Thursday, February 22, 2007

Oakland

I'm house sitting for a friend in Oakland right now. Got here Wednesday night. Thursday night went to drive over to Eva and Tim's house in Berkeley. When I started up my truck it sounded like a hot rod! I looked under the truck and a 3 foot section of my exhaust was missing! They stole my catalytic converter! WTF? I was completely flabbergasted and flummoxed, to name a few things that start with F.

I drove my truck over to a safer neighborhood in case they wanted to steal the gate from my truck bed or something. The truck was so loud it was setting off car alarms!

The next morning I called up some muffler shops and found out that this was pretty common in Oakland. Apparently there are some people going around chopping the catalytic converters off of late-model Toyota pickup trucks (probably 4x4 so they're easy to get under). I guess they sell them to metal recyclers for the platinum, etc... that's in them. The guy at Ron's Berkeley Muffler Shop (great place, I'd recommend them) said that mine was the 3rd catalytic converter theft he'd seen that day! Apparently they only steal the old ones (more recycleable metal in them?) so I'm not likely to be a repeat victim (knock on wood). Also, the newer trucks have the converter above a frame member, so they're harder to get out. Doesn't help me, though.

They chopped off the mounting bolts and all that factory goodness, so it would have been like $1200 to replace everything to factory specs! Thankfully they could just throw in a universal catalytic converter and weld it into place for $200. They even gave me the pity discount for having it stolen in the first place. They had a sign in the bathroom listing the 9 common reasons why catalytic converters go bad, but I guess they forgot the most common East Bay reason. On the plus side, there's a good BBQ place across the street. Super nice people, and great ribs. Another recomendation.

At least I got a good story out of it. :(

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Wednesday, February 14, 2007

Pillow Fight Club

On Valentine's Day this year there was a huge flash-mob pillow fight at the Ferry Building in San Francisco. Pillow Fight Club. All you could hope for, and more. Remember to bring a handkerchief to put around your mouth and nose so you don't choke on all the feathers!

http://www.pillowfight.info/

There were over 1000 people there going crazy with the pillows. I didn't know about it until the day of, but thankfully I ran into a friend there who loaned me his pillow (thanks Adam!). By the end of it, though, people felt that somehow their pillows were not worth taking home again so they were just leaving them there or giving them to other people to use. The fight went on for over an hour with little kids and big kids alike giving it their all (although the little kids were a bit overwhelmed by the scale of the thing).

I'll upload a photo of this later.