After work yesterday I went on a couple of errands.

The first was to Les Schwab. I had been there last week to get a (free!) inspection of the tires and brakes on my commuter car. They unsurprisingly recommended that I replace two of the tires (they were quite worn), and were able to do so on the spot. Unfortunately, as I was driving along the next day, the hubcap on one of the tires popped off. I recovered it and brought it to them for repair. They couldn’t get the hubcap to stay on, and couldn’t find an exact replacement, so they replaced all four hubcaps on my car, no charge, no fuss.

The second was to Costco. My glasses had been in an unfortunate accident involving my lap and an incoming child. Julie somehow found the little screw that had popped out, so I taped it all back together until I had time to bring them in for repairs. The friendly man behind the counter at Costco took the glasses and quickly fixed and readjusted them, no charge, no fuss.

That’s my kind of errands.

We had a garage sale this past weekend; Friday and Saturday, to be exact. A coworker asked if it was to get rid of stuff or to make money – definitely the latter. We can get rid of stuff easily enough by donating it to Second Chance or the Hope Chest, but it's fun to make a little money by selling some of our old things, invariably to help pay for their replacements. Among the particularly productive sales were our extension ladder, which we no longer need to get on the roof of our single-story house, and our trusty old dining room table and chairs, whose replacements should be arriving at Front Street Home Furnishings in Lynden this weekend. Julie deserves all of the credit, of course; she set it all up and monitored the proceedings (along with a few relatives who brought stuff of their own). Thanks, hon!

My boss just blogged about something that I’ve been meaning to blog about for a while now: alarm clocks.

Why on earth do alarm clocks have to be so horrible? Surely there must be a really, truly good alarm clock out there, but I have yet to find it. Any alarm clock I’ve ever seen has had at least one, if not most, of the following annoyances:

The clock face uses green LEDs. We bought an alarm clock like this (green numbers on a black background) and quickly returned it. The green LEDs lit the whole bedroom. I shouldn’t be able to see reflected light off the wall from my alarm clock, nor should I see a green glow on the underside of my eyelids if I happen to be facing it. Red LEDs seem to be the trick here (red numbers on a black background), though they’re becoming harder to find. I haven’t tried a green LCD clock face (black numbers on a pale green background), so I can’t speak to that, but it sure seems like it would be too bright.

There are buttons on the top of the alarm clock besides Snooze. If I want to snooze for another nine minutes (why is it always nine, anyway?) the last thing I want to be doing is feeling around on the alarm clock for the Snooze button. My current alarm clock has a Sleep button that feels exactly like the Snooze button, and if I press it, all is lost. The radio stays on, but it is now in Sleep mode, not Alarm mode, and if I press the Snooze button, the radio goes off, but doesn’t come back on in nine minutes. It’s hard to imagine worse behavior. There should be only one button on the top of the alarm clock: a big Snooze button.

The alarm is too hard to turn off. Our alarm clock has a little switch with four modes: off, radio on, radio alarm set, and buzzer alarm set. This makes it a real pain to turn off the alarm in the morning when you wake up. Fortunately I have the (undocumented) Sleep button trick described above, which has the added benefit of leaving the alarm set for the next day.

The current time is too easy to change. Most alarm clocks have a mode that must be set or a button that must be held in order to change the current time (or the alarm time). Believe it or not, our previous alarm clock had buttons on top that unceremoniously changed the time whenever you pressed them. So I’d be fumbling for the Snooze button and accidentally set the clock ahead an hour or two. Very frustrating. Setting the time should not be that easy. (Though it can’t hurt to have a simple switch in the back for Daylight Savings Time.)

The radio reception is terrible. It’s depressing when you can’t wake to your favorite radio station simply because the broadcast station isn’t across the street.

The radio volume control is on the side of the alarm. Many alarm clocks have little dials on the side that change the volume; unfortunately, this means that the volume can be accidentally changed if something brushes against the alarm clock, which means that I have to check the alarm volume every night, just to be sure. Our previous alarm clock was especially bad – it had a large knob that was very easy to bump.

The radio volume can’t be lowered enough. Of course, the volume can be turned all the way down, so that you hear nothing. (Why do all volume controls support turning it all the way down? Wouldn’t the power button work if you didn’t want to hear it at all?) You slowly turn the volume up, and get nothing, nothing, nothing, and then it abruptly switches to a volume that’s louder than what you want. There’s simply no way to set the radio to soft. The whole point of the radio is to wake me up without a loud buzzing; I don’t want loud music, either.

