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  • 38 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: July 1st, 2023
  • tipicaldik@lemmy.worldtoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.world•Do you have any tattoos, piercings, or scars that you regret?
    9·
    9 days ago

    I spent a short time in the US Navy, just long enough to get a couple of tattoos that I put literally zero thought into. One, a stupid cartoon character done at a whole-in-the-wall shop while I was drunk faded away pretty badly, but the other one, a sexy sailor girl (done by Philadelphia Eddie himself!) stayed pretty nice for quite some time. I was sober that time. That was about 44 years ago. I don’t necessarily regret them, but I wish I’d put more thought in to them, especially dumb old Yosemite Sam…

  • tipicaldik@lemmy.worldtoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.world•Have you ever been experienced a natural disaster? If so, which one?
    11·
    5 months ago

    Took a direct hit from Hurricane Ivan. Blew all our roofing off so the rain was blowing in and big chunks of ceiling were falling in while we were all huddled in the hallway. We found the roof of our back porch in the middle of the street, about 4 houses down. We’ve ridden out a lot of hurricanes over the decades, but Ivan was the scariest.

    In the end we came out of it smelling like a rose. My wife’s parents had both recently passed, and we were planning on buying their house out of their estate. I was in the middle of readying our house for sale when the storm hit. Our house got wrecked, while the parents house was left pretty much unhurt, aside from a few missing shingles and a downed tree. We moved in immediately and ended up selling our house as-is to the “we buy ugly houses” people for about half it’s normal value, collected a fat insurance check from Liberty Mutual, which combined with the sale was enough to pay off the mortgage and pocket a few grand, which was right at what we hoped to sell it for because we didn’t have very much equity in it at the time. We ended up right where we planned on being, much sooner than we thought we would. We got lucky for sure…

  • tipicaldik@lemmy.worldtoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•What was the Worst car you've ever owned?
    11·
    6 months ago

    I had an '82 Ford Escort. Those things were notorious for lunching the motor if the timing belt ever broke (which they did every 45,000 miles like clockwork) while you were traveling down the road. The valves would stop in whatever position they were in at that instant, and then the momentum of the car would keep the pistons moving up and down, bashing the piston tops in to whichever valves were unlucky enough to still be open, ruining pretty-much everything. At the same time I owned that car, my best friend owned an '82 Chevy Cavalier. We were constantly one-upping each other over who owned the biggest turd…

  • tipicaldik@lemmy.worldtoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•What was the Worst car you've ever owned?
    13·
    6 months ago

    Back in about '89-'90 I was the assistant manager at a fast oil change place, and we had a regular customer with a maroon '76 Aspen with a bullet-proof slant-six who got his oil changed with us regularly. I could hear him coming. I’d know it was him without even looking because of the distinctive TAP-TAP-TAP -TAP-TAP-TAP-TAP. We’d pull him in and he’d tell us to just change the oil and filter and don’t bother checking all that other stuff, so that’s what we’d do. We’d pull the plug and if more than a half a quart drained out we’d be surprised. After a filter swap, we’d fill it back up and restart it and it would go TAP-TAP-TAP-TAP-tap-tap-tap-ta-ta-ta-t-t-t-t-t-t-t- etc and he’d smile and pay and be on his way. Of course, we’d see him again in about 3 or 4 months, same thing, rinse and repeat. The tapping was his signal to get it changed. Fast forward to '97, after working as a manager at other locations I came back to that same station as the manager there and I’ll be damned if that same guy in that same '76 Aspen didn’t pull in for the same service with that same oil-leaking loud-ass tapping slant-six, still hanging in there…