psipsy

Tackling rear brakes on Ai! This was a known issue, as I would hear a groaning/squealing when going in reverse. That's happened before and replacing brake parts was the fix. I already had the parts. This should be uneventful, until it is. Some of the bolts put up more of a fight than they should have. On Hondas, there are often a pair of screws holding the rotor to the hub. Those tend to be an awful nightmare to remove normally and they do nothing once the wheel is on and tightened down, so I just leave them out on reassembly. When I'm almost done with each wheel, I'll put some nuts on the studs to hold the rotor, press the brake pedal, and the pads clamp down to hold it in place enough to put the wheel on and tighten the lugnuts. Anyway, this time they were not coming out intact with normal hand tools or power tools, so I had to drill them out. As expected, the pads were almost gone and the rotors were too rusty to save.

She does start and run, though. There was a close call with the battery, but I have one of those fast/trickle charger things that clamp onto the terminals, so I let that on there for a few hours. Another thing I do when starting up an older car that hasn't run for an extended period of time, is I don't immediately crank the starter. Instead I'll turn the key to ON, and the fuel pump will run for a couple seconds, then I'll turn the key back to OFF, and ON again, repeating this cycle about 4 or 5 times. That works out any pockets of air or stagnant fuel. This usually works and is a lot easier on the car than just full cranking for 30 seconds at a time.

If I took all of the rotors I've replaced since 2017 and put them in a stack, how tall would it be? How can I find out?

One fine evening I got home and found a note on my door, from my neighbor's 13 year-old son, asking if he could mow my lawn for me. Before I unlocked my door, I made up my mind that he could have that job. I talked it over with his father, agreements were made, and grass was mowed. This is the way, this is how it was meant to be.

Something I tend to do at work is in the first half of the year, I hardly touch my vacation time. Then the second half of the year comes up and that's when I start burning through it. I still have about 4 weeks that need to get used up. And use it I will!

I found my older Canon Powershot camera. The last time I used it heavily was in 2011, until I got my T3i. It still works! What's great about it is it uses AA batteries. What's not so great is it won't work with newer and bigger memory cards. 32GB is the max for it. 32GB was incredibly big for a memory card in 2011, and it still is for a camera with 6 megapixels. It's still a good point-and-shoot though. But I did outgrow it, as the T3i has features I use that just aren't on the Powershot.

My model kit backlog is still long. I think I have one more papercraft kit and then I'll switch back to plastic kits. One of them is for Culver's, a fast food place that is prominent in the MidWest. I never heard of them until my 2019 road trip, because they don't come any further east than Ohio. Food's good though, that's the important part.

Someone once pointed out that the older we get, the more we look forward to eating at new places when we travel. I can't disagree with that. That's one of the remaining pleasures. My knees and feet won't let me hike to the top of Mt. Fuji but I sure will be trying out new restaurants in my next trip to Japan.

KMFDM concert was awesome. I knew all of the songs played, and until the mosh pit gravitated over to me, I was less than 10 feet away from the stage and right in front of Kap'n K himself. There were more mohawks in the audience than people, body piercings and black shirts were everywhere, and it's common practice to shout "KMFDM sucks" to get them to come back out for an encore. Read into that what you will.

( What else is new? )
Gotta keep going.

As per a recent conversation with animedude, I've decided that there needs to be manly air fresheners, with wondrous scents such as diesel, charcoal BBQ, gunpowder, motor/gear oil, axle grease, things like that. If I could find them, I would use them. More conventional scents like "new car" and "pine" will do in the meantime.

So I get home and there's a message on my answering machine, from an insurance company investigating someone's medical records. Now, I can understand that my number used to belong to a doctor's office, but c'mon, I've had it for over 5 years. And my answering message on it should tell anyone that it's not a doctor's office. It's not like it starts off as "Hello you have reaced the offices of ___", no mine starts off as "Hi you have reached Bob's place" while the Bottle Fairy theme plays in the background, for that extra psychotic touch. Or maybe I should change it to something more obvious?

Meanwhile, I finally put the new bulb in the projector and reset the hour counter, which was at 211 hours. I'm guessing previous owners had reset it before putting it on eBay, but then again there were a few strains put on it in the past couple years under my command. As such, I figure that using the projector cost me about a dollar an hour, not counting what I paid for it. I also discovered the carrying case itself originally retailed for about $250, and that came with the projector when I got it. tl;dr is I have a working projector again, at least for the next 200 hours or so of it being on.

Heading off to bed soon so I close with this: