Pumping Up The Tires

So it was near 50 degrees out today ahead of a cold snap coming tomorrow which will put me down to 10 degrees tonight; and I decided to pump up my bicycle tires. I haven't ridden my bike in awhile since it is Winter here; and the air escapes from my bike every few months to near flat. So I brought the bike out to my car because I bought an air compressor that runs from the cigarette lighter awhile back when gas station air cost 50 cents and the pump was over a mile away. I spent time filling my bike tires while standing in a couple inches of snow in a super slush-filled parking lot that was dangerous to ride a bike in anyway. Then I checked my car tires. Wooo, 15.5 pounds of pressure in the first tire (right rear), and I've been driving on that for awhile without noticing. The front right was at 22.5 pounds; the left side tires were at 25.5. So I filled them all up to 31.5 pounds; the compressor meter reads 35 when I disconnect it from the tires, then my Radio Shack Tire Pressure Gauge with the battery and cool red LED display reads 31.5...I trust the digital reading more than the analog dial on the compressor. This took more than a half an hour to pump up these tires, compressor is slow. So I checked the DC voltage and it was down to 9.8 volts. I put the bike away and got to driving to see the sunset and to recharge my battery, I drove maybe 8 miles and now it's all better.

I filled up the gas tank with nearly $20 of fuel at $1.939 a gallon, it's gone up 13 cents a gallon this week!


I thought about my mom's car and her tire pressure, so I checked it. The right side was 28.5 pounds, the left front was 25.5 pounds, and the left rear was 15.5 pounds. So I go in the house and explain to her that there's a problem then my dad interrupts with a problem on the stereo system. I told him it'd have to wait until after dinner because I gotta get these tires filled before it gets too dark. It took me half an hour to fill those tires too. I asked my mom if she ever fills her tires, she says no because she can't read the tire gauge at the gas station anymore. She did suspect that the left front was low but had no clue that the left rear was so far down.

After dinner, my dad, mom, and I tackled the problem with the stereo. Manuals had to be consulted briefly, stuff had to be removed from the bookshelf, and a mirror had to be applied. I found out that an audio cord was not properly plugged into the tape deck so that was why they were only able to record the right channel to the tape deck.

Then my dad went to dub a tape to another tape. He wasn't paying attention. He left the setting on the playback tape to chrome when he was playing back a Normal tape AND the recording tape deck had Dolby B enabled and he never uses Dolby. He earns a chance to do it again. Never mind he's already spent hours fussing around getting nowhere today with this project.

Later, I found an old photo album of shots I took while in my first year of college. They were square pictures shot with an Kodak Instamatic. I tried scanning entire pages of photos (6 photos per side of a page) and found 300 dpi would work best for filling up a monitor screen with these tiny pictures. But I really do have to scan them one by one instead of 6 at a time. That one album probably has over 600 prints in it, it might take well over 20 hours to scan just that album. I don't own a USB 2 scanner, but my parents do, but they don't allow me enough time to work over there to do that kind of project. I get maybe 2 hours a day I can work up there, during their dinner.

I'd like to get these pictures scanned. I've got pics from a trip to Rome and Madrid back in 1978 when I was in 11th grade; pics from Boston when I went to College, and even some B&W from the early 70's.