Moving In To A New Place!

I just found out today that I was accepted for a rental agreement on a home! After months of looking at tons of depressing looking homes that were way out of my price range, my girlfriend and I decided that renting was the way to go. Albeit many factors led to this decision, I think that we found the perfect rental. It is a two bedroom house with a 2 car garage, enough room for my motorcycle and the GF's car! I think I will be keeping my car at work (free storage!), the truck will primarily stay at home and I promise to make a serious attempt at riding my bicycle to work. My commute to work should be around 8 miles, and my GF's will be around 15. I haven't mapquested it, so don't quote me on that! The plan for finding a place was as follows...Start at my job and work toward her's with more attention placed whenever we got to the middle point. We never made it that far! Our first look was at an apartment complex in Seal Beach, for only 4100$/mnth. So we proceeded and found this place kind of sort of near my job. I won't mention what I pay here, but the sad part is that most people would pay this on a mortgage. Hopefully when the market in about a year is better than it is today!!!

Doing Some Reading!

Without getting into too much detail, since afterall I did find it online, and since Big Brother has been keeping tabs on me lately, I must word this carefully! I read Wikipedia's entry about Chernobyl. I thought it kind of scary of how accurate this info is, or may appear to be. The entry goes into detail of why the reactors had a positive void coefficient, it mentions how long it took for a scram to fully insert the rods, and it even talks aboout the Xenon excursion that may or not have confused the operators. Anyhow, enough said about that. If you are bored enough like me, you can read about it here.

Why Do These Things Happen To Me?

My cousin was back in town today. He was on his way back to the motherland after spending a couple months on a fishing boat somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. He left his truck here and then flew up to meet up with his boat somewhere in Alaska. Anywho, I drove his truck over to my job about two months ago since there is plenty of room to park extra vehicles there. He came by in the early morning to drive me over on a friend's car to pick up his truck. We get there and decide I should drive the truck, and he will follow on his friend's car. On the way back I noticed that the truck was idling kind of fast but thought nothing of it, about halfway home on a big freeway interchange the throttle got stuck. And not only did it get stuck it went to about full throttle! I planned on getting close to home using the brakes to control speed. However this got to be really difficult when the brakes were burning up, and the engine overheating! I tried to kill the engine, but the stupid interlock thing on an automatic would not let me kill the engine, not even in neutral (this should not happen on a working car, but the thing was not working right). I slammed on the brakes to come to a stop, throw it in Park and kill the engine. The smoke from the front brakes starts to rise and the coolant starts to bubble out of the expansion tank. I popped the hood to unstick the throttle linkage and it was very sticky, I tried freeing it with some WD-40, but it wasn't working. So...I left the throttle at about 30% and took the streets home. It was quite the adventure, my top speed was about 18 MPH, and it would take a long time to coast up to this speed. Unfortunately I would hit every freakin' red light on the way home, I was even holding 35 MPH after this one downhill! This was very short lived though since the light turned red a few hundred yards after the bottom of that hill. It took me about 45 minutes to travel only a few miles.

I'm a Shady Guy!

Apparently big brother has been keeping tabs on me for a while. For some reason over the past couple of months my credit card account has been frozen several times because of suspicious activity. The first time it happened I was kind of "OK" with it, since it is done under the pretense that they are looking out for you. However after about the third time this happened to me, none of this has ever been over anything that should raise a flag. In fact the latest one I came to find out was over a few bucks at some fast food joint, maybe the fact that I don't frequent this particular franchise raised a flag, I don't know? As soon as I found out this happened to my account I immediately checked my activity online, and I noticed a recent charge from last week that I figured might have raised that flag. Due to the nature of my job (depending on how busy it gets) a regular deep tissue massage can do wonders for my back! My favorite place to go to is at a women's only gym, the spa part of the gym will allow guys, but not the gym. When they rang me up the charge showed up as "Women Only", but did this raise a flag? No! The fact that I went to a fast food burger joint raised a flag. I feel really secure now, and will close out that account as soon as I can pay it off.

Exhausted

I had a real busy weekend at work! Yesterday I was "forced" to watch the college football all day, where I mainly watched the USC game, and afterwards the UCLA game. The local teams did well, they both won! Today we watched the NFL, and I finally understood the whole fantasy football thing. Our facility has our it's own fantasy football league, and one of the guys I work with is in it and I finally understood how it works. Unfortunately I don't follow the sport close enough to care to play the fantasy football, but it does seem to add a little incentive to following the game. So, after a full day of watching the sport I was completely footballed out! It had never happened before, but I think the lack of alcohol made it harder to watch, in fact the last time I was able to watch a full day of football was at sports bar in Bremerton a few years ago. I think it was called the Cloverleaf, and their pizza was the best!

How Badly Do You Want Your Coffee?

Work went by as normal as could be, we ended up watching some college football. Nothing has been going on for a while now, so towards the end of my shift I left a little early. Both local teams won, I am happy for them. I ran across this during my normal time killing routine, would you believe it? How badly do people really need coffee this bad, moreover how lazy are they that they would have to resort to this instead of picking the beans themselves. "That's just gross, UGH!", apparently this stuff is really expensive too. I guess people are entitled to be stupid.

