swing swing

First off, I want to start on a personal note. Since this weekend my car has been sounding beefy. I can't explain it better than that. She sounds like she's a souped up little rice burner. She's not. She's still stock under the hood. The only difference is that Bill pulled off my muffler. To be honest though, it was going to fall off so I can't complain. Either it was now or somewhere on the road. This is better. Of course now the problem is that Stacy sounds like she's racing everywhere, and I'm surrounded by porsches, corvettes and magnums. All of them think I'm racing them when we pull off the line at the stoplight. So when I'm driving normally (a little on the fast side) all these other people with hundreds of horsepower are just blowing me away.



Last night I did a search of odd news from Yahoo!. The rest of the world hates us because we live in a bubble. A coup in Fiji, Iran is still continuing its nuclear program and Iraq is still a mess. What are we concerned about? The Vaughn/Aniston split, Murphy/Brown split and the Longoria/Parker engagement. Umm, yeah.

Nothing brings a family together like the holidays, so nothing says Happy Thanksgiving like trying to stuff a spouse in an oven. Seriously? In front of the kids too, that must be one happy household to do something like that. Couldn't he just be like the rest of us and smack her around?

Kid violence is not a laughing matter. OK, so I make it a laughing matter but not by making fun of anything serious. Like this study conducted by the government on school killings. Really? It's up from last year? Wow. But what's really amazing is that the government had to do a study to state the obvious. What's next? Oxygen deemed a good thing for survival. Thanks government, glad to hear my tax dollars are being well spent.

I just liked the headline of this article.

Now there's another hazard when we're flying. It's not just shoe bombs, guns, knives or liquid. Yes, I'm talking about farts, the silent but deadly killer. Paranoid people are funny.

Irony: Auschwitz, the place made infamous in WWII as a death camp is getting renovated. So we're keeping this place that has caused so much death and destruction of families... because? Well, I guess if the South can keep the Confederate flag then the Poles can keep Auschwitz. At this point I was going to make a bad joke about the Holocaust but instead I'll just leave you this link.




There's a ton of odd news out there and I wish I had the time to post them all. Oh well, I can do that later. The world is a hilarious place.

wouldn't it be loverly?

The Queen has lost her edge. Why can't the English teach their children how to speak?

Tonight on CBS is the Victoria Secret Fashion Show. I'm looking forward to that... for research purposes of course. You know, the latest trends and innovations in fashion technology. Wait, why do I have to justify that? I'm a guy.

If you were wondering what the Top 10 searches for 2006 are, you might be surprised. Maybe not. The overall winner is: Britney Spears. I'm just waiting for there to be an awards show on a cable channel. OK, before I open that can of worms I'm going to stop. I'll just say this, there are too many award shows nowadays. It takes away from the whole meaning of awards.

Moving on. Stacy still needs electrical work done. Wires need to be run, hooked up and devices need power. All of the standard features work, it's just all of my extras need power. The radar detector, power converter, iPod, phone charger and CB radio.

flavor of the week

Perusing through the online news services I stumbled across some diamonds in the rough. Across the world people are worried about famine, disease, civil war and genocide. Here in the grand ol' United States we have these top the US News section at CNN.

1. Indiana puts price on profanity. The only good thing about this article is the use of alliteration in the title. Nothing good has come from Indiana.

2. Molester blames wife's bingo habit. Bingo huh? Yeah, the judge didn't buy that either. He wasn't a perv, but someone else's "habit" made him that way. Can bingo really be a habit?

3. Frigid Midwest could lose power for days. Ah, finally, some hard hitting news! Something I can sink my teeth into. Yet, when I look at the article, I'm instantly drawn to the guy in the photo, smoking a cigarette while handling high-voltage lines. Yes! He rocks!


The US can't be all that bad right? I mean, there's always college basketball to cheer you up from all of this depressing news. Lincoln totally wailed on Ohio State-Marion. 201-78. You might think that was a blow out, but again you're focusing on the wrong part of this story. A bunch of 6th graders with Down syndrome and CP scored 78 points! That's a victory in my book.
Wait, I'm sorry, Ohio State-Marion doesn't have a CP basketball squad. So I guess they suck, how the hell do you score 200 points in 45 minutes? Did someone explain to OS-M that college basketball is played on a full court? None of this schoolyard half-court stuff, take it out to the line and then shoot.

cars

My love for my car knows no bounds. Here's the tale of the heater core...

It all started last Monday when I purchased a heater core and picked it up this Saturday, because this was the day that I was going to install it. No sense driving around with a heater core that wasn't installed. Sure. I had my trusty Haynes manual for all Civic models from like '87-'91. I get to my friend's house at about 10:30am on Saturday. In a genius move, I open the Haynes book to the heater core disassembly page. Nice! Only like eight steps, this will take a few hours top!

Step One: Disconnect negative battery cable.
CHECK.

