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

Is that the name of the move?

Superbad?

 

If it's the one I'm thinking of, then yes, where the kid has a fake Hawaii driver's license...?

 

I’ve never seen it.
But I just watch the trailer for the movie.
Now I just need to see if it’s on Amazon prime movies. (I don’t it)

 

Did you guys ever watch the Dukes of Hazzard? The series ended about four years before I was born, but I discovered reruns of it while channel surfing in about October-November 1999 and it was love at first sight. It was on TNN then (which I believe became what we now know as Spike TV), and TNN reported record viewership by kids my age due to interest in reruns of the show. In a little over after I started watching the series, I had three model General Lees (one of which was autographed by John Schneider) and two different Dukes of Hazzard video games.

 

I've never seen it either, and I've only seen the second half of the Big Lebowsky...

 

How much time we got?

Never missed it on Friday nights, that and the Incredible Hulk with Lou Ferigno. Catherine Bach was my second celebrity crush at age 7. Still have the plastic car somewhere.

I have one of the PS1 Dukes games actually.

You're right that TNN became Spike, it's currently Paramount.

 

Sure did, I loved that show.

And I’ll stop now, before I voice my opinion on “Cancel Culture” and get myself banned.

 

Y'all need the series DVD set like I bought this year

 

I just remembered something about the house we were living when I discovered the Dukes. The house was built in 1996 and my parents bought it from the original owners in 1998. It had a remote-controlled gas fireplace with a TV alcove above it, as in a for a now-obsolete CRT television. We had a 32" Sony Trinitron back then, and the VCR was on top of the TV; I couldn't reach it, so my mom always had to put VHS tapes in and take them out...



Also, I can't help put wonder what was done with that alcove in the age of the flat screen HDTV; I'm guessing they put a large plant in the alcove about the fireplace and mounted the TV on the wall. That was also the last place we lived that didn't require cable box to get all of the channels. My mom and I used to hate cable boxes, and I sitll kind of miss the days of just plugging a TV directly into the wall and getting cartoons or Shark Week...

I got a TV in my room for the first time in the summer of 2001. We had a lot of relatives over that summer, and my bedroom became my safe space. My room had a cable jack in it, so my mom bought me a 13" Emerson TV/VCR combo at Walmart, on sale for $140. This was before HDTVs became affordable, and people were still buying TVs like the one I smashed with my zombie bat up in Centralia two weeks ago. This was when we lived on Whidbey Island, in Washington. Our house was a rental, and thankfully it had a cable jack in my room, because my parents wouldn't have had a hole gouged in the wall of a house they didn't own to install one. So, from 2001 to 2002 I had cable. My bedroom at our house in Northern Virginia where we lived from 2002 to 2005 did not have a cable jack, but I had a whole finished basement with cable and my PlayStation 2. My parents actually owned the house in the DC suburbs, but I believe that cable boxes were required by then, and my didn't feel like paying for another one. As stated before, the basement was basically my media center.

My bedroom in the house we rented in Pennsylvania from 2005 to 2007 did not have a cable jack, but the guest bedroom (which we used as the computer room) did. If I wanted cable in my bedroom, I just ran the extra-long cable across the hall to my bedroom. My parents had both of our houses (2007-2016 and 2016-present) built, and they specified a cable jack in my room. I did not need a cable box in the townhouse, but I have one in the house we're in now...

 

You can still get it on DVD!

 

I don’t own a DVD player.
I’m not one to sit down and watch a movie either.

I’m a night owl, and I used to watch that show late at nigh,

What I want to know is how come Dukes was canceled, but “All in the Family” wasn’t.
Actually I don’t want to know, because then they probably cancel that show too.

 

One of the greatest movies of all time.
https://youtu.be/2HTHPtoNJLk

 

@6 gearT444E
@98tacoma27
@ABA180
@ALI3N_123
@BkerChuck
@ColoradoTJ
@Plain Jane Taco
@shakerhood
@TnShooter
@wilcam47

So, as most of you know, my dad was in the Navy from 1982 to 2007 and stationed at NAS Whidbey Island from 2000 to 2002. NAS Whidbey did not have a Navy Exchange, a commissary, a BOQ, or a Navy Lodge. It did have a church, but I don't seem to remember it having much else compared to other bases where my dad worked. There was a former seaplane base located right in town, and had a Navy Exchange and a hotel; I forget whether it was the BOQ or the Navy Lodge. The old seaplane base was open to the public in the sense that anybody could just drive right on, but the hotel and Exchange were only available to military and their families. My dad bought me a tax-free PS2 at that Exchange for Christmas in 2001!

