The Old Jeep Cherokee

I am turning in my 1995 Jeep Cherokee today for a new car. It has 362,841 miles on it. I've had some seriously good times with this car, and resisted getting rid of it for a few years now.

However, as I am finally turning it in and contemplating that it is going to be destroyed in the Cash for Clunkers program, I have been thinking about all the reasons why I am not sad to see it go. You see, as an old car, it has accrued all sorts of aliments that I have ignored up to now. Here is a partial list of what I can remember:

The roof leaks above the driver's side front windshield, leaving puddles in the front driver's floor.
The windshield is pitted and has some little cracks to the point where it is hard to see out of.
It is increasingly difficult to put it into reverse, I have to put it in 2nd, jog it, and quickly go over to reverse.
It smells funny from all the drinks I have spilled in it.
It is loud. The seals on the windows have successively failed to the point that the highway speed wind whistles through the little cracks. It has also lost a couple of insulating or shielding panels so that you can hear road and engine noise from below the car.
The muffler front connection pipe rusted through an fell off last month. I rigged it back together, but realized it wouldn't last much longer.
The radio doesn't work worth a damn. The cassette stopped working about 3 years ago and the radio volume has such rusty points in the knob that it sounds like an old fashioned AM radio on a lightning storm when you adjust the volume. Sound quality is horrible.
Gas gauge isn't accurate.
Speedometer hasn't been accurate for years.
There are multiple lights out that I haven't tried to fix.
The blower has one speed, high.
The rear tire mount sagged, but still works. You have to lift the tire to get it to catch closed.
The hatch back pistons work intermittently. Sometimes they hold the hatch up, other times they don't.
The front tires are bald. Worst, I replaced the rear tires 4 months ago, so the rest of the 2 years or 30,000 miles I could have gotten out of them is wasted.
The rear shocks and springs are about shot. Worst, the front ones failed last month and I had to replace them.
The emergency brake hasn't worked well for years.
The headlights are so dim I can't see well at night.
The headliner is coming off right above my head.
The front bumper is rusting through
The rear tire mount is rusty to the point where it almost doesn't catch and it has to be repainted every year.
The roof around the upper rear tail light is rusting through.
The cargo strips on the roof are coming off.
I have a small hit on the right front fender above the wheel that I got a month ago and never repaired.
The light cover on the left front is cracked from when I hit a deer 4 years ago.
The driver's window won't go up by the handle when you take it all the way down.
The driver's side door lock freezes in the winter.
The radiator inexplicably leaks and the motor tries to overheat, but I think that's just a loose radiator cap.
The rear cargo light stopped working a couple of years ago.
The rear door latches are so hard to open that I have to open it for people.

One the plus side, happy memories:
This is the car I took to Colorado about 4 times, Yellowstone and the Black Hills, New Orleans and Tampa, and to the Chicago Marathon, as well as every other fun trip in the last 15 years.
I quit chewing tobacco the day I picked it up from the dealer and haven't touched the stuff since then.
I never got it stuck 4-wheeling.
It's the car I took my wife to the hospital in when we had our son, and it's the car I took our son home in.
It's run well and faithfully for 15 years and it could carry a ton of stuff inside it.
I was able to pull the buzzer alarm out when I first bought it and it hasn't buzzed to warn me about anything since. It's nice and quiet when it comes to annoying alarms
I pulled the driver's side door light switch out when I first bought it, and I can get in and out of the car at night without a light going off.
The 4WD still works, but I never used it enough.

OK, I need to go turn it over to be put out of it's misery.

I am looking forward to having a new car.

Super Happy Baby

This is the picture we will use for the baby actor portfolio.

Balloon Landing

I've seen a hot air balloon around town before, with the Remax Real Estate logo on it. This morning, I saw it low over the road and followed in order to watch it land.

The cool part is that you could see the reverse shadow of the dump vent that they open to let all the hot air out. They missed a pond by about 10 feet.

Watching the half baked and dangerous way that they landed makes me thing twice about taking a ride on one of those things.

Fleming Elk

Zach got to meet and feed the elk after our treks in the woods.

Backpacking Baby

Zach loves to ride in his backpack. I can't believe that he can fall asleep while being jostled around back there.

Instant Fossil

I found this bleached snail shell in the woods out by Jacomo that looked like some ancient relic.

Old Tyme Scenes

I don't remember ever going into Old Missouri Town quite at this time of the year before.

It's quite rustic. How much time did they have to spend on flower gardening? How did they keep the livestock out of flower beds?

