Not Necessarily Interesting News

Well, I got the truck all put back together and on the road. We were supposed to go a Boy Scout campout with the kid so we packed it up and headed out. It was a beautiful weekend and it was nice to get out in the Defender again. I did somehow manage to crack my exhaust manifold flange so I have a small exhaust leak there. It makes the 90 sound like it’s got an huge engine under the hood now. I need to get it fixed because I hate sounding like I’ve ‘riced out’ my truck.
As for the campout, it went okay. I normally go camping to get away from people, like at Padre Island. At Padre Island you can find a spot and literally be miles from anyone. This weekend I had to camp mere feet from others and it wasn’t pleasant. If I’m going to put up with sleeping on the ground and pissing in the trees I better get the trade-off of having peace and quiet. My wife finally realized what I’ve been telling her all my life. I hate people. More specifically, I hate crowds. Anything more than 6-8 people I don’t know is a crowd. I put up with DisneyWorld but only because we go in the off seasons and never have to wait in line much. We were sitting around the campfire and my wife noticed that I was tensed up, rubbing my temples, and grinding my teeth and I think it dawned on her.
The weather was nice and I was able to sleep outside. I also get a kick out of watching people who have no right being outdoors trying to set up camp. They get these huge multi-room tents and take an hour getting them set up. They put on rain flys and all. They don’t seem to understand that unless the temp is under 50 degrees or so a rain fly is going to make that tent a broiler. Our entire campsite was setup in under 10 minutes. Personally, unless it’s raining, I sleep under the stars and that’s what I did this time. If it is going to rain I’ll setup a tarp and crawl under that. My wife and kid slept in our little three man tent because they are paranoid of bugs but that’s fine. I was the most comfortable person in camp sleeping out in the nice cool breezes.

This past weekend I finally got around to replacing the dead clutch in the Defender. The poor truck has been sitting for nearly three months. Things like a vacation, 4 weeks of illness, and then another month of crappy weekend weather kept putting it off. A couple of weeks ago I started the job and Saturday was the big day for the heavy work.

In most cars you have to drop the tranny out the bottom and you spend a lot of time on your back in the driveway. With a Defender you have an ‘easier’ option. Take it out through the top.

First, remove the seats.

Then find to 60 or so bolts holding down the seat box and transmission tunnel and remove them. Once they’re removed you see this.

Next, remove driveshafts, wiring, and clutch tubing, and hook up your friend, Mr. Engine Hoist.

Unbolt everything and with a little bit of wrestling it comes right out through the passenger door. Transmission, transfer case, and all.

This gives you easy access to the clutch.

Damn, that thing is glazed pretty bad. Attack it with a grinder to clean it up and reassemble with a new clutch plate and throwout bearing.

Now just put everything back in with the help of a friend.

Simple and easy. It’s back in the truck now. I just need to hook up driveshafts and wiring, bleed the clutch, and put a seat in for a quick test drive. All told about 8 hours of work. Now that I know how, I could probably do it in 4-5 with a friend. The book rate at the shop was 9.5 hours and with parts they quoted me $1300. I did it in a day and parts were $150. Nice little savings there which will probably go to a nice shiny Detroit Locker in the rear.

Been a couple weeks since I’ve posted. Guess I forgot how. I just haven’t been too motivated lately. Been super busy in my new position at work. Also, I’ve been fighting depression over the last few weeks. I occasionally suffer from SAD and it seems like it came back this year. Being sick over the last couple months coupled with our weather insisting on being really shitty every weekend brought it on. I wasn’t getting outside in the sun enough. Yesterday was beautiful and sunny so we went hiking and geocaching. Just the couple hours outdoors in the sun seem to have turned me right around. I feel much better today and actually I managed to crawl out of bed at a decent hour and got into work around 8:30 instead of something approaching 9:30-10.

The world needs all kinds of idiots. I saw this on the way to work Friday and stopped to take a few pics. How does one manage to drive up the guy wires to a power pole? I was impressed at how the wires could support the weight of almost an entire car on them though.

My son spent some money he’d earned from helping out on a project on a GameCube for himself. It’s his first ‘big’ purchase. All his other electronic toys like his GameBoy and NintendoDS have always been hand-me-downs from his father. This one is all his and he agonized over it. We’d go into the store and he’d look at it and think about it then decide not to spend his money. On Monday I took him to the game store and he finally went for it. They had a special bundle with Mario Party 7 and an extra controller for the same price as the base unit. I’ve spent the last two nights on the floor with him playing it. Nice thing is it’s a bit older now so used games are pretty cheap and plentiful. He’s already making a list of the ones he wants to save for. Now he has his GameCube and I have my X-Box and I don’t have to worry about finding my favorite games hiding in the wrong case anymore.

Last night I was getting ready to go play poker with the guys and before I left I asked my wife what she was having for dinner. She pointed into the darkened kitchen at a box on lying on the counter. I looked over and for the life of me couldn’t figure out what the hell it was. I’d never heard of it before so I moved in for a closer look at the box. This is what i saw before I got closer:

As I got closer I realized what I was looking at and started laughing. For about 30 seconds I couldn’t figure out what the hell ‘dnos’ was. I figured it was something exotic she’d picked up at Central Market.

Yesterday was our first rain here in Texas in over 2 months. The kid was bored so I looked for something we could do around the house. I was making breakfast and next to the bowls in the pantry I noticed an old electric firestarer. I knew it was almost empty and had an idea. I started scrounging the rest of the house to find more supplies. He’s what I came up with:

1 electric firestarter
1 35MM film canister
Some assorted wire
a block of wood
and a bottle of my wife’s perfume

First, disassemble the firestarter to get at the piezoelectric ignitor.

