Why Can’t I See Reviews on Urbanspoon?

Today on Urbanspoon, you’ll notice that some content in the United States has been blacked out. We’re making this dramatic gesture to illustrate what might happen to the internet if a law currently proposed in Congress is passed. Along with Google, Wikipedia, Tumblr, Reddit, and thousands of other websites, we’re participating in a coordinated blackout today to focus attention on this critical issue. Here’s an explanation:

We believe that if SOPA/PIPA passes into law, it will be lethal to the internet as we know it. That may sound exaggerated, but we encourage you to read the information on these sites to learn more and see just how serious it is:

• Ars Technica: House takes Senate’s bad Internet censorship bill, tries making it worse
• ExtremeTech: How SOPA could actually break the internet
• Electric Frontier Foundation: How PIPA and SOPA Violate White House Principles Supporting Free Speech and Innovation
• OpenCongress.org: Summary and details of the bill

Most importantly, PLEASE contact your senator and representative today to express your opposition to SOPA/PIPA. Here’s one site where you can email Congress.

In closing, enjoy the video The Day The LOLcats Died.

UPDATE: The Oatmeal contributes an excellent anti-SOPA piece.

When I was first learning Chef, though, I found the learning curve pretty steep because of all the terminology. It was hard to understand how all the components related to each other. I wasn’t able to find anything online that would have helped give me the overview I needed, so I created one myself.

Click image for full diagram.

As I said in Offbeat Divorce Part 1, my marriage failed. After a period of struggle, we decided to separate (and have since divorced). The separation process was also fraught and sometimes felt impossible, but I got through. Here are a few things I learned.

(Note: We have a daughter together, so these guidelines apply to parents more than they might to divorcing couples who can sever all ties if they choose.)

DON’T CHEAT

I’m not referring to actually cheating on your partner. Instead, I’m talking about the rules and guidelines you work out between yourselves as you separate. I agreed with my ex that we would inform each other about certain things regarding our daughter (times when she’d be watched by a third party, for example, or when she has an upsetting experience). We’ve kept that up, even when telling the other person about an incident leaves us open to criticism. That’s challenging, but worth it, because it fosters trust.

ACCEPT YOUR EX’S FAULTS

During the time of separation, you’re probably vividly aware of your ex’s faults. Some of them may have played a part in your split. But now is the time to stop trying to change, fix, or fight those faults, because you’re never going to be able to do that now. Instead, try to find a way to work around your ex’s faults, to make allowances for them and the intense emotional struggles they’re going through. They’re imperfect, and so are you, and it’s to both of your advantage to find a way to work together anyway.

TAKE YOUR TIME

Separation is a slow emotional process. It took me a long time before I could even use the term “divorce” for the direction we were headed. That’s OK. Don’t rush yourself. There are so many things to be decided between you (especially if you’re parents), that you can work on the easier stuff while you put off the things you don’t feel ready to tackle. In my case, we worked in spurts, focusing on the decisions and paperwork for a while, then taking an (unspoken) emotional break. Once we’d developed a track record of being able to agree and move forward on things, it felt more possible to discuss the difficult issues without derailing everything.

THINK BEFORE YOU RESPOND

During our separation process, we both did things to hurt each other. Maybe we meant it sometimes, maybe we did it without knowing, maybe we couldn’t help it in the heat of the moment. The point is, we were each sometimes faced with behavior that was hurtful. Because we were separated, this usually happened via phone or email. When it happened to me, if at all possible, I tried to stop and think before responding. My body and heart reacted in pain or guilt or anger, but I tried to respond as if what he had said were more neutral. I tried to avoid escalating the problem, and instead tried to model the kind of behavior I wanted us to exhibit. I tried to think about the long term instead of the current awful moment.

NO LAWYERS

Simple as that. Cling to any remaining shreds of trust you still share and do everything in your power to keep lawyers out of the equation. Take the time you need to decide things on your own. Read books. Consult friends. See a mediator. Divorce is expensive enough as it is; don’t pour unnecessary thousands more down the litigation drain.

That said, I know that some people’s situations call for legal representation. If that’s the case, you’ll be pretty sure about it up front. This is advice for people who are trying to decide or feeling tempted to engage a lawyer when you could make it work without one.