The backup battery isn’t much of a backup. Standard battery backup behavior is to preserve the time and alarm settings when the power goes out, but the clock doesn’t actually work while there’s no power. That’s certainly better than nothing; if the power goes out briefly, it’s nice to not lose your time and alarm settings. But does an alarm clock really drain so much power that it can’t simply work normally and sound the alarm even if the power is still out?

The AM/PM indicator and the active alarm indicator are indistinguishable little lights. Worse still, alarm clocks can’t seem to agree on whether the AM/PM light should indicate AM or PM; our last alarm clock thought it should be used for PM, but our current alarm clock uses it for AM. This makes figuring out whether the alarm is set basically impossible. Couldn’t the clock simply use letters for AM and PM?

The alarm time can’t be set in the dark. I can’t say that I mind pushing buttons to set the alarm time that much, but it is certainly annoying when it can’t be done in the dark, and when the controls are little buttons with labels, there’s not much chance of getting it right if you can’t read them.

The radio can’t be tuned in the dark. If the radio tuner isn’t digital, and the analog panel isn’t backlit, there’s not much hope of finding a radio station without ample light and a lot of patience.

There are countless other features that could make a good alarm clock great, but I’d just settle for good. If you know of an alarm clock that doesn’t suffer from any of these problems, I’d love to hear about it.

The age of the pickup has ended. My 1987 Nissan Pickup limped along bravely after the accident, even after being declared a total loss (i.e. “totaled”) by the insurance company – until the battery light came on. Still, I held out hope that I’d just have to replace the battery, and all would be well. This past Friday, I decided to pay a visit to the Department of Licensing, since I hadn’t heard anything from them yet, and I knew that they were supposed to contact me about sending them my title, since the truck had been declared totaled. After waiting for 30 minutes, I was told that I had to go to the vehicle licensing office, not the driver licensing office – so I made my way there, waited in a much shorter line, and I found out that I’d been driving illegally all along. Apparently you can’t drive a totaled vehicle until you get an inspection by the state patrol, unless you get a 60-day temporary license pending your inspection, or a 1-day temporary license for the day of the inspection. I did the latter, since it was much cheaper, and I already had an appointment for an inspection this Thursday.

On my way home from work on Friday, I noticed that all was not well with the truck. There was definitely something battery-related going on. When I got close to home, the truck just about died, but it held on until I approached my street. Fortunately I drive downhill to get home, because the truck died as I was turning onto my street. I was able to coast down the road and halfway up my driveway. I tried to start it again, but got nothing. I thanked God that I wasn’t stuck somewhere and walked into my house. I was able to start the car again later that evening, which made me realize that the problem is probably more serious than a simple battery replacement. I started rethinking my options.

I decided to do a little car shopping on Saturday. I roamed around I-5 Auto World for a little while, talking to one salesperson and even going for a test drive. Mostly I was simply reminded why I hate shopping for cars. Furthermore, car dealers aren’t all that interested in someone looking for a really good deal on a really used car. I returned home empty-handed, but soon got a call back from Lee Hornbeck at Blade Chevrolet, who sold us our minivan last year. He actually had a car that sounded interesting, so I drove over there, checked it out, and ultimately bought it.

The car is a burgundy 1999 Ford Escort LX. Its purpose is to get me to and from the office for as many months (dare I hope for years?) as possible, hopefully consuming less fuel than my pickup did. It has a 5-speed manual transmission, 90,000 miles under its belt, a couple of air bags, etc. It has a “rebuilt” title, which means that it has been totaled and repaired – and it shows. I won’t bore you with the back story, but Lee claimed to know the family, etc. Anyway, it was listed for almost $3,000, but Lee had already made it clear that they were very flexible with the price, and I ended up getting it for $1,800. A sweet deal if it fulfills its purpose. Here’s a picture out in the rain:

Did I mention that I got almost $2,000 for my truck as part of the insurance claim? That was considerably more than I expected to get, to be quite honest. Now all that’s left to do is get it to the salvage yard and hope to get $100 for the parts. I hope I can get it there on its own power…

Did I mention that the closest Ikea to our house is in Canada? No? Then I probably also didn’t mention that on our way to Ikea, a large Canadian truck launched a rock at the windshield of my pickup, which left a nasty double-chip that soon matured into a six-inch-long crack. It was the least pleasant part of our trip to Canada, to be sure.

Fortunately, though my pickup is hardly a luxury vehicle, I do carry comprehensive on it for this very reason. Better still, the $100 deductible is waived when the windshield can be repaired rather than replaced. So, other than the time I spent waiting at Novus, no harm was done, and all is back to the way it was. I sound like a State Farm commercial…

We had a bit of a scare with our new television – suddenly channels 4 and 5 didn’t have any sound! First I assumed it was some sort of cable malfunction, but our other TV didn’t have any trouble with the signal. So I then began to think that it must be a malfunction in the TV set. I really didn’t want to pack that heavy thing back in its box and take it back, especially after the great deal we got.

