Actually, that is a Honda Civic Si. With our family size changing, I decided to get a car that is roomier. Also, it will be easier to lend to other folks (including my wife) and I won't worry about it stranding me anywhere.
The car is a 2003 Honda Civic Si. I really like this car for a number of reasons. First, it reminds me of the Volkswagen GTI my father had when I was in high school. Something about a fast little hatchback really floats my boat. The seats are incredible, better than the seats in my Porsche. The engine is 2.0 liters, which is quite large for such a little car. Everything works--the A/C, the ABS, the heater. Finally, and this is a little hard get your head around unless you are as enlightened as I am, this car is nearly as much fun to drive as is the Porsche. Rev it up, snick snick the shifter, crank it around a corner. It is a blast to drive.
In the parlance of the kids these days, I have "killed" a few cars with this car. The most fun have been a Mini Cooper S (a long on ramp getting onto the freeway, accelerating from 0 to 85 mph) and a 2006 BMW M3 SMG (this wasn't fair because I caught the guy unaware at a stoplight. By the time he got on it I had gotten up to 50 in a 35 and had to slow down. At the next light I rolled down the window and apologized and chatted with him for a minute. Then he put it in launch control mode and lit up the rear tires for about 100 feet. I was grinning like an idiot for 10 minutes.) .
I am really thinking of putting a Jackson Racing Supercharger in... Stay tuned.
When I was a young lad, I had a BB gun. One of the rules that came with the BB gun was that shooting animals was off limits. I only violated this rule one time, when I killed a magpie that was tormenting our cat. I still remember how bad I felt when I saw it dead on the ground. I am not a violent person, and its death really shocked me.
Why do I share this story? To make myself feel better about having become, to paraphrase J. Robert Oppenheimer (and the Bhagavad-Gita), death, the destroyer of squirrels around my house.
When we moved into our house, we thought that the squirrels in our yard were cute. They are. And they are smart. And, it turns out, they like our house. They like it so much that they found a way to get into our eaves and make a nest.
Not long after we noticed the scratching sounds in an upstairs wall, we found out that we were expecting a baby. This triggered an unexpected reaction in me. It must have come from deep in my caveman/alpha male brain. The reaction was that I felt a strong desire to kill every squirrel I could find near my cave, err, house. Not kill for the purpose of making stew. But to lay waste, like to protect my little pack. I had crazy thoughts--kill a squirrel and hang its body from a rope right where the other squirrels were likely to see it, deliver it on a private jet for interrogation by the secret police in Egypt or Syria, that sort of thing.
But the squirrel is a smart foe, and I decided that it should be possible to defeat it with a combination of reason and violence. So I started to pick apart the squirrel problem piece by piece. I developed the following premises, and it is on these premises that I built my plan:
1) Squirrels like easy access to food. If there is less easy access to food in a location, then that location will be a less attractive location in which to set up domicile.
2) Squirrels like an easy way to get onto my roof and thence into my eaves. They were walking from a tree branch directly onto our roof. If the access is made less easy, then they will be less likely to use the eaves as a nest. (Note here that I recognize that squirrels can climb anything and can walk across the power line connection to get to our roof. But I am looking for marginal effects that make it less likely that they will return).
3) In the short term, there is a finite supply of squirrels in any given location. Squirrels are territorial, and if they are removed from a particular area, it takes a while for other squirrel clans to move in.
4) A dead squirrel is less likely to nest in my eaves than is a living squirrel. A note here: Squirrels are not people. I don't go in for anthropomorphizing of animals. Squirrels are rodents. They are smart, but they are prey. I am an apex predator. Crocodiles eat wildebeests. Lions kill hyenas to prove a point. For one reason or another, I was born higher on the food chain than the squirrel. It is not only my prerogative to kill squirrels, it makes mother nature cry when I refuse to take my proper place in the circle of life. I don't do this for fun. My genes are less likely to be propagated out into the future if my offspring are living around plague-carrying rodents.
