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

We were living in Virginia Beach at the time, and it took like fifteen hours to drive from there to Maine if you drove straight through; It takes about seven hours to drive from my parents' current house up to Maine, and it takes six hours to drive from here to Virginia Beach, and you've also got to account for traffic...

I don't seem to remember Virginia Beach being horribly affected by the drought in the summer of 1999, though I can distinctly remember temperatures in the triple digits; Luckily, our house had central air and both my parents' vehicles (a 1996 Nissan Pathfinder and a 1990 Mazda B-series) had A/C. I took swimming lessons to refresh my skills that summer, and I can remember burning my hands on a pool ladder one time when it was like 105 degrees...

Anyway, it was hot in Maine that summer, but not as hot as Virginia Beach; My parents drove me up there in the 1996 Nissan Pathfinder and then flew to Washington (state). I had my portable TV/VCR and a wide selection of movies, and the A/C in the Pathfinder worked great so I didn't really pay attention during that trip; Because it was such a long drive, we stopped at Grammy's primary house in Pennsylvania to rest for the night. She had relocated to South Florida as her primary home, and the Pennsylvania house was empty with the exception of basic furniture; One thing I distinctly remember is getting out of the Pathfinder and my dad pointing out how brown the front lawn was...

 

Grammy bought the first Maine house in 1990, but lived in Arizona from 1982 to 1994; She moved to Pennsylvania for the first time in 1994, and lived there until 1999...

She bought a house from her son (my uncle) in Boca Raton sometime in the range of 1992-1994 and moved her mother (then about 80 years old) into that house. In 1998-1999, she decided to move down to Florida, bought another house across from the one Great Gram was living in, and sold the first Pennsylvania house. In 2005-2006, she decided to move back to Pennsylvania; She sold both Florida houses and bought another house in the same neighborhood she'd lived in from 1994 to 1999. She moved back to Florida last year, but still owns the place in PA and is trying to sell it (I was just there last week picking up the patio furniture).

 

I had my own room in the first PA house, but the house was big and almost empty, and I was afraid to sleep by myself, so I slept on a futon in the master bedroom just steps away from my parents...

We drove the rest of the way to Maine the next day; Anyway, the A/C in Grammy's Mercedes developed a leak sometime in 1997-1998. It was pretty hot in Maine that summer, and Grammy wanted the A/C in her car to work again; R-12 was still fairly easy to obtain in 1999, so Mr. P and I took the Mercedes this mechanic just over the state line in New Hampshire who Mr. P knew; The biggest appeal here was that New Hampshire didn't (and still doesn't) have sales tax! We waited with the car while the mechanic charged the system, and if I remember correctly it cost like $129 to charge the system (a bargain by today's standards), and both myself and Mr. P were not terribly satisfied with the performance of the A/C on the drive home considering how much he'd just spent; The A/C did blow cold, but it didn't seem to be up to the same standards as the A/C in Mr. P's 1993 Lincoln or even my parents' vehicles...

The A/C in that 1987 Mercedes was never fully repaired, even after my dad took de facto ownership of the car in 2003 when Grammy replaced it with a 2002 Lexus RX300. It did work great when charged during the time we had it from 2003 to 2005, but a charge never lasted more than a summer...

 

Agreed. But not to the point that the lawn dies!

The hottest summers that I can remember are...

• 1999
  
• 2002
• 2005
• 2010

The worst (not just coldest but snowiest) winters I can remember are...

• 1995-1996
• 2002-2003
• 2005-2006
• 2006-2007
• 2009-2010
• 2011-2012
• 2013-2014
• 2014-2015
• 2016-2017
• 2017-2018

If you want evidence of how miserable early 2018 was, scrolled back several hundred pages in this thread to see pictures of my Tacoma in the snow at my friend's vacation home in the Poconos (below -20 when I took them)!

 

Slowing the grass down a bit wouldn't bother me, i just mowed a couple days ago and you cannot even tell! I remember back a few winters where it was below zero, the shocks froze on my truck and it drove like a hay-wagon for about 45 minutes until the heat from the engine warmed them.

