PennSilverTaco's "Perfect 5-Lug Regular Cab" Build, Aspergers, and General BS MegaThread!

She is finally starting to put on a show!

 

The regular sized ones aren’t too bad, but this is Lava Grande we’re talking about...

 

@Taco critter

My Grandma owned two lake houses next door to each other in Maine. She bought the first one in 1989 or 1990, and the second one in 1999 or 2000 when our family outgrew the first once. From probably 2004-onward, I slept in the basement of the second house; I bought a rocket-shaped lava lamp that I kept up there. My Grandma occasionally spent the winter in the second house (it had oil heat while the first one only had electric heat, and it was a 1-story while the first house was two stories).

One winter, the heat in the second house gave out. The pipes froze and flooded the basement, and while my lava-lamp was unaffected by the flood, it never worked again after that. The light would turn on, so there were no electrical issues, but the lava part didn’t work. On top of that, that lava itself looked rather weird. This is Maine we are talking about, and winter temperatures routinely drop below zero. It probably got into the single digits in that house, and my theory is that the liquid inside lava lamp actually froze. I forget what year this was, but I’m pretty sure it happened after I graduated from high school in 2007. When I went up there the summer after the deep freeze/basement flood, the lava lamp had long since thawed out. I have no way of knowing for sure if it actually froze, but this was definitely one of those “If it quacks like a duck” situations...

 

My grandma’s houses are located in Acton, Maine. She still owns the first house, an A-Frame built in the 1970s that she bought from the original owner in 1989 or 1990.

The last time I was up there was in July 2016. My dad’s 17-foot inboard/outboard is still up there and hasn’t seen the water in more than three years!

In August 2013, I went to a car show at the Acton Fair and got to see security guards eject a drunk 20-year old. The drunk dude looked much older, and with his long beard actually looked like one of the guys from Duck Dynasty, but the security guards specifically mentioned that they could call the cops and get him busted for underage drinking, so I’m assuming he was 20.

 

20,000TH POST!!!

 

I am second only to my Grandmother when it comes getting my driver’s license much later than age 16!

I got my license when I was 22...

Grammy, now 81, didn’t get her license until she was 25! By that time, she’d already had four kids!

 

And, in about 56 years of driving, she's never had an at-fault accident!

 

@El Duderino
@shakerhood

The summer of 2001 was an exciting one. My dad became a Commander in the Navy, and most of the family descended on Whidbey Island for this exciting occasion. Our 4-bedroom, 2.5-bath rancher was decent sized at just under 2,300 square feet, but nowhere near big enough to accommodate that many people. For starters, a divorce in the mid-1960s left me with two sets of grandparents on my dad's side; My biological grandma came with her husband, and my biological grandpa came with his wife. My Grandma on my mom's side, all of my cousins on both sides, and all of my aunts and uncles, also came! Most of them stayed in hotels, but a few stayed at our house. Somehoe, I was able to get out of giving up my bedroom to a grandparent, aunt, or uncle. This was less than a year after I'd found out I had Aspergers, and being a 12-year old boy on the verge of puberty with Aspergers was not easy.

Does anybody remembers the good old days when paying for cable meant the whole house had cable, and all you had to do was was plug a TV into a cable jack to get cartoons? Whidbey Island was the first place we ever lived where we had to get a cable box (I remember my mom saying we'd gone back to the dark ages), but only the TVs in the family room and my parents' room got a cable box. My bedroom has a cable jack, and my room was very quickly becoming my refuge. My mom out of the blue offered to buy me a TV so I'd really have a place to go and relax. We went to the local Walmart, and she bought a 13-inch Emerson with a built-in VCR and game hookups for $140 (may have been $180, but either way it was cheap for a TV in 2001 in my opinion). This was right before flat-panel HDTVs really took off (and back when they were obscenely expensive), and even some fairly well-off families still had good old CRTs. At 12 years old, I hooked that TV up myself and had instant cable TV. One particularly obnoxious thing about the cable company on Whidbey Island was that it lacked a few channels including Animal Planet and Cartoon Network (it did have Nickelodeon, which I generally watched more than Cartoon Network). That was my personal TV for four years. When the TV in our 2000 GMC Safari conversion van quit working in 2003, I brought the Emerson in the van on long trips.

One time in 2004 or 2005, when most of my mom's family was visiting, my cousin and I were relegated to my bedroom. I did not have cable in my bedroom when we lived in Fairfax County, Virginia. However, my cousin and I spent most of our time playing Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. All we did that weekend was smuggle uncooked packages of slice-and-bake sugar cookies up to my room and eat them raw while committing random acts of violence in a fictionalized version of Southern California. I have four cousins on my mom's side of the family, two boys and two girls, born between July 1980 and October 1988 (I am the youngest, born in March 1989). The boys were brothers from one aunt, and the girls were daughters from another aunt. My older boy cousin happened to come into my room while my younger cousin (still older than me) and I were playing GTA. He was arguing with his mom about something, if I remember correctly. My aunt and uncle had never allowed my cousins to have TVs in their rooms, and when he saw my TV he flipped out. Mind you, this was a basic 13-inch TV that wasn't hooked up to cable, so I found the whole thing amusing.

 

Another time when we were living in the same Fairfax County house, the older of those two cousins showed up at my house for a family gathering (they lived in Fairfax County too); He immediately went up to my room, hopped in my bed, pulled up my covers like he owned the damn place, and fell asleep in my bed in his sweaty clothes. I don't know if he was just trying to be funny or what, but I wasn't amused. After trying unsuccessfully to get him out of my bed, I went ballistic and complained to my aunt, who made him get out.

 

A lot of my relatives preferred to have the thermostat turned up higher and like it warmer when they sleep; I am the polar (no pun intended) opposite. My parents and I (Especially me and my dad) like it cold when we are sleeping. We keep the upstairs thermostat at 68 degrees, year round!

