Hurricane Dorian

The 2pm report on Dorian said that it was at 26.5 N / 77.1W moving W at 7mph. The max sustained winds are at 185 mph, That’s category 5. My house is at 26.4N / 80.1W. That’s 186 miles east of me. At 7mph it will be here in 26 hours unless it follows the predictions and turns north.

Hunkered down

I’m pretty well hunkered down waiting for the storm. I have hurricane windows all around the house and a natural gas generator. The cars are as close to the house as possible for shelter. Being below the ridge that runs along NW 4th Avenue, I’m somewhat sheltered from wind and storm surge.

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Catching Up

It’s been an interesting year. In November 2018 I was told that I needed to have my right shoulder replaced and on the same day I was told that I needed to have cataract surgery.

I had arthritis and a bone spur on the right shoulder. It was painful and I could feel the bone spur grating as I moved the arm. Dr. Toman in Boca Raton did a total reverse shoulder replacement on December 11th. The shoulder is now comfortable, but still doesn’t have the full range of motion that the left arm has. The only real down side is that I have to take antibiotics whenever I go to the Dentist.

I still haven’t seen the doctor about cataract surgery.

Someone donated a 1954 Studebaker Champion to the St. Lucy Catholic church in Highland Beach in February

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Email addresses

To be honest, my main reason for having a web site is to have my own email addresses. When I first connected to the internet, I was communicating over an acoustic modem to Cybergate. There was no world wide web at the time, just email and use-groups (sort of like today’s mailing lists or wiki’s). My first email address was at ‘gate.net’. They were bought by Earthlink, so my email address changed to ‘earthlink.net’. I then moved up from 1200 baud to 3 Mb/s on DSL. By this time we had limited access to the world wide web.

Bell South (AT&T) came through the neighborhood and said that they had put in high speed internet access to the neighborhood. When I switched to them, they said that I would have to disconnect my DSL access before they could install their access. When I did that, they said that they would be out to install my service in a month. Can you say “internet withdrawal symptom”? So I switched to AT&T DSL. I was getting better speeds on that link than from Earthlink fpr a while. My email addresses were now ‘att.net’ going through Yahoo. Corrosion on the copper wire phone lines would build up to where I needed someone to come out and scrape the connections at the local box.

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2018 RM Auction

I volunteered again for the RM Auction in Fort Lauderdale on April 6th and 7th.  The time put in is the major fund raising event for the Sunshine Chapter of the Studebaker Drivers’ Club. 

The cars start inside the Fort Lauderdale Convention Center.  This year there was something else going on at the center, so our space was smaller than in years past.  We only had about 340 cars.  The first team pulled the cars from the hall and drove them to a staging area outside the building.  My team drove the cars from there to the entrance next to the auction block.  We were then pushed to the foot of the ramp and drove it up onto the auction block.  After the bidding we were pushed to a turntable and out of the building.  Then we drove to the entrance where the third team pulled them into the building; sold cars over here and still-for-sale cars over there.  We were not supposed to run the cars inside (except for the drive up on the block.)

My first two cars were a 63 Renault Caravelle and a 59 Autobianchi Bianchina Transformable.  Both were small cars with stick shifts with unmarked shift pattern2. Then I got a big car, a 93 Rolls Royce Silver Spur II.  It started once when I tried it.  Then it died and had to be pushed or towed the rest of the time. 

Later on I got a 41 Lincoln with a 12 cylinder engine.  Once the battery was replaced, it ran fine.  I drove some other cars on Friday, but lost the list.

One of my Saturday cars was a 61 AMC Metropolitan Convertible.  My first car was a 57 Metropolitan, so I was right at home.  Other cars included a 91 Alpha Romeo Spider.  That was a very nice well behaved car. 

The 60 Mercedes-Benz 300d ‘Adenaur’ took two of us to figure out how to start it. 

A 68 Jaguar D-type Alloy Recreation with right hand drive nearly had me trapped.  I think I’m going to have to get some yoga/gymnastics/contortionist lessons before next year.  

There were a number of other cars such as Porche’s and Corvettes, which I didn’t record.

My final ride was a 63 Volkswagen Deluxe “23 Window” Microbus.  The final bid was $170,000 and didn’t meet the reserve. 

Building my own structures

Still making new buildings.  The roofs have been a problem.  I was going to try concrete as shown by the Stoneworks web site.  The compound shape for my house was a little to much for that.  So I switched to iron sheets brazed together.  I tried welding but the sheet metal is two thin.