jotsheet

Okay! I know I haven’t updated this badboy in forever! Sorry about that. I’ve been busy—no, really! Tomorrow, I depart for Bryn Athyn, so I’ve got a 12 hour day ahead of me. No fun, but I’m hoping the book-on-tape will help me weather the storm.

In preparation for the drive, I had to do some work on my car. Now my confidence in my car has been slipping of late. My car is kind of like an old athlete who’s always been reliable but who will have to give out sometime—the laws of time just work that way. And time has started to wear on my ol’ 1987 Toyota Camry. The Mysterious Electrical Problem™ has repeatedly reared its ugly head, and I had a bunch of lights out throughout the car. Besides that, the oil hadn’t been changed, and basically, the thing hadn’t really been looked at in a while. Needless to say, I wasn’t excited about driving it across the country.

So my task today was to get this aging athlete back in shape for another race. Yesterday, I went over to Car-X, but they were basically dickwads, so I left without even giving them the keys. Today, I went and bought fuses at Napa, figuring that the electrical problem had caused fuses to blow and corresponding lights not to work. I also took it to Jiffy Lube, and they were actually very helpful there. They changed the air filter and oil and checked all the fluid levels and just all the basic shit that I should know how to do.

Well, after that, I took to the fusebox with my new little kit of fuses and the pull tool + tester, but I didn’t find any blown fuses. Hmm. Looks like the damn bulbs were just burned out. So I trekked over to Wal-Mart (what a crazy, crazy place that is) and bought the replacement bulbs and put them in myself. Presto. Damn car works now. Crazy shit.

So what’s the point of all that? Basically that I like to be self-sufficient. I should have been able to figure all this out by myself, with no help from anyone else. Maybe I would ask for help from a friend but certainly not a mechanic. Alas, Tom the Computer Geek knows jack about cars, however, and he must stoop to crawling into places like Jiffy Lube. It’s really pathetic, but at least I fixed the lights myself and learned some stuff about fuses. (I actually went to the library to look up the fuse diagram.) One of these days, I’d like to take some kind of course on basic auto repair.

Ugh. End of rambling auto repair story. I have a new photo gallery of pictures up from my college graduation. My dad took them and I processed them. Some turned out quite well. Take a gander.

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