Get Off My Lawn!

Winter at The Haven

/ Shane / Leave a comment

For reasons I will explain next week, I am a bit behind on posting things. However,  a couple of weeks ago we made a quick day trip up to the Haven.

First off, visiting this time of year means wearing blaze orange. Nobody should be hunting on our land, but with the amount of gunfire we heard while we were up there, better safe than sorry.

December 001

(photo credit goes to Evie)

Even with the vests on I’m absolutely positive we don’t look like the hunting type, but as we were coming out of the woods one of the neighbors stopped and asked if we’d been hunting and if we’d seen anything. I looked from my five year old to my two year old and back to him, and then I realized that, not only was he not kidding, but he was seriously waiting for an answer. That place is a whole different world, I’m telling you. I’m sure he’d be at a loss for words if I asked him if he’d paid $36 for parking.

The big bummer was that most of our signs were down. I obviously didn’t check them all, so I’m hoping the ones close to the road that are more exposed to the wind were the only ones effected. Looks like I have another job to (re)do in the spring. On the plus side, the raspberries seem to be doing well, and we continued the tradition of taking home a little piece of the Haven for a Christmas tree.

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Often when we go up there, we don’t get a chance to really explore South Haven, so it was nice to be able to do some of that. We checked out a restaurant (honestly not too impressed, but I’m glad we gave it a try!) and afterwards watched the awkward pre-teens on their awkward first dates at the ice rink.

We accomplished a lot this this year: making paths, cutting trees for wood, clearing out around the blueberries, getting the no trespassing signs up, planting the raspberries, finding a potential house location and clearing it out a little bit, hanging the swing/slide, and building the fire pit. We have even more ambitious plans for next year, including starting to  clear for the driveway and planting some fruit trees and some plants that don’t need a lot of care. Additionally I think of all the different people who came up and helped us this year, and I hope they all had a good time. I certainly enjoyed all of the help and companionship.

I feel like a broken record some times, but it just feels so wonderful to be up there, sitting in the woods, in the quiet, and just relaxing. Doing hard, manual labor there is more relaxing than sitting around here in the city. Going up there really does recharge my batteries a little bit, even if it’s only for a couple of hours.

I’m already pining for another trip (get it? pining?)

Don’t buy me a Christmas present

/ Shane / 1 Comment

I do hearby officially declare that I am releasing you from your Christmas buying obligations when it comes to me.

When I was a kid, Christmas was all about presents. Who had the most presents, who had the biggest presents, presents for the sake of presents. I’m not a kid anymore. If you ask me what I want, I might be able to come up with a thing or two, but honestly? What’s the point?

When it comes to gifts, there are three scenarios:

  1. In the best case scenario, we both buy each other absolutely amazing gifts that we love and adore forever but never would have thought of ourselves. Amazing. We’re awesome. This practically never happens, maybe once every couple of years at the absolute most.
  2. In a more typical scenario, we both buy each other gifts that we asked for very explicitly (like, we sent the hyperlink to the Amazon page and specified a size and a color), or gift certificates. These are offsetting gifts. We both could have purchased our own gifts, been out about the same amount of money, and saved a little hassle. We might as well wrap it up for ourselves too, since it’s not like you were going to surprise me with the gift that I forced you to buy in the first place. The only people who benefit in this case are probably multi-conglomerate corporations who take our cash and use it to pillage natural resources from Santa’s North Pole home.
  3. In the worst case scenario, one or both of us buys the other something they don’t want. In this case, the gift is a complete waste and the money would have been better spent burning on the hearth as a yule log. Waste of time and hassle, waste of money, and now it’s all awkward between us. Merry Christmas.

Scenario 1 is when the stars align. When you’re in scenario 1 mode, you absolutely know it. However, it’s not very realistic to expect the stars to align all that often. 99% of the time we live in scenario 2. Scenario 3 is what happens when you are forced to buy a gift for someone but you don’t want to fall into scenario 2, so you try to force scenario 1, but deep down you kind of know it’s probably not scenario 1 and you really would have been better off going with scenario 2 anyway.

I do not want to contribute to rampant consumerism. I do not want to contribute to the stress of people trying to rush around and buy presents for everybody. At this point in my life, I really don’t get all that much enjoyment from unwrapping presents anyway. Certainly not enough enjoyment to offset all the bad things that come along with it (the stress, the exploitation of peoples and the destruction of the Earth, the frozen smiles on our faces when we both swing and miss with our presents and realize we’re in scenario 3 territory).

