Category: Life with Pratts

A Tale of Tires

Today was tire buying day. My 2017 Toyota Camry has 21,500 miles on it, and before winter arrives I want to replace the very noisy Bridgestone Turanza EL400 tires that came with the car. For an all-season tire, I wasn’t impressed with its traction in snow.

I have been very pleased with the Michelin Defender T+H tires on my 2011 Honda CR-V. The ride in the CR-V is quieter with the Michelins than in Camry is with the Bridgestones! Which isn’t how it should be, comparing an SUV with a passenger car. Having a set of Defenders on the Camry seemed like a good idea, but another Michelin option seems even better — the CrossClimate2. Here’s the CR comparison.

The Camry’s mileage — up to 40 mpg highway — is much better than the CR-V’s, so the CrossClimate’s lower rating for rolling resistance compared to the Defender isn’t a concern. The Camry being FWD, not AWD like the CR-V, the CrossClimate’s superior snow traction is the big attraction.

Taking advantage of a Michelin promotion at BJ’s (the warehouse store for those of us not near a Costco), four CrossClimate2’s, including installation and tax, cost $800. The tires are on order and are scheduled to be installed a week from Monday. So if there’s a freak Halloween snowstorm like the one we had in 2011, I’ll be ready!

There are a lot of YouTube videos about the CrossClimate2. This one is the most informative and interesting overall.

All Shook Up

After getting the Covid-19 Bivalent booster yesterday, I woke up in the middle of the night shivering uncontrollably. Eventually I was able to get back to sleep, and I feel okay today.

“Shakin’ All Over” is in this fantastic, official 65-track Who playlist. “My Generation” remains one of my all-time favorite performances, with a spine-tingling power chord crescendo at 11:30 into the track.

1983

I’d flown from Boston to somewhere, wearing a suit and tie, and I was in an awful Plymouth K-Car rental with the radio on, driving to a hospital to install a medical laboratory computer system. This is a song I associate with that time in my life, the work I was doing, and all of the traveling required to do it. Bring back the 80’s!

Max GPM

The Symmons shower head in the master bath was shot. The adjustment knob wouldn’t turn, and water was spraying from only part of the nozzle.

As I recall, it cost upwards of $200 when the bathroom was remodeled over 15 years ago. Off to Lowe’s I went, with no intention of spending that much again. Ten bucks was more like it, with thread tape included in the package.

As mentioned a while ago, my last home heating oil delivery was a budget-destroying $6/gallon. With that in mind, and my hot water maker coming from a zone on the boiler, I chose the 1.8 gallon per minute max option over 2.5 GPM, and it works nicely.

https://www.epa.gov/watersense/showerheads

By the way, I had some trouble removing the Symmons shower head. It was metal-on-metal, and not enough thread tape had been used, so it didn’t extend past where the shower head and pipe met. The result was rust, and after applying 3-in-1 oil to the seam I carefully used a crescent wrench until the fitting finally loosened. I cleaned off the threads of the pipe with silicone lubricant before applying a couple wrappings of thread tape. When I had the new shower head installed, I said this to myself.

Burn it Like Beckett

Recently I had routine annual oil burner servicing*, and now a problem from last year has returned, likewise when the burner is needed only for the hot water maker. The Beckett 7505 burner controller is shutting down the system and the reset button flashes. The button can be pressed only so many times to fire it up before there’s a hard lock-out. So far I have pressed it twice.

The first step in last year’s troubleshooting was to replace the 7505, despite a diagnostic reporting the original unit was fine. The problem returned only minutes after the technician had left. Later, a complete disassembly of the burner by a different technician revealed a worn-out part. It was replaced, and the burner has been trouble-free for well over a year.

Maintenance is supposed to prevent problems, not cause them. I almost didn’t schedule routine servicing this year, out of concern the very situation that I am in would occur, but it’s included in the service contract.

Being Labor Day weekend, I have a service call scheduled for Tuesday morning. This time, if the diagnostic doesn’t report an internal controller failure, and the technician wants to replace it anyway, I’ll suggest that he keep looking for the underlying cause of the problem.

* Many New England homes rely on #2 home heating oil, which is mostly kerosene, rather than natural gas. The price tracks diesel fairly closely, and the last oil delivery I had cost $6/gallon. Six dollars per gallon, for a bio-fuel mix that has a tendency to clog the fuel nozzle in a burner. Which could be the underlying cause of my present problem. Will I be paying less than $6/gal. this coming heating season?

https://apnews.com/article/heating-oil-diesel-inventories-low-in-northeast-192f998c29bcb05fd0fcd4f680f1faf6

Driven to Distraction

Another favorite memory that, after 50 years, still seems like a fantasy. It happened the summer between my junior and senior years of high school, after attending the 1972 New York Comic Art Convention, which was made possible by mih.

That was the first time I met Joe Sinnott. It was also the first time Joe met Jack Kirby. In the past it was widely stated that Joe and Jack met for the first time at the 1975 Marvel Convention, but that is incorrect.

That isn’t, however, the memory that seems like a fantasy. The story you are about to read is true. The two names in it have not been changed.

After returning home from the convention, I attended a driver’s ed class that was held at the high school, paying for it myself. The first part was classroom instruction, before taking the learner’s permit test. For those who passed, driving lessons would be scheduled.

There were 10-12 kids in the class, evenly split between boys and girls. At the end of the last classroom session, the instructor said he needed to speak with me.

“Mr. Pratt, we have a problem,” he said. I had absolutely no idea what that could possibly be.

“Every one of the girls in the class has requested to go practice driving with you.”

“Uh… what? All of them?” I would have been stunned if even one girl had made such an unlikely request!

“Yes, and to avoid disappointing the ladies I have assigned you a rather difficult schedule. I’m sure you don’t mind.”

I swear this really happened, and I’m not making it up! I was, to use the British expression, gobsmacked. It was as if I’d been suddenly made aware of an entirely different plane of reality, where high school sports stars and bad boys with motorcycles existed. But I was just a nerdy, glasses-wearing, comic book fanboy.

I actually did mind knowing why the instructor had given me a crazy schedule, because I was extra nervous every time I was in that AMC Hornet sedan, thinking about the girls in the car with me. I was either behind the wheel with two of them in the back seat, or I was in the back sitting next to one of them! I remember quite vividly that I was so distracted seeing Diane and her friend Cindy in the rearview mirror I almost drove through a stop sign. The instructor had to slam the secondary brake pedal installed on the passenger side.

There was no such distraction when I was ready to take the driving test. I recall the RMV guy told me to go the wrong way down a one-way street. Are trick questions supposed to be part of the test? Anyway, I passed, and that was — gulp! — fifty years ago.