What's With All This Grease, Anyway? (03-22-2008)

 I started a blog at Blogger because I changed email addresses and forgot my password at Wordpress. Most of the stuff I've written over the years is kind of dumb, but some of it might be worth preserving. I'm copying it over here so that when I forget my login info again, I can just copy it from this one place.

I am not much of a shopper. I enjoy going to certain stores (like Best Buy and…well, I’m sure there’s got to be another one), but even a leisurely stroll through the aisles usually takes me about 15 minutes, tops. The prospect of bumming around Wal-Mart for 1-2 hours while getting my oil changed is not a favorable one to me. So I changed my own oil this time, and instead of wasting an hour in a climate controled store listening to resonably, pleasant music, I spent three days in my dank, dusty basement. My victory is less satisfying when I think of it like that.

 To be fair, I didn’t really spend three days just changing my oil. I had intended to change my oil, brake pads, and drive axle. I did the oil first, and then tried to tackle the hardest of the jobs, the axle. My CV joint has been announcing my turns with a steady click for some time now, and it’s a job that I’ve really needed to do (or “have done”, probably) for a while. I decided to buckle down to do it on Sunday. Naomi didn’t need the car on Monday, which was good to know just in case. I figured I could wrap things up Sunday evening, but it would be nice to not be rushed.

 Well, Sunday came and went, and fortunately, Naomi didn’t have to have to car Tuesday either. She did need the car Wednesday morning, though, and at this point, that was starting to look more and more like an unreasonable deadline.

After all my progress (and regress) the first two and a half nights, I finally resigned myself to putting the pieces back together Tuesday night around 8:30 PM. Fortunately, I didn’t have too many extra pieces left-over, and I made it home from my midnight (well, 10:30, really) test drive through the neighborhood in one piece.

Four days later, my fingernails are still stained with grease, and I probably need a new tie rod end, since I managed to screw up the threading on my current one by beating it with a hammer. After all that, I probably did more harm than good. The one thing I did accomplish this week was a three-day oil change.

…Oh, and I think I also learned that I have a long way to go in learning to work on cars.