For want of a nail...

... the Tire Gods decided to try a new method of flattening my tires.

This is the sight that greeted me this afternoon when I took my recyclables out to dump them in the blue bin. That tire is one of the brand new ones I just had installed exactly one week ago. The left front one, to be precise. To say that I was not happy would be the most flagrant understatement of the year.

After I got done cussing — for the moment, anyway — I dug out my AARP motor club card and dialed up their 800 number. The fact that the car was sitting in my own driveway didn't mean I was about to change the tire myself. I'm paying around $50 a year for roadside service precisely so I don't have to change tires. Anyway, the nice young man at the call center (which, judging from his accent, was probably somewhere on the Indian subcontinent), rounded up one of the local services (fortunately, not on the Indian subcontinent) that does things like getting people into cars that they've locked their keys inside and changing flats, and a half hour or so later another nice young man arrived and set about replacing that brand new and extremely flat tire with the pathetic excuse for a spare that carmakers supply with $20,000 cars these days.

As soon as he had departed I got on the phone to the tire dealer where I bought the tires last week and told them that one of those tires was extremely flat and could I just bring in it right now? Which I did, and when they got to it about an hour later, it turns out that it wasn't a nail this time; how about a chunk of glass in the sidewall instead? I now have another brand new tire on my left front wheel. I wonder how long this one will last before it finds something sharp to impale itself on?

I learned two things today. First, the $10 per tire for the road hazard coverage is well worth the price, at least if you drive in South Hampton Roads. And second, if you're going to get a flat tire, it's a heckuva lot more convenient to have it go flat in your own driveway than out on the road somewhere. At least you have ready access to a bathroom, refrigerator, and reading material while you're waiting for the road service guy to show up.

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Throwing out 50 things, part 2

My quest to throw out 50 things continues. In Part 1, I listed my first 20. Last weekend I delivered another load of donations, this time to the Habitat for Humanity "General Store", which accepts and sells not only building materials, but also a wide range of "housewares". And of course, I continue to make donations to my trash can. Herewith the next 15 on my list.

As before, if not otherwise indicated, the destination was the trash.

21. Plastic paint roller tray with sticky sludge and mold growing it
22. Styrofoam shipping cooler
23. Clip-on lamp with a loose connection
24. Travel water-pick
25. Most of a box of supplies for making dollhouse minatures
26. Small (5 cu ft) freezer (sold!)
27. 3 boxes miscellaneous housewares (donate)
    
28. Paper shredder (donate)
    
29. Toaster oven (donate)
30. CD/DVD rack (donate)
31. Set of enameled metal canisters (donate)
32. Battery-powered Dustbuster (donate)
    
33. Twin window fan (donate)
    
34. Easy-Set swimming pool, never out of the box (donate)
35. 2 fake pine Christmas garlands (donate)

These first 35 "things" represent a huge volume of junk leaving my house. Only 15 more "things" to go! But who am I kidding — I could come up with at least another 50 things beyond that, that need to go away just as much as the first 50. And that's exactly what I need to do to get my clutter under control.

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Feeling blue

Finally got the painter's tape off the front door weatherstripping, so I can post pictures of the results of my recent door-painting project. Here's the front door (I plan to get rid of the ugly black storm door) ...

...and here's the back door, out on my deck. The color was picked as a pretty good match for the new roof I had done a couple of years ago. The picture of the back door shows the color more accurately than the front door, which is a little washed out from the flash.

Just another one of those little projects that I don't have to put off any more!

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Can you hear me now?

So, I've had this Toshiba laptop for, oh, about three or four years now. (No, I haven't abandoned my Mac; it's just that most of the courses I've been taking at the community college are Windows-centric, so I got a Windows laptop back when my Mac wouldn't run Windows.) Anyway, when I first got it, I remember the sound working OK. You know, the little riffs that Windows plays when it starts up or shuts down. I had little occasion to play any other sounds, since I do all my email and web surfing on the Mac.

Then, somewhere along the line, the sound just... disappeared. Well, not entirely; but when I tried to listen to a web video for one of my classes, the volume was very, very low. All attempts to adjust the volume in the sound control panel did exactly nothing. I finally gave up, on the grounds that a) I could get along without the video anyway, and b) I could also get along without Windows' startup and shutdown music, which I realized had also faded to near-silence without my really noticing.

OK, then last fall I started my new job, and since February, most of the time I've been able to telecommute a couple days a week. Now, being a contractor to a government agency, I'm restricted to working on my government-issue office workstation, via Remote Desktop over a VPN with so many layers of security I practically have to provide a DNA sample to log in , and the client software is strictly Windows-based. No problem, I just use my otherwise underutilized and nearly mute Toshiba laptop, which is fine because that leaves my Mac free for accessing my personal email, which cannot be done on the same computer where I'm logged in to the VPN. (I told you they're security-conscious.)

The only thing that's been a bit annoying is that, because of the extremely low volume, I don't hear the Outlook "new mail" alert sound for my work email, and with three or four other apps open and obscuring the Outlook window, I have to periodically check to see if I've gotten anything important, like an email from the boss checking to see if I'm really working or skipped out for a two-hour lunch. So last Friday, I finally got fed up with the silent treatment and decided to do some troubleshooting.

