Granite Falls. We even got Rolling Stone famous at one point:

I grew up in Meth-town USA (a little shithole half an hour into the mountains from Everett) and I’m surprised it’s taken this long.  My childhood home was stripped of all the copper decades ago.  It is a sinister place, Snohomish County.

A few years back, I had jury duty on a civil case where a guy ignored all the construction signs to ride his bike through the construction zone, and clotheslined himself on some cable that was stretched across a closed path, doing construction things. It’s just human nature to think screaming orange signs don’t really …

Have you ever talked to junkies?  The excuse about recycling bottles and leaving the car is as plausible as the earth being flat.

I had totally missed that the attached brackets were attached to a permanent cable- I thought you just unwound until the whole works plopped out and somehow had to get it into position for a bolt to pick it up again.  I wonder how often the cable gets dragged along the pavement and wears away because of relative…

Maybe a dumb question, but after use, how do you get the spare back up there?  Slide it in hopefully the right place and... how do you wind it back up into its little cubby?

How do you even describe that movie to someone?  Watching two kids starve to death for two hours, but somehow even more sad than that sounds?

That and Grave of the Fireflies... I don’t know which messed with me more.

I just picked up my first set of Blizzaks this season and have thoroughly enjoyed using them on my silly little hatchback in way worse weather than I have any right to be out in.  How many seasons use should I expect out of the things before I get into trouble?

Better than asking someone to “knock me up in the morning.”

I’m very possibly an outlier, but I’m in my mid forties, and didn’t have the chance to learn- my family wasn’t mechanically inclined, I lived without a car for many many years, and by the time I wanted to learn, I had nobody to learn from, and was kind of ashamed of knowing so little as an adult.  Add in the fear of…

Way back when, I remember the first roll of film I processed after ordering a Soviet-era Lomo LC-A mostly had shots that looked like this.  I think that was the idea at the time.

I am the idiot this new series should be for. All lessons I’ve learned have been expensive lessons where I’ve had no clue how to diagnose a problem or how to monitor things. Here are two examples of my dumb moves that are important for relative idiots like me to learn.  I know car people will think these are stupid,…

And the step number has “ate” right in the middle of it.

I now want to see a tail light that is flower shaped so I can say it “looks like a Lego anus.” 

I now want to see a tail light that is flower shaped so I can say it “looks like a Lego anus.” 

This is a fun story- my cheap bike got stolen at the university.  A week later, I saw an unlocked mountain bike on a different rack.  I watched it every day for a week before I saw the security crew come by (they would impound unlocked bikes), and finally took it home.  I used it a few days while keeping an eye on…

True dat.  They were brand spanking new this summer, and the cheap me is considering replacing them in the spring, which is saying a lot.

It does depend on the tires, too. I’ve never had snow tires until this year, and just stayed home and been relatively okay on all seasons the few times I’ve been out. But my new-to-me car had some eco-friendly, increase fuel efficiency tires on them that gave me a serious pucker on the first dusting of snow, so I bit…

“It’s the same road underneath!”  I shit you not, my ex brother-in-law said that to sixteen year old me and I quietly decided he was an idiot, not to be listened to ever again.