Step Two: Drain coolant. (See Chapter 1)
Umm, Chapter 1 wasn't that much more of help, but it gets done.

Step Three: From inside the engine compartment remove the two hoses attached from to the firewall.
Crap, 16 year old hoses and clamps. Can't reach clamps. Need to disassemble air filter and attached hoses. Still can't reach clamps. Unbolt fuel filter. Ah. CHECK.

Step Four: Remove screws and bolts in center console and pull out console.
CHECK. Wait, there's additional stuff back there. Like the whole dash! Crap. OK, no problem, simply remove bolts securing the dash. Well, the display console needs to come out before that. Some issues, OK, here we go. Oh the steering column frame is in the way. Disassemble steering column. Fine. That only took a few hours to figure out.

Step Five: Disconnect AC/heater controllers.
CHECK.

Step Six: Remove screws and bolts securing heater core.
Look, there's only three bolts! This is easy! Four hours later... we find out that the old heater core pipes have melted into the insulation. Oh, the two pipes are also melted into their rubber fittings. RIPPPPPP. CRACK. Huh, there's a fourth bolt and hook attached to the back of the heater core case. CHECK.

Step Seven: Reinstall heater core.
CHECK.

Step Eight: Reverse removal procedures to install.
CHECK.


The part cost $32 with a deposit (that I get back) of $17. So really it's like $15. I feel like one of those Mastercard commercials.

Heater (minus deposit): $15
Oil drip pan: $6
Creeper: $29
Coolant: $5
8' rubber hose: $2
4 Clamps: $2
Additional tools needed to disassemble car: $149
3 packs of cigarettes: $12
Food: $29
Halogen lamps to work at night: $34
Working with two good buddies for 24 hours when a mechanic would've had this done in eight: PRICELESS.

For everything else, there's Mastercard.
Except that I used my Visa. Ha! Take that!

We had Stacy reassembled by 1:30am Monday. I have to go back to my friend's house to pick out my tools, plus the electrical isn't done. We have a plan, all of the accessories will have their own fuses and actually be ran properly, hidden from sight. May also install an external speaker to my CB radio to use it as a PA. Which will be a nice offensive weapon system.

So the story continues...

first of the month

Well, it's the start of a new month. Work is moving to new office space, I don't know if it is closer to home or not. It's probably about the same distance which is fine by me. What's been pissing me off lately (as if I needed an excuse) is my boss. Before I joined the company I worked as a furniture mover at United Van Lines for a year. I've done household, spec com and commercial moves. I'm not stellar in any of those fields but I have an understanding of what needs to be done and how to do it. So in this move I thought I'd be a logical choice to be on the team. Right? Nope, I didn't even get asked. Instead, I did what I do and forced my way in on the issue. Then my boss tells me, "Oh, you *don't* have to help if you don't want to." ???? What kind of statement is that? Then he tells me that he thought I was better than that. Bahahahahaha. No. Obviously I'm not. I work on my own car, wash my own clothes, iron my uniforms and shine my boots. He might think that he's better than that, but I know he's not. It's not the fact that he has a personal assistant and before that had a maid service, it's the fact he hasn't done a day of manual labor and doesn't understand its value in society. Example: He will bring in something from his home that is maybe ten-fifteen pounds, so he'll come into the office empty handed and then ask me to retreive it for him. I find out too, that his personal assistant put it in his car too. So basically he drove it here. Wow, that's hard! Or how about this feat of redundancy? He has magazines that I have to sort. After coming from the post office, he goes straight into his office and puts all of the magazines into a pile, comes out and puts them on my desk because it's part of my job to organize them. Here's the catch though, all of the magazines are in his office. So I have to go back to where they were just a few seconds ago and follow him back to his office to sort them. I understand that if it's my job to pick up shit, it's my job. That's fine, I can live with that but if you pick up the shit and walk past a trash can just to give it to me to throw away then I think that's stupid.
My boss claims to be a smart man, OK, he graduated college. Yay! Here's the runner-up story of all time. He was telling us a story, near the end said, "...yeah, so he'd buy cigarettes and then turn around and sell them for a profit to others, it was LIKE racketeering." Uhh, no, sorry it is racketeering.
This one takes the cake though. Bill was talking about his recent trip to St. Louis and all of the stuff he had to pick up at home; how full his car was with his stuff and his girlfriend's stuff. Bill says, "Oh, I picked up an oil filter and oil filter wrench for the bike down there too." Now my boss has been in this discussion the entire time so he didn't just walk-in on the conversation. So my boss replies with, "Why didn't you just get it changed down there?" We all just looked at him, dumbfounded. We put the pieces together quickly, but he hadn't yet. Breaking the silence, I think Bill said, "Because the bike was up here." There was a pause and then you could see the light go off in his mind. Oh...


Ah, I feel better. Now I can go work.