Next Stop, UTAH!

Just finished loading "The 1%" remaining in the Jeep and trailer. As soon as the dog finishes up her business in the back yard, we're outta here.

See you tonight, God willin' and the circk don't rise.....

I'm Too Tired To Think Straight.....

12 hour marathon.

House and garage are packed into the 6 U-Boxes (God are those things flimsy JUNK!) and the overflow filled about 2/3 of the 6'x12' trailer.

The house in 99% empty, and the remaining things will go with me, my son, and the dog when we depart Long Beach Wednesday morning.

I was wondering why me feet were hurting so much, and then I inspected the Denali boots I was wearing all day.

They're worn out and shot, and I've only been wearing them for six months!

I not only hurt in places I forgot I had, but hurt in places I didn't know I had.

Next post will most likely be from St. George, UT, our first night's stop. I'm pretty sure we'll need to get gas in Baker, CA, and one place I want to stop is "Arne's Royal Hawaiian Hotel", and abandoned hotel where the two guys on RoadKill made a stop.

I'm hitting the showers, then the sack.

G'night, all.........

T Minus ONE and Counting.....

Good Lord....this is the most monumental PITA I've ever been through.

The packing/loading guys are here filling up the six "U-Boxes" that U-Haul dropped off and positioned yesterday, and "1-800-GOT-JUNK" is coming by for another load.

This is stuff I really wanted to keep, and have definite future uses for, but I'm dumping it to keep peace, or at least try to.

If the marriage survise this, it should be damn near bullet-proof in the future.

My son is coming over tonight after he gets off work, and he and I and the dog will take off tomorrow after U-Haul picks up the U-Boxes.

Per our real estate agent, I'll lock up everything except the front door, leave my keys on the counter by the stove, and set the snap locks, and close the front door behind me.

I'll post from the road, and probably one more from here tomorrow before we leave......

Things Ending and Things Beginning.....

Dragged out my big Toshiba laptop to get ready for the trip. Spent about 45 minutes last night updating Windows and all the other "security" utilities I run on it.

The former Radio Room is now empty. All the equipment is packed away, the desks are dismantled and in the front yard, and "1-800 GOT-JUNK" is coming this afternoon to haul away many things of my past.

I made up a network diagram of our home network for the new owners. There's a "Coaxial Segment" and an "Ethernet Segment", but I'm pretty sure my nice, neat drawing might as well be done in Martian for the new owner, as he's not a "Tech Guy" at all. Perhaps it will help whoever they call if there's a problem. They only active component is the network switch; the coax splitters should last 100 years unless the house takes a lightning hit.

Oh, well....time to get my hand cart and start moving large boxes of stuff out to the front yard for the junkman......

Network Going DOWN....

Seeing as I have to empty this room TODAY, I'll be powering down this PC, tearing the desk apart and dragging it out for the junkman, and falling back on my laptop.

Posting from this point on will be very sporadic.

See you all on the flip side.......

Leaving Kalifornia.....

Last post here for a while. I may or may not post from the road...we'll have to see about that.

And the place we'll be staying at has basically NO Internet, so I'll be using one of my portable 4G WiFi Hot Spots.

Things are going South in a hurry here. My wife she was going to arrange the junkman pick-up, but since *I* didn't get this room cleaned out yesterday because I was outside making big piles of stuff into smaller pile of throw-away and very small piles of keep, she says I broke my promise to have the room cleaned, and now it's my task to make arrangements to having the stuff hauled away.

And I'll have to park the Supra on the street starting Sunday night, as she's demanding I have the entire driveway empty so U-Haul can fill it with pods. I took the tap measure outside and measured out the area they said they'd need, pointing out that two of the six pods could be placed alongside the house, by OH NO!!!!!! The whole damn driveway MUST be empty accord to She Who Must BE Obeyed.

And other misc BS, dagger stares, etc, etc, etc.

Makes me wonder why I bothered to get married again. I can give myself this kind of abuse, and then it's over. She's running at flank speed all over me, and shows no signs of letting up.