 

@El Duderino
@shakerhood
@Taco critter

As stated above, the summer of 2010 was record-settingly hot! A former friend of mine DJ'd on the side, and he had a gig at hookah bar in Jenkintown this one night in July. I'd had the Tacoma for like ten months at the time, but did not yet have a driver's license (just a learner's permit), but after what happened that night I am glad I did not drive the Tacoma. My former friend the DJ did not have a driver's license either (he is 33 now and still does not have one) went with another mutual friend who did have a driver's license in the 1997 or 1998 Plymouth Grand Voyager he'd inherited from his deceased father; It was over 100 degrees that day, and luckily that old minivan had great A/C!

So, the gig at the hookah lounge went more or less okay (though I got incredibly bored at times); My DJ ex-friend lived in New Hope with his mom at the time had invited a couple of his scumbag friends who lived across the river in Lambertville, New Jersey; One of these friends had just bought a 2003 Toyota Celica, but did not have his license yet, so he got the other friend who did have a license to drive it.

On the drive home, it was me, the DJ ex-friend, and my other friend in the minivan, and the other two guys in the Celica behind us. We were coming to a stop sign, and all of a sudden, I feel the unmistakable thunk of a rear-end collision. The guy in the Celica had rear-ended my friend's minivan. To my absolute shock, my friend did not get out to check the damage or exchange info, and didn't even seem to care...

Then, the asshole in the Celica tapped the rear bumper of the minivan again, and it became obvious that this was his idea of a joke...

 

@El Duderino
@shakerhood
@Taco critter

Let me tell you something; My Tacoma was ten months old at the time, and probably had like 5,000 miles on it; It was brand new and not paid off, plus it was still in my dad's name...

If I'd been in my then-new truck, and that asshole had purposely rear-ended it, I seriously would have forcibly removed him from the Celica, given him the ass-kicking of the decade, and likely put him in the hospital! Hell, if that 12-year old Plymouth minivan with over 100K miles had been mine, I still probably would have given the kid a beating!

 

There's no telling how many pages of this thread I could fill with stories of the shit this former friend of mine (the DJ) pulled...

Particularly irksome was the type of people he hung out with outside of the Coffeehouse, like the asshole from Jersey whose idea of a joke was rear-ending my other friend's van...

On one occasion, not long after I turned 21 but before I got my driver's license, I went over to the DJ's house with him and another friend who had a license; This guy's mom had serious trust issues with him, and it was easy to see why for numerous reasons!

 

This was sometime in 2010 if I remember correctly, maybe early 2011; The DJ's mom lived in a very nice neighborhood, and it had a finished walkout basement with a sliding glass door. My former friend lived in the basement, and routinely left the sliding door unlocked while locking the front door; Nobody ever broke in, but this guy had a bunch of friends who would routinely crash at the house, often without his mom's knowledge...

On this particular occasion, we were in my buddy's SUV and the DJ told us that he had some friends over at the house; He asked if we were cool with this, while if I remember correctly failing to give specific details on the friends, and we both said yes...

So, we got to his house and entered through the basement slider, and sitting on the couch there was a boy and a girl who I assumed were in their early 20s (I was 21, my other friend was 20, and the DJ would have been 23 or 24); I had never seen these two before, and I got "a feeling" just from making eye contact with them but kept my mouth shut. We talked for a bit, and then the girl asked me how old I was. Thinking nothing of it, I told her that I was 21; Ever so casually, she asked if I could buy them some beer...

**Up until this moment, I'd found this girl rather attractive; I was only 21 at the time, and when she asked me to buy them beer I figured she must still be at least 18 (acceptable as a date for a 21-year old guy)**

I of course said no way, and then asked how old she was; I was completely shocked when she told me she was fourteen! Needless to say, I was no longer attracted to this girl, and at this point I just wanted both of them gone. Luckily, I didn't have to say anything; My body language and the look on my face must have been enough, because the guy said "maybe we should go" and both of them were gone in a heartbeat...