I should mention that homemade gifts are somewhat of an exception, since they do not (usually) contribute to consumerism. In that case, what you primarily spent was time, not money, so that’s a little different. And anyway, those gifts probable already fell into scenario 1 in any case.

I cannot stop buying presents for people who I feel obligated to buy presents for, but I can at least release you from your obligation to buy for me. So please, only buy me something if you have something really, really good (we’re talking scenario 1 here). I’d rather have a great present every 5 years without all the mediocre-to-bad presents in between clouding the memories of the good ones.

Your Christmas present to me can be not participating in commercialism-for-commercialism’s-sake on my behalf. I thank you in advance.

I Made That

/ Shane / Leave a comment

In preparation for Evie’s Halloween costume, I made her a scrappy tutu.

This was really supposed to be Sara’s project. She found the tutorial and picked out all the fabric. However, she has such a massive backlog of projects that she asked me to help out. I probably would have helped in any case, but when she said it was for Evie’s Halloween costume, she knew she had me.

My family was always big on homemade Halloween costumes. They’re such a great opportunity to let your creativity fly. I really just don’t see the point of buying some costume off the rack and tossing it on your kid. Why even have a costume? What’s the point? It’s not like people are going to deny your kid candy if they’re not wearing a costume, not to mention that the costume is usually covered up by a coat anyway, so you might as well just send them out there with nothing on. Otherwise, you’re just making a donation to costume manufacturers. The fun of the costume is in the imagining and creating.

But I digress.

Suffice it to say, I’m keen on making Halloween costumes. Even still, I was just planning on helping out a little bit, maybe cut a few pieces of fabric or whatever. However, as I got going I realized, “Hey, I can do this thing.”

So I made a skirt. A skirt, as it turns out, that’s perfect for twirling…

Proof that packaging has gotten a little out of control

/ Shane / Leave a comment

Recently we received a large package. It was so light that it seemed like it was empty.

 

So they shipped a full-sized, 21 inch box for blush and mascara. I can only assume the Lacoste sample was thrown in for a little extra weight, to keep the box from blowing away. Even that was 99% packaging, with a tiny vial inside.

Not to worry though, as they proudly proclaim, they’re “going green”.

This is why I hate car repair shops

/ Shane / 2 Comments

Oh the time I have had, my friends. I apologize in advance; this is going to be a long one.

On the evening of Labor Day, my car died in the middle lane of traffic on a busy street. I put on my 4-ways, but I was causing  a pretty major traffic disturbance. People were honking and driving around me. I knew it wasn’t a good idea to leave my car there for very long, but I also had Evie in the car, and I didn’t feel like it was a particularly safe situation. I wasn’t sure if I could push the car by myself, but I didn’t really see any other choice, so one way or the other I was moving that car.

I braced my shoulder in the open door so I could reach in to steer and started pushing. Oh-so-slowly I got it going, and I crossed over a few lanes of traffic. I needed to make it around the corner to pull it safely out of the way, but the light wasn’t with me so I had to stop and wait. There must have been a little depression in the road there, because when the light changed I couldn’t get it going again. I started rocking it back and forth and eventually got it up and over the dip and back on track.

No one bothered to jump out of their car and help push (thanks citizens of Chicago!), but I did get it over to the side and out of harm’s way, even if it wasn’t in a legal spot.

Of course, then Evie and I had to wait for a tow truck to show up, and since it was Labor Day I had to wait quite awhile just to get a hold of someone. After finally getting off the phone with insurance, the tow truck dispatch said it would over an hour before they could get here. Luckily, when I said I had a kid with me, they ended up getting there in 30 minutes instead.

I had the car towed to a shop in my neighborhood that was only a few blocks away. Normally I have my car stuff done out by work, but that was very far away, so it really didn’t make sense to have it towed all the way out there. I had gone to this little repair shop attached to the Mobile gas station a few times before for very minor things and hadn’t had any trouble.

This time I had trouble. Lots of it.

But first things first, we had a funeral to attend in Michigan the next day. So we had to get a rental car, and I told the car people we’d be out of town for two days, but I could pick the car up on Thursday. The rental car and funeral part went very smoothly, so I felt like this whole ordeal was actually going to be relatively painless.

