Da' further adventures of da' trusty billy-goat wagon!

[elagache]

Dear mid-60s Buick owners,

Yesterday was the first chance I've had to get Biquette out since the Orinda Classic Car show.  Since it was cloudy and dreary that day, I decided to take some "make-up" photos in the bright sunshine.  Before the show I switched to an even glossier tire dressing and I was curious to see the difference in photographs.  Here is a photo taken one year ago with the usual "high-endurance" tire dressing I use mainly for protection:



Here is a photo of Biquette taken yesterday at about the same angle:



I don't know how to properly apply this new product.  When I applied it just before the show I made a mess on the concrete of the garage, but it might be worth learning how to use it.  It does seem to bring shine up another notch.  Here is the side view:



For completeness, here is the tailgate:



I guess I'll have to figure out how to use this stuff after all! 

Cheers, Edouard 

[elagache]

This is a test of posting a photo from an iPhone using only the Dropbox application.

[elagache]

Second test of uploading a image from an iPhone.

[elagache]

Dear mid-60s Buick caregivers who have to cope with whatever is thrown at them,

The weather is definitely looking more like winter for some of you but here in California it is a demonic continuation of summer.  I'm sure you have heard of the electrical power shutoffs in Northern California.  We lost power late in the evening on Saturday and didn't get it back until Monday afternoon.  However, things could have been worse.  Another internal combustion powered device came to the rescue:



We were able to keep the refrigerator, upright freezer, and a few other small things powered during the day.  That was enough to prevent losing any food.  Alas, we have an all-electric kitchen.  Cooking outside on a propane stove in chilly winds was hardly a culinary adventure!

At the moment, we are not being threatened with any other power outages.  However, da' trusty wagon may not be getting out soon.  They have started repaving a nearby street and now there are large trucks and lots of dust on our street.  Definitely not a good Autumn around here for classic car driving - at least for the moment.

Cheers, Edouard 

[elagache]

Dear owners of mid-60s Buicks who have to earn their keep.

S-S-S-S-Sufferin' Succotash!  Out of seed again!??? 

I purchase large quantities of seed infrequently to save time.  Today was the day to restock and my trusty wagon got the call:



80 pounds of bird seed lasts 6-8 weeks and is definitely wagon work.

Amazingly, a couple who had their SUV parked next to Biquette were fascinated.  It turns out the woman's mother had a wagon like Biquette.  So Biquette got her dose of compliments for the outing.  I hadn't planned on it, but I used my phone to take this photo:



Biquette wasn't by herself either.  On the way home I was able to exchange waves with 1960s Thunderbird and Mustang.  California is in a drought and our electrical utility is going to cut off our power on Wednesday through Thursday at least.  Still, when the weather is nice, and there isn't any other impending calamity, our classics can manage to get a bit of exercise! 

Cheers, Edouard   

[elagache]

Dear fans of a certain rascally wagon,

Gosh darn it!  Da' dreaded "green poxes" have returned! . . . . 



I must admit my embarrassment, but I didn't have a chance to harvest the apples off of our Granny Smith tree until this past Sunday.  At that point, all I was trying to do was lighten the load on the tree.  I assumed by then that all of the apples were rotten.  However to my amazement, most the apples were still good.



Those apples are certainly good enough for making apple sauce.  We have a number of storms blowing through this week, so not the sort of weather to get a classic out for some exercise.  However, it might dry out next week.

Cheers, Edouard 

[option B9]

Hi Edouard, The weather is changing here too, this past Saturday the temperature here in NYC hit 67 ! The parks were full of adults & children running around in tee shirts and shorts (very strange) And by the end of the week it's going back down to the 20s. Most of our major snowstorms occur around the 19th to the end of the month. so the worst is yet to come.
   My fruit tree has not produced any fruit in three years so I will give it one more season, if not I will dig out the stump and plant a money tree !!    I could always go out in the yard and pick some ripe dollar bills and then use the dollars to buy the fruit of my choice or Buick Parts whatever I need the most of..  But those Granny Smiths look good, enjoy the sauce or the pie (my favorite) if you make one... And keep the Buick away from the road construction, That black tar is nasty....