The sheep smelled really bad.

Missouri Town Mansion

I took Zach through Missouri Town to get to a secret Geocache. I love this scene.

Mommy Makes Hats

Andrea made a couple of hats for Zach to wear to Colorado.

This is the Court Jester version, there was also a Russian Bear version complete with little ears.

Yellow on Yellow action

I love to see the giant yellow bumblebees on the giant yellow flowers.

Heartland Garden

They opened up a new section of Powell Gardens that is based on farms in Missouri.

Zach & I could only get a quick once over, as it was so hot that day.

I forgot sunscreen, baby hats, and the cover on the stroller. The giant metal praying mantis approved of the way I improvised.

July's Blooms

I went out to Powell Gardens on the weekend they opened the Heartland Garden and took some closeups of the flowers in bloom.

Children of the Corn

This is what you look like when you spend too much time picking sweet corn.

Water Gardens

Here's some scenes from Powell Gardens water garden.

Coneflowers and Honeybees

Powell Gardens must have some wild honeybee hives. I've never seen any man-made hives out there, but there are plenty of the embattled insects to be seen at the gardens. So plant some flowers in your yard for the honeybees!

Moonbow

This is the astronomy picture of the day from a couple of days ago.

Lucky Lillies

There were some exotic plants in pots on the walkway of the Powell Gardens Island Garden. This one looks like a cross between 4-leafed clovers and water lillies.

Powell's Muskrats

While visiting Powell Garden's Island Garden, we saw two muskrats just off the little bridge over to the island. We had seen them last year and the year before, swimming in the lake as we watched fireworks, proving that they are fearless.

There was a huge snapping turtle right next to them, and I wonder if they get together and sing Disney style songs about life in the pond at night when the humans aren't around.

Skate Park

After going to a gigantic skate park in St. Louis with my nephew Matt, I noticed that there was a skate park going in near my office in Lee's Summit. It replaced a basketball court, displacing one of "scary" misunderstood loitering youth with another. More power to them, I say. Anything that makes oldsters shake their heads in dismay is probably a lot of fun.

There are two other small skate parks in Lee's Summit parks, which aren't as extensive or cool as this one.

Bunny Park

We were out GeoCaching last month and I was following a group of sites put together by someone called the Lee's Summit Parks Tour. They wanted to show people all these little obscure parks that spread out through the city. As a lifelong resident of the city, I had no idea many of the parks existed. We went to Canterbury Park to try to find the cache hidden there (failing the first time), and discovered the rabbit serengeti of Lee's Summit. We didn't try to count the number of rabbits that we saw, but it was probably around 20. They were fairly tame, too. You could get about 10 or 15 feet away before they dashed off. They had little worn paths going back into the high grass, too. The fact that there were so many of them proves what they say. We saw no direct evidence of the old saying, though.



I love the "Native Habitat" sign. For Rabbits? Seriously? My garden is a native habitat for rabbits.

Cat Tails

Smudge likes to sit on the table and tempt Zach with his tail. He's really pretty good at it when you consider that he can't see what he's doing, he was continually brushing Zach, and he never got caught in the little vice-like grip of the baby claw.

Hidden Valley II

Here is the farm pond first featured in a post on 6/13/09.

As you can see, the lush wet summer has continued.

Electric Meditation Cat Hammock

I had the strangest night the other night. I was awoken by the music from our baby's mobile, which has a sound activation circuit. I slowly arose out of a deep sleep, gradually noticing that this simple baby music was really annoying me.

I staggered into the baby's room and shut the noise off, but instead of being relieved and going back to sleep, I noticed that I was feeling really queasy. This happens more and more as the years go by, usually as a result of eating something that doesn't agree with me, which gets to be a longer and longer list each year.

I made the mistake of opening the door. I thought I heard thunder out in the distance, and as soon as the door was open a crack, the cats ran outside. I was able to catch 2 of them, but Cuppy was still out there, and with the possibility of a storm coming in, I couldn't just leave her out there.

The problem was that I got much more tired by this time, and considered abandoning the cat until I heard a commotion outside.

I got a flashlight and then got distracted searching for my earphones and the little ear buds that always fall off of them. I plugged in my iPod and switched it on. I was getting really restless, as I couldn't locate the cat and I really wanted to go back to sleep. I started listening to a meditation routine that sometimes gets onto my iPod that I usually skip. I thought maybe this would be a good night for the meditation, I could relax and get ready to go back to sleep. While wandering around in the dark, I decided to lay down on hammock in the back yard (hoping the cat would come to me). The meditation routine was pretty nice. It was telling me to relax, and to put all concerns or worries away. There was a thunder storm approaching and the noise it was making was a peaceful rumbling that helped me relax. The meditation was saying to push all worrying thoughts out of my head.

