Peter Vieira
Wow, you're reading this? Thanks! If you're into RC cars and I seem vaguely familiar, it's because I spent over 25 years writing and editing RC car news, reviews, and tech articles in print and online. What else, what else ... I have a degree in Film Studies (useless), most of a degree in Graphic Design (useful), and I'm married to a wonderful woman with horrible taste in men. Thanks to her, we have a terrific daughter who just earned her Journalism degree and is way, waaay more together that I was at her age. Or right now.
Read All My Posts »
The white Golf next to the Saab is a GTE, the 245hp hybrid version of the GTI. Charging port visible behind the front wheel, fuel filler is on the other side at the back. Mildly interesting!
I was a realtor for a while. In-ground pools around here are more likely to be filled in for sale than cleaned up for the next buyer. They are seen entirely as a liability.
A pool was on both of our lists before we moved to a home that requires a lot of outside maintenance (house / garage / grounds). There was no way I was willing to add pool maintenance to the chore list.
We can be at more than one beach (2 that regularly appear on ‘top beaches’ lists fwiw) in less than 10 minutes, and we could be to a boat ramp in less than five minutes that would give us access to many beachy areas that would be completely private. I would rather maintain a boat than a pool – and have managed to dodge that bullet as well.
I will eventually put together a beachable boat for exploring the waters. I will likely never be in charge of maintaining a pool if I have a vote in the matter.
For Mark:
The house we bought 22 years ago came with a big pool as well, and it took quite a few years to figure out the trick to getting it cleared up when the cover came off. The guy who did the opening told me that I just had to regularly shock it with chlorine, which was expensive and took a couple of weeks. What I finally discovered was that as soon as the cover came off and the initial chlorine dose was added, dumping in a bottle of algaecide made a huge difference. But the key is you have to use the expensive stuff with copper – $30 for a small bottle vs $7 for a gallon of the regular stuff. My water clears up in a couple of days, then I just need to vacuum the junk off the bottom. Good luck!
Another thing that was a revelation for me was getting a leaf vacuum that doesn’t need the pump to work. Here’s a cheaper option than the motorized ones: https://a.co/d/0axsvdan
Getting rid of the organic material at the bottom before aerating the water seems to make such a difference in preventing the algae bloom before you even need to deal with it. At least it works for me to buy time or the water to heat enough to absorb enough bromine to keep the algae in check.
This is written tongue in cheek. OK I admit, as a stupid homeowner, I built a pool. A relatively big one. With a rock waterfall. Over a cave. With a diving platform on top.
My career took us to different places, but it appeared we would be in the same city for years to come, and the family was so enthusiastic for a pool.
Months go by, it’s being built, when a career advancement came along to move to a great place. We did. We got back one out of three dollars spent when we sold the house. Oh, that hurt!
So ENJOY your depreciated value pool, and all the labor that goes with it, never again!
I have posted the link to this street before, but thought this might be an appropriate time to do it again if Annti likes looking at old Saabs.
I’ll take the yellow convertible and the red sedan in front of it, both with the tri-spoke wheels please!
If you go go back in time there are a few others that have come and gone. There is a nice seafoam green tri-spoke coupe in the Sep 2019 images.
The two across the street are pretty sweet too.
Sweet Rav4!
For Annti:
How difficult is it to keep a Saab (or any car) of that vintage on the road in terms of regulations, inspections, etc.?
For Bishop:
I’m a big fan of having a 3-D printer. I like the super easy to use Tinkercad website for my designs. It’s amazing to me how many things I’ve designed for sutff around the house and car related.
https://www.tinkercad.com/
For a car that supports ONLY wired carplay (like my Ioniq 6) I can recommend this particular wireless carplay adapter. Plugs into the USB port and appears to your car as a carPlay device, while your phone see it as your car. Works better than the other 4 different models I’ve tried.
https://a.co/d/08fj8E3B
Thank you!
‘Currently Unavailable’
Damnit. I have an Ioniq 5 and the wired android auto is a pain. If the built-in GPS wasn’t so bad, I’d skip the androidauto entirely and just go with regular bluetooth for audio.
It might come back. I’ve seen it disappear before. Keep trying.
We finally got a robot vacuum for our pool and I’m pretty annoyed we didn’t do it a few years ago. We named it Luigi and it is adorable. It will also crawl up the walls and wait patiently when it wants to be done. It’s a huge time saver – especially since our neighbor has a tall pine tree that hangs over our pool and drops pine needles and huge-ass spiders into the water. Ain’t pool ownership great?