Well, that's a lot of talk for a simple plan. Basically, the plan was:
1) cut down any tree limb access to the roof 2) try to plug the hole under the siding that provides access to the eaves 3) spray the area down with squirrel repellent 4) bungee down garbage can lids 5) use a Chinese pellet gun to shoot any squirrel I see on my property
I have to say that cutting down the branches helped a lot. I am doubtful about the effectiveness of the other steps, except for number 5. I am pretty sure that one is working. I try to make it as painless as possible for the squirrels, following the Marine sniper motto of "one shot, one kill."
To my surprise and (and mild moral consternation), I have felt no remorse whatsoever each time I have sent a squirrel to the big acorn stash in the sky. And there have been a few that have made that journey in the last few months.
******UPDATE****** This plan worked really well for a while. The squirrels stopped getting into the roof for about two months. One morning a few days ago, we heard the familiar scratching inside the roof. They have returned. I went outside and saw a squirrel jumping from out roof into a tree limb six feet from the gutter. So cutting back the trees and killing the squirrels' relatives evidently is not enough. More steps will be taken. In the meantime, this video has inspired me. I am going to a medical supply store to get surgical tubing this week...
Today I went mountain biking with friends. I have decided to start documenting the routes we take. I bought a Garmin Etrex Vista Cx GPS unit along with a handlebar mount. It worked extremely well. Here is our route. The altitude data are flawed for the first .2 miles, but after that the GPS got dialed in. Check it out:
You can zoom to see things more clearly, or click on the altitude profile to see our altitude changes (the Y-axis on this graph is in meters). You can see that we did two ascents to the water tower. The drop at about mile 4.2 is where my buddy Dave went over the handlebars. The "Snow Cave" is at about mile 4.7.
So today was a red-letter day for me. As shallow as it may seem, I got to live my lifelong dream of driving on the Autobahn in Germany. I drove from Munich to Nuremberg, a distance of around 180 KM (111 miles). This took around an hour. My rental car was yet another diesel with six-speed manual transmission, this time a Ford Mondeo wagon. I will say this until I am blue in the face--why can't the US manufacturers learn from their foreign subsidiaries? This is a really nice car, it is well made, it handles great, and it feels like more like a BMW than a Taurus. Too bad. I guess they tried in the 80's with the Merkur, and that didn't work. So maybe it is more complicated than I think. OK, so here are my observations in list form.
I set a new personal speed record today. I saw a sustained 219 km/h (136 mph) on the speedometer. I know lots of people claim they have gone 160 mph on Interstate 70 or whatever, so this may not seem that impressive to them. But this was cruising along for 20 minute stretches at this speed, and the speedometer needle just would not quite make it to 220 km/h. The few times I had to get on the brakes, the Mondeo hauled it down to 140 or 100 km/h with no drama whatsoever. No shuddering from the brakes. I think most US cars would melt their hubcaps off if you were to try this.
I was flying in formation with a few other cars, including (holy cow) a Volkswagen Caravelle TDI. This is the equivalent of the Eurovan in the US. Dude, all I can say is, wow. This thing is the size of a full-size US van, and it was going 135 mph. It seemed to be more affected by crosswinds than were the cars. Again, wow.
Slowing down to normal speeds after going 135 mph feels like bending time and space. Speeds of 60 or 80 mph feel like walking pace. For getting from city to city, this is a really great alternative to flying in a plane.
I identified two weird behaviors of the rental car, and I spent time hypothesizing about them while I drove. I assume that these behaviors are specific to all diesels, not just to Ford diesels.