A standard Bic lighter will have one but they are smaller and harder to get out of the case. In our case I needed to solder on a new wire as the lighter used the body to transfer the charge back to the ignitor.

Then drill a couple holes in the block of wood and run the wire from the ignitor down one and up the other and through a small hole in the film can lid.

Then you need to set the gap to get a good spark.

When done you’ll have something that looks like this.

Nothing fancy looking but still lots of fun.

Lastly, spray a squirt of your favorite fragrance into the can(make sure it’s an alchohol based perfume) and snap it on the lid. Click away on the ignitor and you should get a nice sized pop. We can get about 30feet across the house. With a better propelant, like Binaca or hairspray we could probably get more distance.

Here’s a clip or two of it in action. Getting the fuel mixture right takes a bit of practice to get it to fire correctly the first time. Too little fuel and it won’t go, same with too much which is usually the case. It makes a nice satisfying *POP* that kids absolutely love. It’s mostly safe for indoor use as long as you don’t go nuts with the fuel and get a pool of it in the lid. If that happens it can ignite in the lid but it’s not like it’s a huge fire. One puff and it’s out. Keep an eye on it.
First video

Ok, It’s not a real cannon but it’s still a hell of a lot of fun to build and fire. Easily built out of stuff you have laying around the house. It also is a learning experience for our homeschooled son. He gets to write a report on thermodynamics and explain why the whole contraption works. He wouldn’t get to do this kind of stuff in public school, that’s for sure.

Last night we bought a toy I’ve wanted for ages. A nice shiny Tivo. They have a $150 rebate going right now if you get a year’s service. We went with the cheapest 40hour unit at $170. After rebate our net out-of-pocket is $20. Not bad. I know it’s going to be a bit small but we wanted to try one out before jumping in for a $400 Tivo.

I got home and hooked it up. Now there’s a little task for ya. We’ve got our 51″ HDTV, HD cable box, Sony audio receiver for sound, DVD player, VCR, Xbox, and now a Tivo in the system. The back of the TV looks like spaghetti. The actual hooking up wasn’t too bad I guess. Luckily the TV has 5 inputs and the Tivo doesn’t support HD so I could just use one of the S-videos I wasn’t using. I had to run a phone line from the kitchen across the floor for its initial setup call it makes to get programming info and such. It took about an hour to do that and I was ready to watch TV. After the initial phone setup I plugged a usb ethernet dongle in the back and hooked it to my home network. Now it doesn’t need the phone line and can get updates and program guides over the Net.

The picture quality is a bit worse because the signal now leaves the cable box to go through the Tivo and on to the TV using S-Video instead of the component output straight from the cable box to the TV I usually use. I can still use the composite for HD programming but lose the Tivo funcionality. They are supposed to be releasing a HD Tivo by the end of the year. I may look into that. The guides and recording parts of the Tivo are very easy to use and fun to find those weird programs at 3 in the morning you might want to record. My wife is currently teaching our son about the Revolutionary War so we decided to try the search out. We looked for ‘revolution’ and it came up with a series airing at 4AM on Sunday on like the Military Channel. It’ll record that automatically now and he can watch it during school.

I had thought about one for years but got pushed over the edge when I read about the Tivo Desktop software. It lets you play music and photos from your computer to the TV. Even better it gives you the ability move recordings from your Tivo to your computer over the network to watch or burn to DVD for archiving. The features of the latest release are even better. It’ll automagically convert the video file to download to your iPod or PSP. Being able to watch Battlestar Gallactica or WRC on the go is going to be so sweet.

Well, got to see the doc again today. Things are starting to look up though he says I’m not out of the woods yet. I like my new doc, he seems genuinely concerned about my health. I was able to blow a 375 through the air flow meter today. I’m running at nearly 2/3rds normal lung capacity again. For the past 2 weeks the best I could manage was 210. 600liters per minute is normal for a man my size. He’s put me on steroids for another 2 weeks and wants me to follow up again in a week. I am feeling a bit better, maybe because I’m almost getting enough air to breathe. Waking up in the middle of the night gasping for breath does have a way of screwing with your sleep schedule.

I am sick and tired of being sick. I have not been well for over 3 weeks. I’ve been hiding inside my house most of the time. I have had very bad bronchitis for that entire time following a cold I cought at Christmas. Late last week I also caught the flu on top of it. My temp topped 102-103 for all of Thursday. I stayed in bed for 5 straight days and limped into work yesterday finally. The docs are mystified. I’ve been given/told to take albuterol inhalers, anti-biotics, prednisone steroids, Advair(that crap costs $150 btw), and plain old Robitussin. Nothing eleviates the wheezing and constant tired. Walking 100 yards from my car into work tires me out. All I want to do is find a nice cozy bed or couch and sleep.

On sunday my wife almost called 911 when I passed out laughing. I could not breathe because I was laughing so hard. It scared the hell out of me. I can only imagine what she thought. We were standing in the kitchen talking about how in high school I could take a rolled towel in the locker room and draw blood with it. Guys were scared of me. Well, I decided to demonstrate to her and picked a target. That banana looked like it’d do. I wound up a kitchen rag and let fly the hand towel of war. The banana exploded. Literally. There was banana on the counter, on the cabinets, the ceiling, the microwave, me, her. Everywhere. I started laughing so hard I fell down and passed out.

I’m visiting the doc again tomorrow so he can see my progress, or lack thereof. The weather outside is beautiful. I’ve got two cars in my driveway that need to be repaired and all I want to do in my free time is hide in my HEPA filtered/75% humidity bedroom.