Oh, well......

So here's something I ginned up a while back. I was planning on making it pretty and polished, but that wouldn't really fit with this blog very well, so here it is:

Leaving Kalifornia…..Or Should That Be “Kommiefornia”?

As our time in The People’s Demokratik Republik of Kaliforniastan draws to a close, I thought it interesting to go through my time here and reflect on some things. There’s times I wonder if I made the right decision when I moved here, and ponder what Might Have Been if I’d stayed in Illinois. I can pretty much say that I never would have had the interesting career I’ve had, and I know I wouldn’t have been able to do a lot of the things I got to do while living here.

Things I’ll miss:

My family and friends

The Battleship Iowa

The weather. My wife has never lived anywhere with REAL weather. The first major thunderstorm will have her under the bed clutching the dog

The ocean. Now I’ll have the mountains, though, so I’ll call that a wash

In-N-Out Burger. The closest one is in Utah

Really good “Chinese” food. The only place I’ve that I like is the HuHot, a pretty good “Mongolian BBQ”, but the add-your-own sauces are pretty bland, at least compared to The Golden Camel in Torrance

REALLY good Mexican food, although The Kids tell us Fort Collins has some great Mexican restaurants

KLOS, KCBS (“Jack FM”), KROQ, KSWR, KYSD, and a couple of other FM radio stations

150MB high-speed Internet for a reasonable price

Things I absolutely, positively, will NOT miss:

The congestion that comes with “postage stamp” sized lots. Our lot is 5400 sqft, with maybe 15’ between the houses, and is in a neighborhood consisting of a couple of hundred other houses. I don’t want to know when my neighbor flushes their toilet, or what they’re cooking for dinner

The traffic. Used to take me 20~22 minutes to get to the Iowa in 2008. Now it takes 45 or more

The graffiti that gets painted over only to reappear a day later, larger and more colorful

The trash alongside the roads and in the parking lots. It’s everywhere. It really boils my blood to see somebody open their car door, dump a bag of McDonald’s on the ground, and then walk to a store that has a big trash bin right by the entrance...

The crime. This part of Long Beach is pretty safe, but go a mile or two North or West, and the whole scene changes….

The STOOPID gun laws

The even STOOPIDER (is that possible?) politicians. How Nazi Pelosi and Dianne Frankenstein manage to keep getting elected is astounding

The taxes. You name it, and it’s most likely taxed here. And at an exorbitant rate…..which is increasing. Our betters in Sacramento just added $1/month to everybody’s water bill, domestic and commercial, to pay for “Safe, clean water for our rural brothers and sisters”, or some equally inane reason. They’ll probably want another tax to repair Oroville Dam…..

The ever increasing numbers of The Entitled and their attitude. And their driving is getting worse. Cutting across multiple lanes without a turn signal, stopping in the street to talk to somebody, blatantly blabbing away or texting while they’re driving, etc, etc, etc

The FOURTEEN Mexican and SEVEN rap crap radio stations on the FM dial

I’m tempted to say “The DMV”, but that’s highly dependent on which office you go to

So bye-bye Kalifornia. You used to be The Golden State, but that was a long time ago, in a USA far, far away

Light Posting Ahead.....

Getting down to the wire, and the stress level here is past eleven....

I'm going through the remaining piles in the backyard, and told the wife to call the junk man.

This is as hard for me to do as it was for me to stop on the aft brow of the Iowa yesterday, and salute our flag before I walked off the ship for the last time.

I know, it's just "stuff", and it's bad to be too materialistic, but this "stuff" is a collection of things I managed to acquire after I got sober in 1995. I put my life back together and got my own apartment after living in a men's sober living house for a year, and slowly started rebuilding my life.

Amateur Radio played a big part of that, and for years I scratch-built equipment because the job I had managed to hold on to before I had my "Moment Of Clarity" didn't pay all that well, so I had to build stuff if I wanted to get on the air.

