Some Blog Site

Here are some thoughts I jotted down that aren’t quite sufficient for their own individual blog posts. If you’re the type of person who likes Twitter, pretend each of these are tweets.

• Rice is never good the second time around. It is one of the few things that do not make acceptable leftovers, like fresh breadsticks. My wife disagrees, because one can make fried rice out of it. But if you’re doing that much cooking then it’s not leftovers.
• Does anyone actually use those tiny plastic domes on the lids of soft drinks at restaurants? You know, the ones that say regular, diet, and other. And one more category. I know what they’re for, but I’ve never seen them used for their intended purpose. Usually it’s just a child who’s trying to annoy his sibling by pressing his (plastic lid) buttons.
• I’ve seen enough people spit into drinking fountains that I always let the water run for a couple seconds before I take a drink. An ounce of prevention…
• I don’t need Loctite to keep the bolts in place on my vehicles. After a short time on these Michigan roads there’s enough rust to prevent them from turning. They actually salt the roads year-round.
• What is the plural of “cyclops”? What would a cyclop be?

Gamma, having just read the school lunch flyer : When it says ‘reduced lunch’, do you get less food or just a lower price?

Gamma : Delta punched me…
Me : Delta!
Gamma : …last year sometime.

Delta : I’m mad! I need a 2-minute break.
Me : Ok, go ahead.
Delta : Good, I get to break things for 2 minutes.
Me : Oh no you don’t.

The Scene: We are in a hotel with a pool.
Child, having just read an older comic strip that didn’t make much sense to him : What’s a bikini?
Me : A girl’s swimsuit.
Some Wife, remembering an earlier trip in an elevator when a family with girls was headed to the pool and certain boys didn’t know how to conduct themselves: And what do you do if you see a girl in a swimsuit? Do you laugh? Or stare? Or point?
Other Child : No, you run away screaming.
All Children : AAAAAAAAAHHH!

And of course they were waving their hands over their heads and pretending to run.

Delta, stomping very madly across the floor
Me : What’s the matter?
Delta: He looked at me while I was going potty.
Gamma: The door was open, I didn’t know.
Me : Shut the door then.
Delta: But I want it open!
Me : Well then, don’t get mad if people look in.

Having replaced our minivan’s struts, I thought it wouldn’t be much of a problem to help my brother-in-law replace his struts. Or rather, his minivan’s struts.

Even though I knew what to do and how to do it, it still took about 2 hours per side. The main culprit is the sway bar link bolt. If you have any vehicle whose sway bar link design includes using an allen wrench to hold the bolt still while you turn the nut with a normal wrench, replace it as soon as possible.

Looking back, I think it would have been worth it to get a 3/16″ hex head socket for my wrench, rather than trying to use an allen wrench. As it is, I lost another 3/16″ allen wrench. I have about 3 sets of allen wrenches, you know the plastic organizer with 8-12 allen wrenches lined up. And they are all missing only the 3/16″ size. I would love to be able to buy a 5-pack of 3/16″ allen wrenches. But all I can do is buy another full pack of all the sizes, because no one sells normal allen wrenches of just one size.

Technically speaking, I didn’t lose my last 3/16″ allen wrench. I have it, but I can’t use it anymore. Before starting the project, the allen wrench looked normal, with a ball-type thingy on the long end and a standard end on the short side.

Here’s what it looks like now:

Notice the ball-end has been snapped off. It’s stuck inside the sway bar link bolt. That was after the first problem:

I had to switch to the long end because the short end was too far gone. It ended up rounding itself off, but that’s after it twisted at least 100 degrees around. That bolt did not want to give up, and it was stronger than the allen wrench.

After running out of allen wrench, my only option was to grind the bolt off. That was slow going. I really need to get a cutoff wheel for my angle grinder, rather than just a grinding wheel. And it heated up the bolt so much the ball joint on the other end of the bolt fell apart. The ball joint of the sway bar link, not the wheel hub ball joint. That would have been bad.

After spending a while grinding off the bolt but getting only about 1/3 of the way through, I thought I’d try again because the grinding was taking forever. This time I clamped some vice grips onto the other end of the bolt (the stock link is perfectly round, so you can’t get a good grip on that end – except the grinding gave it a nice big flat spot). The nut certainly wasn’t freely spinning, but I could turn it. I think the intense heat is what broke it free. If I had realized that earlier, I could have saved myself some time.

After all that, I had a new sway bar link to put on but no allen wrench to keep the bolt from spinning. I was so glad to see the aftermarket part did away with that design and the bolt can be held in check by a hex shape on the ball-joint end. No allen wrenches needed.

It took us two days to do the job, because they gave my brother-in-law one strut that was correct and one that was backwards. At least he thought to compare the new strut to the old before we took the old one off. So the first day we replaced the one strut we had, and then he went and got the backwards strut replaced, and he came back the next weekend.

All’s well that ends well.

Sticking with the theme of last week’s post about having a plan for how you child will learn how to navigate the internet, I’m posting this week about what we did with introducing phones.

It seems a lot of kids are getting phones while in elementary school. I remember a few years back, my brother-in-law was telling us how his 6th-grade daughter was complaining to him how she was the only one in her class without a phone. He thought she was being dramatic, so at the parent-teacher conferences, he asked one of the teachers if that was true. The teacher answered that yes, the daughter was the only one without a phone.

Now, just wanting to fit in with the crowd is not necessarily a good reason to get something.

We tried to wait as long as possible before getting a phone for our kids. The oldest got his first phone in 8th grade because there were a number of things he was involved in after school that he needed to call or text us when he was done and needed to be picked up at the school. Back when I was in school, I used the pay phone in the lobby to call home collect for things like that. But since there are no pay phones anymore, we decided to go ahead with the phone.

We certainly didn’t buy him a phone, as that’s a waste of money. We just went to the phone store and got a SIM card for one of our old phones that would have netted us only $30 if we traded it in when getting our new phones.

I had been looking for a cheap flip phone as a sort of learner’s permit – one that could call and text but no internet. All the flip phone still came with web browsers, so those weren’t safe. We settled on the old iPhone, which has the convenient feature of being able to disable the browser (and other features if you want). He doesn’t have the passcode to enable the browser, and he doesn’t have his own iTunes account, so we will let him search the app store for games and apps, but he has to have one of us install it. There’s a lot more flexibility on the iPhone regarding parental controls than on a flip phone.

Plus, one of the things we didn’t foresee when we got him a phone in 8th grade is that the high school classes are setup assuming the students have certain apps on their phones. I’m sure the teachers would have made arrangements if we had said he doesn’t have a phone and can’t do what you assigned. But it makes the kid’s life easier just having that there, and not being annoyed that he has to go to the teacher to get special arrangements.

Beta got his phone is 7th grade. I was trying to wait until 8th grade like we did for his brother, but with kids at the elementary, middle, and high school, our schedules were a little more packed than they were when Alpha was in middle school. He had to borrow a phone to call us to get picked up and by that time we were familiar enough with the limits we could put on the phone so it wasn’t as big a step. Gamma and Delta still have to wait until middle school activities keep them after school though, before we get phones for them.