pondering the windshield

i know, this is a little ordinary, but i have to admit that i’ve spent a lot of aggregate time thinking about two things over the past few weeks:

1. the flip-up ice question

when we’re in tahoe, i notice that often when people park their car at the resort or in the lodge or whatever, they flip their winshield wipers up into the air, to prevent them icing over and being frozen to the winshield when they return. it’s a simple little thing, but it makes a lot of sense. however, i can’t ever recall doing this a single time while i was growing up in michigan, nor did the thought even cross my mind that this would have been a good idea. did somehow a simple meme of wiper-icing prevention suddenly take hold after i moved to a sunnier climate? or is it just something we do because no one owns a decent ice scraper? (except for me, which is useless because i always forget to bring it to tahoe.)

2. the replacement question

a month or so ago, i got a big WHACK while driving my car, and the end result was a big impact star crater on my windshield due to some rock or whatever. i kept meaning to go to get it fixed or patched so it wouldn’t spread, but then i recently noticed yet another crack in my lower passenger side corner, which is slowly creeping towards the impact mark at the top. the question is, how big does the crack have to be before you really need to replace the sucker? hmc has a crack in her winshield which has been slowly zigzagging for months now, but not getting appreciably bigger. my friend brett has one that goes up from above his speedometer about two inches, and then shoots all the way across the winshield about 2/3 of the way. perhaps it’s like qix, where as long as the crack doesn’t go back and hit the edge to carve out and claim a section, then you’re ok. as long as i avoid the qix, because that sounds like trouble. or am i the qix?

Posted at April 13, 2006 6:52 PM