1994 & 1995 Sea Doos

1994 Sea Doo XP

1995 Sea Doo HX

I had these quite some time ago - thus the picture quality, or lack thereof (we used to have this stuff called "film").  It's no secret that anything with a flame job immediately catches my eye.  These bad boys had my name all over them. They were completely custom and in perfect condition.  Even the engines had been painted.

Air Mike!!! - My brother enjoying the XP.

Shelley's Nightmare! - My sister-in-law would not have approved.

This is the best we could do for action shots back then.

Barry at 50.....mph, not years old. :-)

We had a great time with these things, but only one of them was really all that functional.  The HX was a racing model, and wasn't stable enough at low speeds to cruise around on.  You were basically flying or you were tipping over.  To make matters worse, it was about impossible to get back on in open water.  The XP, however, was a blast to ride.

As much fun as they were, the unstableness of the HX combined with the fact that the trailer wouldn't fit in my garage at the time made it clear that they had to go.  

My brother and my nephew, Carter.  This little dude is a senior in high school now.  Man, I'm old!

2000 Ford F150 Harley Edition

2000 Ford F150 Harley Edition

Ford started offering Harley-Davidson edition pick-ups in 2000.  The 2000 model was an extended cab version of the F150 with mostly appearance upgrades and a few minor performance additions - most notably a cool sounding exhaust.  I wasn't a Harley guy in any way, but I picked this truck up for some reason and loved it.

The touches were subtle but consistent.  They branded the truck just about everywhere they could.  I drove this thing all the time and actually ended up selling it to someone I worked with who was a true Harley fan.  She had it for at least a few years that I know of.

This truck had a great sound to it and I thought it looked good too.  The Harley Editions got better and better of the next few years and I actually ended up buying a 2002 at one point.  This one was pretty much stock with the exception of a locking bed cover.

Guest House Construction: Part 16

Once again this will be a short post because not much has happened.  There has been some progress in the last week finally.  The AC guys came out and "roughed in" the HVAC for the entire structure.  

I remember the AC company owner saying that it could be done in a single day when he was out planning the job.  They ended up doing it in two days, but I would have guessed at least a week after seeing what goes into this step.  They have all this raw HVAC material - bags of vent ducts, vents, tubing, etc - and they basically have to fabricate everything to the house.  It's like making your own puzzle.  

They ran all of the ductwork first and then worked on the lines and the vents, return air, and furnaces. These guys also put in all of the exhaust vents and the vent for the dryer.  We have two separate units in this house, one for the downstairs and one for the upstairs.  There was a lot of wood work that went into this as well.  They had to build the decking for the furnaces and they used wood from our giant scrap pile to frame vent mounting points and to brace things. (My builder had told me that the AC guys would be the last ones that might use scrap wood so after they were done we could clean up the pile.  True to his word the pile is being loaded into a dump trailer as I write this.)

One of the two furnaces.  Our layout actually ended up being pretty easy for AC design and install - at least that's what they tell me.

You can see how they use boards to brace all of the vents.  

The utility room.  I'm not sure they installed the dryer vent in the right place, but it works for me if it's okay with the inspector.

This just shows a vent and an exhaust vent.

The only other thing that's happened is that the roofers came back and installed all of the Air Hawks they didn't have when they put the roof on.  They did this in a morning and put them all on the back side of the roof, which I assume is fine. It wasn't a critical timeline hold up, but it's now in the "completed" box.

Now we wait on the electrician to start.  I've been told he is contracted, but waiting for a crew to free up.

"The Steak & A Half"

I feel like I don't educate enough on this blog, so I thought I'd share a simple life hack that I like to call "the steak and a half".  In this example from dinner tonight it literally applies to steak, but any food is fair game really.

In order to accomplish this rather simple ruse you need the following things:

1. A healthy eating partner who likes salad
2. A willingness on your part to not eat salad

Luckily for me my wife loves to eat salad and I actually refuse to touch the stuff.  

First, you head to dinner at a place where you know your stooge will order something you like to eat. Tonight Nel and I headed to Boondoggle's, a local pub that she loves and that serves decent food.  Monday is 'Cheap Steak Night' (that's what I call it anyway - I think they call it 'Ribeye Night', but whatever). They serve a very good 14oz Ribeye with a baked potato and a salad for $14 I think.  I always order it, and, more importantly, I know that Branelle will get the same thing.

As I mentioned before, I don't eat salad.  I used to just say "No salad, thank you" and wait for my steak, but not anymore.  I order the salad.....exactly as Nel orders hers.  When they bring them out I just sit back as Nel devours her bowl of greens and then when she's done, I slide mine right across the table to her.