The first behavior occurs when the car is "speed shifted." Speed shifting (or at least that's what I am calling it) is when you upshift without taking your foot off of the throttle. You very briefly push in the clutch while very quickly moving up to the next gear. If you do it fast enough, the engine doesn't have a chance to get to spin up to redline while the clutch is in, and the car takes off quickly in the next gear. I tried this a few times because, when accelerating hard, it breaks my heart to waste all of the manifold pressure built up by the turbo when shifting. Anyway, I noticed after performing a full-throttle speed shift that when I arrived at the next gear the car would keep accelerating even if I lifted my foot off of the gas after the gear change. Make sense? For example, I floor the throttle in 5th, and as I approach redline, I briefly push in the clutch and switch into 6th without lifting off the gas. But once I am in 6th, if I lift off the throttle, the car continues to accelarate for a few seconds as though I were still flooring it. This is a bit disconcerting at first, bringing to mind the phrase (verboten in Ingolstadt) "unintended acceleration." My hypothesis is that excess intake manifold pressure, along with unburned fuel, builds up during these speedshifts, and this combination continues to power the car after the shift. As I write this, that sounds wrong, but it's my best explanation. Is this a common issue, known to truckers? Hmm.
The second thing I noticed is that, at normal operating RPM on the highway, say around 2500-3000 RPM, the car produces peak power at 1/4 to 1/3 throttle. I first noticed this when I was cruising on the autobahn. If I applied a slight amount of throttle, the car would accelerate. But if I applied just a little more, the car seemed to produce slightly less power. The diminution in power was so small as to be almost imperceptible. But I think it was real. To test this, I only gave the car 1/3 throttle (the max I could give without feeling the slight loss in power) and the car accelerated smartly up to 210 km/h. So what is the rest of the throttle angle for? My hypothesis on this one is that in a diesel (I think), the air/fuel ratio can vary much more than in a gasoline engine with a throttle. So the perfect stoichiometric ratio only happens by coincidence when you are dumping fuel into the engine with the gas pedal at the rate that happens to match the quantity of air coming into the engine. I wonder if, at 3ooo RPM, that sweet spot just happens to be at 1/3 throttle pedal? If I had one of these cars, I would figure out a way to get an oxygen sensor into the exhaust stream and hook it up to a meter so that I could see what is going on in the engine. Hmmm.
I visited BMW headquarters and got the full tour from a friend. Cool, cool, cool. They are building a massive wind tunnel on the grounds.
Finally, I visited the Adidas headquarters in Herzogenaurach. There is a big factory outlet store there. It is big, but the deals are only so-so. It is worth it to see the cool stuff, but I was expecting to find bargain bins full of odd, special-edition Sambas. There were none of those.
Here are some photos I took. Unfortunately, I don't have labels for all of them.
Sweet handlebars:
This bike was achingly beautiful. Really amazing work.
I picked up a pair of these sliding dropouts from Paragon at their stand. They will go on the frame I am building.
A really cool big 29er MTB.
A very early MTB on display at the Ritchey stand. Check out the motorcycle brake levers.
Very sweet bike that uses the Shimano 8-speed Alfine group. Check out the hand-carved handlebar and aluminum doodads. The pulley for the shifter cable is a nice touch. The builder said that his family had a background in aviation, and this is a nod to cable-and-pulley airplane controls.
Nice way to tie in the seat stays. I wish I knew who did this.
Another nice seat stay solution.
Craig Calfee's carbon fiber bike. Crazy cool. With some analysis, I think that a frame built like this could be incredible strong.
He is building a lot of bikes that combine carbon fiber and mother nature's nearly perfect composite, bamboo. Apparently these are really nice bikes to ride.
A tiny road bike. But really small.
Moulton-inspired delivery bike.
Rohloff hub.
Cool fairing reminiscent of racing motorcycles from 50s and 60s.
Mike Flanagan of A.N.T. Bikes is a true artist. I met him when I bought his drill press from him a while ago. He is a mensch--he mailed me the chuck key a few weeks later when he found it. Didn't need to, but did. Cool
Really sweet MTB.
I am thinking of copying this paint scheme for my bike.
The new Columbus XCR stainless tubeset. These are good guys.
