My Hood Will Open

There are a few details that need to be corrected from my recent post.

Correction number 1/2: Only one of my lights was obliterated. For some reason I thought that both had been destroyed but one is perfectly intact. I failed to notice that somehow.

Correction number 1: my hood will open. I was trying to pry my hood open with a pry bar a few days after the accident, and after a few pries, I let it be. A day or two later George Walker stopped to look at my car for a minute and he began undoing the bolt on the latch that holds hood down (it was easy to access since the grill was busted out. About this moment I had the most amazing flash of insight, "Jude, pop the hood". I hadn't tried that yet. Sure enough it worked.

Correction number 2: not being a car guy, I did not know that the venty thing that was bent up is actually the fins to my air-conditioning unit and not my radiator. My air-conditioner does not work anyways, so no loss there anyhow. There is a bend in the front framework of my car that needs to be pulled out, but George says it is easy and he will help. So it turns out that the only expenditure will be one new light housing which george says could be about $60. Not bad.

Correction number 3: I spoke demeaningly of my wonderful wife by hinting that she was not compassionate towards me in the post. That is not true at all; she cares for me very much. I have retracted those lines from the post. I did it thinking it to be funny, but it is never funny to be funny at someone's expense. I am sorry.

I'm Pregnant!

We are very excited to announce that we are expecting baby # 3! Today I had my first visit with my doctor and everything is looking great. We were able to hear the baby's heartbeat and it was wonderful. My due date is September 14th, but I will be having the baby on or before August 31st since my doctor says I'm at high risk for having a "car baby." SCARY! With Lisi I was 7 centimeters dilated with no symptoms whatsoever. And with Evie my water broke at 36 weeks. So, needless to say we are going to be cautious this time around. I was going to wait a few more weeks to make an official announcement, but most of our families know already and I have accidentally let it slip to a couple of people as well. I don't know if I could have lasted much longer. Looking forward to keeping everyone updated!

Broken Lights

So you know how I fixed my lights...they are broken again, actually obliterated. All that remains of my lights is broken glass. Actually just one of my lights is gone, the other survived unscathed. I was in a car accident.
Now to explain the situation; luckily, I chose to drive the 19 year old Toyota Camry to work this day. The accident occured at a busy intersection where wrecks occur all of the time. The lady in front of me started to go but changed her mind and braked to a stop, and I followed suit, BAMMM!!! The gentleman behind me was already looking over his shoulder to see if it would be clear and had not noticed that we had stopped. When he hit me my foot came off the brake and in the confusion I did not realize that I was moving, CRUNCHHH!!! I stopped on the bumper of the lady in front of me. No major damage occurred, except to my car. My neck was a little sore that day and the next but it feels great now. After the accident my car was still running and wasn't leaking anywhere although it looks as though my air-conditioning heat exchanger thing is now one with my fan. I was able to drive my car home. One of my light casings is obliterated. The gentleman who rear-ended me was insured so some compensation should be obtained before too long, much to my wife's satisfaction. We will be needing a van soon with another baby on the way.
-Jude

Ladies and Gentlemen

I am not sure where Evie gets her ideas from. This is a cute little episode from our lives the other day...

Ashley, Lisi, and myself are sitting in the living room.
Evie comes walking out from her bedroom carrying her book bag and nonchalantly says, "Hey mean people." This captures our attentions and smiles. She then says, "I've got something to make you nice." Then like a magician pulling a rabbit out of the hat, she puts her hand into the deep recesses of the backpack, says "Ladies and Gentlemen", and whips out a pink head band. I say "Oh, is that going to make you nice?". Evie responds, "No, it is going to make you nice". She then crowns me with the pink head band and her precious little smile.

- Jude

Saturday's Warrior

Yeah, do you remember that movie? It sure was cool.

A narrative tells of a legendary narrative whose story was the stuff of narratives. This will not be one of those, but if you have watched Kung-Fu Panda 13 times in the past 3 days you will understand - okay, maybe you only need have watched it once.