In the summer, my aunt and uncle kept the thermostat as high as 75 degrees in the summer, in the interest of "saving electricity", even in the middle of a heat wave. It did not help that their huge house had the worst-designed central A/C system I've ever seen; Whoever installs a single-zone HVAC system in a 3,500 square foot 2-story home in Virginia needs to be fired. In the winter, they would have no problem roasting me out of the house because one elderly relative was cold. I could ask nicely and be a perfect guest, and my aunt would refuse to adjust the thermostat.

More than one time when staying at my house in the summer, my aunt would tell me it was too cold, and I was not the least bit sympathetic. I actually remember telling my aunt at one point something like "Tough shit. It's de facto my house, and I like it cold when I sleep." I later felt bad and apologized, but my parents let me keep the thermostat low and gave my aunt an extra blanket if I remember correctly.

 

There was this one time in December 2010 when I wanted to tear my hair out. We were visiting another aunt and uncle in California for Christmas. Their house was built in the late 1940s, and they bought it in the late 1980s if I remember correctly. The house had two or three of these gas-fired "floor furnaces", which worked, but were original to the house, had rotted out, and were unsafe. My uncle ripped them out and did not initially install a modern central heating system. They just used space heater and portable baseboard heaters.

During the Christmas 2010 trip, I slept on a futon thing in the family room. I was absolutely fine with this, as the futon was very comfortable; The problem arose on Christmas Eve when one of my aunts (not the one whose house it was) wanted to turn on the portable heater in the family room and leave it on all night so the room would be suitably warm for my cousin's 1-year old daughter. My argument was that portable electric heaters were very efficient at heating smaller spaces like the family room, and it would be just as good if the heater was turned on as soon as I woke up so I wouldn't get all sweaty and have trouble sleeping. My aunt, for whatever reason, could not comprehend this, and insisted that the heat be left on overnight "for the baby". Keep in mind that I was 21 years old, but I didn't care; I like it cool in the house when I'm trying to sleep, and keep in mind that this was California so it was in the high fifties. An argument very quickly started, and my parents took my side. I believe that my cousin (the baby's mother) finally settled things by saying that the heat did not have to be kept on all night. As stated in the previous post, I tolerate it 99% of the time when I'm in someone else's house (the Christmas 2010 debacle was the 1%). It is really galling when relatives who won't let me have any say in the thermostat adjustments at their houses complain about it being to cold when they stay at my house; Just deal with it!

 

Maybe three years ago, my aunt and uncle had a Bryant gas furnace installed in their house...

 

@shakerhood

The uncle from California is the same uncle who let me drive his '71 VW Bus, and I love him more than anything; However, when I was younger, we clashed over a few things...

In Christmas 2001, my parents and I drove down from Washington to spend Christmas with them. He had a really nice La-Z-Boy recliner with a matching footstool/footrest thing. If I remember correctly, I stubbed my toe on the footrest thing a couple days after Christmas; I don't remember what made me so angry (I think it was a painful stubbed toe), but regardless I became so angry that I kicked my uncle's footrest across the family room. By some miracle, it did not hit (or break) anything else. My uncle (in my opinion) took this so personally that he turned into the Incredible Hulk, rather aggressively blocked me from walking past his beloved chair, and refused to let me pass. I had to go the long way around to get to the bedroom section of their one-story house. I didn't get in trouble with my uncle, but I went to bed that night without speaking to my uncle. The next morning, my uncle asked me to go for a ride with him in the Rabbit. Specifically, this was my uncle's red 1984 Volkswagen Rabbit cabriolet, a car I absolutely loved riding in. We both apologized to each other in the car before he pulled out of the driveway; He took me to 7-Eleven for a Slurpee if I remember correctly, and then we went to a few local car dealerships to look around. My parents and my uncle probably do not remember this very well (if at all), as I had number of "meltdowns" in my younger years that forced my parents to go into "damage control" mode and explain why I was acting that way. I still remember it very well, however. I was 12 years old, and if I had to guess, my parents probably talked to my uncle about the whole Aspergers thing after I'd stormed off to the guestroom.

Below is a picture of me in the '84 Rabbit during a visit in August 2000, over a year before the incident I mentioned above...

 

@shakerhood

At a car show with my dad (who took the pictures) almost 20 years ago!

This is a Trabant, the 4-wheeled epitome of what a failure communism is! I believe it is a 601, but I am not sure; All I know is that I've had a bit of a soft spot for these cars since I first really learned about them on a visit to the International Spy Museum in 2004. Take a look at the second photo; Yes, the owner let me sit in it!


August 5th, 2000:

Anacortes, Washington

 

@shakerhood

Another picture from that same show...

Everybody knows that the unwritten rule of cars show is "Look and photograph, but don't touch". However, I've found out over the years that a lot of owners are more than happy to let young automobile enthusiasts sit behind the wheel of their vehicles...


August 5th, 2000:

Anacortes, Washington

 

Anybody notice the square-body Suburban parked across the street? Just a decade a later, I would have been all over that Burb with my SLR and paying more attention to it than to the Bel Airs!


August 5th, 2000:

Anacortes, Washington

 

I think next year I am going to try to set up an electric heater of some sort in the garage.

 

The beershift! Photo circa summer 2012...




If you look closely, you'll see that whoever is sitting in my truck in these two photos is wearing different shorts than me; I have no idea which one of my friends this was...

 

I remember when I was a kid my Dad had a big shoebox full of tubes and would always have the back cover of the TV off so he could swap them around. Had the big antenna up on the roof and you would turn the wheel on the box to get a better TV signal. Was probably about 13 when we got cable and I had a 13" black & white TV that I would watch the 3 stooges on before school.