Unfortunately, when I called the shop up on Thursday they hadn’t started working on it yet. This meant I had to stay home from work that day, after missing two days for the funeral. It quickly became apparent that unless I was physically on the phone with them, they weren’t working on it. This caused me to call them every couple of hours to get an “update” on how it was coming.

Finally, I called them at about 7 p.m. and the car was ready. However, this conversation took place:

Guy: “My friend, how much did I tell you this was going to cost?”
Me: “Uh…you said $575.”
Guy: “Oh yeah. Okay, mi amigo, do you have any cash?”
Me: “Some, I guess.”
Guy: “If you bring $40 in cash, I’ll take $35 off, give it to you for $540.”

Now this was obviously some shady dealings, but then I decided I didn’t care. If that’s the way the guy wants to run his business, I guess that’s alright with me. There might be some risk for me on that $40, but mostly it’s risky for him to have shady deals going on with his business. Anyway, luckily this didn’t come back to haunt me, but I include it just as an example of how shady this place is.

Alright, so I show up to pick up my car, pay, and start to drive away. Immediately I notice that my check engine light is on, so I pull back into the shop.

Me: “The check engine light is still on. I guess the code needs to be cleared?”
Guy: “No, the guy with the computer isn’t here. You’ll have to come back tomorrow.”
Me: “Well, I can’t take the car while the check engine light is on.”
Guy: “No, no, no, don’t worry my friend. I checked everything out, everything is fine. I checked the oil. Just come back tomorrow, 10:00. The guy will be here, he’ll clear the code.”

I wasn’t too thrilled with that, but what was I going to do? So I took the car. The next day was Friday, so I put the kids in the car and we took it over there at 10.

Me: “Hi, I’m here to get my code cleared on my car?”
Guy: “Yeah, okay. The guy’s not here.”
Me, starting to get upset: “You told me to be here at 10. I’m here at 10.”
Guy: “Yeah, you’ll have to leave your car here.”
Me, gesturing to the kids: “I can’t leave the car here, I have my kids with me. This is my only car.”

Eventually the guy made a phone call and told me to wait for 30 minutes. I was feeling distinctly jerked around at this point, so we left and played at a nearby park, before coming back. The guy was there and he read the code before clearing it. The code said that the evaporation sensor was bad, but I’ve seen that code before: that’s the code you get if you leave your gas cap a little loose. So it made sense to me, because I knew they had to drop the gas tank to put in the new fuel pump. So if leaving the gas cap open and letting air in could trip that sensor, then it seemed reasonable that actually removing the gas tank would let air in and trip that sensor. I figured it was probably normal and they just forgot to reset it after they were done working on it. I thought that was the end of it.

That Saturday we were actually driving up to Wisconsin, and right away I noticed that the check engine light was back on again. However, the car was driving without any noticeable problems, so we went ahead and went anyway. After the various experiences I had had thus far, I really didn’t want to go back to the same place again, so on Monday I first called my usual repair place. They agreed with my self-diagnosis that something was probably not sealed or connected properly, but said they’d have to charge $115 to figure out what, so I should probably take it back to the original place and force them to do the job properly. So I called the Mobile back and the guy told me the soonest he could take a look at it was Thursday at 10 a.m. So I continued to drive all week with the light on.

On Thursday I was prepared to do whatever it took to get this resolved. I had to stay home from work for yet another day (it would have been 3 at this point, except I was already home on that Friday), so I really wanted to get this resolved. I decided that I would just wait there while they repaired my car, no matter how long it took. There were two reasons for this, 1) they seemed to work better when they had a reminder, and 2) I knew there would be an argument, and I didn’t want them to do something to my car afterwards.

Unfortunately, it went exactly as I expected it to.

In retrospect, the initial posturing was kind of funny, how we were both doing that thing where we’re smiling at each other but carefully choosing our words to make our position clear, like

Guy: “Okay, mi amigo, you want me to look at the new problem with the engine light?”

or

Me: “It says here on my receipt that all parts and labor are guaranteed.”
Guy: “Oh, are you having a problem with your fuel pump?”
Me: “Yes, according to the light on my dashboard.”

Unfortunately, that didn’t last long, and we quickly escalated into shouting. His basic position was that he couldn’t possibly have affected the evaporation sensor by replacing the fuel pump, and my basic position was that it would be awfully coincidental that this totally unrelated problem happened while it was at their shop. In addition, there was a bit of a disagreement about when the work should be done, his basic position being never, and my basic position being right now.

