Here at Chaos Central, the Unix Curmudgeon and the Nice Person are getting ready for the first road trip of 2011, with the usual chaos ensuing.  The Nice Person (being nice) has promised a number of quilts to be finished, to be delivered as part of our trip, so she is frantically racing the big Gammill machine over quilt tops at a dizzying pace, lubricated with quantities of acetaminophen.  The Unix Curmudgeon recently answered a call for volunteers at a local non-profit and is frantically converting their web site from a hodge-podge of HTML2.0 and HTML4.01 generated by various word processors over the years into a streamlined PHP and CSS-driven integrated site that is not only consistent, but reasonable to maintain and follows an overall theme.

Amid this level of chaos, along with trying to get a more permanent solution to the monsoon-fueled pool at the entrance to the basement-level garage other than the sump-pump-in-a-bucket in a hole in the driveway, the wireless networking on our primary development Linux laptop and road machine has decided to be stubborn, defying all attempts to get it to work properly.  The driver, always a crap shoot in the world of Linux and proprietary hardware drivers, appears to be working–we can see the networks with the wireless tools, but the connections just aren’t connecting.  It appears to be some sort of permissions problem, compounded by the fact that, in this wild frontier of Linux hacking at its best, there are several ways to do it, none of which work, and some of which may be counteracting others.  This saga continues.  We do have one Linux netbook that does appear to still have a functioning wireless capability, so we are good to go as far as being able to read email and login to do system administration on the road.

But, which brings us to the subject, we realized the folly of attempting yet another marathon 7500Km road trip in a 17-year-old Jeep with 300,000Km on the odometer.  We’ve been putting off looking at replacement (or supplemental) vehicles because, in the midst of the real-estate crash and recession, we are encumbered with more houses than we can reasonably occupy at once.  But, the inevitable is upon us.  The venerable old machine, which never got a name other than “Jeep,” has carried us and our 25-year-old tandem bicycle on many adventures over the last 17 years, but it was time to retire it.

We went to the local Jeep dealer this weekend, with the idea of kicking the tires and looking at the newer models (i.e., anything built in the 21st century) up close and personal, but without any pretense of being able to budget a new or even late-model used vehicle.  There were other issues, too: we have a large cargo trailer we used to move our heavy equipment from Montana, which has been in storage for a year, with brief excursions by the kids to move their household last fall.  We found a suitable replacement vehicle, but, of course, with no tow package and no drip rails for our aged tandem rack.  The tandem we can deal with, as we are thinking of replacing the tandem as well by the time we need to be in Michigan for a bike tour this fall.  The trailer is another problem–without a way to tow it, delivering it to a potential buyer is out of the picture.  Well, it was beginning to look like a fanciful diversion for a rainy Saturday, when the salesman, Steve, who used to be an RV dealer, mentioned that we might be able to trade in both Jeep and the trailer in one deal.

This, of course, was the closer, as they say.  After a bit of dickering to maximize trade-in value to us and resale value to the dealership, we took a break while they checked our credit, stopping at home to unload 17 years of accumulated glovebox debris and remove the tandem rack, pretty much corroded in place after 17 years, then swing by the storage yard and pick up the other half of our trade-in package, the 7×16-foot covered trailer.

The downpour continued throughout the day, but we managed to switch vehicles on paper without too much further ado.  The rainy day turned to stormy night while we signed papers, so we dispensed with the usual walk-around checkout, and drove our newly-acquired debt home to RTFM (Read the Fine Manual).

So, now we’re almost ready for our trip.  We need to get the Green Hornet into the shop for the add-ons, there’s still a quilt on the quilting machine, the wireless is still iffy, and the new PHP-based web site needs some last-minute revisions before being reassigned as the default on the client’s web site.  Chaos reigns supreme.