Potty party.

Came home today, put new litter in the cats’ litter box and immediately they both decided to take it for a trial run, at the same time.

Please forgive the quality of the picture, I took it with my cell phone.  Cat’s don’t dawdle there, so I knew that I had to act fast and didn’t have time to get the good camera out.

And just because I need to counteract the “ewww” factor of a picture of them in the litter box, here’s three “awwww” pictures.

Alan in his favorite sleeping corner.

Except when they want to cuddle together on my chair.

And Denny (I think) helping me do the dishes,
although he looks a little perplexed.

Why?

I’ve been thinking about getting a cheap little beater economy car so I’m not spending a zillion dollars a week driving the beasts.  Which means my favorite past time, looking for cars for sale on ksl.com,  has an actual purpose.

I have a hard enough time understanding why people don’t bother posting pictures of their car in the ad, which there are a lot of, but this kind of crap is really annoying.

Why would you put pictures of $100,000 cars on an ad for something you’re selling for $500?  Do you think anyone is going to mistake a Porsche for a Chevy Corsica?  Especially when it’s obviously an ad or show picture, and not just your wife sitting on the hood of your $500 car?

Or maybe the idea is that people will think “Hey, that guy knows good cars, he must have taken real good care of his Corsica!” With the blown head gasket.

I don’t know what the concept behind this is, any ideas (or funny concepts to add)?

1 + 1 = Happy

The funny thing about bolts is when the end breaks off, nine times out of ten it stays stuck in whatever you were bolting into.

This is what happened to the alternator bolt on Big Green.  Snapped right off and the end was left inside the engine.  Which makes it really hard to just bolt in another bolt.  You have to get that end out.

For me, it’s been a three week process.  Mr. Gearhead rigged the alternator so that the car could run, but since the bolt wasn’t in the engine, it really wasn’t secure enough for long-term use.

2 Weeks ago I tore into it and attempted to extract the bolt piece.  This entailed removing the alternator, 2 of it’s brackets and the fan and it’s shroud.  Lotta removal for a small piece of bolt.  I used an extraction bit that Mr. Gearhead gave me, and all it did was mess up the end of the bolt.  So, I put it all back together again and let it sit for a while.  I gave up on trying it myself and figured I’d just have to cough up the couple hundred bucks to get someone to do it.

A week ago I brought it down to Midas.  They’ve done some work on my cars for me before, but this time they said they didn’t have the ability to drill out a bolt.  So I took it to Pep Boys who said they should be able to do it.  5 hours later I called them up to see how progress was going and was told they looked at it but couldn’t do anything.  Seems my first attempt was off center and messed it up so they were unable to even try.  They said that I’d probably have to get a new engine head (several hundred bucks) that would replace the part of the engine the bolt was broken in.  Thanks a lot guys.

So my older brother, Pedro, pointed out that since I’d probably have to buy a new head anyway, why not just try to drill the thing out myself.  If I totally screwed up the head, no real loss anyhow.  So I figured I’d give it one more try on my own before going the real expensive way.

This week I went to AutoZone and asked the guy if he had something to pull out a broken bolt.  He showed me this extracting drill bit and said what I needed to do was drill a hole in the bolt then use this one backwards, it would drill into the bolt, tighten down and then unscrew it.  I even told him that I had attempted it with a different bit and had drilled off center.  He said no problem, this would still work.

So, today that’s what I did.  Took me a total of 3 hours, and that included disassembling the car, going down to NAPA for a new bolt and then reassembling the car.  Actual work on the bolt literally took less than 10 minutes.  And Midas and Pep Boys couldn’t do it.  Meh!

So, now Old Blue and Big Green are in dang good running order, and that makes me happy.  Now I just have to put the transmission from the Wagon into the Convertible and I’ll have 3 functioning ‘70-ish Ford LTDs.

‘bout time!

I have no idea how many years it’s been since I’ve cleaned out my closet, but I figured it was about time.   One of the problems with living alone in a house with a 12 foot (4m) long walk-in closet is that it is real easy to not throw anything away.  After all, I just may need that pair of shredded, stained, glue encrusted blue jeans for the next time I want to tar the roof of the back porch.

Well, today I had three rules to what I kept:

1. I can and will wear it to school next year.
2. It has some real sentimental value. Such as it’s from one of the schools I worked at, from either Free Wheeler Pizza or Chevron or a gift from one of my siblings.
3. 3 shirts, 3 pants for working around the house.

Here’s an idea of how much stuff I accumulated, and decided to get rid of, in the last decade:

Those are the hangers from everything I either threw away or will be giving to the D.I. (click link if you don’t know what the D.I. is, which is very likely if you don’t live in Utah).

I now have about 16 washer loads of stuff to clean, stuff that has been sitting on the shelf of the closet (or on the floor).   I’m going to try, knock on wood, cross your fingers, to keep things organized for at least a little while.

Wish me luck.

Vertical?

The theme for this week is “Vertical”, and my pictures depict things that are not really vertical, but are supposed to be.  If you want to join in, or just check out some other vertical pictures, click on the banner above.

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I took this picture on the way to work one morning back in 2008.  Whatever happened to the power pole happened before I got there, and to this day I’m still wondering what could have knocked a piece out of that pole and leave it hanging from the wires.

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I took this picture today.  I’ve been filling in cooking at Free Wheeler Pizza and Ziggy and I were out front cooling off and were talking about this power pole.  As soon as I saw the theme for this week, I knew I had to go downtown and get these pictures.

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And finally, a few of the parking lot lamps that were taken down because of the construction at the Chevron by my house.

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