Even though I knew 100% that they had caused this problem, I had no way to prove it (something that he pointed out many times). This is what makes the whole thing so frustrating; you’re being done an injustice, and there’s almost nothing you can do about it. And they weren’t even entertaining the possibility that they could have done it. How nice it must be to be so confident that you couldn’t possibly have made a mistake.

I had arrived precisely at the agreed upon time of 10:00, but the guy there claimed I must have set that up with someone else, because he couldn’t possibly do it at 10. I had never seen anybody else at the shop, but I gave him the benefit of the doubt. Unfortunately for him, I didn’t really care who I had set up the appointment with: I was there now for the third time, a week and a half after I had originally dropped my car off, and I wasn’t leaving until it was resolved. I also graciously offered to talk to this other guy, his boss, or anybody else I needed to talk to in order to get this resolved. I also super-graciously offered to take my money back if he wasn’t able to fix my problem.

I parked myself in the corner, which made him very upset, but what was he going to do? I think maybe he intended to make me wait as long as possible, but then I unnerved him by knitting, so he broke down and put the car up on the lift. He explained to me how the sensor giving the error and the fuel tank weren’t even remotely connected, despite the hose I could see running from one to the next (and which, by the way, I knew to be false anyway or else how could leaving your gas cap open trip that sensor unless there was some connection?)

Finally, after an hour or so, he said the boss had to order a part, and I would have to leave and come back when they had the part.

Me: “And you’ll fix it at no extra cost?”
::Guy, giving me a hard stare for probably 30 seconds::
Guy, sighing: “At no extra cost.”

It somewhat seemed like a victory, but I was also disappointed that even after all that, I wasn’t able to get everything wrapped up. Now I had to come back yet another day, and every time I even thought about the car or the repair shop, I felt sick to my stomach. Although I can be a real pain in the ass when I have to be, I absolutely hate doing it. I hate it. I mean, I’m sure nobody likes it (or at least most of us don’t, I’ve seen some people who I’m pretty sure actually enjoy it), but it was just the last thing on earth I wanted to do. I almost just wanted to say forget the whole thing and just go pay to take it somewhere else, but it was the principle of the whole thing. On the other hand, were principles really worth losing 2 years off the end of my life from worry?

I called later in the day, and they said to bring it in on Tuesday at 8, because they wouldn’t have the part until Monday. They also made it a condition that I couldn’t sit and wait for it, I’d have to leave it. As I said, they were pretty uncomfortable with me sitting there (or maybe they were afraid I was going to knit again). I was a little nervous about this, but I got a sense that I was pushing them pretty far, and they needed at least a little victory. So I let that one go.

I stayed home from work yet another day, and dropped the car off at 9 (because when I called on Monday to make sure they had the part, they said they weren’t going to be getting it until Tuesday at 8). I had been hoping maybe they could get it taken care of right away and I could still make it to work, but then they told me “afternoon”. When I pressed for what time in the afternoon I should be there to pick it up, they said, “5 or 6”. You know, 5 or 6 in the afternoon. Well, I needed to pick Evie up from school, so I told them I had to be there at 5 (which meant paying for aftercare, but I didn’t get into that…I just wanted my stinkin’ car fixed!) and they said, “I’ll try to have it done by then.”

I did not have very high hopes. Excuse me for doubting.

Finally, I called at 3:30 and they said it was fixed. I walked back to the shop, psyching myself up the whole way for another round of arguing about whether or not I would have to pay. Truth be told, I brought some cash with me, since I knew that had special allure for them. I figured that I had saved $35 originally, so I would pay up to $40 in cash if it meant that I could just end all of this.

It didn’t come to that.

The boss was there and he gave me a little talk, but they gave me the keys and didn’t mention payment. I think the boss was trying to intimidate me, but there was a bit of a language barrier, so it didn’t come off as very intimidating since I had to keep saying, “What? I’m sorry, what?” We finally left it as the evap sensor must have ruined itself, but they did me such a nice favor by fixing it for me, and I shouldn’t really bother coming back there again. As far as I was concerned, if the problem was fixed they could say whatever they want, and they didn’t need to worry about me coming back anyway.

In any case, I took my car, with no check engine light, and went home.

Sooooo, anybody have a good repair shop in the neighborhood? You might say I could use a new place.