  

My wife is healthy, and she loves a good salad.  She can't resist and she will plow right through that 2nd bowl in no time.  I just wait patiently.

When they bring the steaks out I just calmly eat mine and then just sit there, knife sharpened, fork at the ready, until she cries "uncle".  My wife can eat me under the table usually, but she's too disciplined to stuff 14oz of beef into her stomach when she's full on salad.  She'll eventually just slide at least half that steak right across the table and then I go back to work.

One and a half steaks for me, and all it cost was a little rabbit food.  You're welcome America!  

2002 BMW M5

2002 BMW M5

I bought this car from Momentum BMW of Houston with about 20,000 miles on it but in mint condition.  An M5 had been on my wish list for years, and while this one is now two generations old, at the time it was the "new one".  I kept it and drove it for a long time before finally selling it for considerably less than what I paid for it.  

Unlike a 1999 M3 that I had previously owned, this car had some real power.  It was a beast at the time with about 400 HP - and you could feel every one!  The car was fairly tame when just driving around, but when you dropped the hammer you knew it.  The M5 is really best described as a German muscle car.

I loved the car, but the 6-speed manual wore on me over time.  As a daily driver it was an automatic away from being one of my favorites.  The clutch was just too heavy to be a comfortable car in the real world.  Still, no real complaints and I would certainly enjoy one again.  

That said, there are good reasons not to buy one.  You can get this body style M5 for very little money today, but I'm not sure you should.  Maintenance costs are going to be excessive, and I doubt many of these were "babied" - they're just too much fun to drive hard.  

Interestingly, I've owned 13 BMW's over the years but this is the newest one I've had.  I just stopped buying them for some reason.  I hate the SMG transmissions they started putting on cars for one thing.  Another problem is that they all started looking alike to me.  The 3-5-7 series became difficult to tell apart to the untrained eye.  I guess that's what they were going for, but it was a mistake in my book.

1999 Ford F250 XLT 4X4 7.3

1999 Ford F250 XLT 4X4 7.3

So I do these 'Random Vehicle Blogs' because I seem to have a sort of compulsive need to finish this catalog of all the cars I've ever owned (and I've been challenged to do so).  I say compulsive because if I had never started I wouldn't care, but I can't stop now.  This one came up tonight and it's kind of interesting because I only owned this truck for maybe a month or two, and it was probably 10 years ago, but it's in my driveway from time to time now.  

I used to keep a Superduty around all the time.  I'd buy a high mileage one and just drive it until someone wanted it or I got tired of it for some reason.  I bought this one with about 200K miles on it from Big H Auto Auction.  It was in great shape and ran great as well so I was happy with the purchase.  Maybe a month later I was visiting the build site of our home we were constructing in Seabrook and my builder took an interest in it.  He decided he wanted it and I was happy to let him have it for what I had in it so he wrote me a check on the spot and gave me a lift home.  The only down side was I had to go out and immediately find another one.  

The interesting thing is that same builder, Bill, is currently constructing our guest house at our home in League City and his son, who works with him sometimes, owns and drives the truck.  It has over 400K miles on it and it's still going strong!

Guest House Construction: Part 15

Well, the holiday's are a nice time of year but also frustrating when you're trying to build stuff.  This will be a short post because not much has happened really. A few weeks ago the roofers finished up with shingles, and then nothing.  I know that our builder has been out of town so I imagine that is the primary reason that no crews have shown up over the last couple weeks.  

When they show up, the roofers make pretty quick work of getting the house sealed up.

All finished....sort of.  They forgot to put in these things called "Air Hawks", primarily because the supply company forgot to deliver them.  They're here now, so we'll see how long it takes these guys to show back up and put them in.

The roof looks great, even if the build site doesn't.  I really should go door to door and apologize to my neighbors for how this place looks.  Fortunately, it's behind our house for the most part.

The only thing that's happened in about two weeks is that our outside doors have been delivered.  So here's where we are:

• AC guys need to come out and install two units.  They say that they can do all that in a single day.  I'll believe it when I see it.
• Electrician - we're ready for him.  He's got to wire up the entire house.  I have no idea how long this will take.
• Roofers need to come back and install the vents that weren't here when they left - not a big deal and can be done any time but no idea when that will happen.
• Cornice guys come back and install the doors that were delivered.  This includes a "builder's door" that sits in for the front door until we select one.

The only other update is that we've decided to make life unnecessarily complicated by starting on a pool.  I originally planned to wait until this thing was completed, but there's really no reason to do that, and in fact there are advantages to starting now.  Utilities for example, which are being moved and added anyway, can be done with the pool in mind if we're doing it now.  I'm meeting with different pool companies to see what they propose.  We'll see.  