50/50 CUSTODY FEELS GOOD

If you’re a parent, I encourage you to seriously consider 50/50 custody. For us, it was a natural choice because we’d been equal parenting partners all along. In retrospect, though, I’m especially glad we did. It just feels better, when it comes up, to say that we’re still equal co-parents. That both of us share equally in our daughter’s life, and are both equally entitled to make decisions, get notifications, etc. That neither of us appears, even just on paper, to be a more primary parent than the other.

YOU DID YOUR BEST

Chances are, there are times in your relationship that you look back on and feel bad about now, given how things ended up. For me, I had a hard time thinking back on our good times and shared dreams. It was hard to reconcile that with the current awful situation. Eventually, what I realized was this: I did my best. And so did my ex. Back when we were happy, we did our best. And when things were complicated and falling apart, we did our best, given the mighty challenges and crazy situation. It doesn’t mean our happy past was a lie — it was real to us. We just didn’t know then what we know now. If you’re able to see the past in this light, it can allow you to forgive yourself a little bit more.

Hi, my name is Kate and I failed. I had a somewhat offbeat wedding, was married for 8 years, ultimately failed at it, and got divorced. I’m starting this way because it’s not something you hear people say very often. After a marriage falls apart (or serious problems are worked out), it’s swept under the rug, put in the past, and never mentioned. This might make the newly-divorced feel better, but it creates a false impression that most people are happy and have never had these problems. When my marriage was exploding, I felt so alone and so defective in a world full of (apparently) shiny happy people.

In this post, I want to pass on a few of the things I learned while my marriage was struggling, before we decided to separate for good.

TALK TO PEOPLE

My initial instinct was to keep my problems to myself, for fear that people would judge or pity me. But I didn’t want to perpetuate that illusion that marriages never struggle, so I summoned the courage to talk to my friends about what was happening. I didn’t tell everyone all the details, but I gave at least a broad outline. Far from being judgmental, every single person I talked with was supportive and sympathetic.

To my surprise, three of my friends had previously been divorced that I hadn’t even been aware of! Sharing my story led them (and several others I already knew about) to share their stories with me. I’d forgotten that it is struggles and challenges that bind friends together. During the hardest time of my life, I found myself blessed with a number of deeper friendships.

One word about this: everyone will react to your story through the lens of their own experience. If they struggled but made their marriage work, they’ll assume (even if only subconsciously) that that’s the best outcome for you. And vice versa. If you know this going in, you won’t see their perspective as judgment; they’re trying to help. I learned that everyone’s situation is different, and nobody can know what’s best for anyone else.

HANDLING THE GUILT AND ANGER

Chances are, one person in a struggling relationship is wrestling with guilt and the other is wrestling with anger. I don’t want to share too many details about my situation, so I won’t say which I was, but it was often unbearably intense. I had to learn to handle the feeling, both within myself and in my partner.

Just accepting that my partner was feeling his guilt/anger was a first step. I tried not to poke at it or make it worse. He did the same for me. But there’s only so much we could do, and I had to come to terms with the fact that neither of us could make his negative feelings go away just by trying really hard. The emotions had a life of their own, and needed to run their course.

I’m going to ask you to bear with me as I use a couple of buzzwords: empathy and mindfulness. During my difficult times, I read two books about them that I found very helpful: Nonviolent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg and Radical Self-Acceptance by Tara Brach. Yes, the titles both sound kind of weird and new-agey; don’t let that turn you off. They have a lot to say, but the very heart of what I got from them was that I needed to empathize with myself and my partner, and that means just HEARING what needs to be heard without trying to change it. And mindfulness is accepting and making room for the negative emotions instead of ignoring or fighting them. Letting them pass through. That may sound counterintuitive, but it made the difficult stuff seem smaller and more manageable.

ONE MOMENT AT A TIME

Beyond this, all I have to give is sympathy. When your life feels like it’s falling apart, maybe permanently, it can be excruciating. In retrospect, I don’t know how I kept my life functioning on a day-to-day basis. Cling to whatever things help you get through the moments. Some of the things I relied on were: a single song I must have listened to a thousand times, vodka, mundane housework, my job, writing things down, and walking on my slackline. Time moved so slowly that I often experienced a week’s worth of emotions in a day or even less. But life went on, somehow.

