Of Minivans and Men

NOTE: The legendary Minivan of Manliness -- as of this past December -- 'tis no more. Fifteen years and nearly 170,000 miles -- all in good service. Well, mostly good. Things got a little hairy those last few years. Various battery/electrical issues, wonky doors and a strange penchant for developing flat tires on long journeys: college trip to Baltimore, the night we moved -- seriously, drove three hours in the pouring rain and next day, flat as my singing voice; and, lastly, on the interstate the day I was driving to the dealer to test drive a new car. It's nice one of us knew when our time was up.

Here's a piece I wrote about the ol' girl back in 2008 for DadCentric.

Of Minivans and Men

Whrrrrrr -- CHUNK. Whrr -- CHUNK-CHUNK.

Hmmmm, I mused. The garage door track could have shaken loose from the ceiling again. Let's punch in that remote code two, neigh, three more times to be sure.

Whrrrrrr -- CHUNK. Whrr -- CHUNK-CHUNK.

Frickity-frick on a frickin' stick.

I had left the minivan tailgate open while it was inside the closed garage. Now the arm extending from the roller chain to the door was welded into the gate. 

Please, DO Adjust Your Dials

A couple of quick programming notes:

Subscribe by email. Huh? It's 2021

Since Feedburner is shutting down its email subscription service support, I've switched my feed over to follow.it. Boy, are those folks friendly. They helped via email with the whole process.

• If you are already subscribe via email, you are all set -- the subscriptions have been carried over. 
• If you want to subscribe by email, go onto my site and put your email address in the box on the top right then hit "Subscribe."

I'm uncool, dude. I still use a blog reader and RSS.

Dude/dudette -- you are my kind of people.

The Feedburner feed will still work for the time being (I think -- Google owns it, so who knows), but it will soon be deleted. I have redirected the site to the new follow.it feed (https://follow.it/always-home-and-uncool), so if you got this, all is good. If not ...

Now, for my next trick, maybe someday I'll finally get off Blogger.

And finally ...

"New" post coming Wednesday. Note the quotation marks. See y'all soon.

PLEASE STAND BY ...

Don't panic. Just testing something out here at Mission Uncool Control. Meanwhile, enjoy this photo of Dinger trying to decide if he's really an IPA dog.

What We've Got Here is Failure ...

Things have changed in Uncool Land. If you haven't been paying attention, here or elsewhere, let me give you the 411 on what's been going these past several months:

The Modern Age of Youth Baseball

Welcome back to Little League baseball, guys! It’s good to ha–

What’s that, Carl? You want to be called what? Like Casey Stengel, the great baseball manager? No? Like Kacey Musgraves, the great country songstress. Mom and dad on board with that? Cool. Let me grab my clipboard.

All right, let’s try this again.

Welcome back, children, to Little League baseball. OK, so you all have good winter? Play some basketball or hockey, did you? No? Well, what sports did you kids play over the winter?

Fortnite does not count as a sport, Roberto. Neither does Minecraft. I agree, it does help your hand-eye coordination. It also helps prepare your glutes for another three months of riding the pine.

The Headaches of Moving and Downsizing

If you still haven’t found the motivation to clean out even your kitchen junk drawer during all this pandemic downtime at home, try this three-step formula:

1. Sell your current house.

2. Move 200 miles out of state.

3. Then, and only then, buy a house built when lives were simpler and homeowners smaller.

That’s what we did this autumn. My Love received a job offer she couldn’t possibly pass up even though, despite living in a world brimming with deadly airborne contagions and pants-less Zoom calls from home, it required her to work on-site. With live, air-spewing co-workers. And, I assume, a dress code.