"Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city." - George Burns

Awww!

Coming down to the wire! Whatever the outcome of the election it looks like it will be close, which pretty much guarantees more political gridlock for the foreseeable future. The winners won't have a mandate and the losers will feel emboldened by their near miss. 

After my comments about a Slate bias in a post from last week I was interested to see one of their weekend articles. They asked the staff who they were going to vote for and why. Participation was voluntary and I don't know the size of their staff, so it's hard to tell if this is a fair representation, but I think it probably is. At the end of the article they give the totals: Obama - 31, Romney - 2, and four votes spread over the three "third party" candidates. I wasn't at all surprised by that outcome but I found their brief explanations interesting, including the frequent use of the term "reproductive rights" as a euphemism for abortion. That bit of grammatical duplicity leaves me shaking my head. 

Louise is all but "sorted out" and I enjoy driving her. The one stubborn problem - OK, there are two, but the more problematic one - is her refusal to start after a period of 30-45 minutes. If it's a very brief stop to run into the store and back out to the parking lot: no problem. If it's a 2 or 3 hour stop like church yesterday: no problem. But if we go up the hill for dinner on a Friday night and come out 45 minutes later she'll start right up, die, and then refuse to run. It's clearly a fuel problem and it eventually clears itself up. It seems I can hasten that by raising the hood and taking the air cleaner off, which I've done to check the choke position. I've done that almost immediately after the problem and after trying for 10 minutes to start it. Pop the hood, "the choke is fine," drop the hood: the car starts and runs fine.

I think I'm getting a vapor lock! The engine actually gets hotter once it's shut off because the cooling system stops running, too. Eventually the engine cools off, but temp goes up before it goes down. And that's the window I'm in when I get this problem. After a lot of head scratching I've concluded it gets hot enough under the hood that the gas in the line "boils," turns to a vapor, and creates a bubble that starves the car of fuel when I try to start it up.

Pop the hood, the heat escapes, the lines cool down, the gas vapor condenses and returns to liquid form, and voila!, she starts up and runs fine.

But why now? Why wasn't this a problem back in the mid-60's when they built this thing? Surely Ramblers didn't have this problem then or nobody would have bought them.

A: Ethanol. 

I've been doing some reading, and ethanol lowers the boiling point of gas. A 10% ethanol mix is enough to make the difference. 

So I'll get some rubber gas line to replace the metal line. The thin metal tubing easily absorbs the heat off the engine and transfers it to the gas whereas the heavy rubber line won't. 

Then we'll find out if I'm correct. 

This is fun.

This is not. It's from my older brother, a collection of photographs of Hurricane Sandy's damage that appeared in a British paper. Hard to believe.

Steve helped me install the VW windshield this evening. The plan: windshield, dinner at Chick-Fil-A, (the four of us), then Pam, Steve & Michelle go fabric shopping for the nursery while I go home and watch football. Part One of the plan didn't go quite like we wanted. It cracked about 30 seconds into the project. But the VW forum is loaded with stories of windshields cracking during installation so I was neither surprised nor upset. Vintage VW's have flat windshields which makes them weak and susceptible. A replacement is already ordered from a guy in CA and I'll have it by the end of the week. 

Steve felt bad about the crack because his job was to be on the outside pushing the windshield inward. But I told him before we started this was a real possibility. Besides, he's in a fabric store right now and that's all the punishment any male should have to endure for almost any sin.