Greets,
Big 18th birthday for a couple of boys here today! Pizza and movies for
everyone. Nick wanted to go to 2 movies today, so he picked a comedy for
Laurie (‘School of Rock’) and a action flick for me (some movie with ‘The
Rock’ ex-wrestler in it). Tomorrow Zack has invited a boatload of friends
over for a barbeque. Should be fun.
Nick is officially 18, so we will be trying the driving tests soon. It took
his friend Clark 3 tries to get it, so I suspect we might not get it on the
first spin. So the hunt for a third car here continues. Last Saturday Zack
found a ‘sweet’ Honda Celica on the web. More exactly, in Chicago, 300
miles away. He was really fired up about it, and it was a good price and a
good fit, so we decided to let he and some buddies drive down there to check
it out. But we didn’t have a $4000 cashier’s check, and the banks were
closed, so we stayed up till midnight coaxing large sums of money out of
various ATM machines with various credit cards. $500 at 11:50 pm and
another $500 at 12:01 am. Between my cards and Laurie’s, we got $2500 and
wrote a check for the other $1500, hoping they would agree to that. I was
thinking it would be wiser to wait till this weekend, when we could get
things better arranged, but Zack was determined. Off he went at 5 am with a
big wad of cash in his pocket. They got 3/4 down there when the car owner
called up and confessed she had lost the title! So they went there anyway
and gave it a test drive. Still seems like a fair deal, so we might go back
down there after she gets her title replaced in a week or 2.
Last weekend Laurie had her open house at a local art studio. Her paintings
were on display there all month, and finished up with this open house and a
nice concert. Zack and his friends went up to visit and talk Laurie into
the Chicago car adventure. Nick and I went up a bit later to see the art
and attend the concert. Good music, great art. She had a good turnout and
sold a number of paintings.
Last week Zack was being a nice brother and picked up Nick after school. He
had the white car for the day, and was traveling about 40 mph on their way
back when the hood flew up and smashed the front windshield! He handled it
well and got off to the side of the road without any other damage, but the
hood and windshield were trashed. Remember those hood pins he put in a
month or so ago? We are now both thinking those were not the best idea.
Normally would have been ok, but somehow the safety latch failed also.
So Zack was pretty mad at the car, but he tried to make the best of it and
tried to talk me into replacing the hood with a fancy black carbon fiber
mail order hood. He had a video of the hood from the net that showed guys
jumping on it with no damage and his friends were all lobbying for him,
bragging how they could jump on our car with no damage. That alone seemed
like a good reason not to get that hood (visions of hood hopping contests).
He took the car down to the body shop and had it all worked out with the
body shop guy. But a black hood on a white car??? All his friends swore
it would look uber, but I just couldn’t see it. So we simply replaced the
hood with another nice metal white hood … without hood pins 🙂
Love Bruce