The "hotel" wasn't actually a hotel or even a motel, but rather a cluster of single-wide trailer homes, and they were NICE. They probably weren't more than a year or two old at the time and they had two bedrooms, two bathrooms, a washer and dryer, a full kitchen with a full-sized fridge and dishwasher, and even central air! The house we ended up moving into didn't even have central air! These places definitely didn't have gas heat, but I don't remember if these were heat pumps or just straight-cool A/C units with electric strip heat. We only stayed there in the summer, so only used the A/C.

We moved to Oak Harbor in July 2000, and we actually arrived on July 4th. My dad put me on the top of our van (it may have actually been the UHAUL trailer hooked up to the van) so I could watch the fireworks. My dad's friend and his family were still living in the house we moved into, and we stayed in the single-wide for close to a month.

When we moved out of the house in June or July of 2002, we spent a week or two in the same trailer hotel again. My mom's side of the family was visiting, so we rented two or three of these single-wide units. There was a strict NO PETS policy, so poor Molly had to stay in the kennel in both 2000 and 2002. Luckily, we were able to visit her.

Due to some sort of scheduling issue (I believed it was because the kennel was closed on the day we wanted to leave), we picked up Molly from the kennel a day or two early, and she seemed weird. Molly was a Labrador, about 7½ years old at the time, and normally very energetic. With no other options, we smuggled Molly into our trailer; I was sitting on the floor in the living room, petting Molly while she lay on her side. Molly loved having her ears scratched, and it was while doing this that I discovered her ears were puss-filled and swollen.

We were leaving in less than a day and didn't want to get on the road with Molly in this condition. My dad somehow got ahold of Molly's vet, and if I remember correctly the place was closed, so I don't know how he did it. For $100, the vet agreed to open up shop and see Molly. Our GMC conversion van was loaded with our belongings and hooked up to the UHAUL, so it would have been a pain in the ass to take our van. My Aunt Ellen and Uncle Craig, and my cousins, had driven up from California in their well-used 1994 Dodge Grand Caravan SE for that visit; Uncle Craig gave my dad the keys to the Caravan, and my other cousin (not Aunt Ellen and Uncle Craig's kid) went with my dad to the vet.

Molly ended up having some sort of ear infection that was easily treated with prescribed antibiotics. Even more important, nobody found out we were keeping Molly in the trailer. My Uncle Craig decided to play a prank, after we got back from the vet, where he banged on the door and pretended to be a hotel employee demanding to know if we had a dog inside.

 

Why not? I don't like them as much as I did when I was a kid, but I do have my favorite episodes...

 

Your computer is a DVD player. If you end up buying a new laptop, it might not come with a disk drive, but you can buy an external USB -> disk drive.

I now fail to remember the name of the people I meet 3 minutes after they introduce themselves. I do remember stuff from my childhood, but the detail with which you remember this stuff is astonishing.

 

@6 gearT444E
@98tacoma27
@ColoradoTJ
@shakerhood
@TnShooter

That seemingly ordinary silver Dodge Grand Caravan played a major role in my childhood. We lived in Pennsylvania twice (1990-1996, and 2005-present). My aunt and uncle bought the van brand new when we still lived in Pennsylvania the first time. They bought a Grand Caravan rather than a regular Caravan, because they needed the space. The van had air-conditioning, but only in the front. My aunt and uncle had two kids and a mortgage, and not a whole helluva lot of money to throw around, so they ordered the van with what they though they needed rather than what they wanted. The van did have A/C; I have a 1994 Caravan brochure in my collection and I believe that A/C was standard on the midlevel SE trim, but rear A/C was an extra-cost option and only available on the Grand Caravan. The A/C worked fine in the mild summers of Monterey, California. My uncle's family lived in Texas, and they regularly drove to Texas instead of flying. It was after the first trip to Texas that my aunt and uncle realized they probably should have spent the extra money for rear A/C, but they kept that van for ten years. Both of my cousins took their driver's tests in that van, and when we moved back to California in 1996 I spent a significant portion of the two years we lived there in that van.

1994 was the first year for dual airbags, and I could not ride in the front when we lived there, but my aunt and uncle had ordered the van with 2nd row captain's chairs. Chrysler products have their shortcomings, but MOPAR minivans have some of the most comfortable seats I've ever experienced. The backseat was incredibly spacious, and my parents had never owned a minivan before, so it was a new and exciting experience for me!

