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

@El Duderino
@shakerhood
@Taco critter
@Thunder Fist

There are two people I would never allow to borrow my truck...

• My one friend because he has epilepsy; he has lost his license so many times over the last decade due to seizures that I lost count, and had two major accidents as a result of his condition. His license will be suspended for six months as required by PennDOT. He will then be seizure-free for years before he has another one and the vicious cycle repeats itself.
• My aunt because she will smoke in your vehicle even if you ask her politely not to, and she has an almost mystical ability to kill vehicles prematurely (She managed to murder a 2001 Jeep Cherokee with less than 90K miles last year).

 

For liability reasons I only let me and my wife drive our vehicles for liability reasons I won’t let anyone drive them

 

Also, my aunt’s ability probably is not so mystical...

She doesn’t take care of her vehicles; She’s claims she changes the oil and other fluids regularly, but her previously mint ‘01 Cherokee with less than 90K miles that’s now rotting in a junkyard would beg to differ...

The 1993 Nissan Pathfinder is the exception to the rule; The transmission went in 2004, but those older Pathfinders with automatic transmissions were prone to premature transmission failures, so I’ll cut her some slack. The transmission went when she had only one more payment left, and buying another used car was cheaper than putting a transmission in the Pathfinder, so she let the bank take it.

For a while, she drove my Grandpa’s 1993 Lincoln Continental but neglected to notice that she was running with no oil due to a long unnoticed oil leak, and cooked the engine in 2004 with only 100K miles on the clock.

She bought a 1997 Hyundai Tiburon that she totaled in 2005, and then she bought my cousin’s 1998 Monte Carlo. The Monte Carlo was T-boned by a Hummer and totaled in 2008. My aunt bought the 2001 Jeep and managed to keep that alive for about a decade. In 2018, she bought a 2008 Honda CRV, a vehicle we were 99% sure she won’t be able to kill in this lifetime...

 

Getting the house I can understand, especially if husband and wife had a kid or three...

However, what pissed me off is that the wife always seem to get stuff that she is not entitled to (like your buddy’s Raptor).

I also saw an episode of Hardcore Pawn where vengeful ex-lover pawned her boyfriend’s video game system and put an ID hold on it so only she could get it out.

The moral of that story is to keep your valuables locked up tight if you suspect even in the slightest that your significant other wants to break with out and/or is mentally unstable.

 

@El Duderino

In 8th grade, I got suspended from school for two days for “assaulting” a kid who was picking on me. Thinking ahead, I hid my PlayStation 2 and several games when I got home so my parents wouldn’t be able to take them.

P.S. I think that hitting a bully in school is one of those things that should be treated as a public service and rewarded instead of punished.

 

@El Duderino
@Running Man
@shakerhood
@Taco critter
@Thunder Fist

Since it’s close to the holidays, I figured I’d discuss something that’s a hot issue for me; Giving up your room to a relative when they come to visit.

If I’m at a friend or family member’s house, I’ll sleep wherever they put me...

If I’m at my house, ain’t nobody getting my room! I believe I finally gave my parents an ultimatum when I was 16 or
17 that I would no longer be giving up my bedroom to anybody for any reason.

My room is my space, and on the rare occasion that I need to be alone when we have company over it is my refuge. I also didn’t want my aunt or grandma finding the issue of Playboy I had stashed in the dresser drawer...

 

My grandma and grandpa came for Christmas in 2002. My grandpa unexpectedly got sick and they ended up staying with us until well into March 2003. This is all well and good, except they moved from one of the 2nd floor guestrooms and into the basement bedroom, where they colonized my gameroom.

I would bring my dog downstairs with me and play PlayStation or watch cartoons for hours. My grandma started making ask permission to go in my basement and forbid me from bringing my dog downstairs.

Obviously, I couldn’t play PlayStation downstairs, so I’d get my video gaming in on the family room TV.

I would play video games (most notably Test Drive: Off Road) on Saturday mornings. My grandma could supposedly hear the vibrations of the speakers through the floor, and the bedroom was directly below the family room. She would be trying to sleep, and she’d send my grandpa upstairs to tell me to turn down the volume.

I love my grandmother, but I didn’t realize how high-maintenance she was until she spent about four months living in my house. My relationship with my grandma was legitimately strained by that fiasco.

My grandpa was the glue that kept my grandma together, and when he died I stopped going over to my Grandma’s house alone because quite frankly I was a bit afraid of her and temperamental
behavior.

 

My aunt and uncle were extremely rigid about about A/C and heat usage and I was almost always immensely uncomfortable at their old house in the summer because the central A/C was underpowered for the house and they rarely set the thermostat below 75 in the summer.

One time, fairly recently, my aunt had the nerve to ask me to turn up the temperature when she was staying at my house in summer (my parents and I keep the thermostat at 68). I got her an extra blanket and essentially told her to take a hike...

You didn’t scratch my back, so why should I scratch yours?

 

Here’s holiday story ...

When my dad was stationed at NAS Whidbey Island from 2000 to 2002, I went to Oak Harbor Middle School.

Every holiday season, we’d donate canned food through the school. If I remember correctly, there was a church next to the school. Obviously, a church is going to be heavily involved in donated food to poor people.

The people at the church got the bright idea to walk onto school grounds and hound students for canned food donations as soon they got out of their parents’ cars. Students, myself included, did not like this one bit. I was one of many students who complained, and it eventually became so bad that the people from the church were given an order to cease and desist.