Fortunately, a bit of experimentation led me to the discovery that it was in “SAP” audio mode. I don’t know what that means, except that some channels have audio in that mode and some don’t. Switching to that mode must be a pretty useful thing, because the button to do it is easy to hit on the remote. In any case, I hit that button a few more times and audio was restored.

(Okay, I couldn’t resist figuring out exactly what SAP is, so I “googled” it. It’s the “secondary audio program,” which would be used for an alternate translation (e.g., Spanish) if it was available, but in actuality is used inconsistently and thus causes people such as myself great confusion.)

Our old TV was giving out – it would regularly pick an inopportune moment to shut off automatically, and wouldn't allow itself to be turned back on for a while – so we were in the market for a new TV. The most comparable televisions have 27-inch screens and run from $200-$250. We were about settled on buying a Panasonic from Costco, but hadn't quite done it yet, when we spotted a Fred Meyer ad for a similar Panasonic TV. As it turns out, that television was one model better and $20 cheaper, so we jumped on the deal. It's a few inches bigger than our old TV, but the picture and sound are really good, and we got a great deal, so I'm happy.

The irony is that I watch little television these days. The only shows I watch on a regular basis are The West Wing and Smallville, and those are over until fall. I'm not watching much baseball this summer, and we don't seem to rent many movies... But it's still a useful device, so we need to keep it running, and I'm certainly enjoying the enhanced picture when I do watch a DVD. (We're up to season five of Babylon 5...)

The other irony is that the TV in our bedroom – yes, we have a television in our bedroom, but we don't watch it in bed, so there – is an old 13-inch that I owned way back when I was in high school! That makes it more than twelve years old, and it's still going strong. Now that was a good deal!

This past Saturday was supposed to be a productive day at home. In particular, we were supposed to clean the garage. Unfortunately, that didn't happen. I blame the truck. I drove it to get an oil change on Saturday morning, but it failed to start when they were done. After a bit, it started again, so they decided they must have flooded the engine or something. Sounded good to me, but that became rather unlikely when the truck suddenly died as I drove south on I-5 to get home. I safely pulled to the side of the freeway, but despite numerous attempts, I couldn't get the truck to start again.

Thankfully, I had remembered my cell phone, so after I called Julie, I decided to give the oil change place a ring to see if they had any ideas, since they'd got it to start again. To my surprise, they said that they'd send someone out; to my chagrin, nobody showed up for nearly an hour. Worse yet, he wasn't able to help me at all, so when he drove off, I was back to square one.

No need to panic, though; I've got a AAA membership. So I gave them a ring, and they sent a tow truck. That can take a while, so I walked to the gas station at the next exit – I had drunk a few cups of water at the oil change place a couple of hours before, so you can guess why. Fortunately, a few minutes after I returned to the truck, the tow truck arrived. My truck and I were successfully towed a few miles to our mechanic, which was closed, of course, so I called Julie to come and pick me up.

While I waited for the tow truck to disconnect from my truck, I made a mistake. I decide that I'd drop my key in the mechanic's drop box with a note. Bad timing, because we needed the key to unlock the steering to push the truck into a parking spot! Fortunately, Julie had my spare key when she arrived, so she helped me get the truck into position.

Goodness, this is a long story. Anyway, my Nissan Pickup has been a faithful commuter car for many years, but it certainly has its quirks, and with over 210,000 miles, I won't be terribly surprised when it croaks for good. Happily, the shop managed to examine and fix the problem on Monday afternoon – a battery cable had corroded to the point of no return. About $50 for parts and labor, so I'm a happy man.

I picked it up from the shop this morning and had no trouble getting to work and back, so I'm hoping for a few more months of trouble-free driving! Hey, it's paid for!

It was a beautiful sunny day here in Mount Vernon today – this was an especially good thing for me, because I spent the day assembling our new shed!

We bought it at Costco last week; it was simply an offer we couldn't refuse. The time, energy, and money it would have taken to build a wooden shed was too intimidating. Costco has one already built on the floor, and it looked pretty sturdy, so we decided to go for it. Fortunately, the directions were very clear, easy to understand, and not terribly difficult to pull off. The hardest part of the whole assembly was getting the ground level beforehand!

