9/10+1/2006

Oh, get over it! So, you may have noticed I didn’t have anything to say Friday. That is because I didn’t have anything to say on Friday. Saturday morning I, eventually, went over to John's to help him with the broken water hoozis in the head of the L-18 in the “new” red 510 he just got. He had good news when I arrived in that it looked like the threads had not broken off but rusted through. We both had a look and agreed that a tap to clean the threads and we could probably put in a new fitting. He called a place to see if they had said tap and when given the affirmative we headed that way. He bought the tap and we headed for Lowe’s. He bought the fittings and we left to grab some lunch. We decided against the hotdog stand hotdogs and opted for Chinese at some place he saw from the road. It wasn’t very good. We went back to his house and I watched as he installed the fitting and the hoses. We had to stop at O’Reilley’s for something and then went back again for something else. Once we had his car as sorted as we were going to get it, we began looking at the Volk wheels he had for Matilda. It was decided that we’d take the wheels and tires to a place and have them mounted but we wouldn’t swap the valve stems just in case. The “just in cases” were: a) if they didn’t fit for some reason or 2) I didn’t like them for some reason. Yeah, hindsight, 20/20, all that, shut up. We loaded everything into the back of Matilda. Well, I loaded it all up while John went to get lunch for his family. He returned with a Route 44 Dr. Pepper for me, which pleased me greatly. We rolled to the tire place and had the tires mounted. As he finished each one and I rolled it to the car, I stopped to see how it sized up next to the stock tires. They were slightly taller but I thought they would probably look good. I should have, at that point, taken them right back in and had the stems done, but I didn’t. When the dude was finished, I paid and we headed for the shop. Once there we drug out the jack and the impact wrench. I popped the center caps off and unbolted the wheels that John had in the air. I stuck the first of the Volks on and bolted it down. It looked good hanging in the air. I did the other wheel on that side and we lowered the car to the ground. They looked even better on the ground. I drove around the building to settle the front suspension and turn around. We did the other side and stood back for a good look. They did look sweet! I was beginning to wish I had opted to “gopher it” all the way in the first place. I loaded one of the old wheels in place of the spare thinking it might fool the tire pressure sensor. Of course it didn’t and it was dumb to think it would otherwise all four tires would have to lose pressure below the threshold for it to register, duh. What I haven’t tried is loading all four into the hatch to see if they will shut the light off. I doubt that will work either though. I'll ask Nissan if there is a way to deactivate the monitoring system. We cleaned up and headed for his house again. There, he had me position the car and he took a few pictures. Did he insert the links just then? I hope so. I took my leave and headed home. I shaved and showered then mom and I went to dinner. The service was lousy but he made up for it by comping our meal. Normally, I'd flame the waiter but like I said, he comped the meal. No, I'm going to flame the asshole manager. After waiting for quite a while for a refill of my tea, mom stopped this manager to complain. He seemed exasperated that he had to deal with customers. He did bring me two more teas though so I let it slide. When we were done eating and waiting for a check, mom called out to the same manager as he walked by attempting to ignore us. I saw him roll his eyes as he turned around to see what we wanted. It pissed me off. He said he’d have our ticket printed and walked away. I was ready to take my ire out on the waiter by stiffing him on the tip until he returned and said the meal was on him. That calmed me down and I felt a little guilty and sorry for the dude. I almost left him a small tip anyway, but I didn’t. I blew off going out with my friends to Gallery Night and wasted the rest of the evening. Sunday I took the long way to the Motorsport Ranch and had Ray balance the wheels. I opted to not have the stems swapped yet again because, well I'm not sure why. I know I didn’t really want to dismount those tires again so I'm going to wait a bit. Ray got them all balanced and we went to lunch. We stopped at this landscaping place next to the entrance to the Ranch because it has a “for sale” sing up. It was a lot of acreage and a really cool building. I want it. I cannot afford it. It is $595,000.00! I told Ray I'd move into one of the out buildings with Dimlight Racing if he’d buy it. I don’t think he can do it either. We’ll see. I went back home for a bit and then decided I wanted to look at the turn signals in the Seven again. I had a thought that a resistor in line with the main power lead might raise the load enough to make the flasher click. I took off the new scuttle and tried my idea. It didn’t work. I wound up installing the dual resistors to ground like I had before and it did. I reinstalled the choke cables but didn’t put the scuttle back. Instead, I spent an hour or so carefully scraping the inspection and license stickers from the Brookland screen and placed them on the new windshield. That bought me another month on the license and the rest of this one for the inspection. I may look into a hand-operated wiper to mount to the top of the screen for inspection porpoises. We’ll see. Well, I think y’all are up to speed. I'm going to call it a rant.