Adam Steinhoff Archives

January 24, 2015January 25, 2015

Odyssey Beginning to End

It is said that the happiest two days in a boat owner’s life are the day he buys the boat and the day he sells it. That was the kind of day Saturday was for me.

Kid Matt shot this photo of me taking a test drive in my new 2000 Odyssey van on November 26, 1999. The sales guy was trying to tell me where all the bells and whistles were located.

Less painful than expected

When Kid Adam said he was trading up and that his 2010 van was going to be available at a good price, I wasn’t looking forward to unloading my 2000. You caught part of that the other day.

I started by driving down to Car Max for an appraisal that would give me a floor price. They offered a number lower than what I was hoping for, but wasn’t insulting. There was a guy with a spinner sign down the street saying that HIS company would meet or beat any other offers.

A. He was lying and
B. His offer WAS insulting.

Adam had some friends or friends of friends who expressed an interest. A batch of them drove up from Miami Saturday noonish to look it over.

I was brutally honest about all the little quirks and foibles the vehicle had, but when we got finished with the test drive, they came up with a couple items that I dismissed as no big deal.

Negotiation is on

They shot me a price lower than I would accept, and I countered with one a hundred bucks higher, conceding that the noisy brakes really would need to be fixed and that my offer would split the difference on the brake job.

They wouldn’t budge off their offer, and I wouldn’t budge off mine, so we started to go our separate ways.

Before I could get to the house, they came back with an envelope of cash and we did the deal. In the long run, I think we were both OK with it. It’s just that crazy dance you have to go through when you buy or sell a car.

While we swapping license tags and going over little details, I left Wife Lila filling out the paperwork so there would be half a chance that someone would be able to read it. (As it was, I dated all my signatures 2014, and had to scratch over them)

They got the title and seemed to be happy. A camera aimed back in my direction would probably have captured a smile that big on MY face.

[Editor’s note: you’re going to have to take my word for their smiling faces. I got a text asking that I remove the photo. I cropped out the top of the photo and blurred their license tag to insure their privacy.]

Waving goodbye

When it pulled away from the house for the last time, I have to admit having mixed emotions. One of them was relief when it made it all the way to the corner and disappeared from sight. I honestly believe it has lots of miles left in it, but if it was going to die, I’d rather not see it.

That corner has bad car karma associated with it. It used to house a car dealer whose business model was to sell to people with lousy credit. As soon as they missed the first payment, he’d send the repo wrecker out to recover the car so it could be sold again and again.

I think his warranty was 30 feet or 30 minutes, too, based on the amount of shouting that would come over the fence.

I wish the new owners good luck. I have their address if any of the Road Warriorettes want to pay it a visit.

January 7, 2015

Patches from the Past

Wife Lila was shuffling some stuff around this afternoon and ran across this pile of patches. (You can click on the photo to make it larger.)

When the Kid Matt and Kid Adam were in middle school and early high school, they had denim jackets that Lila would decorate with patches we had picked up from our travels and from Scouts. The ones on the left are mostly Scout patches; the ones on the right include a lot we got from our Great Family Vacation Out West in 1990.

When the kids outgrew their jackets, their mother would painstakingly take off the old patches and either move them to a new jacket or replace them with newer souvenirs.

The kids got T-shirts from me

When I was on the road, I’d look for custom T-shirts. If there was any kind of big event going on, some entrepreneur would come up with a design, run off a couple hundred shirts and skip town before anybody came around checking if he had a license. I saw a T-Shirt guy get rousted by a couple of cops in Key West during the Boatlift. After a few minutes of conversation, the cops walked off with shirts and the guys were given two days to get out of town (by that time their stock would be gone).

They were usually cheap – $3 or $4 apiece – they were easy to pack, and they were unlikely to be worn by any other kid in their classes.

In that category: Cuban Boatlift; the Whigham, Georgia, Rattlesnake Roundup; Wheeler’s Bar’s Million-Dollar Log; the Pope’s visit to Miami; all kinds of hurricane commemorative shirts; Don’t Mess with Texas, and one from Two Egg, FL. I have two large plastic containers of shirts in the top of the closet just waiting for a quilt or something to spring from them.

That’s Grandson Malcolm in a Bunny Bread T-shirt picked up in Cape at the Used Bread Store. He’s a lot cuter nowadays. His father, Matt, is, well, older.

December 14, 2014

Florida Gas Below $2.50

I was all excited in Cape when gas dropped to $3.03 in September.

I’m not sure what it was when Sons Matt and Adam pulled up at this gas station when we were on vacation in the Southwest in the summer of 1990. It’s probably good I didn’t need to put Dino Supreme in my Dodge Caravan.

This afternoon, Wife Lila and I passed a gas station in Palm Beach County where the gas was less than $2.50. That’s pretty good for us; our taxes usually make it about a dime a gallon higher here than it is in Okeechobee County, northwest of us. (I always buy a lottery ticket when I gas up at a station there. You know how it seems like it’s always some out-of-the-way place in a little town that gets a winner. I keep hoping.)

Gas station stories over the years

December 10, 2014

Shakspere on Kent Library

Son Adam brought Grandkidlets Graham and Elliot over this evening to give their mother a few hours of piece and quiet.

That left me scrambling for something to post this morning. I came up with a long-forgotten (and poorly composed) shot of the front of Kent Library before a wraparound covered the names of seventeen writers chosen by English professor Dr. Harold Grauel and Dr. W.W. Parker, then president of the university.

Fred Lynch’s February 22, 2010, blog lists the names as “Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, William Shakespeare, John Milton, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Cardinal John Henry Newman, Virgil, Geoffrey Chaucer, Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoi, Henry David Thoreau, Edgar Allen Poe, Eugene Field, Victor Hugo, Homer, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

Kent Library in 2010

Here’s what the library looked like in 2010. One-Shot Frony took a picture from almost this same angle in the late 1940s if you’d like to make a comparison.

By the way, Wife Lila questioned the spelling in my headline. Fred’s blog talks about that:

Grauel recalled that the stone mason wanted to alter the spelling of Shakespeare. Grauel suggested “Shakespere,” one of several ways that the famous playwright spelled his name.

That spelling was used on the frieze. Soon after, letters arrived at the school from people critical of what they felt was the “misspelling” of the name.

“When the enlargement of Kent Library was undertaken in the ’60s, I saw to it that the name of Shakespeare appeared on the new facade as SHAKESPEARE,” Grauel wrote.

Tag: Adam Steinhoff