Been dealing with it since 1985. No fun.
Been there and so has my 34 y/o daughter......
If your over 50 or, have any family history of cancer DO get it done.
I'm 46 and my dad just beat colon cancer (7" removed).
My dad lost his battle at age 59 - I've been getting scoped regularly for about 15 years.
Cancer is one of the few things that you can say that everybody knows someone who's been there. I'd never wish it on anyone. (Okay, maybe a few people! 
)
i just had a colonostomy and ectomy(?) done at VA, every 10 years, all good..
the nurses there refer to it as "top and bottom"
hope he used a different scope for each:}
I've had three colonoscopies and two endoscopies over the last 5 years and for sure the pre-party is far worse than the main event!
Agreed. The prep is total hell. I went in the next morning totally exhausted. That was days ago and I'm still running on about 50% energy.
Okay, enough about the innards, back to car stuff!
I got the u-joints I bought plugged into AutoCAD, sent Carey a question and gave him an update. Have to send him a few pics of what I'm doing and go from there. I figure any amount of work I can do can cut down on the bottom line with the amount of time it would take them and be able to save me a few bucks AND let me build something.
I still have to order some Scat Pro90 seats, measure, pull apart, cut, weld and then ship to Bremen. Bremen is only 2 hours away but it can be a hell of a drive if you're going around the bottom of the lake. If you've driven there, you know it's total construction, potholes and bad areas.
Ah, 80/94/294.
I'm pretty sure whoever laid out the Interstate grid was either drunk, sadistic, or a landowner in Gary, IN. Every major highway east of the lake comes together into one happy stretch of road that is approximately one half the size it ought to be to accommodate the traffic. I have never successfully avoided 5 mph traffic on it, and I'm not sure anybody has ever actually driven the speed limit from I55 to about Portage, IN, which is coincidentally the only way to get to Breman from Peoria.
Stan, just take 24 east to 31 north to 6. Might take a hair longer but you get to miss all the crap. But even taking 55, you could get off sooner and come in from the south. If you get off 55 around Braidwood and just huck it east, there is a nice route from there. I live right over by the 355/ I-80 interchange so I'm already up too high. WHATEVER YOU DO, DO NOT GET STUCK ON RT30 BETWEEN MATTESON AND DYER! That's Chicago Heights and Ford Heights. Not a place anybody wants to be, even on a beautiful day with open roads and green lights!!!!
(and DEFINITELY not in anything as nice as a speedster. We drove our FJ through there and feared for our lives!)
But you're right, getting around the lake is horrible until you hit the Michigan state line. Done it many times going to Traverse City.
"WHATEVER YOU DO, DO NOT GET STUCK ON RT30 BETWEEN MATTESON AND DYER!"
Sounds somewhat like taking the "Cross-Bronx Expressway" just north of NYC on I-95 to get to the George Washington Bridge. You might leave you car if it breaks down, but it probably won't be there when you get back...
Gordon, it's scary to know you're not the first person I've heard say something similar!
Dudes, the Cross Bronx is still a potholed mess, but the days of cars being stripped an hour after parked are 25 years in the rear view by now. Jes sayin'.
Two kinds of people in the world: New Yorkers and people who are scared of New Yorkers.
Big Ed's Nova wrote: Dudes, the Cross Bronx is still a potholed mess, but the days of cars being stripped an hour after parked are 25 years in the rear view by now. Jes sayin'.
So true. And I was thinking of a business trip I took with three co-workers back in the early '90's, so the timing would be about right. We had to visit AT&T in Bedminster, NJ, and decided that we could get to and from faster if we rented a Town Car and just drove down, rather than take the NYC/Bos air shuttle. One of the guys, Ron Morrison, was a pretty cool field service guy whom I had known since 1969 at NCR. Ron was an accomplished off-shore power boat racer who had heard stories of the carnage of abandoned cars on the Cross Bronx Expressway and was worried all the way down about going through there. I mean, really worried.
