Tires

I started calling around today, looking for good, used tires - 2 of them - for the old Buick.

I gave up on it.  I called a Discount Tire company - several of them actually - but one of them had a guy who said he could help me out with 2 new ones.  I told him I already tried that route, your company wanted $185 for 2 tires out the door.  I said I might be comfortable with $120, but no way am I spending that much money on tires for an old car. 

He "did the math".  Came back and told me $135 out the door.  Well, that's $50 better than the first time around.  I just decided to bite the bullet, get the tires and hope to high heaven that that takes care of the vibration problem.  I am going to be driving this thing for a while longer while I'm whittling down the problems, I don't want a blowout on the way to work.  I don't have a spare - yet. 

Got out of there and headed directly for the freeway.  I did break some speed laws, yes I did.  I pushed her up to 80mph with no problems whatsoever.  No vibration, just smooth gliding down the freeway.  I remember what I did as a teenager -  my parents couldn't possibly know I was driving the old Ford Galaxy 500 to the maximum speed on the speedometer - which was 130 mph.  Lucky I didn't kill myself.  Regardless,  I don't really get that my son wants to come anywhere near 130mph, he doesn't even like getting ON the freeways, but in case he "tries"something that I don't approve of, at least having good rubber on it can make all the difference.

That - the lack of vibration - made me very happy.  Seeing that money go bye-bye did not.  I still have left an exhaust leak and it idles rough.  The idling?  One of my roommates has a car identical to mine, only it's 1 year newer.  She has a friend that knows how to get those babies purring.  He has already offered to help me - not free obviously but certainly nothing as expensive as taking it into a shop, so I have asked her to ask him to come back over and take a look.  The exhaust problem - well, unfortunately that's going to have to be dealt with at a muffler shop.  UNLESS, of course, they tell me some unbelievable price to fix it, then I'm going to find some other way to get it done.  After those 2 things left to go, then there's a bit of body work and a cheap paint job.  I'm figuring another month - at least - before I call it done.  My son's money ran out for repairs on it quite a while back, I'm eating the rest of it, though, he is paying his own insurance and I am going to require extra on top of that for some time to come to help pay some of this back. 

I pretty much intend on giving him the car - if I see that he will treat it well and take care of it.  However, that isn't going to happen right now.  I intend on keeping that car as my own until we are out of this recession nonsense, I know (or at least hope) that I'm not going to lose my job and my ability to make the car payments on my newer car.  That's the point: I own this old thing outright and no financing company is going to be taking it away from me.  It's so old, no-one would ever want to steal it, I'm pretty safe.  I AM feeling better about it now that I have dumped the money into it and it IS working out pretty well, albeit the little detour when it broke down and I had to have it towed and have it fixed. 

So, does that mean the new computer is down the drain?  Not at all.  I still have enough to do that and pay my bills.  So, cool.  This weekend - I don't know.  Next weekend, probably unless I decide to wait for Black Friday and see if there any great deals on components to build it with. 
I will say this: this machine is getting worse.  I keep getting "This system has recovered from a serious error" messages; I keep getting the thing shutting itself off and it keeps putting up yet another message: "Internet Explorer has experienced and problem and needs to shut down".  This is happening quite frequently, which may be the motivating factor that I go out and buy the rest of the stuff tomorrow, versus a week or two weeks from now. 

The weekend - is here.  I am glad this work week is done.  Normally I don't care about work weeks - working is good for you - just this week for whatever reason is a good one to get behind me.  I have the entire week of Thanksgiving off, thankfully - haven't decided what to do with it yet.

Anyway, I'm off to go visit my ponds and enjoy.

G'day.

ben