I dug around in the Windows help files; tried the troubleshooting wizard; and attempted to update the driver for the RealTek "sound device" (as Windows so quaintly refers to it), only to be informed that I already had the latest driver available. Time to Google "no sound Realtek Toshiba laptop"... whereupon I stumbled into a plethora of forum posts from people who lost the sound on their laptops, with the same RealTek device as mine, after doing various upgrades (in the majority of cases, to Vista). Now, I haven't upgraded to Vista (and won't be), but it did look like I was on to something. I found advice to uninstall the driver and reinstall it; to get a new driver from Toshiba (but that was a Vista driver so that wouldn't help me); to apply a couple of Windows hot fixes from the Knowledge Base before (re)installing the driver (but when I read the KB articles, they didn't seem to apply to my problem); and lots more. And yet... and yet... it was nagging at me that all these folks talked about losing the sound completely, whereas mine still made some sound, albeit far too few decibels.

And then, I chanced upon one forum post that mentioned in passing that, of course, you should make sure your volume control scroll wheel wasn't turned down, if your laptop had one.

Volume... control... scroll wheel? Huh? Seriously? Surely modern-day laptops don't have something as archaic as a physical volume control that you, like, turn? OK, fine, I'll take a look just to be sure.

And there it is, right on the front, next to the mike and headphone jacks. Who knew? Thanks to the clever black-on-black design, I never noticed it. And sure enough, it was turned almost all the way down. After resetting the volume to the midpoint in the control panel, I started turning the volume wheel up, and behold: the sound now works once more. Nothing wrong with the sound chip, or the drivers, or anything really, except the operator, who is rather embarrassed to have owned a laptop for three or four years without ever realizing it had a real, honest-to-goodness volume control on the box.

So now I'll finally be able to tell when I get an email and reply promptly so my boss won't think I'm taking a nap.

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Nailed again

Evidently I failed to make the appropriate sacrifice to the Tire Gods after my first flat tire back in '06, or the second one in '07. True, they waited a bit longer before coming after me again (#2 followed #1 by less than nine months), but I'm sure that was only to lull me into a false sense of security. And now they're being more insidiously subtle in their smiting.

Back in April, almost exactly two years after flat #2, I took my car in to the dealer for an oil change and state inspection. Oh, I said, and can you take a look at that right rear tire — it seems to have a slow leak. Well, they did, and it did, because it turns out it has a nail in it. Fortunately, it was repairable (the tire, not the nail), so the third smiting by the Tire Gods wasn't a flat-out flat, though I'm sure it woud have ended up as one, had I not had to get the car inspected just then.

Well, one thing they pointed out to me from the inspection was that two of my tires just barely had enough tread left to pass inspection; that would be the two original-equipment tires left after replacing the first two flats. The service manager tried mightily to get me to replace the tires right then, but I declined because a) I wouldn't buy tires from a car dealer unless I was desperate and b) I was already looking at over $2,000 for repairs that I had to have done to pass inspection (a small matter of the front suspension and steering being shot to hell, not to mention the front brakes).

OK, it's six months later and today I took a look at the tires while cleaning black crap (brake dust?) off my wheel covers, and it's glaringly obvious from the clearance over Abe's head when I stick a penny in the treads that if I were to have the car inspected now, the front tires would most certainly not pass. The rear tire treads are fine, and they bloody well better be considering that they're only three years old and thus have only about 20,000 miles on them. The left rear tire was a little low on air, so I contemplated going up to the Wawa to top off the tires. Instead, I checked some tire prices online and then called the Kramer Tire that's about a mile from my house and asked if they had two of the tires I needed; they did, and the price was OK, and they said they could install them today. So I head out to Kramer and they put the car on the lift while I settle down in the waiting area with a book.

And then the guy comes and asks me if I've seen "what's going on with the left rear tire". I hate it when I get that kind of question. "What's going on" turns out to be — you guessed it! — another nail, this time in one of the good tires with plenty of tread left. And it's at an angle pointing outward, and there's this nice little bulge in the sidewall, and it's not repairable. I have been smitten — smote? — once again by the God of Punctures and Other Tire Mishaps. Would I like to add a third tire to my purchase? says the tire guy, as if I have much choice. Since I don't really care to risk having the tire come apart some fine morning on my way to work, I buy a third tire.

The only saving grace is that it seems when I bought those two tires from Kramer back in '06 (a different store, but still the same company), I got a "road hazard protection plan" with them which basically says if the tire fails due to a nail, glass, pothole, etc., they'll either fix it for free or, if not fixable, you get a replacement at an adjusted price (prorated for mileage). Didn't even know I had this "protection plan", but clearly it's a good idea around here, so I ponied up $9.99 per tire to get it on the new tires. I mean, look, that's three nails in three years (at least; I never did find out what caused flat #2). I've never been in such an apparently nail-littered area before. I drove for 25 years in and around Ithaca/Syracuse/Binghamton (upstate New York) and never picked up a nail.

Oh, and they also noted that my rear wiper is torn and offered to replace it for $15. No thanks. Replacing a wiper is one of the few pieces of car maintenance I can actually handle myself (along with replacing the air filter and checking the air in the tires), and for a lot less than 15 bucks.

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