The one time I got to ride in the front seat when I still technically too small to do so safely was sometime in 1997 when I was spending the weekend at their house; I had already gone to bed, but it still wasn't particularly late. My aunt had heard about a car show called Cherry Jubilee in downtown Monterey that was still going on. She woke me up, dragged me out of bed before I was fully awake, and threw me in the front seat of the van: I was 8 years old, and I kept asking her what was going on. I knew it had to be something exciting, but all she would tell me was that there was something going on in town that I had to see. So yeah, my aunt dragged me out of bed, put me in the van still in my jammies, and drove me downtown to see a cruise night. Once we reached downtown Monterey, I was leaning out the open window staring in absolute awe at all of the cars.[/user]

 

That van was reliable enough, but it was not without its issues. As stated above, the transmission was replaced as part of a recall when it was only a couple years old. One time in about 1997, it developed this bizarre electrical gremlin where the lights would dim and the door chime would sound whenever my aunt hit a bump. I was in the back, my aunt was driving, and my cousin was riding shotgun. The radio was on, and the clock on the radio would dim whenever this lightshow was triggered; I forget what ended up being wrong with the van, but they fixed it and had it another seven years...

The rear-view mirror was attached to the windshield and fell off at least twice during my aunt and uncle's ownership. The last time it happened was during the aforementioned visit to our house in Washington in the summer of 2002. 1991-1995 Chrysler minivans were still fairly common in the early 2000s, so the local dealership in Oak Harbor, Washington had the parts necessary to fix the mirror in stock. Nowadays, at least in my neck of the woods, you are more likely to see a $300,000 supercar than you are to see a 1990s Chrysler minivan; I highly doubt that any Dodge dealer would have something in stock as mundane as a rear-view mirror assembly kit for a 1994 Dodge Caravan. Brakes and other vital components can easily be obtained, but just to give you an idea, I found out from the local Lexus dealer while getting parts for my grandma's 2002 RX300 that Toyota/Lexus was no longer making interior trim pieces for that model. My cousin actually ended up fixing the mirror in our driveway. We took that van to the Seattle Aquarium on that same trip.

 

The short wheelbase Chrysler minivans were available from their debut in 1983 as 1984 models. The extended wheelbase versions came out in 1987, and rear A/C became available for the first time in 1988. For some stupid reason, rear A/C was not available in AWD Chrysler minivans when the redesign debuted in 1991; I do not have a 1992 brochure, but by 1993 it was available with AWD. I'm thinking that some sort of early design issue prevented the installation of rear A/C in an AWD-equipped van. The LWB vans were obviously the more popular version, as I see far more of them around, but the SWB vans continued to be alongside the LWBs until the 2007 model year. It was possible to get a no-frills Caravan with a 2.4L 4-cylinder engine, and no options but A/C and a tape deck (A/C was standard by then, and I don't think I've ever seen a Chrysler minivan without A/C newer than 1990), until 2007. The all-new vans came out in late 2007 for the 2008 model year, and by then Plymouth had been phased out and the Voyager was long gone. The SWB model went away, and for the rest of its production run Dodge's version was only available as the Grand Caravan. Chrysler continued to produce the Town & Country until was replaced with the Pacifica in 2016. Volkswagen sold a hastily reworked version of the Grand Caravan, called the Routan, from about 2008 to 2010...

Even though my aunt's Caravan lacked rear A/C, it was pretty well-equipped. In 1994, the Grand Caravan was available in Base, SE, and top LE trims. My aunt and uncle didn't want to pay the extra money for an LE, so they ordered an LE, and the captain's chairs were at the top of the list because they wanted my cousins to each have their own seat so they wouldn't fight on long trips. The base model was not available with the captain's chairs. The base model also only came with the potentially troublesome Mitsubishi-sourced V6. The SE and LE came standard with the much better (in my opinion) 3.3L V6. The transmission in my aunt and uncle's Caravan was Mitsubishi, and my uncle said that it was replaced under recall in 1995 or 1996. A/C, cruise control, and tilt steering were standard on the SE, as was an AM/FM stereo cassette with 4 speakers. An Infinity system was available on the SE, but my aunt and uncle did not want to spend that kind of money. I can remember listening to the radio in that van as late as 2003-2004, and that stereo kicked ass for a factory system in a 10-year old minivan. California has obnoxiously strict rules about emissions testing for gas and diesel vehicles, and that van never once failed the biannual smog test, EVER. Not once.

The final nail in the coffin was when the A/C compressor shit the bed in 2004 and it was going to cost a fortune to fix. The van had about 180K miles on it and looked like shit, but it still ran and drove just fine. My uncle sold the Caravan and they bought a new 2004 Honda Element, which he sold maybe five or six years ago to put money towards buying the two Volkswagen buses that he still has; I highly doubt that Caravan still exists given how worn out it was less than two decades ago, but to me the memories made in it are priceless and will live on forever.