dennisjudd.com

I am NOT somebody with a green thumb. To be quite honest my favorite aspect of apartment dwelling was the lack of weekly lawn care. At least down in Arizona you can get away with AstroTurf or rocks and stuff. But up here north of the Mason-Dixon line we tend to have to take care of the outside of our houses.

Well if I hate mowing the lawn so much you can imagine how much I love to landscape. I usually defer to Jen in these matters but with three little overlords we just can’t get out there all at once. A couple of years ago I paid a local place to do some work to tighten up the rock border, add some sod and general clean up. This was before:

and this was after:

So fast forward a few years (and babies) and we were finally ready to turn that stretch of dirt, weeds and ivy into something acceptable. We started searching around the local nurseries and found a dense yew at a local place called The Barn Nursery and Landscape. They were having a sale so we took all the baby seats out of the minivan, headed over and picked 14 shrubs. Which by the way turns out to be the absolute limit you can fit in a Chrysler Town and Country. It’s actually quite impressive…roughly a 4×8 space.

Anyways hauled them around back (didn’t want them walking off) and then pretty much took the next week off so I could recover.

The plan was simple:
1. Move the flagstone rock border back
2. Till the ever living hell out of everything
3. Add a wheelbarrow of compost
4. Add some root booster stuff
5. Lay down weedblocker (black stuff)
6. Put Pea Gravel down to stop the flagstones from slowly sinking into the ground every year
7. Plant Shrubs in ground
8. Mulch

Now I don’t really think that sounds simple…straightforward maybe but not really simple physically when you consider each shrub weights a billion pounds. I ended up heading down the road and rented a rototiller from a local place for three hours but I have to tell you that between the power of this thing and the clay in the IL soil my arms were in a seriously bad place the next few days. Maybe I let it dig down a little bit or whatever but my joints where killing me the next day. Here’s a pic of a before shot, the rototiller (hell yeah go team minivan) and the first run of tilling:

After that it’s pretty much just stick stuff in the ground. Funny thing is apparently with shrubs you don’t need to even take the burlap off the root balls. Just cut the twine and then cut the burlap down a bit…it just biodegrades. Anyways after two days of work this is the result:

So far we’ve come in under budget (although I’m going to pickup more mulch soon) by like half with me doing the labor and the sale prices on the shrubs. Now as long as they don’t die we’ll be golden. Not sure what is going to happen with the ivy honestly…you never can tell with that stuff. I picked as much as I could out after tilling but hopefully the weed blocker will give us an edge. Time will tell.

So I sold my car almost a month ago due to needing room for my kids and the fact that by not having room I wasn’t driving it enough to keep the battery healthy. Now I’ve been looking at cars for a while now and pretty much came down to four different ones:
- Scion xB
-Nissan Cube 1.8s
- KIA Soul
- Mitsubishi Outlander Sport

I only had what I felt were a few reasonable requirements; I wanted manual stick shift and black. That’s it. I was trying to keep it under 20k (which is our max for our budget) and wasn’t worried about any accessories like sun roofs, fog lights (can add them myself afterwards) or an awesome stereo (again I can add stuff like that). With that in mind we began the test driving. First up was the Nissan Cube but we hit a snag right off the bat because they didn’t have any manual on the lot, only the CVT automatic. So we took it for a drive with the sales guy in the back and it was nice enough, roomy inside with what felt like decent enough engine power (family car, not drag strip remember). I didn’t get to drive it in the configuration that I wanted but over all I liked the car and it handled well.

Next I test drove a Mitsubishi Outlander Sport and boy was that a mistake for me. Between the sales guy being all like “have you asked the missus” and the car handling like it was driving in mud (seriously no acceleration at all) it just wasn’t a fit for me.

On the way back from the Mitsubishi test drive I stopped at a Scion dealership and this is where I remember the best experience thus far. I walked in, talked to a salesman named Sam and said “I’m on my lunch, in a hurry, can you help me test drive an xB real quick please”. Just like everybody else they didn’t have a manual on the lot (what is wrong with Americans????) but he let me test drive one of their automatic release 8.0 xB’s. He copies my drivers license, goes and gets the car and then gives me the key and says “have fun, I’ll be here when you get back”.