1976 Buick Century "Free Spirit" Indy Pace Car

1976 Buick Century "Free Spirit" Indy Pace Car

Cool!  Finally the random program has picked a car I'm excited about (although I might be the only one).  For a time, I started actively collecting Indy Pace Cars. Every year the Indianapolis 500 selects a vehicle to serve as the pace car, and most years the manufacturer would release a "Pace Car Edition" to the public. In 1976, the Buick Century was selected for the 2nd year in a row (I also owned a 1975 Pace Car at the same time as this one).  

I bought this car from an individual up in East Texas and drove it home.  It almost made it, other than needing a new tire about half way down Highway 59. Other than that, it ran pretty good.  It wasn't a prefect car, but I paid next to nothing for it.

Once I had the car home I started fiddling with it from time to time.  A new set of tires - Firehawk Indy 500s of course - and a vanity plate reading "76 INDY" were the first couple of additions.  With a few adjustments, the car ran strong.  It had a built 455 that put out probably around 400 horsepower.  Unfortunately, there was no way this car could put all that power down.  It was still fun to drive and sounded meaner than it was.

This is what the car was supposed to look like, and what I always intended it to eventually look like.  Nobody was making the decal package at the time though, so I never got around to painting mine.  Buick produced 1290 of these in 1976. Most of them came with a non-turbo version of the actual pace car's V6, but two V-8 options were available.  Hurst Hatches were an option as well, but most of the ones I've ever seen have had them, although mine did not.  

The doors on this thing were at least a mile long and had to weigh two tons each.  

I actually really liked the interior on this car.  It was comfortable, and I loved that it had two buckets with a console shifter.  The maroon color was fine - it kind of worked on a mid-seventies ride.

George always liked this one as well.  When acting as my garage buddy he would head to the '76 (I assume because his white fur would show up best on the dark interior).

Nel, although amusing me here, didn't get this one really.  To be fair, we had just started dating and I hadn't yet had enough time to teach her what "cool" looked like.  I called this car "Thumper".  I had been calling my '75 Pace Car, which was white and had a rather weak motor, "Bambi", so Thumper made sense.  I eventually sold this one to a couple of guys from Utah who flew in and drove it home.  I told them I wasn't sure it would make the trip but they seemed unconcerned and headed out with big smiles on their faces.  They called me later to tell me they had made it without issue and had a fantastic time.

I miss this car.  It was a casualty of moving to a house with less storage.  I'd like to have another one someday if I could find one.  It's very rare to find survivors today.  Rust was the main culprit, but lack of collectibility and years of them being cheap meant not too many were really cared for or restored. 

NASA 2016 Christmas Stocking Competition

I have mentioned (complained about) this before.  My wife has a habit of agreeing to participate in various competitions at work and then somehow conning me into "helping".  They have a Christmas stocking decorating contest every year and each organization has an entry.  My wife works in the MER (Mission Evaluation Room) and last year she handed me a stocking the night before the judging and said "GO".  I put something together over night and they ended up winning.  I said "Never again"......for the 8th time.  

This year she actually mentioned it to me weeks in advance....and then never brought it up again.  She was busy at work and I had hoped that maybe someone else in the rather vast organization (maybe someone that at least actually works for NASA) might take the reigns this year for the MER.  Nope.

She at least gave me about 36 hours this year.  She told me on Tuesday and the judging was to be on Thursday.  I was really struggling to come up with any clever ideas.  They give you a standard stocking, but just decorating it isn't going to cut it.  Since I had no clever ideas, I decided to just go with ridiculous!  

I was in the garage looking for something to provide inspiration and I noticed our daughters' little Mercedes electric car.  We had gotten it for her a couple months earlier and I wondered if I could turn it into some sort of stocking delivery system.  We're doing some construction work at our house so I've got tons of materials just laying around.  I took a bunch of PVC and constructed a frame for a sleigh that could sit on top of the car.  I had plenty of PVC, but I did have to make a run for some connectors and glue.

On Tuesday night I painted the frame black with some cans I had sitting around.  I didn't get very far on Tuesday, but I had a plan. Wednesday I went to work.

On Wednesday morning I was ready to start testing.  The car was going to be running around inside NASA buildings so it needed to be clean.  Unfortunately, my wife's sister and her boyfriend had been visiting the weekend prior and Kyle had decided to take our daughter mudding in her Mercedes while playing with her unsupervised.  This actually turned out to be one of the most difficult and time consuming issues of the entire project.  Dried mud did not want to come off this thing.  I might have strangled Kyle if he wasn't back in Minnesota!