Eventually, we decided to call it quits. In my next post, I’ll share a few things I learned during that part of the process.

Teapot

You can get something fancy if you like, but you can’t go wrong with the classic English “brown Betty” style (it comes in other colors too). It’s a virtually drip-free spout design, and you can get various sizes. Mine is a 6C size, which fills 3 large mugs.

Traditional Brown Betty

Modern version

Filter

Don’t screw around with tea balls – get a good, large filter so your tea has room to unfurl. Along with this, I recommend a small dish to put the filter on (to catch drips) if the filter doesn’t come with a base. I have and like both of these filters:

Finium Filter

Chatsford Filter

Mug

You can drink tea out of any mug, although I recommend a large size so you’re not constantly refilling it. In the nice-to-have department: for Christmas my brother bought me two of these beautiful Bodum glasses, and I LOVE them. They’re insulated, hand-blown, and dishwasher-safe.

Bodum Pavina 15 oz glass

Other Items

You’ll definitely need a tea cozy. It may be challenging to find one that isn’t all kitschy or flowery, but they’re out there. In Seattle, they carry good ones at Teahouse Kuan Yin in Wallingford. I also recommend a wooden trivet for your teapot… it’ll absorb drips and keep it warm longer.

Tea Cozy

Wooden Trivets

I have a small dish like this to put my filter on

The guide turned out pretty well, and several of the guests thanked me for the help. At their suggestion, I’m posting it here so others can use it.

It seems to me that the biggest problem for visitors to any city is that there’s too much information, too many long lists of things to see and do. So the approach I took was to narrow it down and curate a list of my top recommendations in a bunch of categories. Visitors can either focus on categories of interest to them, or choose one interesting destination and use my guide to find other destinations in the same neighborhood.

If you have any feedback on my guide, feel free to leave a comment here.

Before I go any further, let me just say please don’t use this method on someone’s car without their permission. In addition, it’s a last-ditch technique, since it can damage your car’s weatherstripping. However, if you’re a Honda Civic owner like me and need to get into your car, feel free to give this a try.

Because I was at an outlet mall, my first thought was that wire hangers would be easy to come by. As I walked around the stores, though, I observed that all their hangers were the plastic kind. I was about to give up on this approach when I walked past a kitchen store. I thought that there MUST be something in a kitchen store I could use, and lo and behold, I was right.

For the low price of $2.49, I was the new owner of four metal barbecue skewers, one of which I used for my own purposes. I used the metal on a trash can to bend the skewer into a hook shape like this:

After a few false starts, here’s the method that worked. I slipped the skewer into the side of the window (either front passenger or driver’s side will work).

I maneuvered the skewer past two weatherstripping barriers, and then the hook was inside the car!

After that, it was fairly easy to use the hook to pull up the door lock. In case you don’t believe me, here’s a video of the whole process, which took a little more than 30 seconds:

Once I was aware of it, I noticed that my Civic appears to have quite a history of this entry method:

This was a strong reminder to me that I should never leave valuables in my car. If you own a ’90s Civic, the same applies to you!

After taking a weekend off of the project, we were back at it on another Sunday, cautiously hoping to be able to turn the car on by the end of the day. We put on all the stuff we’d had to disconnect (driveshafts, suspension, exhaust, radiator) and plugged in all the clips and hoses again.

After pouring in the fluids, we arrived at the Moment of Truth. I got in the car and turned the key to accessory power. So far, so good. I turned the key again and there was a kind of popping noise as it started to turn over. This spooked us, so I turned off the engine. We consulted our reference materials and all we could find was some advice that the engine wouldn’t start or run smoothly at first, so I got back in and tried again.

This time, the engine started up pretty quickly, and actually ran! There were no obvious problems that we could see or hear. It was a joyous moment, one I’d hoped for but never let myself really expect. My grin was a mile wide.

At that point, it was late and we were tired, but we pushed through the last hour of work (putting on wheels and hood, mostly) so we could actually drive the car out of the garage that night. I was giddy as I pulled it out and parked it on the street.

The next morning, I took it to a mechanic for a few adjustments that required special tools we didn’t have (timing light, belt tension measurement). The mechanic found one small issue (an extra washer causing a fuel leak), but otherwise praised our work. The one-hour minimum of shop time was plenty to get everything adjusted, and I drove the car away afterward, running smoothly.

