) so I just took it into the local tire place who said they could do the job for $30 or so.
As my neighbor Brian pointed out in my last post about trees, this might should have been filed in the “I thought it was a good idea until…” category 
It could probably go in the “I’m to cheap to spend money on…” category. But Hey, I didn’t have to spend $200+ to have someone fix it for me!
November 20th, 2007
Last night we went on a picnic and then I took a drive up the canyon to do some obligatory road hunting since we were there. Man I like having a range finder and some better binoculars now. We saw about 12 does.
Well, today when Gayla was driving home, she saw two deer run across from the temple into the fields there. She said they both had too many points to count. They were non-typical cactus bucks.
Hm, I guess I’ll have to start hunting American Fork instead.
August 24th, 2007
I decided to take a few pictures of my toenail after it got smashed as reported in this post.
Warning, these toenail pictures are not for the faint of heart.
You can click the “continue reading” link below to see them all.
Continue Reading June 24th, 2007
Today Gayla drove the Van to Spanish Fork. On the way back, she heard grinding noises, saw flashing check engine lights, maintenance required lights, and even a flashing drive light. The van wouldn’t go very good any more. When she pushed on the gas, it just revved the engine. Well, somehow she managed to still go forward back to American Fork. We took it in to the dealer today. Luckily for us, the transmission is still under warranty. We get to have a rental car for a few days (they pay for that too) but it is still annoying to have to fix cars. (I’m not complaining one bit that we don’t have to pay for it though.)
I bought a wheel barrow at Home Depot today. We got rocks scraped off our yard but there is a few where the bobcat couldn’t get. I thought I’d shovel a bit and haul some dirt around. My first load of dirt/rocks, the handle on the wheel barrow broke. That made my new load of dirt/rocks spill too. I went back to Home Depot and they gave me a new handle. Another annoyance but at least I didn’t have to buy a new one.
May 9th, 2006
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