|
|
|
all auto repair places are right-wing
Thursday, March 12 2026
One of the tasks that I handle now that I am a stay-at-home househusband is getting our vehicles inspected. Our Subaru Forester was up for inspection, and Gretchen didn't want to use Van Kleeck's Tires because she doesn't like their right wing politics. (These politics are not obvious to me, but both Gretchen and our friend Lisa P. have mentioned them to me.) Now that the right wing is coming for the last shreds of a free and open society, I get the desire to boycott them, but in the world of auto repair, finding a left-leaning garage is not easy, not even in the greater Woodstock area. Gretchen had demanded that I take the Forester to the West Hurley Garage, but when I arrived there this morning, I saw they had a sign on the door saying those permitted to carry guns were allowed to carry their guns into the shop, which seemed like unnecessary right-wing signaling to me.
After dropping off the Forester, I walked to the Hurley Ridge Hannaford next door to get some provisions: grapefruits, onions, bananas, and an impulse-purchased bento box of vegan sushi.
All this morning I'd been dreading the Forester's inspection because I half expected it to fail. Since reaching a certain level of wealth, Gretchen and I pretty much stopped driving jalopies of the kind that fail inspection. But the Forester hadn't received much in the way of maintenance since we bought it back in late 2021, and, since we got back from the Caribbean, I've heard a jalopy-style rubbing sound whenever the brakes were applied. Going back months, I've been hearing an unsettling (though subtle) rumble every time I rounded a bend in a certain direction with a certain range of radii. (I remember hearing that at least as early as the drive down to Staunton to attend my mother's belated funeral back in August.) Sure enough, when the results came in, the Forester had failed. The sharp-featured (and very no-nonsense) guy running the garage said all four brakes were bad, it needed four tires, a lower ball joint was failing on the right side (that was the cause of the rumbling sound when rounding bends), and one of the headlights was out. I accepted these results without complaint and asked a few clarifying questions. The head mechanic had an attitude of "You tried to fool me, didn't you? Well I am no fool." But that wasn't my intent; I didn't know if the issues were bad enough for the Forester to fail. Getting details on what was wrong was helpful to narrow down what needed to be fixed. For example, I'd feared that the rumbling sound was due to a failing CV joint, which is a more expensive fix than a failing lower ball joint.
Back home atop Hurley Mountain, I broke the news to Gretchen that our Forester had failed. It looked like she thought I was kidding at first, but no, I was not kidding. The news that the Forester was not simply inspected and good again seemed to put another brick in her mental backpack to go along with her many other responsibilities. But I told her it was no big deal, and that I'd probably be able to fix everything except for the tires. And after I told Gretchen about the stupid gun-carrying-positive sign on the door of the West Hurley Garage, she seemed to be much more open to just using Van Kleeck's going forward. They're a no-nonsense provider of tires, and they're less likely to nitpick about subtle issues when performing an inspection of one of our vehicles.
Today was markedly colder than yesterday and marked a bit of an overcompensation for the recent warm spell. With temperatures never rising above the low 40s, they were actually a bit cold for this time of year. There was also a cold rain falling at times, though not enough to keep me from going into the nearby forest to make further repairs on and improvements to my small collection of stone walls. Interestingly, I found that in one place something had caused the collapse of a small wall I'd built beneath a crude archway of stone forming the side of one of my in-wall voids. Perhaps a dog or coyote had done this in an effort to extract a critter hiding back behind it. (There were some chewed-on acorns back there, suggesting a member of the squirrel family had used it as a den for a time.)
This evening while Gretchen was off at the Colony Café seeing a Joni Mitchell tribute act with Alana and Nancy, I was tinkering with my ESP8266 Remote Control code. I'd decided the state-machine I2C reflasher was a dead end, mostly because it was too slow, but also because I couldn't actually get it to work (not getting something to work alone seldom stops me!). So I'd moved on to implementing a useful LittleFS file system in the copious flash space found even on the cheapest ESP8266s. This evening I managed to implement an alternative configuration persistence method using that flash in cases where I don't want to use EEPROM on an I2C slave. Once I had that working, I then added a simple featuring allowing me to copy files visible on the web (the http web, not the https web) into that same LittleFS file system. I also have a set of commands I can run to list those files, show their content, and delete them. A feature I would like to implement is the ability to reflash an I2C slave using a firmware stored in that file sytem, which would make that reflashing less vulnerable to an at-times-unreliable internet. Another possible use would be to store weather data when the internet becomes unavailable.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?260312 feedback
previous | next |