For some reason, this made me think of the fact that big oak trees are like lightning rods. Even though on one hand the meditation was making me relax, on the other hand, I started to wonder if lying out in the open next to two enormous natural lightning rods was really such a good idea.

After listening to gentle rumblings off in the distance for a while, a lone big boom of thunder struck very close, almost throwing me from the hammock in shock.

Even though I had not found Cuppy yet, it was time to go inside. I think she got the same idea after the loud thunder, because I finally found Cuppy headed toward the door the same time as me.

For some reason, this weird chain of events allowed me to lay down and drop off to sleep immediately.

I'm surprised I didn't think it was a dream the next day. Maybe it was.

White Flower zone

There seems to be a spreading mutant white flower epidemic in my neighborhood. I wrote previously about some violets I have in my yard that are white, not violet. See:
http://wagginganimaltales.blogspot.com/2008_05_01_archive.html#4848770589524490255
and
http://wagginganimaltales.blogspot.com/2009_05_01_archive.html#4333680464676385666

One of my favorite flowers is the cornflower, which comes out in July and lasts for a long time. They are light blue, and I've noticed some white ones in the past.

Now I have seen for the first time a white clover. They are normally light purple, and they look awesome in white. They are right where the rabbit used to sit on the side of the road when I ran down the road:
http://wagginganimaltales.blogspot.com/2008_05_01_archive.html#2055746598818070231

I do wonder if there is some kind of toxic chemical knocking out the color producing genes. Paranoia!

My biology class podcast was just talking about how genes express colors, and white items are a lack of color. I want to know if flower color makes a difference in whether the bees will pollinate them or not. I wonder if the white flowers have a different scent?

Or maybe their just simple white flowers.

Gimpy

Where I live we have wild turkey and whitetailed deer. For the last 10 years or so, the populations have been exploding, due in part to the massive amounts of cracked corn that my neighbors are feeding them.

Most of the time, this is a pleasant gift of serene scenes and quiet beauty.

Many people know to be careful of hitting deer with their cars. During rut (deer mating season), your chances of hitting a deer around sunrise or sunset rises. Most people probably know someone that has hit a deer with their car. Surprisingly, the deer does not always die from being hit by a car. Sometimes they break a leg or fracture a hip, and then survive with a limp. I've seen the results of this many times. The deers that limp are usually tamer. It's a pathetic sight and you feel sorry for the deer, but they heal and they may not even be in pain as the go about their lives, eating and drinking and walking through our yards.

What I've never seen before now is a turkey with a limp. This is unique. We now have one, and she walks around through the front yard, usually trying to decide whether she needs to rush forward in the direction she was going or retreat in terror. I try not to make any fast moves.

I love that gimpy turkey.

Rougher Road less travelled

We had a nicely paved road up until recently. While fighting to get deannexed from Lake Lotawana, they tried to convince us to stay in the city because they knew that the road would have to be repaved and they said they would be able to do it and the county would not.

We were deannexed last fall.

This month, the road was "repaved". The only problem is that it was repaved into a gravel road. They sprayed down a layer of tar and spread a layer of fine pea gravel over it and ran over it with a roller.

There were no potholes in the road before. The wide shoulders were fine for jogging and biking. Now there are little gravel bars on the shoulders, great for tripping or skidding out on. When they repainted the lanes, they took away some of the width, so cars are now much closer to the pedestrians than before.

I'm not sure why government money was wasted making our road worse. I am not stimulated.

Indian Statue

Junction City got a face lift, and with it a very nice traffic circle right off the interstate. In the middle of the circle was this statue of an india holding up a buffalo skull.

Wheat Harvest

My guest from Chicago was surprised to see wheat being harvested in mid-June. I was, too. It was also interesting to see a wheatfield and rural looking scene on the other side of a treeline.

Smoky Hill Swallows

While at Junction City for some customer trials, I took a run from my hotel to a bridge that crossed the Smoky Hill River. There were hundreds of swallows that were perched on a power line next to the bridge, and must have had nests under the bridge. They started flying around me in a big swirling cloud.

Dusty Bookshelf Cat

The little bookstore in downtown Aggieville called the Dusty Bookshelf had a cat that looks just like Speedy and Cuppy. See if you agree.