This is the frame sitting on the car.  The Mercedes S63 is really quite a machine.  Samantha can drive it but since she's a little too small to reach the pedals we got one that can be remote controlled.  It works great and she loves it.  It also has a functioning stereo and some really cool LED lighting.  I used PVC for the frame to keep the weight down.  I also used a little foam insulation to keep from scratching Sam's car (we never told her we were "borrowing" it).

I had the 'sleigh', and ideas for how to decorate it, but I decided that it needed to make a grand entrance.  As it was said in the movie Megamind:  What's the difference between a villain and a SUPER villain?  "PRESENTATION!"  I went to the store and bought some more PVC and built a large frame to act as a sort of box / garage.  I originally started to build this out of some of the scrap wood you see in the background but realized quickly that it would be extremely heavy.

Frame built and glued....check!  I made a slight miscalculation by forgetting to add the length of the connectors when computing dimensions.  I was barely able to get this in the front door of our house.  Uh-oh.  It was too late for a redesign at this point though, so I just hoped the doors in whatever NASA building we needed to set this up in were at least as big.

My plan was to have the car staged as this "present" and when it was time to be judged it would drive out in a cloud of smoke, lights, and Christmas music.  I knew that wrapping paper wasn't going to work so I went to the store and bought this fabric.  I thought I had way too much, but I turned out to be about three yards short.  My mother was kind enough to make a trip back out to get the last three yards that they had and I used safety pins to secure it around the frame.

I also bought a remote controlled smoke machine.  The idea was that you would set it up in the box and turn it on a minute or so before you drove the car out.  At the house it worked great!  When the car burst through the fabric door it was followed by a fantastic cloud of smoke.

Branelle actually did help with the decorating.  I cut out red foam board to make it look like a sleigh and attached some other fun items here and there for effect.  I also painted some M E R letters white and attached them to the sides.  We then wired it up with battery powered LED Christmas lights that would twinkle and poked them through the foam board.  Nel made ornaments with every console and group in the organization and put them on.  She also decorated the stocking.

When it was time to head up to NASA on Wednesday night to stage, it was quickly apparent that the box was never going to fit in the back of our truck.  Our only option was a trailer we have but it was located in a storage place we have nearby.  I went to get it and I could write a whole other post about that debacle.  It was blocked in by my Trans Am that decided it didn't want to start.  It wasn't a battery issue, it just wouldn't fire.  I had to have the trailer, so I pushed the TA out the door and down a small incline knowing that there was no way I would be able to push it back up by myself.  I was prepared to leave it until I was done with the trailer and come back in the middle of the night to figure it out but after I had the trailer hooked up and was ready to leave I gave it one more shot and The Bandit fired up.

We headed up to NASA at around midnight to set up, amusing the gate security on the way in with our idiocy.  The conference room to be used was on the 4th floor of one of the buildings.  The car was easy - we just drove it up.

The box was a different story.  We got it to the conference room but it was too big to fit through the doors.  I thought about taking the hinges off, but breaking government property seemed like a bad idea.  We figured out that with the right angle and the right flex, and one joint disconnected, we could force it in.

We set up the box, the smoke machine, and the car and Nel posted a sign on it to discourage peeking and we headed home.

This is what we ended up with.  I actually bought the sock monkey (because I couldn't find a Santa the right size) and I had the space helmet from a "Silly Hat Challenge" game in the NASA Kickball League last season.  The monkey is holding the stocking.  The little Christmas decorations including the reindeer on the front are all from Party City.  I even got a blinking Rudolf nose for the lead reindeer.  

I wasn't actually there for the competition, but you can see Branelle sitting in the corner as others present their stockings.  The idea was that she would start the smoke machine a few minutes prior to her presentation and also turn on the lights and start the car.  At that point you could drive it out of the box and around the room in a cloud of smoke with Christmas music blaring from the MP3 player.

Here is Nel taking it for a lap during judging.  I've heard that it didn't quite go as planned.  One issue is that apparently the smoke machine worked a little too well and there was so much that people started to look concerned.  Another minor issue occurred with the music.  Apparently, we hadn't tested the MP3 player aspect so when the music started up it was limited to the stored tunes - which are basically all Japanese Techno (Samantha loves it but it's not very Christmas-y).  The rig was also about seven feet long and three feet wide and the conference room has way too many chairs in it.  Nel doesn't have quite as much wheel time on the Merc as I do so the lap was a little challenging.  

In spite of all this, the MER won - Repeat Champions!  I'm not exactly sure what they won, but I'm guessing it was some kind of MAJOR AWARD!!

NEVER AGAIN!!!