As we got closer, Ron was riding shotgun up front and constantly looking about for "bad guys". It didn't matter that, between the four of us, we spoke four languages and one of us grew up in Brooklyn (maybe that's a fifth language?) - Ron was still worried. His long-time friend, Jack Volpini, was driving - another guy from the NCR days. He speaks passable Italian, but I don't think that would have calmed Ron. He was asking me how good my Spanish was about the time when we got on the cross Bronx and Ron is REALLY looking around, now, and pointing at the few scavenged cars along the side of the highway (honestly, there were, like, maybe, two) exclaiming, "SEE!!!!"
Suddenly, the town car loses power and starts to slow down. WTF? says Jack......"Didn't this thing have a full tank when we left? It's only been three hours!" Ron looks over at him and says "What's WRONG?" "I dunno", Jack replies....."It just lost power!"
"#0∠¥ $#!+" yells, Ron.....We're all gonna DIE!"
Ron now has a death grip on the door handle and is ready to bolt as soon as the car stops - I don't think he knew where he might run to, he was just going to run. But, just as suddenly as it started slowing, the car lurches forward again and seems to be OK.
"What the hell Happened?" yells Ron, and Jack, trying to contain himself says, "Oh..... My foot slipped off the gas pedal."
Dead silence descends upon the car.
Then Ron leans over and gives Jack a good punch in the shoulder. "YOU S O B! I was ready to run for my life!"
The rest of us were LOFAO. Ron was pissed for the rest of the trip, even though we went far south towards NYC and took the Triboro bridge to get home. We asked him if he wanted to swing through Manhattan, but he grumpily declined.
Much later, I learned to take the more northerly route and across the Tappan Zee Bridge, mostly to escape the really terrible road surface on the Cross Bronx and GWB, not to mention that there are NO service areas for many miles down there on I-95 and we couldn't risk that with the Jacks on the back seat. Nice people come from the Bronx, though, like A-rod, Jennifer Lopez, my favorite, Tito Puente and lots of others.
Cool place to grow up in, I bet........ Even if that section of I-95 has a bad rap.
Gordon, that's hilarious! When I was in college, 4 of us were in a car coming home late from a theatre production we saw for school. One kid would always fall asleep. The three of us decided to scream and hit the brakes. Yep, we freaked him out HARD!
Used to ride, drive, train through all the time. Bus field trips, even. Two stories:
1. After college, but before I got my first "real" job in journalism, I worked as a prep and install guy/salesman at a little custom furniture place in Westport, CT. A bought-out IBM guy owned it; he sold a lot of butcher block oak and rock maple stuff, custom book cases, etc. Pretty much everything was finished with Watco oils.
Anyway, one day he turns to me and says "I need you to take the van to New York. Drop off the table here, pick up this stuff at the warehouse there, and your final stop is here. That's where this coffee table is going." He gave me addresses in Brooklyn, Bronx and Queens. It was 8:30 a.m. "I'll buy you lunch when you get back," he said.
Mother of Mary and snakes on a plane!
This happened in mid-August, 1989. Long before the trendy pocket navigational aids we now take for granted.
I got back around dusk. I think I still had the friggin' coffee table. But in all that time, with several stops and asking various people for directions, and even with a couple of ill-advised and sudden lane changes, I never once felt threatened or endangered. I think I even stopped at a Bronx bodega pay phone at one point to call the store and tell him how utterly off course I'd fallen. People there tried honestly to help me, and did.
2. Five years after that day, returning to Hartford from the Florida Keys in my awesome 1980 Honda Accord, which by then I'd driven solo to California, New Orleans and a lot of other places, I traversed the Cross Bronx Expressway at my usual 9 or 10 p.m., rumbling over the gouged-out pavement, marveling at the burned-out hulks of less fortunate vehicles, supremely confident, as always, in my own invincibility.
Next morning I arose bright and early and was just taking off on a green light on my way to work when the bottom knuckle of the left front strut let go.
So, I missed being a grim statistic by about 115 miles.
Busy planning a trip to Colorado. Be back soon!