        Tony 

[elagache]

Dear Tony and mid-60s Buick caregivers,

Hi Edouard, The weather is changing here too, this past Saturday the temperature here in NYC hit 67 ! The parks were full of adults & children running around in tee shirts and shorts (very strange) And by the end of the week it's going back down to the 20s. Most of our major snowstorms occur around the 19th to the end of the month. so the worst is yet to come.

The weather has been very weird here in Northern California as well.  It has been unusually cold and what rain we have gotten has been only from weak storms.  So oddly enough, you need your rain gear frequently but we continue to fall behind on total rainfall.  Definitely peculiar.

My fruit tree has not produced any fruit in three years so I will give it one more season, if not I will dig out the stump and plant a money tree !!   

Hey, if you find a nursery that sells hardy money trees let me know!  I'm sure I could find a spot in the yard for a tree like that!   

And keep the Buick away from the road construction, That black tar is nasty....

I'll do my best, but amazingly, the road contractors are continuing to work even in the rainy conditions.  Always a new obstacle here in California I suppose.

Cheers, Edouard 

[elagache]

Dear fans of a certain rascally station wagon,

My local classic car enthusiast friend insists that the first of the year and Superbowl Sunday are excellent times to get your classic out for some exercise.  So this year, I decided to try to find some quieter traffic and visit a recently restored railroad depot.  Sadly the traffic was much heavier than I expected.  However, Biquette and I made it to our destination which had once been a popular steakhouse.  Here is an online article describing the renovation:

https://www.eastbaytimes.com/2017/10/24/walnut-creek-depot-poised-to-go-from-steaks-to-retail-shops/

As hoped, the nice and shiny building made a great backdrop for my trusty wagon:



As always, click on the image for a larger version.  I tried very hard to avoid including anything in the photos that would give away that they were taken in 2020.  Here is a view of Biquette parked on the street:



Of course there were modern parking meters, handicap parking, and other obstacles to avoid.  Here is a wide view of the other side of the building:



Here is a close up at that location:




Yes, you can see a blooming tree in the background, California is definitely staring at a drought.  Biquette wasn't the only classic taking advantage of the mild dry weather.  I saw a Ford Mustang and Mercury Cougar both from the 1960s.

Hopefully, I'll find some time to digitally age at least 1 or 2 of these images so they look like they were taken in the 1960s.

Enjoy!!

Cheers, Edouard 

[elagache]

Dear mid-60s Buick owners who enjoy strolling down memory lane,

So what's the point of taking a photo of your classic Buick in front of a classic building unless you do something with it?!?  Fortunately, digital aging can be done piecemeal when you have a bit of spare time.  So here is the first photo aged into a slide and black and white.  For comparison here is the original:



Here is my attempt at a black and white photo from the 1960s:



I used exactly the same "recipe" as I used on this posting:

http://65gs.com/board/index.php/topic,3265.msg22470.html#msg22470

Here is a digitally aged equivalent of a color slide from the 1960s:



For this one I made one change.  I decided to go into the color adjustments and further reduce the brightness of greens.  Looking at the slides I have of Biquette from the 1960s and 70s, the paint definitely looks more grey than green.  So I decided that slides degraded in the greens after all those years.  Without the adjustment, the car looks too "modern" to be from the 1960s to my eyes at least.

Stay tune for at least one more image when I can scare up the time!

Cheers, Edouard 

[yachtsmanbill]

Ive noticed that too Ed. Seems as though the "fix" portion of the process kept developing after all these years. Were your slides ASA 100 ?  Bill

[elagache]

Dear Bill and mid-60s Buick owners who like to photograph their pride and joy,

Ive noticed that too Ed. Seems as though the "fix" portion of the process kept developing after all these years. Were your slides ASA 100 ?  Bill

That's a good question that I cannot possibly answer!  The earliest pictures of Biquette were taken by my parents long before I was old enough to have a camera!  I'm not sure, but I think my parents were using Kodachrome 64.  It was a common slide film for everyday use.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodachrome

I'm not sure, but I might have been the first to use Ektachrome.  I got interested in astronomy in 1973 and soon tried to find ways to take pictures.  64 ASA was definitely not suited for nighttime photography.  Eventually I started looking into other brands of slide film and turned to print film which had an even higher ASA than any slide film.