Even after five and a half days in the garage slogging through this project, I’m not tired of working on my car. I enjoy the measured pace of engine disassembly and reassembly, and wouldn’t mind doing it again. I’m already building a list of possible next projects:

• fix non-working driver side speaker wiring
• add windshield wiper fluid reservoir (mysteriously missing)
• fix air conditioning system
• look into adding power door locks
• troll junkyards for missing trim pieces

My car will never look fancy (it’s a banged-up ’92 Civic, after all), but I’m developing a real sense of pride in it. It’s a great feeling to drive around in a car whose engine I now know so thoroughly.

As I discussed in my previous post, after removing the engine it became clear the best thing to do was to keep the engine I had. I ordered some needed parts (gaskets, mostly) online. We detached the head from everything else and I took it in for resurfacing to a local machine shop, Action Machine. I had a great experience with them – they were friendly and nice, and reasonably priced. Because I knew just enough to sound knowledgeable, I was able to chat with the guy while dropping off the head, and found that he could sell me the head gasket and head bolts for much less than I had been able to find anywhere online.

A handful of other specialized parts had to be ordered from my local Honda dealer (luckily nothing too expensive), and we stopped at Schucks for the more pedestrian things like fluids and filters. Overall, I spent $259.98 on parts, plus $64.50 for the head resurfacing; a total of $324.48 – significantly less than the $1700+ quoted to me by the mechanic. Doing the labor myself saved me about $1400.

Photo credit: Steve Leroux

Then followed a long weekend of work on the car. Saturday was very discouraging. We spent a lot of time carefully scraping off the old gaskets, then realized we were missing some important (new) gaskets and had to make a second trip to the dealer.  By the end of the day, we’d only just put the head back on the block. Adding to the aggravation and the feeling things were taking forever was the fact that the head bolts must be tightened in a very specific pattern, three times each. That is, we had to go through the bolts (in the pattern) three times, tightening to the next torque setting each time. Quite a pain, but we were careful and followed the directions to the letter.

   

The next day, Sunday, things picked up. We finished reattaching all the other engine parts that we had removed (transmission, wiring harness, distributor, etc). By the evening, we were able to hoist the engine back in the car and attach a few of the mounting bolts. It felt really good to pass that milestone and have the visual confirmation of the engine inside the car.

Before this project, I knew very little about cars. Looking under a hood, I could identify only a few things like the dipstick and fluid reservoirs. The most advanced work I’d done to date was to replace my headlights a few times (a very simple procedure).

We equipped ourselves with the PDF version of the 1200+ page Honda Civic Service Manual. One version was all over the internet, and it was very inconveniently missing three pages from the engine replacement section (just what we needed). I had to go to the downtown library to photocopy the relevant pages!

Then, we spent a weekend in coveralls and disposable gloves, getting coated in all manner of synthetic gunk (sometimes at unexpected moments). Grant patiently let me do all of the actual work, removing bolts and clips, labeling parts, etc. By the end of the weekend I was pretty good at estimating the size of a bolt head. I can also name a lot of the parts under my hood, and understand at least how they fit together (if not all the details of how it actually works).

I experienced a minor shop injury when my thumb got jammed between a pneumatic wrench I was using and a foot of the hoist. Luckily, Grant sprang into action right away and was able to reverse the wrench to free my thumb. For a little while I was afraid it was serious, but by the next day it was already a lot better.

  

As far as the car, it does not yet have a new engine in it. Both engines are sitting in the garage as we consider our next step. Once my engine was removed, some complications emerged. (The new engine was a manual transmission, and lacking power steering.) These could be fixed by moving a bunch of pieces to the new engine. However, we noticed that my existing engine was (visually) in great shape. The hoses and belts appear almost new. We realized that we had just done all the intensive labor that makes head gasket replacement so expensive. The only part of the process that we can’t do is to resurface the head, and if we take just the head to a machine shop, it’s pretty cheap. Then, we need to buy a new gasket kit and should be good to start reassembling everything. (I’d return the “new” engine, which has a 30 day warranty.)

   

 I feel pretty confident with the engine at this point. I realize that this is a false sense of confidence because taking everything apart is the easy half of the job. The real test will come when we start to put it all back together. I’m excited to see how challenging that will be, and if I remember it all well enough.