Blog Refreshed

I applied one of the standard boilerplate templates that blogger offers to the blog. Everything is still where it was otherwise. I started this blog in January of 2007 and hadn't done anything to the general look and feel since. Now that I've moved to one of their current templates, it will fit into their newer offerings a little better. I don't know what those are, exactly, but I didn't want to be on the very trailing edge. I figured at some point they were going to force me to move. My apologies if you don't like it, and I'm open to suggestions for something that's better format-wise.
Thanks again for following along.

as long as you're here...
In my last post, I mentioned that I had an adventure getting the MDF into my Jetta. Here's the rub: 7' is longer than you'd think, and 14 year old cars slowly fall apart. My first challenge was with the putting the rear seat down. The Jetta has a 1/3 - 2/3 split seat, and the 1/3 side has been intermittent lately. While in the Home Depot parking lot, it completely failed. The handle on the top of the seat works the unlock mechanism with a ~6" long pin that's about the thickness of an old transistor radio antennae. This pin clicks into a round hole within the seat-back that controls the latch. The end of the pin slowly fatigued until it no longer stayed in the round hole. Rather than design this such that the pin pushed against the controller, the pin clicks in from the top and then pulls up to unlatch. Not well thought. In the parking lot, without any tools, I set to getting the seatback unlatched.

My first stop was to push through the trunk looking for things that could be used as tools. No flashlight. No pry-bar, but I did find the headrest and a pair of big springs that look like they're part of some big brake system. With these tools, I ripped the pull handle out of the top of the seat, and then broke the pin off the handle. I shined my iPhone flashlight into the hole while trying to spear the hole with the pin. I failed to spear the hole, but did succeed in dropping the pin into the seatback. Awesome. At least it was a beautiful spring day... with lots of car and people traffic in the parking lot. This made cursing a disallowed means of venting frustration. Grr.. After a few minutes of growling, I just starting looking at the area around the controller with the iPhone flashlight. I grabbed the weird spring from the trunk and started trying to hook the hole with the curl on the end of the spring. After a couple of minutes, I actually got it!

Once the seatback came down, I started trying to fit the sheet of MDF into the trunk. The hole made by putting the seats down is only just barely 3' across, but the space from the rear of the trunk to the rear of the front seats is more like 5', not the 7 I needed. I was about at the end of my patience. I took the front edge of the MDF, and pointed it at the ceiling, pulling the sheet into the car. I went around back, jammed it in and shut the trunk lid. I couldn't see out my central mirror, but the MDF was in. I crawled the car out of the parking spot (cite: lots of kids running around, swivel-headed drivers looking for parking spots, couples talking about improvement plans and not looking around, etc), and headed home. This whole encounter lasted under an hour, but it was smack in the middle of my Saturday afternoon. Still, I was able to cut one door card after I got home before calling it a day.

Thanks for following along, and this may be the only time I've ever posted twice in a single day. Wow, the end-of-days must be upon us.