Cheers, Edouard 

[yachtsmanbill]

I did quite a few time lapse photographs with Ektachrome slide film. Ya know where you see the tail light streaks behind the cars? Like 1 minute exposures. One day JUST FOR YOU, Ill dig out the slide from 1969 when I was at the top of the Eiffel Tower at midnite! The same from ground level on the Champs Elysees.
The Champs-Elys?es. For glory and grandeur, this is the most famous avenue in the world. If the monuments and symmetrical landscaping don't convince you, remember that Champs-Elys?es means "Elysian Fields" which indicates that someone thought this street was heaven on earth.
RE: The Champs-Elys?es. For glory and grandeur, this is the most famous avenue in the world. If the monuments and symmetrical landscaping don't convince you, remember that Champs-Elys?es means "Elysian Fields" which indicates that someone thought this street was heaven on earth.

Poor storage i.e. moisture and mildew caused a lot of my slides to actually bleed color and become Jimi Hendrix-like posters LOL. They used to be sooo crisp and clear too; what a bummer. This pic is not mine but you get the idea, right?   Bill

[elagache]

Dear Bill and 65GS.com types who stroll down memory lane,

I did quite a few time lapse photographs with Ektachrome slide film. Ya know where you see the tail light streaks behind the cars? Like 1 minute exposures. One day JUST FOR YOU, Ill dig out the slide from 1969 when I was at the top of the Eiffel Tower at midnite! The same from ground level on the Champs Elysees.
The Champs-Elys?es. For glory and grandeur, this is the most famous avenue in the world. If the monuments and symmetrical landscaping don't convince you, remember that Champs-Elys?es means "Elysian Fields" which indicates that someone thought this street was heaven on earth.
RE: The Champs-Elys?es. For glory and grandeur, this is the most famous avenue in the world. If the monuments and symmetrical landscaping don't convince you, remember that Champs-Elys?es means "Elysian Fields" which indicates that someone thought this street was heaven on earth.

Thanks for sharing the neat picture!  I did visit France a number of times as a kid and worked one summer at INRIA in Sophia Antipolis.  I never have spent much time in Paris though.  So I never took it in the famous monuments there.

Poor storage i.e. moisture and mildew caused a lot of my slides to actually bleed color and become Jimi Hendrix-like posters LOL. They used to be sooo crisp and clear too; what a bummer.

Indeed the world and technology has changed so much.  I put so much effort into trying to take photographs of dim astronomical objects and later undersea life.  In the end I didn't have very much to show for all that effort.  I do have a ton of slides stored as carefully as time permitted.  Alas, as you say, the colors are quietly fading away as if heartbroken by my lack of interest in them.

Such are the web of relations human being spin in our current state of being.  It does feel like unfinished business that will need to be resolved in some sort of cosmic way.

Cheers, Edouard

[elagache]

Dear mid-60s Buick owners who have displacement and aren't afraid to use it!

Our town has a freeway off-ramp which of course cannot be allowed to back up onto the freeway.  To avoid this, there is a section of 4 lane surface street which acts as a buffer before people have to merge into 2 lanes.  In a traffic engineer's nightmare, It was necessary to put a stoplight just before the very short merge section.  When that light turns red, it is a perfect invitation for a very short street race.

Alas, the plot is further thickened by inattentive drivers.  Since we have a lot of egotists in German performance cars, the prudent strategy is to allow the those vehicles their brief thrill and pull in behind them.  But what do you do when the driver next do you isn't paying good attention?  Yesterday my trusty wagon was going home when I found myself lined up against a Mercedes at this very light.  When it turned green I started accelerating modestly, but the other driver didn't race ahead,  instead it was hanging almost next to me!  With a split second to decide, it was time to escape this dangerous situation.  I gave Biquette a bit more gas and vroom! The Mercedes was eating Biquette's dust!

Once more, Biquette's sudden acceleration and loud exhaust made quite an impression on this driver.  Because all of a sudden, this car followed Biquette at a very respectful distance!  I suppose I successfully got this women to pay much more attention to driving!

Sometimes our mature Buicks need to teach those young whippersnappers some manner! . . . . 

Cheers, Edouard