Channel 5
Chrome, silver, old Architectural Digests, and this month's PROJECT
[Schmidt voice] CHANNEL FIVE! Welcome to the fifth edition, the sixth week of Channel Changer, and the second day of Gemini season. I don’t know anything about astrology but I do know that summer tends to be really good to me, and it’s also home to my birthday. So—cheers all around.
This week we’re talking CHROME and we’re talking CAR STUFF. But first, little j’s of the week:
Riding bulls. One day (if I’m lucky), my body will be too fragile, immobile and weak to climb on top of the bull at Whiskey River and give ‘em 18 seconds of rodeo. Gratefully, I’m not there yet, so this weekend I woo-girled my way through a quick ride and remembered how AWESOME it is to be silly and playful. Also very cool feature of aging that it didn’t even occur to me to be worried about how other people were perceiving me. Who cares! I’m not a performance. Thank you brain!
New tires. I got a comically flat tire over the weekend and decided to go ahead and replace the whole set, which had at least 45k miles on them and had not been replaced since I got the car 3.5 years ago. Did I enjoy spending that amount of money on something that sparked zero joy in my heart? No. Did I ride home from that tire appointment in total silence, feeling how much different and quieter my car rode, creating that damn joy anyway? YEAH BABY!
I grew up riding in beater cars, and then I drove a rotating cast of beater cars that broke down in places ranging from Siler City North Carolina to Knoxville Tennessee. I’m not kidding when I say I still feel a sense of relief every time I climb into my very boring, very reliable crossover SUV that drives like a champ and puts zero debt on my balance sheet. Big j <3
I’m crushing on silver and chrome
Chrome/silver accessories are really doing it for me right now. I’m proud to say I have been on that train since Candice Olson and her Divine Design days—silver has never left my wardrobe or my home, even during the darkness of Rose Gold Days. Here’s what’s on my mind and my wishlist right now.
Original Sambas (ASOS) (I don’t want to hear about how Sambas are cooked, I don’t care, I have been wearing them for 15 years and will keep buying them)
My slowly-growing collection of vintage Architectural Digests has plenty to offer too. This 1978 issue blows me away every time I crack it open. It feels impossibly fresh and innovative, but it was published just under a half century ago. That’s on true timelessness.
This month’s YSITT is a relatively recent habit for me. INCREDIBLY low effort, high reward.
So because of the aforementioned history with beater cars, I have a kind of weird relationship with car maintenance.
Are you familiar with the idea that it’s very expensive to be poor? The car thing has gotta be a leading example of that. You can’t afford a nice car, so you get an old car, which requires more maintenance and expense, but you can only afford DIY oil changes, so its existing risks only get worse, and you just hope The Big Break doesn’t happen, and then it finally does and you either have to pay the value of the car to fix the car, or sell it for parts and start the whole cycle over. If you’re not familiar with this cycle, I regret to inform you you’re rich.
Anyway when I got my Hyundai I thought—I’m gonna treat this vehicle right so I don’t have to go car shopping again for at least 10 years. And I skimmed the car manual enough to know that it gave me a lot of info about what needed to happen at what milestones (despite what you may think, I’m not a ‘read the manual cover to cover’ person but I am a ‘get a sense of what info is in the manual so I know whether it’s useful later’ person).
So when it hit 100k miles I did all the things you’re supposed to at 100k miles—full inspection, tires rotated, fluids changed, etc. But then a few months later when I went in for my next oil change, I couldn’t remember what I’d gotten done. So they asked me if I wanted such and such suggested maintenance, which is something Valvoline’s software spits out that’s designed to get you to spend more money with zero regard for the vehicle’s actual needs, and I didn’t know what to say. By deciding internally that I wanted to commit to regular preventative car maintenance, then not actually keeping track of that maintenance, I was lobbing every mechanic I interacted with the world’s softest ball.
In that instance, I walked away from the shop without doing anything but an oil change, but when I looked back at my 100k maintenance receipt, I realized Valvoline had suggested about 5 things to me that I’d had done in the last 6 months. (For the record, I never go there anymore for like one thousand additional reasons). So I created a VEHICLE MAINTENANCE LOG.
Project: VML (Vehicle Maintenance Log)
Time to complete:
Easy mode: 5 minutes
Hard mode: 20 minutes
Cost: $0
Go here to download this spreadsheet (I used the Google Sheets version)
Walk outside to your car, open up the driver’s side door
Take a picture of the label inside the door that has your VIN
Take a picture of your odometer
Hard mode: If you are someone who keeps car receipts in your glove compartment, grab those
Go inside and input your VIN, mileage, and car make/model/year to the spreadsheet
Easy mode: If you can recall any recent maintenance, great—throw that in. If not, just add your next item in when you have it done.
Hard mode: Go through your receipts and input any records of maintenance done
Download Google Sheets to your phone so you can pull this up for reference at the mechanic
Next time you get work done on your car, add it to DA SPREADSHEET
That’s it. I’m not going to offer you guidance on what maintenance to do or when (I will offer the suggestion that the car manual has way more information on this than you might think). Just this log so you know what’s up and you’re not an easy mark for the Jiffy Lube crew, asking you to replace your engine air filter every 3 months. And keep this thing on hand for if and when you ever sell your car—you’ll have a log of all the work you’ve done to back up whatever asking price you go for.
That’s all from me this week—peace and love, I’ll see you next week for an abbreviated holiday week version of Channel Changer.
Spring must be the season of getting-it-together because I'm ALSO working on a VML!! I must be doing it on Extra-Hard Mode because I'm trying to incorporate formulas that reference my car's maintenance schedule to let me know when it's time to take the car back in. Definitely overcomplicating things, but hopefully it helps me keep up with it. :o)