It’s slightly extremely annoying to be outside sweltering in the sun on the deck on Sunday with thoughts of opening the pool and going for a swim, only to have everything covered in snow two days later. It was something like 83° on Sunday and around 78° on Monday. Even yesterday morning wasn’t bad – in the low 60s, which I’ll take. Then the rain came, the temperature dropped, and the rain turned to snow. It was 19° when I got up this morning.

Oh, there’s not a ton of snow. Enough to cover everything but not enough to make me regret taking the snow tires off the car (or the plow and chains off my tractor), but it still kind of sucks. The only nice thing about the cold weather is that I get to wear a jacket to work, which is nice ‘cuz I need the pockets. Having to stuff a wallet, phone, mp3 player, and a 5-pound wad of keys (do I really need all those keys? What the hell are they for?) into my pants pocket is tough. Especially since I’ve graduated to wearing “bell top” pants these days.

That’s the other problem with warm weather – no ability to cover up with a sweatshirt or sweater (‘cuz if I wear a hoodie, nobody can tell I’m fat).

Oh well, after a cold day today, it’s supposed to warm up for the rest of the week. Not the summer-like weather of last weekend, but into the 50s, which is actually better for getting stuff done outside. Not to mention installing the new car stereo I ordered yesterday.

It’s nothing fancy, but the original factory stereo in my 2004 Hyundai has gotten kind of buggy over the years. The biggest pain in the ass is that when you turn the volume knob up, the volume goes down. Sometimes. And when you turn it down, it almost always goes down, up, down, nowhere, down, up…. I wouldn’t care, but much of the time I’m in my car I plug in my mp3 player and listen to music or podcasts. For this, the car stereo volume needs to be up pretty high. But when I want to listen to the radio, it needs to be down quite a bit lower, or my ears get blasted out.

So I’ll typically have the tuner on, and the volume on 16 or so. Then I plug the mp3 player in, and I can barely hear it, so I try to turn the volume up (like, 21-22 is pretty good. Higher is OK, ‘cuz then I can use the mp3 player volume). So it’ll do something like this: 16…17…16…15…14,13,12,11,12…13…12…11…13…14…15…16…17…18….

OK, at this point, it’s still kinda low and hard to hear, but if I strain, I can kinda hear depending on what I’m listening to, and then I hear Clint Eastwood’s voice in my head

I know what you’re thinking, punk. You’re thinking “if I keep turning this knob, is it gonna keep going up so you can hear the goddamn, thing, or is it gonna go back down?” Well, you’ve gotta ask yourself a question: “Do I feel lucky?” Well, do ya, punk?

And then I yell out “YEAH!” and turn the knob some more and it goes down to like 2 and I can’t hear a damn thing and I get really pissed (did I mention I’m also trying to drive the car at the same time?).

For while, I alleviated this problem by using the remote control (why the hell car stereos come with remote controls these days is beyond me – I mean, what, I’m gonna get in the back seat and crank some tunes? I don’t think so). But then the remote quit working, so now, finally, I’ve had enough.

As I said the new one is nothing great, but it’s got a USB port and an aux input on the front. And Bluetooth. And a remote, of course. And hopefully the volume knob works.