Slow Mo'

My life starting flashing before my eyes this very evening on the drive home! I was in a hurry to get home to make an appointment later on in the evening, and just a few miles from home traffic came to a halting stop for some reason. I slammed on my brakes and stopped lickity split, those Goodyear eagles can handle a lot of stopping power, they are something else I tell you! Unfortunately the car behind me, a really old Cadillac, was hammering right toward me. He slammed on his brakes, I could see the smoke from his tires billowing out from under his car as he started sliding sideways at me! I had no way out, traffic surrounding me on both sides kept me from making a quick getaway. He came close enough to hitting me that he threw all of his smoke at me, it stank like burned rubber, but luckily car and self were still intact!

I Smell Kind Of Funny!

So after adding tons of makeup water to our cooling system at work it was necessary to add tons of chemicals to it. It is pretty simple to do, the mixing tank has a stirring thing inside with a heater element to make it easier to dissolve all those chemicals. Unfortunately the chemical smells funny, and it is not supposed to be ingested so I donned a respirator to filter out the magic dust.

Another Day Down!

So I was sharpening my forklift skills yesterday! I mean I have a certification saying I can operate one, but in no way do I feel comfortable using one yet. My biggest challenge is operating a loaded forklift while having to maneuver on an incline. It can get pretty darn scary! I just strap on and hope for the best. Also today, with our units down we needed a creative way to add some make up water to our cooling water system. Our normal means is through the cond't system but with both units down the normal method is unavailable. It would have took days to fill it through its chemical mixing tank, so I ran six fire hoses together to the top of the tank from a distilled water pump belonging to a seperate system. I rinsed down the fire hose for a few minutes, I opened up the nozzle to solid stream, shoved the fire hose about 8 feet into the tank through the manhole at the top, I kept it in place with some duct tape.

Out of Place!

I woke up today and tested out the patched up tank. It worked just like new! Before installing it though, I had come up with a game plan! Removing the right front tire was going to make this job a lot easier, or so I thought. Moreover...I figured what the heck, lets rotate the tires. This really sounded like a great idea (especially since the rotation was due) however I discovered that some of the axle bolts got cross threaded, the galling was so bad that I was unable to remove some of the lug nuts. I even snapped of an axle bolt while attempting to loosen the lug nut. I quickly remembered that a few months ago I had picked up the car at the dealer, and part of the service included the tire rotation. So I decided to innocently call them up to verify this. They told me that the tire rotation was indeed part of the service. I then explained my problem, they asked if I could bring the car in for them to "inspect", I agreed. They were forced to snap off the remaining bolts in an attempt to loosen the remaining lug nuts. They promptly apologized and said they would fix it! After about the longest hour I think I have ever waited at a service shop, car and I were ready to go. Why? Because apparently I am not part of this import culture! Too much annoying exhaust noise, turbos dumping way too early, fake car club insignia! "WHY AM I HERE?" I think to myself. I had never seen or heard of the bolts snapping off a tire before...well at least until the imports starting showing up, in fact did you know that overtorqueing of the axle bolts on a P.O.S. can cause catastrophic failure leading to the wheels falling off mid travel! I wonder if Car and Driver has a test for this? Well, at least the cup holder was nice, too bad the wheel fell off!

Fixing it on the Cheap!

A couple of weeks ago the Windshield Wiper Fluid Reservoir on the GF's car sprung a leak, actually is was more like a rupture than a leak. I priced out the little plastic tank at a local Nissan dealer and those guys wanted $120 for a new one, that is just pure highway robbery I think! I just bought one for my Firebird a couple of months ago for only $20. I opted on fixing it myself. I bought me some JB Weld for about $4, removed the plastic tank from under the car, and gave it two coats around the fracture. The tank was cracked along a seam, and if I would have put some thought into this little endeavor I would have roughened up the surface before applying the cold weld, but I didn't. I allowed the stuff to dry for a few hours and then I roughened up all surfaces (which should have been done earlier) and I made the weld area bigger with a second coat. Now if this thing springs a leak I will be pissed, there is enough stuff there to make this thing bulletproof!!!! I will allow the tank to cure overnight before I give it a test. Hopefully the tank is now watertight and ready to go! Project cost: a whopping four dollars and some old popsicle sticks! Oh...and some cokes to keep the Lou happy!

Busy Weekend!

We looked at the nicest home we have seen in a very long time, it is going for 530K. For those that don't live in California this is just about what a nice home in a nice area sells for...at least it does here in the southern California area. I do not want to commute and therefore I am stuck somewhere around this price range, although I am hoping for something closer to the 400k range.

I finally decided to soap test my GF's car tires, I found one screw and one nail! I was thinking of taking them in to get fixed, but even if you do all the work yourself by finding the leak and taking in the tire, you still pay a pretty penny to get it fixed. I decided to plug the tires myself, It was easier than I remembered it, might have had something to do with the punctures being in the center and perpendicular to the wear surface.