First off, I would like to tell of the second trash can turkey that I cooked this year. This occured the Saturday before Christmas. We were having a family party at our house and my wife commanded that I cook another parrot. Wait my wife says that she cannot stand when I call it parrot, so I cooked another wood pecker, is that better? This is okay with me because it is one of the few manly things I get to do. Most of my evenings are spent dancing like a princess, painting filange nails, and wearing feminine head apparel as this is the only items of my daughter's dress up clothes that will fit me. I found out the hard way. Yes, I dream of the day when testosterone will enter my life again.
Well back to the bird... It was a rainy week and the heaviest of the rain occured on Saturday. I believed that my bird needed to be cooked before the Sabbath so I went to work Saturday evening. It was still raining but that was okay with me, because I have a garage now. I often have brilliant flashes of insight like this, and when they hit me it is pure euphoria and all rational thought and my wife's cautions do not ever connect with my elated brain cells.
My wife tells me she is becoming annoyed reading this so I had better get to the guts of the matter. I opened both garage doors at either end of the garage so air could flow, and prepared my pigeon as described in a previous blog post. I arranged the fire area in the middle of the garage at the opening of the big door just inside from the rain and as much outside as possible. I lit my fire...then seeing how big the flames got, and how far the storm winds blew them, I panicked...I immediately removed the nearby gas cans from the vicinity, ran out the back door and drug my hose into the garage. After a while the flames died down and everything worked out just fine. The crow was amazing! The only drawback was the smell of burned wood pecker juice that stained my garage over the next few weeks.

The eve of Christmas Eve I had another opportunity to feel manly. Yes, feeling manly has become somewhat of a treat and I do feel to rejoice at these opportunities. The lights on my 1990 Toyota Camry have been busted for some time. They just stopped working. I do not know much about cars but I did know to check the fuses and the bulbs, all of which were good. Others suggested things like replacing relays or your dash switch, but that would have required about a half-hour of effort and would never have satisfied the inventor in me. I decided that I would take the road less-traveled. Some less-traveled roads are traveled because it is the right thing to do, others are traveled because the traveler is stubborn or desperate. I fell under the desperate category. I had procrastinated fixing my lights until the very last moment possible as we had to drive both cars to a Christmas Eve party. On my way home from work I stopped at Lowe's and purchased 40 ft of wire for about $10.
This was much cheaper than a 40 dollar steering column switch but probably more expensive than a relay.
However, inventing your own solution is priceless.
My car feels old, looks old, and is old. So I felt little or no fear at drilling holes in it and removing any sort of aesthetic panel that stood between me and my dream. Rather I felt a sense of excitement at the operation. Could I remove things make the changes I needed to make and put everything back together? I realize now that this might be how surgeons feel who operate on really old people. I appreciate the years of service my car has given me but I know the end is coming. I will do what I have to do to the car and if it passes away, oh well - it was going to happen before long anyways, but ripping the chest open for heart surgery sure was exciting. I hope that none of you ever have a doctor like this work on your loved ones. The plan worked. I cut the wires to my lights to get the plugs and ran wires straight off of my battery to the light plugs. For anyone who cares, the lights are wired in parallel. The most interesting part was deciding where to put the light switch. I decided that it definitely had to be in the cab, but how to get it there? Lucky for me, I walked out from church a few years ago and found my passenger sideview mirror missing. It had been broken off and was just gone. Some might not see this as a blessing but really it provided me the only decent way to run a wire into my car. I drilled out a bigger hole in the metal plate on which it had been mounted and pulled the wire through it. Now where do I put the switch? In the glove box of course. I removed my glove box door and used my soldering iron to carve out a rectangular piece out of the plastic back plate. I then drilled a slot big enough for a standard light switch to switch in. I mounted an old light switch to the back side of the door and wa-lah! My lights are now controlled by a switch on my glove box door. Pretty cool huh? In high school we thought it was cool when one of our friends duck taped his rear lights in place - this is so much cooler. Maybe my next task will be to route my window washer fluid line into the cab to use it as a Kool-Aid dispenser.

I am tired. I will try to add pictures soon and continue narrating recent events.
-Jude Collins