We have had a few over the years and we recommend the Dolphin
I see your pine needles and spiders and raise you figs and wasps.
Always satisfying when someone adds a Saab to the fleet.
P1S gang! Love mine. Just grab an AAWireless dongle, they do wireless carplay now.
The pool is a PITA but the kids love it.
I didn’t want a pool, my wife did, so we agreed that if the right house happened to have a pool, then so be it. And so it was . . . and ironically, I’m the one that spends the most time in it.
We had a very similar first open – there was a loose tarp on top of the pool held down with sandbags, and six inches of water filled with seven months of dirt, leaves, and pollen on top of the tarp. I finally got it clean, and then one day I wake up and the water had turned white because the alkalinity was too high and I didn’t know to monitor and manage it. Whatever.
Over the next few years we changed a lot of stuff – a new safety cover, a salt chlorinator, and a cartridge filter made it WAY easier to deal with. After a few years we even cut down an otherwise perfectly fine tree that would lose its small leaves in mid-August and clog up the skimmers constantly.
If you’re going to have one, it’s all about making things easier on yourself.
My first house had an above ground pool. It was a great day when it sprung a leak with no obvious source and had to be demolished. If I were with someone who wanted a pool, the deal would be they have to take care of it, but not the way most people say that to a kid who wants a dog where the parents end up doing most of the work.
I built a pocket kind of like that for my phone in my GR86. Under the HVAC is a small plastic filler panel I built a felt-lined pocket for it to slide into. Mine has to be hardwired (I don’t like BT or wireless chargers, anyway), so I ran a cable from the USB port in the console cupholder area under the console where it’s hidden, then up through the back of the slot where it can be plugged into the phone. The USB plug is a removable module, so I was able to pop it out and make a small notch about the diameter of the USB cable jacket on the console, plugged it in, looped the cord through the notch, and reinstalled the module. I could have been really slick and hid the entire thing by installing a hidden USB port, but then it would be inaccessible if it needed to be unplugged and replugged and there’s only a small loop of wire and the plug visible, so it doesn’t bother me. Point is, something like that might work for your wife if she hates visible/unkempt wires as much as I do.
I’m sure the Bishop has to be aware they exist, but the wireless Carplay and Android Auto converters are very handy. I did the same thing, without the custom molding, on my wired car. Wireless charging mount plus wiress Carplay and I never have to find a wire.
I also mounted the phone where the AC will hit it, keep the charger from overheating it.
Yep! I have an AAWireless Two in my 2016 Mazda 3 and 2024 4Runner. They work great. They do have more startup lag than infotainment systems with Android Auto built in.
My first adapter was the Motorola one, I think the only “name brand” adapter I’ve seen. I seem to recall it booted pretty quick. It was Android only though, and had no interface to change settings or connected phone.
I now have a different one, a brand I’d never heard of but had good reviews on the internet that can do both phones and it definitely takes a tick to load, especially where it loads the settings screen first.
Having had to occasionally deal with clients’ in-ground pools while trying to get their homes sold, I have learned from experience that an in-ground pool in an area with all four seasons is just a really expensive planter….
This is why God invented pool cages. Baffles me that they are so unknown up north. Snow load issues I suppose. But if you can engineer one to stand up to a hurricane I’d imagine you can make one survive God’s Frozen Dandruff.
But *indoor* pools are not uncommon in the snotty Maine town I am from. The only way you can really use one for more than about three months a year.
But a pool is the LAST thing I ever want to deal with owning. If I want to soak in water (rare), I have a perfectly good bathtub.
And Hi Paul! Assuming you are the Paul E. I think you are.
Hey, Kevin! Yep, you guessed correctly!
There was a local house a couple of years ago with a big indoor pool. I wanted it so bad that I tried to get a co-worker to buy it.
I have watched a lot of ‘urbex’ videos where they go into homes with indoor pools. An indoor pool take almost all of the pool maintenance (minus skimming leaves) and multiplies it by the added maintenance of a crazy high humidity indoor environment (think whatever local grow house was condemned after the bust).
Oh, totally. Years ago, I listed a bank-owned house with a defunct indoor pool that pretty much matched up with those kinds of urbex videos. Nasty smells through the rest of the house, moldy, rotting ceilings, plus the bonus of having to track down a previous owner of an abandoned K-Car New Yorker in the driveway, to get the title signed so it could go for scrap.
