LittleJoe

Thank you Dennis Kucinich

It's a shame that Dennis Kucinich has dropped out of the race for US President. He has a good message, and ideas that I think offered what this country sorely needs. But it was not to be this time. Nonetheless, I am grateful that he took the time to be heard as much as time and money would allow.

The Democratic nomination is now among Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John Edwards. I was an early supporter of Obama's, and came to favor Kucinich as I realized just how much my views agreed with Kucinich's. Now that it is down to the 3 remaining candidates, I am again enthusiastically supporting Obama.

Thank you Dennis.
Here's to Barack Obama as the next President of the United States!

Honda Fit: 1, Joe: 0

Note to self: When opening a car door, if you should happen to hear a truck noise nearby and need to take a look, it is best to stop opening the car door until you are again ready to pay attention to the hard metal of the door in close proximity to your head.

Yup. that did ring my bell and get my attention. I got some ice a few minutes later and let Shirley handle the driving whilst I got that knot to go down. Today the aftermath is manifesting as a nice little bruise under the eye.

This will be fun to explain if it's still there on Monday when I go in to the office. Hmmmmm.... I'll have to come up with a good story; the truth is just that I was an id10t :)

Finally driving the Yaris :)

Back on 31 Aug 2007, we ordered a 2008 Yaris. We picked it up this past Wednesday. The reason why it took 4+ months is that Toyota had stopped making the '07 models when we ordered ...and they'd not yet started making the '08 models. The reason for the special order was because we insisted on getting ABS. The target demographic for this car is apparently younger folks looking for an inexpensive car, and to help keep the cost down, few if any dealers stock Yarii with ABS. Sheesh, it's only a $300 option. Well, I ordered it with ABS, side curtain airbags, and various other options (doing a special order means you order exactly what you want :)

And what's the best thing to do when you get a brand new car? Start taking it apart! The stock horn sounds like the old RoadRunner cartoon - just a little *beep*. I wanted something safer. So I pulled off the front bumper assembly (have to do that to get to the horn - which sits front of the radiator) and installed dual FIAMM horns - 130 decibels of dissonance (one low tone and one high tone). NOW it sounds like a real car, and the horn has already helped a few times when folks didn't see this little car tooling along the road.

Here's a shot of the finished horn install ...it worked out quite nicely that there was the perfect sized hole - sitting unused - just waiting for me to take advantage of it for the mounting of the 2nd of the 2 new horns.

And here's the view from the outside after everything was back together. I guess the first change to the car was the blind spot mirrors I added before we even left the dealer. The horn swap was the second. More mods are in store, mostly geared toward improving safety and fuel efficiency. And speaking of fuel efficiency, I filled up when it got down to 1/2 of a tank. On the first bit of miles, I've gotten 37.6 miles per gallon. My goal is to average over 40, but I won't worry about that too much until after the break-in period (after which I plan to switch to synthetic oil, a higher quality air filter, swap out the crank pulley for a lighter one, etc :)

Auto Detailing from '2Xtreme'

I've had my Subaru Outback for 10 years, and it's been a great car. Never been in a wreck, so it's got great 'bones'. But it was really needing a day at the spa - a good thorough cleaning. So I called Derwin (1-813-900-8000) from 2Xtreme. Derwin used to do auto detailing out of his shop, but decided he could offer a better price for customers and have less overhead by devising a mobile system. So for only $50, Derwin came to our house, and in about 2 hours he had the inside and outside of my car looking the best it's looked since it was new 10 years ago. I was amazed. You can see more pics of the finished job up here on Flickr.

For those in the Tampa area, Derwin will come to you and do his magic anywhere in Hillsborough County, and in parts of Pinellas County. And for the record, I am not receiving any discount or other benefit from this posting; I just felt that this was a fantastic job for an extremely reasonable price.