Ford Driving Skills for Life

This truck travels around the country, presenting these programs at high schools.

On Saturday, Nicolas attended a teen driving program sponsored by The Ford Fund.  It was a mini version of the half-day program he attended back in the summer at our Test Track.  There were just 12 kids in a 40-minute session.  They started with an introduction to the program, and a description of the two scenarios they would experience.

The teens listen intently to the instructor as he describes the program they are going to experience.

The two situations the kids would experience were distracted driving and reacting to a rear-wheel skid.  In the distracted driving course, the kids followed precise directions to navigate around a small course, and then had to repeat that same course while attempting to text a message on their phone.

Nicolas driving a new Focus while texting.

The intent of this exercise was to demonstrate to the teens that there was no way they could be successful at all three objectives – navigating the course without hitting cones, maintaining the required speed, and texting the requested message – they would mess one of them up.  And they all did . . . even Nicolas . . . he was able to maintain the required speed complete the text message, but he flattened a few cones!

The other situation was the rear-wheel skid, in a Mustang that had been set up to skid very easily.

The Mustang was definitely the favorite car of the teens!

The kids drove around an oval course, and when they reached the correct speed, the car would skid in the corners.  The instructor explained to them how to steer out of the skid, and how to keep their eyes on where they wanted to go, NOT where they did not want to go.  Nicolas was anxious to get behind the wheel on this one, and he did really well.  Most of the kids were tentative at first, not going fast enough to get into a skid, but not Nick . . . he was skidding from the very first lap!

Even though it was just a mini-session, Nicolas enjoyed it, and got some good experience.  All the kids seemed to like the session, and one girl even ran up to her dad after getting out of the Mustang, and said “Let’s buy a Mustang!”  That’s another side benefit of this program – exposing these teens to new and exciting Ford cars may turn them into future customers!

Burning leaves and the housing market

We had an eventful week with a 2nd showing on the house on Wednesday.  The visit seemed to go well, but we haven’t yet heard back from them yet.  If nothing happens in the next week, we’ll take the house off the market for the winter, and put it back on in February, probably with a new Realtor.  We’ve given our current Realtor 2 seasons (3 with this Company), and we figure that’s long enough . . . it’s time to move on to somebody else.

We saw an article in the Sunday paper that said that luxury home sales have increased 43% from last year, and the worst is supposed to be over for that market segment.  That’s good news for us, and we’re hoping that starting fresh in the early spring will bring us some luck!

Yesterday we went to my Mom’s house for dinner – she had quite a few leaves down in the backyard, so Tom and the boys were busy raking and burning.

By the time the raking was done, and we were just watching the last of the fire, the “Supervisory Crew” arrived . . .

It was a nice day for working in the yard, and Grandma appreciated all the help!

Fall Cleanup

With the fall weather settling in, we’ve been doing quite a bit of cleanup around here . . . trimming bushes, pulling out dead flowers, covering the A/C and getting the furnace ready to turn on.  We’re lucky that we don’t have many leaves (most of them just blow away), but we do have black walnuts.  In fact, we have a line of black walnut trees between the house and the barn, and this year was apparently a good year for black walnuts – we have tons of them!

It took 4 days, but the boys and I finally raked up all the walnuts and deposited in the back corner of our property.

That’s a lot of walnuts – too bad I don’t have something to make with them!

Nicolas’ favorite part is pulling the wagon with his 3-wheeler . . . in fact, it’s not too difficult to get the boys to work in the yard when they get to use the 3-wheeler.

After several hours of back-breaking work, Bryce is ready for a ride in the wagon!

So, we’re pretty much ready for the winter now . . . all cleaned up outside, RV winterized and packed away, furnace and humidifier cleaned up and ready to go . . . now all we need to do is sell this house so we don’t have to do this again!

Meanwhile, we brought Nicolas’ RV carpet and Poang chairs into the house, and Casey sure is happy – she’s been making herself at home in one of the chairs!

We were shocked the first time we found her there – she’s not allowed on any furniture . . . but for some reason she’s decided that this is her chair!