Neanderpundit

I started yesterday dealing with weeds- the flower beds the Ogwife was so desperate to have do not imply that she was desperate to weed them- I piled the pulled weeds out in the lawn and moved on to mow, with hands now full of thistle spines. Got the front mowed and weeds mulched, moved to the back, and once the back was half done moved a bunch of logs so I could mow the patches under them. Got stung by five yellow jackets.Rolled a bunch of logs up into position to stage them for the drag up the hill, and managed to cut my thumb AND jam a bigass splinter up in the joint on my right ring finger. Parked the tractor and moved onto the Oglets truck, made trips to three different auto parts stores, finally got the right part, whereupon I dropped the part coming out unto the valley between the intake manifold and valve cover, reached for it, burned my hand and smacked the hood prop with my elbow, dropping the hood on my head. Right next to one of the five bee stings. Ended the day by waiting for partner at a restaurant we have been frequenting for five or six years whose name I don’t remember except that they were once called “Crab Shack”, and since the sandblasted B looks more like P on the inside of the glass we always call it the Crap shack, and Partner thought we were talking about the Crab shack some fifteen miles away. Having arrived there and not finding us he called, and we managed to sit down to dinner about seven thirty with no further incident. I am consistently amazed that I managed to survive.

Do a pretty good job of getting all the pieces in place, and having most of what you need for the common vehicles.

And ain’t no more common vehicle than an Explorer, just about.

So the idea that something as common as a gauge sender would flummox them is amusing at best.

So I hied me hence to the local REAL auto parts store. A big Dorman display of nuts and bolts and specialty fasteners. A whopping load of starters, alternators and gasket kits.

Even the MOPAR topped stools with the chrome legs and etc.

Frankly, the only thing they were missing was the big blown pistons used as ashtrays, and the giant racks of books- now replaced by computers.

After Three trips to AdvanceZone, the guy in the refular auto parts store walked up to the shelf and grabbed the part I wanted. it was nine bucks. And now the temp gauge in the daughters’ sploder works, really the only non-regular maintenance item it has ever needed in over 400,000 miles.

I wish it werent’ such a rustbucket, I would steal it back from her and go back to driving it myself. Well, if it survives four years of college it will more than have done it’s duty.

A courteous and decent co-worker assisted me by helping to dismantle the machine while I was waiting for the cables. The cables arrived, were signed for by the front desk, who WENT INTO A MEETING AND NEVER TOLD ME. Thankfully I was refreshing the UPS tracking website like a crack monkey pushing his fix button, and I got the cables. They had to be encased in a wire braid, which I had gotten earlier.

Putting a recalcitrant 10 meter cable inside a 9.5 meter wire braid is like jamming an anaconda into another anaconda. It took four of us, and it was no fun, but we got the cables together and I went to the customer to install.

The old cables had decided to stop being magnet cables and start being weld cables. That wasn’t working so well. So I managed to get the old crap cleaned up and put it all together, seal it up with red and hit the road. Now, it’s all about getting the lawn mowed and the daughter’s truck ready for her to go to school.