It may have actually been the guy who asked me to buy them beer, but it doesn't matter because neither one of them was even old enough to drive! My other friend would later tell me that the same girl had been hitting on him when I wasn't paying attention, and it made him incredibly uncomfortable. After they'd left, my ex-friend the DJ had the nerve to get mad at me for disclosing my age when asked, and that inevitably sparked one hell of an argument (which I won). That was just one incident in a long line of shady and downright creepy incidents with that guy, between 2010 and 2012, that would lead to us parting ways...

 

I figured you would like this, @El Duderino
And you too, @ColoradoTJ

I took swimming lessons at two different places in the summer of 1999, either once or twice a week for both; The first round was in the morning, and taught in a class with many other kids of varying ages in the pool at NAS Oceana; The second one was one-on-one with a private instructor at a pool that either public, or part of a civilian club.

Jeremy, I tagged you in this post because I think you would have liked my swim instructor; He was either a former Marine or a former Navy SEAL, this blonde guy in his 20s who was build like a bodybuilder. He drove a beat up 1985 or 1986 Chevy Astro conversion van with A/C that did not work. Like I said before, we were going through a record heat wave at the time and one day after lessons I saw the van for the first time time in the parking lot actually asked if the old, worn out van had A/C; He told that it did, but it did not work. I can remember thinking he was crazy for not getting it fixed!

Here's the part you're gonna like; He told me that as part of his training when he was still in boot camp, was that his arms were tied behind his back and his legs were also tied, and he had to simulate escaping an enemy captor by swimming while tied up. On my last day of lessons, he wanted to show my mom how far I'd come (I could swim prior to starting lessons, but I was rather unrefined); He had a female lifeguard (who I believe may have been his girlfriend) tie him up with the straps of life preservers (because he would have kicked my ass if he was untied), and I raced him from one end of the pool to the other. It was very close, but I won...

 

I slept for like two three hours this afternoon (and into the evening), but now I'm starting to feel tired again, so I'm out...

Goodnight!

 

Nice I remember doing swim qualifications in the military. I had to wrestle in the water. I bit the shit out the dudes arm caused it to bleed. He said get out by any means lol

 

Biting was actually encouraged?

 

No but he said “by any means necessary” so when he’s arm went around my neck, I dropped my chin an bit the shit out his arm.

 

My factory jack works just fine, I've used it.
I carry boards to put under the jack to stabalize it.
I believe AAA won't leave the paved road but I do so I self rescue.
I carry a plug patch kit and tire pump too so with luck I can fix a tire without taking the wheel off.

 

This Pier 1 has been here for over thirty years, and one time in the early nineties, my mom actually stopped and took me inside just because I said I wanted to; Unfortunately, it has been closed since mid-March due to the Coronavirus pandemic...

 

This is in the same shopping center as Pier 1; The bike shop has been there for well over 20 years under at least two different names (and is still open as it’s consider an essential business under PA law). There used to be an independently-owned video rental place there when we lived here from 1990 to 1996, but it was long gone by the time we moved back in 2005; I have not seen a video store in at least ten years!

 

This Red Lobster has also been here for years; The last time I went as a customer was with my parents in like 1994 or 1995...



Back in the nineties, it was blue, but they painted it red not long before we moved in 1996 and it has been red ever since; I picked up a few DoorDash and Uber Eats orders here in 2018-2019, but I’ve never actually eaten here because it is almost twenty minutes from my house and not cheap! I have no idea if it was open for takeout or not...

 

I encountered a fellow 2nd Gen owner in the parking lot of a shopping center while heading back home; Unfortunately I did not get any pictures because I was in a rush to get home and answer nature’s call

Anyway, the truck was a super white 2007 AC 4.0L/auto 4x4 base model, and the guy was the original owner; When his girlfriend rolled down the passenger window, I realized that the truck actually had manual windows! He told me it was the last one on the lot in configuration he wanted, and as of this post the truck has less than 77K miles on it! It also has a new frame! He added a touch screen head unit and a backup camera as well!

I told him how easy it was to add intermittent wipers before we parted ways...

 

My neighbor is a guidance counselor at a Catholic high school, and as some of my readers may or may not know, school in Pennsylvania has been cancelled for the rest of year statewide due to the pandemic. She and some of the other staffers have taken it upon themselves to make care packages of sorts for the graduating seniors; Today I took it upon myself to help...