So I guess this "Pile Of Junk" as my wife refers to it represents a whole lot more to me than just parts for future projects, and parts from past projects; it represents a time of my life where I not only found sobriety, but had to "reinvent myself" as a means of keeping busy. "Idle Hands" and all that....

I'm happy that my son kept all the little things we built together during that time, as I was completely out of his life for a couple of years after my first wife tossed me out. I didn't really come back into his life until my best buddy from college dragged me out of the cheap motel I was slowly dying in, and helped me clean up. It took me another couple of years before I finally manged to get sober, and stay that way.

Maybe it's finally time to put that all behind me, and open a new chapter in life.

I still hate tossing out good parts and equipment, but the clock is ticking, and if I don't get it done in the next 48 hours, it'll cause a real mess with things....

T Minus Sven Days and Counting.....

Next Wednesday we bid goodbye to Kailfornia.

It will be bittersweet.....

The movers are scheduled, my 6'x12' trailer is scheduled, and I dragged a bunch more stuff to eWaste today.

I was "saved" from the agony of dumping perfectly good stuff because of the gentleman who bought a receiver I sold on eBay. He lives in Costa Mesa, and came up here to pick it up so he could save the shipping cost. We got talking, as Hams do, and he followed me back here from our meeting point. Together we went through all the stuff I've collected over the years.

He's a "hard core" Ham, and scratch builds things and restores equipment, so he lit up when he looked at the stuff I had.

He took three radios in various states of restoration, all the parts for them we could find, four pieces of old (but working!) HP test equipment, and TWELVE boxes of miscellaneous parts, cables, variable capacitors, transformers, chokes, knobs, tubes, and other stuff.

We had his Subaru Forester loaded to the gills when he left with a big smile on his face.

My wife couldn't believe somebody was so happy to drag a car full of "junk" home, and the huge piles of "stuff" in the backyard are now manageable.

I spent some time after he left consolidating several boxes of stuff into single, larger boxes, and if I keep doing that over the next few days, I should make the piles of "stuff" get down to "Wife Approved" size.

I loaded up the Jeep to the max with stuff I'm taking down to the Iowa, and that cleared off the back porch, and made several of the smaller piles disappear.

Wednesday will be my last day on the Iowa for the foreseeable future, and walking down the brow to the pier for the last time will be hard.

As one of my blogging friends has told me "Colorado is beautiful, but they don't have battleships".........

Jeep Maintenance, Part II

Just finished the front brakes, and inspection.

Took about three hours, and all of the rubber boots on the CV joints, steering rack, and other suspension bits are in good shape. NO tears, rips, or leaks, and not even any seepage indicating a pending leak.

Taking a break after I washed up, and then I'm off to get the oil and filter changed. I generally do that, too, but I don't have any 5W-20 oil, or a filter.

I'll take the Supra for a drive on Thursday and then change the oil in that.

The hardest part about doing the front brakes was jacking up the car, and dealing with the BIG rims and tires...

9-11

Read the others who have posted.

They've done a better job than I could ever hope to.....

Jeep Maintenance....

Started off this morning by replacing the two gas struts that hold open the rear hatch, and the one for the hood. Then I changed the "cabin" air filter for the passenger compartment and the wiper blades.

Then out came the power tools, floor jack and jack stands, and I commenced to replace the rear rotors and pads.

Making sure the parking brake was OFF and the front wheels were  chocked securely, I jacked the car up and pulled the drivers rear wheel off. The caliper came off easily, but the rotor....SHEESH!

Took me about 20 minutes to find some videos on YouTube showing how to do it. It's really quite simple....you just wail away on it with a BFH until it comes loose!

I found by using a big pry bar between the rotor and caliper mount I didn't have to bash on it as much as the people in the videos were bashing on it.

Took longer than I thought, and it was nice to have my son over to help with the big, heavy rims and tires, and flying the floor jack.

Got the rear finished, but it wasn't all that many years ago that I would have continued and done the fronts, too.

Those will have to wait until tomorrow. I'm trashed and filthy and need a shower and a good night's sleep to do this again.