Oh man. 77 days, that’s it. I lost my challenge. I totally forgot to post something yesterday. Let’s see, what happened?

In the morning after my shower I went out to the garage and cleaned up my “leftovers” from the week–tools left out, packaging strewn around from the new weed wacker I bought this week, etc., then I swept off the workbench and swept the garage floor. I had to pull Sandy’s car out of the garage before I could do any of this, because she tends to park too close to the workbench. (see exhibit a)

As I was sweeping up, I remembered us joking about the hanging tennis balls we’ve seen at various times on TV and in movies, that people have in their garages. These are used as parking aids–when you pull in you just watch the hanging tennis ball, and when it hits your windshield, STOP. That’s the perfect position, which fits your car in the garage and still leaves you the desired distance in front and behind your vehicle. Of course, to determine this exact position requires a little positioning and testing and re-positioning, and I was up for it!

I went back into the house and rummaged through Shadow and Tigers’ toy bin and found a few tennis balls. I had to find a few, just to make sure I wasn’t stealing their only tennis ball, then I took that back to the garage and started constructing my “Parking Ball” apparatus. I drilled a tiny hole in the ball first, then I needed string and didn’t have any, but I knew I had an old, huge roll of loose plastic weed wacker line that George had stored from when we cleaned out the garage recently, so I used that. I stuffed the end of the line into the tennis ball and it stayed pretty good. Luckily I made the hole just small enough to allow me to force the string in and it wouldn’t slide out easily. That’ll even make it easily adjustable if I need to change it a bit as I’m positioning.

The first spot I chose in the garage rafters was a huge fail. I positioned it way too far into the garage and had the ball hanging way too low. I pulled Sandy’s car back in the first time, eyeballing about where it needed to be, then checked all around the car – it just cleared the overhead door by a few inches – perfect – and there is plenty of room in front of it, with a nice path of space to still walk in front of the workbench. And if you make sure the tennis ball is centered in the windshield, there’s also plenty of space on either side of the vehicle to get anything else you need in and out of the garage.

So now I had the exact spot, and I could visualize exactly where the ball needed to be full 3D space – x, y, and z – if you will. So I pulled the car back out of the garage, got the ladder back out, and tied the ball right where it needed to be, perfectly. I tested it afterward with Sandy’s car and it worked perfectly. She can’t mess this up. Then I pulled her car out again and cleaned up my mess.

Sandy had to go to get a haircut yesterday morning (see figure b, and the amusing figure c – more of this later) so I left her car outside and she left for the barber (‘stylist’ when it’s for women? whatever). When she was gone I decided to pull my car in try it on my car to compare. It worked perfectly on my car as well! I love it! The tennis ball was just a little higher up on the windshield, but otherwise it had the same distance from the overhead door and the same nice space still left in front of the workbench. Done deal. Today I’ll have Kevin pull his car in and test that one too. If anything, his car will probably leave more room in from and in back of his car, which will still be perfect – His car – a Kia Soul – seems to be shorter than ours. We’ll see.

After testing my car and having it in the garage, I realized we have the shop vac right there, so I looked to see how bad the floor mats were, and they were pretty sad. Very dirty, with a lot of dirt and dust throughout the entire car. I hadn’t cleaned the interior in some time. Armando’s Body Shop always fully details your vehicle inside and out, and I think the last time I was in for a repair was the last time it was cleaned! So I went to work. I vacuumed the floormats, removed them, vacuumed the floor itself, then vacuumed everything else in the car I noticed, then went to work with the interior and window cleaner. The rear window was the worst – it’s a very thin area, very hard to reach, and I had to kneel in the back seat. With my one bad knee and my new knee, it was a toss-up of which one felt better when cleaning the rear window. I ended up switching back and forth and taking a few breaks in-between just to lessen the pain. When I was done everything looked very nice, and I had that “new car” smell in there.

Oh yeah, exhibit c. Sandy texted me a photo of her hair right after she got it cut, so I “enhanced” it real quick and texted the new one back to her saying “It looks really nice, but I think it looks a little different on my end.” She got a little mad at me, but I don’t think she was serious. Now that it’s here for the world to see though, she might get a little more serious about being mad at me.

All that took up a good chunk of the day, then Matt & Anna dropped off the grandkids for the weekend, which easily consumed the rest of the day and evening, resulting in me totally forgetting about my challenge to post something..anything…daily. Oh well. I lasted 77 days. I think that’s longer than I lasted for any Ingress challenge. I remember them having badges for consistent daily hacks, and I think the top badge was 365 days of hacking at least once per day. I don’t even remember how far I made it, but I know I blew that challenge as well.

I don’t mind too much though. I’m still going to try to post daily. I like it. I just don’t have to worry about adding the “365 days…” to my title anymore. That was very often an inconvenience anyway, since I can never remember what day I was on, so I’d have to go back and look at my last post to make sure I got the number right pretty much every day.

And if anyone signed up for the daily “Newsletter” e-mail in the right sidebar, just an update: It’s working great now. I had some issues for the first couple weeks tweeking the settings, but I finally found an option that works properly, so you’ll get an e-mail once per day, if I posted that day, and it comes overnight, looks like between 3am and 4am.