It's too bad that it took an entire day to do it, of course – I tend to be a little over-careful and meticulous about these things – but I'm really glad that it's done, and I hope that it will prove useful for us. We've already cleared a bunch of gardening stuff out of the garage, and that's a good thing. Now I just need to remember to put the lawn mower back in the shed instead of the garage when I'm done with it...

One of the interesting things about buying a used vehicle is that you never know what surprises you're going to find. Usually, used car surprises are bad things, but we've had pretty good ones so far with our van.

For example, one day, we suddenly realized that one of the middle row seats has a built-in child safety seat! Our oldest girls are already too big for it, but Rebecca should grow into it eventually.

Another surprise was the “Check Engine” light. Of course, we knew we had one, but we didn't expect it to light up while driving north recently! Thankfully, this too turned out to be a good thing – the van was noticing that its gas mileage wasn't up to par. As predicted by the owner's manual as the most likely cause for the light, the gas cap was loose.

Did I mention that the van has tinted windows? Easy to forget from the inside, but I hope it'll cut down on the intense sunlight that can bother the girls in the summertime; it certainly gives a bit more privacy in the back.

Anyway, yesterday I discovered that our van has another cool feature. It should have been obvious in retrospect, but this is our first “new” car – we have an anti-theft device! I guess the little flashing red light actually does mean something! I decided to unlock the van with the key rather than the keyless entry, and, to my surprise, the van started honking at me! I don't really know much about the system yet; I need to do some more experimentation. But this is a good thing to know!

I've got a cell phone. I don't really use it much, so I have the cheapest plan T-Mobile will give me, but it comes in handy when I forget why I'm at the grocery store. Plus, I like knowing that I'll be able to call AAA when my truck finally breaks down for good on my way to Bellingham.

In any case, one danger of owning a cell phone around here is getting too close to Canada. I don't pay roaming or long distance as long as I'm in the States, but all bets are off in Canada. Unfortunately, when you go any farther north than Lynden, the Canadian provider takes over, even though you're still in the States. I was in that predicament a few weeks ago when I was up in the Blaine area on business. (That sounds important, doesn't it? Fortunately for my family, I do very little business travel. This was a mini-retreat for long-range company planning that a dozen or so employees attended.)

Anyway, as we approached the hotel, my cell phone announced that we had arrived in Canada, and, not wanting to incur any charges, I turned it off. The next day, on the return trip, I turned it on and watched it switch back to my local service. It was almost as good as actually being in Canada.

So, this past weekend I was doing our finances, and I checked my cell phone bill. To my shock, surprise, and utter dismay, there was about $9 of charges from Vancouver, Canada! Julie had called my cell phone a few times while I was gone, but since I didn't answer – nay, since the phone wasn't even on – I didn't expect to be charged anything.

Perhaps foolishly, I decided not to absorb the hit and gave T-Mobile a call, hoping that they'd quickly credit my account. Unfortunately, this was not going to be easy. To make a long story “short,” after talking to two different customer service reps and finally a supervisor, after insisting repeatedly that I didn't receive any calls, didn't make any calls, didn't let anyone use my phone, didn't even have the cell phone on, didn't know what that phone number was, didn't know why it was marked as “forwarded” – after all of that, along with some unfortunate raising-of-voice on my part, the proverbial lightbulb appeared above the supervisor's head, and he figured out that my cell phone was forwarding the unanswered calls to my voice mail – through Canada. Something about it being an older phone, though I still can't understand how the phone could do this feat when it wasn't even on. I'm sure I'll never know, because I won't be bringing it that close to Canada ever again.

He did credit my account in the end, so I'm a semi-satisfied, but certainly better educated, customer. Maybe it's time for a new cell phone...

I forgot to mention; my truck was in the shop last week.

My 1987 Nissan Pickup with over 200,000 miles is still running strong, but it has its quirks, particularly in the electric department. For example, the dome light doesn't work, the stereo won't work unless the headlights are on, etc. Anyway, I had to stop on a dime last week and shook some wire loose somewhere, because I lost power to my dashboard. Fortunately, the engine kept running, so I drove carefully home. I turned off the engine, and, to my surprise, it started up again, but I had no accessories, no headlights, no brake lights. The generous fellow that I carpool with helped me coordinate getting the truck to and from the shop as well as myself to and from work for a couple of days.

The damage was less than $100, amazingly enough – some after-market circuit breaker had failed (or something like that – I don't pay as much attention to the mechanic as I should), so he just took it out and rerouted the power. Everything works as well as it did; unfortunately, it works no better, because I still can't listen to the radio without the headlights on. But, the bill was less than the value of the truck (by a few hundred bucks), so I'm happy. The cheapest car you'll ever own is the one you're driving right now. :-)