I swear I don’t know why more dealerships don’t do this (in low crime area’s), it was brilliant. Even though it was an automatic I had a ton of fun driving it once I got used to the touchy gas pedal that Scions and Toyota’s seem to have. Really letting me drive the car by myself was a great sales tactic. I was still a little stuck up on the whole “didn’t get to drive a manual” but the over all impression of the car was good. Just like the Cube it had a lot of head room and space for the kids.

Next up was the KIA Soul and Jen and I took a long trip to get to the dealership (using precious babysitter time) and I have to say that I was overall impressed by the KIA Soul. They had a manual to test drive and I have to say that it’s the best way to get the most out of that cars engine. The handling was great and if it wasn’t for it feeling “smaller” inside and the uncomfortable seats it would have been a serious contender (but only in black, it looks like shit in other colors). Not to mention the hokey iPod integration.

Anyways after all that we test drove the Cube one more time (this time I asked the salesman to stay behind) and I was going to “pull the trigger” on it except for one small problem. There was no such thing as a Nissan Cube 1.8s in black with a manual transmission within 300 miles of here. So we went with plan B which was the Scion xB which actually has a higher horsepower engine but hit a few snags there. We had a line on a black manual xB in southern IL but it got sold before they could cement a dealer transfer so I had to capitulate and go with a “sizzling crimson mica” but instead got upgraded “rimz” (yo!). Even so it still had to be driven in from MI due to either people not liking manual transmissions or Tsunami shortages.

Long story short my new car (with 380 miles on it) arrived last week and we bought it.

As you can see lots of room for kidlings and stuff, at least compared to the Insight (still miss her). Plus you can see the upgraded rims in the last picture.

Trunk space is decent and I let myself get the upgraded rims (they were already on, I had no real choice) to compensate for the “non black” color.

The last two pics illustrate two unique things about the design of this car. The first one is native iPod integration (hey guess what I have) with the stock stereo. The second one is the instrument cluster is located in the center of the dash as opposed to the drivers side. I have to say that incorporating iPod into the stock radio (made by Pioneer) was a brilliant move. They also put tweeters on the sail panels although I have to admit that while the stock radio isn’t shabby if it wasn’t for budget limitations I’d have already planned it’s removal (along with the stock speakers). But i do have to admit I am impressed with a default stock stereo that comes with subwoofer outputs…which I already had to test out myself:

Overall happy with the new car and happy Jen and I can split up with the kids to run different errands on the weekends finally. Still getting used to the gas pedal as opposed to the Honda and get used to how this car shifts but over all thinking this was the right decision. In the end the dealership also went with all our requests financing wise so I can’t really complain to much about that. Oh and I also ordered floor mats off eBay for 1/3 off what they wanted….and if i ever decide to put fog lights or what not in it I’ll do it myself. There you have it the Scion xB is a pretty decent amount of car for under 19k (out the door).

Last night I sat down to play a little Dragon Age: Origins on our Xbox 360 when I was confused by the sound of the DVD spinning up. See I had installed the game to an external USB SD card in an adapter (8gb) a while back in an attempt to quiet the “jet turbine” sound. So I look over at the Xbox and don’t see the card in it. In fact I don’t see the card anywhere. I figured it must be lying on the ground or somewhere so I look around but to no avail.

So as I’m digging through the old Nintendo cartridges it occurs to me that this must be the work of “the minions“. I knew I had to begrudgingly accept that such a small piece of plastic might be forever lost but that if I had any chance I had to wait until they were up and could be brought back to the scene of the crime.

The next morning I brought my son Connor (age 4) over to the xbox and held up the SD card from the digital camera. I prepared myself for the worse such as he dropped it down the heat vent, toilet or fed it to his sister but when I asked him if he had seen something like this and where it was I wasn’t prepared for what came next. He pointed to the PS3 sitting silently next to the Xbox 360 and said “oh yeah, I put it in there!”.

The PS3 does many things but it does not “do” SD cards natively and certainly not via an optical blu-ray drive slot. It’s amazing how times have changed since the 80′s where VHS tape slots beckoned longingly for sandwiches yet the concepts remain the same. Now from the outside you couldn’t tell that something had been shoved in there so I did what I do best….I took it apart (using this guide).

