No, I Haven’t Fallen Off the Face of the Earth
- November 29, 2007
- 4 comments
It’s been so long since I’ve posted to the site, you might think I had fallen off the face of the earth. Clearly I haven’t. I just haven’t had that much to write about.
I’ve been keeping busy with work. I’ve got a lot of projects I’m working on, almost all of which are ExpressionEngine related. Projects range from simple design conversions to custom modules, extensions and plugins and everything in between. I find I don’t even want to deal with upgrading my own site when work is done for the day. I guess that’s kind of sad, but that’s where I’m at.
Not a whole lot has been happening besides work. I’ve started meeting up with a group of people on Wednesday evenings and have made some new friends, which is always good. I’m not a super outgoing kind of person, but I do need some kind of social interaction or I think I’d go mad.
I also just got back from my unexpectedly long Thanksgiving break yesterday. My car needed some work done on it, and my brother-in-law said he could do all the work it needed for about half the price of any local mechanics. So I drove it up last Tuesday and gave it to him the following Wednesday morning. It was needing the 90k mile checkup and all that involved, a headlight had a short and was constantly burning out bulbs, my ABS light was staying lit, it needed an oil change and I was finally going to deal with the rough idle it’s been having for a couple years now.
My brother-in-law has his own shop and is a certified master mechanic so I wasn’t worried he’d do a shoddy job. He didn’t really get to it until Friday though, and it started throwing him curve balls left and right. He was able to fix the headlight, change the oil and do everything that was needed for the 90k mile checkup (which is a lot), but the idle problem turned into a nightmare. He tried several different things to fix it, and managed to minimize it but not completely fix it. It looks like I’ll be replacing my idle air control valve, which Hondas apparently have problems with.
The ABS problem turned out to be a simple relay. Unfortunately no one carried it in the area, so I decided I’d skip it and fix it in Austin.
On top of that, once he finished putting the engine back together, the harmonic balancer started acting up. It was moving around way too much. If it went out on the trip back, I would be stuck in the middle of BFE with two small dogs to deal with. No one in the area carried the part, so he had it overnighted from Austin (how ironic is that?). So my Thanksgiving holiday was extended by a couple of days which would’ve been kind of nice except I had no car and work was piling up back home.
Once the part came in, he popped it in and everything seemed ready to go. I hopped in the car and drove about half a mile down the road when my check engine light popped on and the engine starting revving wildly. I threw it into neutral and pulled off on a tiny dirt road. Of course, no one was answering their phones for about 10 minutes. I finally got a hold of my dad who got in touch with my brother-in-law. He pulled up a few minutes later and eventually figured out that a wire to my idle air control valve wasn’t completely plugged in. Once that was fixed it ran great.
“Why didn’t you just walk back the half mile, you pansy?” some of you might be asking. I would have except I knew my brother-in-law had just left for town which was several miles down the road.
Later that day, when I went to check out the work he had done on it, I tried to open my door and the freaking door handle broke! This car hasn’t given me any real problems all this time, but now that it’s approaching 100k miles things are starting to happen. The door still worked from both the outside and inside, so I decided I’d drive back to Austin and get it fixed there.
I’m glad to be back home and have started chipping away at the pile of work waiting for me.
Andy
Glad to see you are still alive and kicking. I was starting to think that maybe you ran off and got married, or something.