Did you buy a lottery ticket (or two) for this weekend? I did. I figure my luck can't get any worse, and I sure could use the pick-me-up.
As was briefly mentioned in a thread yesterday, my daily driver took a special trip into the shop on a flatbed truck yesterday. I spent a couple of hours writing out a big post on that whole fiasco, and then I couldn't post it because of problems with my computer. I may still recover that stuff, so stay tuned. I may eventually be able to post it after all.
Anyway, in the interest of keeping things short and sweet, here's a summary.
I've had some problems with my daily this winter, and it has been in the shop quite a bit. 10 weeks in all so far, and it's going to be at least a couple more before I get it back. My wife and I have been sharing a single car for a long time now, and it is just killing us. So the weather is finally breaking a bit, and since my daily is under the knife again, I didn't see much alternative but to break a toy out of hibernation so that we can have two vehicles.
I have never had a toy out this early in the year before. The sand and rocks that are on the roads are still terrible, and I am not happy about having to drive my 19-year-old car in this s**t. But life is tough, and you have to make sacrifices in order to keep some equilibrium to stay married.
So yesterday I had to reassemble the throttle body, MAF, and air intake on my TA as I had removed them to try to band-aid the TBSS a few months ago. I called up my insurance company to get liability put back on it, and my boy was thrilled to get picked up from daycare in a 'hot rod'. Small point of satisfaction, but I'll take anything at this point!
This morning, my wife took the boy and the Cadi into town to visit her uncle in the hospital, and I tried to do some running around so that I can get some things done around the house. One of which was getting some compressed air so that I can clean my computer so that it doesn't keep shutting down from overheating. The wonderful thing about having a 19-year-old car that you have to rely on all of a sudden is that they don't feel the same way about things as you do. The TA started up just great, as it always has, and then would not disengage the shift-lock to put it into gear. Kind of a plan-killer.
I spent about three hours today pulling apart the center console so that I could get access to the shifter linkage and figure out what was going on. Can you imagine my reaction when I found a toothpick (no joke) in between the solenoid and the linkage for the brake shift-lock mechanism? WTF? I have never even eaten in the car before, let alone carried a toothpick into the car. Is it seriously possible that something that has been inside of that console for more than eleven years could suddenly jump up and cause a problem? What kind of craziness is that?
Here's to hoping that crazy weird bad luck like this should be equally offset by the crazy possibility of matching six little numbers.
I've seen crazier things happen, and this is just one of them.
As was briefly mentioned in a thread yesterday, my daily driver took a special trip into the shop on a flatbed truck yesterday. I spent a couple of hours writing out a big post on that whole fiasco, and then I couldn't post it because of problems with my computer. I may still recover that stuff, so stay tuned. I may eventually be able to post it after all.
Anyway, in the interest of keeping things short and sweet, here's a summary.
I've had some problems with my daily this winter, and it has been in the shop quite a bit. 10 weeks in all so far, and it's going to be at least a couple more before I get it back. My wife and I have been sharing a single car for a long time now, and it is just killing us. So the weather is finally breaking a bit, and since my daily is under the knife again, I didn't see much alternative but to break a toy out of hibernation so that we can have two vehicles.
I have never had a toy out this early in the year before. The sand and rocks that are on the roads are still terrible, and I am not happy about having to drive my 19-year-old car in this s**t. But life is tough, and you have to make sacrifices in order to keep some equilibrium to stay married.
So yesterday I had to reassemble the throttle body, MAF, and air intake on my TA as I had removed them to try to band-aid the TBSS a few months ago. I called up my insurance company to get liability put back on it, and my boy was thrilled to get picked up from daycare in a 'hot rod'. Small point of satisfaction, but I'll take anything at this point!
This morning, my wife took the boy and the Cadi into town to visit her uncle in the hospital, and I tried to do some running around so that I can get some things done around the house. One of which was getting some compressed air so that I can clean my computer so that it doesn't keep shutting down from overheating. The wonderful thing about having a 19-year-old car that you have to rely on all of a sudden is that they don't feel the same way about things as you do. The TA started up just great, as it always has, and then would not disengage the shift-lock to put it into gear. Kind of a plan-killer.
I spent about three hours today pulling apart the center console so that I could get access to the shifter linkage and figure out what was going on. Can you imagine my reaction when I found a toothpick (no joke) in between the solenoid and the linkage for the brake shift-lock mechanism? WTF? I have never even eaten in the car before, let alone carried a toothpick into the car. Is it seriously possible that something that has been inside of that console for more than eleven years could suddenly jump up and cause a problem? What kind of craziness is that?
Here's to hoping that crazy weird bad luck like this should be equally offset by the crazy possibility of matching six little numbers.
I've seen crazier things happen, and this is just one of them.