The ride to school every morning in my mom’s van was something I relished. I would crank the heat up and point the vents at my face, and put my favorite country station (94.1 KMPS out of Seattle) on the radio. The last thing I wanted was some overly cheerful churchy bombarding me as soon as I get out of the van!

 

Our family van from May 2000 to May 2004 looked a lot like this one (same color and same wheels), except it was not AWD like the one pictured and ours had running boards...



Ours was also a 2000 (this picture that I snagged off the internet is of a 2002 model). That van should have been called “Charlie’s Limo”, because that’s what it basically was...

For the first year we owned it, I rode in the back. It had deep-tinted windows and mini-blinds, along with a TV and VCR.

We got rid of that van for a few reasons...

• The high-top made parking in some places impossible.
• The air-conditioner had a leak that two different dealerships failed to find, and the when the bumper-to-bumper warranty expired, my parents pretty much said “screw it”.
• It was rear-wheel drive and had an open rear diff, so it sucked in the snow.

 

All of my friends thought that our GMC Safari was the greatest thing since sliced bread, because it had a TV in the back and the high-top ceiling allowed most kids under 13 to stand up in the back!

When I was 14, my dad actually let me drive this van on a back road near my grandma’s lake house in Maine! License? I don’t need no stinkin’ license!

 

You guys had a van for one kid. That’s some space dedication.

 

We bought the van for multiple reasons...

My dad was in the Navy and we regularly moved across the country every couple of years. My parents wanted a vehicle with a TV and VCR in the back for me to watch movies, and unless you wanted to spent forty grand or more on a Suburban or Excursion and then spend another two grand installing an entertainment system, a conversion van was the best option in 2000. The sticker on that van was over $30K, but it had been on the lot for like six months and my dad got it for like $24K.

The Navy would only pay to ship one vehicle, so my dad wanted to pull his Harley in a UHAUL trailer. He specifically sought out a vehicle with a large towing capacity, and with a dedicated “tow/haul mode” and a 5,000-pound toeing capacity, that van was perfect.

Keep in mind that we also had a fully grown Labrador retriever and larger-than-normal amount of luggage

 

@El Duderino

I don’t think I ever told anybody about the time I freaked out because I thought we were getting carjacked.

It was June 2000 and we were moving across country from Virginia Beach to Whidbey Island. We had driven up to Grammy’s house in Maine to spend a week, and then we drove west.

We stopped in Wyoming to see Yellowstone Park. Obviously, my dad didn’t feel like pulling the UHAUL through Yellowstone, so he unhitched it from the van and chained it to a utility pole. I believe the hotel we stayed at was just over the state line in Montana.

The multi-day layover in Wyoming was great! On the day we left, however, my dad was having trouble hooking the UHAUL back up to the van. This was years before backup cameras were commonplace.

I was in the backseat of the van sorting through my VHS tape collection, and unbeknownst to me, my dad had sought the help of either a hotel employee or the waitress who had just served us breakfast at a nearby restaurant (I forget which).

All of a sudden, this strange woman hopped my behind the wheel of our brand new van and put it in reverse, and I damn near freaked out. Seconds later, she leaned out the window and asked my dad what he wanted her to do. I don’t remember where my mom was, but it was obvious that this woman had permission to be in the van and I breathed a sigh of relief.

 

In the summer of 2002, we moved to Northern Virginia from Washington in the same conversion van. Just hours away from our new home in Fairfax County, in Ohio if I remember correctly, traffic just completely stopped.

Thanks to a network of truckers with CB radios, the news eventually made it back to us that a particularly nasty accident had occurred. This is the first time I’ve seen an accident that completely shut down a freeway for that long. I don’t remember how long it we there, but I was watching the first Harry Potter movie in the van; That is a pretty long movie, and I got through most of it in the time we were stuck. I inevitably ended up having to answer the call of nature, and I would have just gone in the woods, but the driver of a Greyhound bus almost directly behind us starting letting stranded motorists use the bathroom on the bus and I gladly took this offer.

We also had to let Molly out to do
her business...

Traffic finally got moving again after close to two hours or so, and that accident was worst I’d ever seen personally. I’m pretty sure people died, though all of the casualties had been taken away by the time we drove past. The part I remember most vividly is a brand new dark red luxury sedan (either an Audi A6 or a VW Passat) on its roof with what looked like blood smeared on the asphalt around it. From what I remember, the vehicles involved included the red sedan, possibly one other car or SUV, a tractor trailer, and at least one motorcycle. If I remember correctly, the biker actually escaped serious injury and ended up ditching his bike in the field next to the highway.

 

I agree. When you reach a certain age, your room is your room.

 

I had an old truck that I would always loan to friends who needed a truck. It wasn't fancy, but I took good care of it. I had a friend who was down on her luck and needed a vehicle so I loaned her my truck until she could get sorted out. She wrecked it, which I wasn't mad about, accidents happen. I was really disappointed, however, in the fact that she totally trashed the inside of it. She had been smoking in there and had old, uneaten food, and dirty clothes, and trash, and it was just gross. I felt disrespected.

 

Yea when you move out of your parents house they pay for lol

 

Yeah, but even a high school kid should have his or her own space.

 

My truck is messy at times, but it’s different if the registered owner of the vehicle makes the mess...