An indoor pool is *definitely* not the purview of the poors. But that’s the sort of town I am from, LOL. Typically it’s in a sort of attached barn-like structure – or in a couple of cases, literally in the old renovated attached barn, being old New England. So “indoors” but not necessarily inside the house proper.
Best investment we made with our pool. An electric solid cover that folds onto itself under ground as it retracts. Expensive but it will keep the pool clean, warm and reduce all other mainteniace like 3x. Paid for itself in 3 years.
Takes the weight of a deer or a human and many inches of rainwater or snow
I am so tempted by those but the price put me off.
True AF. I was a realtor for a while and it’s a lot easier to sell a back yard large enough for a medium dog to run around than an insurance liability hole.
It’s literally worth $50k-$100k around here to have yard area instead of a pool. We’re also in an area where ‘suburban’ home lots are 1/4 acre, so that pool makes a big difference to the usable space.
I am very impressed at the turnaround on that pool’s greenness.
When we were looking for a house about 6 years ago, we looked at one with a pool. I thought it would be nice, but my wife said no way. Too much work, expensive to heat, and expensive to insure. She was probably right, but from June to the end of September, I often wish we had considered it more seriously.
Oh boy, there’s a running joke about the love/hate relationship I have with our pool. It sure is rewarding keeping it up though and not as difficult as I thought, more time consuming than anything. Yours is looking great!
Wow that Saab 900s would be as uncommon in their own neighborhood as they are here in the states now. Where they likewise used to be a pretty ordinary sight, the I’m too hip for a BMW but not stodgy enough for a Mercedes choice of the 80s professional classes.
I enjoy trying to guess the autopian by the topline. “Shooting Music Videos” kinda had to be SWG, didn’t it?
Or in my case as a skint lad just starting out in my career – I drove Peugeots until I could afford Saabs then drove Saabs until I could afford BMWs. And I could always afford Volvos so I had a bunch of those along the way too.
But even in Maine, the state that probably had more Saabs per capita than anywhere else, they are getting very rare, and non-convertible 900s are basically extinct. Entropy always wins, and the newest of them are now 32yo. Though a rather lovely Nocturne Blue with blue top C900CVT lives in my garage up there. Not mine anymore, it once was. My friend I sold it to keeps it there winters. ~260K on it and still running like a champ. I bought it in southern NJ, and never drove it in the winter either, so it’s very rust-free.
I remember the Peugeot 505s as the true avant gard Euro choice back then, esp as a teenager in the midwest. I’d see maybe 1 for every 10 Saabs.
In their best year ever, Peugeot sold about 20K cars in the US. Saab in those years was doing 50K+, and climbing rapidly. They had an even more sparse dealer network than Saab, though little Maine had THREE Peugeot dealers in the ’80s glory years. And three Saab dealers too. They weren’t uncommon cars when I was a kid. But get much out of New England or the West Coast and they were few and far between.
I think the truly avantgaude choice in European cars were Alfa Romeo sedans. You had to be pretty brave to choose an Alfetta, then a Milano, then finally the 164, all of which sold in tiny numbers. Maine had a single Afla dealer – which actually was also a Saab dealer. In the back of a big Chevy store. Which today is again the Fiat/Alfa dealer when they came back.
The best dealership combo, and where my Grandfather bought his ’85 Olds 98 Pregnancy, was Oldsmobile-Fiat-Peugeot-Rolls-Royce. Colony Motors in Falmouth ME. Sadly that location is where a Walmart stands today. Down the street was the Mercedes-Subaru store. And still to this day, a VW-Audi-Porsche-Mazda store, the last remaining dealership of what was a pretty big “auto mile”.
In was about 20 miles south of the Maine border in MA, and we had one Alfa dealer located in the first floor of a run-down industrial building. It was located in down-town when all other main line dealers were on the highways.
It was gone entirely by the time I was old enough to drive. I only knew of its existence because the owner ran for mayor.
I am amazed that any are still rolling around in the salt belt. At this point, any on the road have required some form of commitment to keep them operational.
Edit: That was also before Maine (at least south coastal) wasn’t entirely overrun with Boston refugees. The Massholes do not value work and would never put the effort in to keeping a Saab alive.
Any survivors of either brand have either never been driven in winter if bought locally, or were imported from much less salty places.
long ago my Dad bought a new 86 Saab 900 like that in silver. I loved driving it.
That’s honestly a pretty clever way to make a mold. I’m impressed!
And there are excellent tools for a phone that can perform a 3D scan and provide a model of the scanned area that can be then altered or fixed in a 3D tool. Really impressive what can be done today. That way of doing a physical model is a very clever method.