Once you get the top off, and the 7 screws removed there’s not a lot to it. The only other step I had to take was to remove 4 very small machine screws that held the metal enclosure on the blu-ray drive. After that as you can see the SD card was just sitting there waiting patiently for my retrieval. The only thing that scares me is what would a person who couldn’t take it apart have done?

Update: Now with “nom nom goodness”

I just had one of the most frustrating experiences at my local Chase bank (branch #000773) dealing with them and their coin counting procedures! I’ve been a member of Chase since the late 90′s (when it was called First Chicago) and have always used my checking account (and accompanying debit card) for my main paycheck deposit, mortgage payment, big purchases, etc. So in preparation of purchasing a car I brought in the family change jar to put into the account. Even thought the amount isn’t huge it’s the idea that counts for me. This is where my problem starts.

Previously I had counted the change out by hand with my wife and we had come to total of $106 dollars. We didn’t put the money in rolls because we have been told in the past that they have to unwrap them and not to bother. So this morning (6/10/11) I entered the branch around 10:20am to deposit my coins and handed my small container to the cashier. She took the container and went out of site into the back where I hear the sounds of coins being dumped and of machine(s) counting. She came back in a short while and then told me that the total of the coins was $77 dollars to which I replied that I had counted $106 and there must be a mistake. She went back and checked it again and after reiterating the value of $77 so my reaction was to say “ok let’s cancel the change part of this transaction please and I’ll just deposit the cash bills I brought with.”

This is where my situation goes from bad to incomprehensible. Her response to me was that it was impossible to do that. Apparently the coin counting machine is designed so that once money goes in it cannot be removed nor separated from other money that had been deposited in it. In short once they put my money in that machine (without any warning to me) it could never ever be taken out for any reason. So regardless of the fact that I believed I had $106 there was no longer any way to prove it because my money was now part of all the other money in the device.

At this point my only other option was to wait 15 minutes for the person who could audit the machine to see if they could find my missing $29 dollars. After waiting for a while I was called back up to the clerks desk and was told that after an audit they had found a discrepancy of $2.25 and could credit that to the $77 but that was all they could do. I asked to speak to the Manager and was told the same, once money went into the machine it could not be removed, differentiated from and that the machine couldn’t be wrong (which begs the question of whose $2.25 it was that I was offered).

I just can’t believe they would design a machine and/or process this way. I asked a lot of questions about if the machine was zeroed out every night or how many customers had been in since they opened (two hours ago) with change and was told the machine isn’t zeroed out but rather balanced and that a lot of customers had been in with change. They wouldn’t give me exact numbers for anything but there are a lot of questions I have:
1. Why maintain a balance on a machine designed to count change?
2. Why have a policy where money can be only added to a system but never removed if the customer changes their mind?
3. If the machine is infallible then where did an error of $2.25 come from in only two hours of operation?

Maybe I miscounted, maybe there was a mistake but I’m frustrated that now I can’t find that out for myself because they took my change and without warning put it into a machine it could never be taken out of. They should have a system where change goes in a machine to count it and then goes out into the same container it came in. Then if the customer accepts the count they can sort and deposit it. Not tell the customer that the machine can’t be wrong and I have no choice but to take their count. I ended up having to accept their count (plus the mysterious $2.25 from the machine that can’t be wrong) because they simply wouldn’t do anything else aside from giving me the branch manager’s card (who is out until next week). I’m so angry because with buying a car, three kids and all the other stuff the last thing I need to waste my time on is fighting with Chase about thirty bucks when if they could have just given me back my change bucket I’d have gone home and counted it again myself.

So a lot has been happening lately but one of the biggest things is that I sold my car last week. Well I can’t really call it “my car” any more but the point is still valid. I just had the IMA battery (big expensive thingy) replaced under warranty and the truth of the matter is that if you don’t drive a hybrid car alot the batteries just sit there and waste away.

Couple that with the fact that it can only hold two adults and it was time to get a bigger car. I already miss my stereo setup in that car. I can’t really complain though because for a 10 year old car Honda Insights hold their value remarkably well especially when you only have 57k miles on it. Heck the guy who bought it drove up here from WV…which isn’t too uncommon among the Insight owners out there. Some will fly in and drive home. Heck I bet he’ll even improve on my 54.5 mpg lifetime average, I always tended to accelerate a little to much.

The end of a decade