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

Friday 10/29/2010

Friday


Ugliness this morning. A return. I hate doing returns. The salesman just dump this stuff on drivers and leave it to us to figure it all out. They take a list over the phone, print it out and then give it to us. It's never that simple. Go to the jobsite and start trying to find all the stuff on the list that the salesman never actually went out and verified whether it's there or not.

Then, start writing in by hand a bunch of other stuff that wasn't on the list but the contractor wants to send back. Then, deal with whatever crew is available to help load the stuff - they are in a hurry, always and don't care if it's safely loaded or not. I DO care and I almost always have to tell them to STOP what they are doing. I've taken over crews whose boss's weren't even paying attention to what was going on - they're sitting in their pickup truck doing whatever.

Not really looking forward to that, not at all. On the flip side, I am 2 hours over my allotted time and I am either getting off early today or I am getting 2 extra hours on my paycheck. I'll gladly take the 2 extra hours, of course, but I somehow suspect that won't happen.

How would you like to be a police officer in Mexico right now, in one of these towns with all the drug violence going on? And now Chandler police are investigating whether the beheading of a mexican national (illegal) was the work of a drug cartel as well. How far is this going to have to go before the federal government/Obama says, oh, gee, we have a problem down there on the border, maybe we should do something about it.

It is widely recognized that the amount of National Guard they recently deployed is not near enough. November 2 is almost here, I'll be in one of those lines to vote, oh, yes I will. I am going to spend this weekend going over the local propositions as well to make an informed vote on those.

Yup, that's my self-induced "thing" to do this weekend. Pore through all the material on these propositions, I determined who I was going to vote for in the bigger races long ago. Why these parties are dumping so much money into a "last minute" effort, I'll never know. It's a huge WASTE of money if you ask me, I rather suspect that most people make up their minds on specific candidates and the offices they are running for well before the election day actually arrives.

Propositions? Don't know. Oh gee and gads, the DC truck is here. 17 minutes early. I almost always forget to lock that front door on Fridays - they always think I am going to start work early and get them taken care of. NOT. We have let them know many many times over that we start at 6:00, but they don't care. Neither do it, I won't do anything until 6:00 and that is the way it is. I WILL take care of a customer early, that's a fact, but not truck drivers and their impatience. Being and impatient truck driver? Sorry, Charlie, you're in the WRONG business cause you have to wait just about everywhere you go.

Anyway, I have several news tidbits I want to read with my last 15 minutes before work, c'yall

later.

ben