1/24/08

Well, no springs yet. I'm hoping they arrive today. I spoke to a guy who is willing to cover for me if I want to take the day off tomorrow. It will wind up costing me $32.00 though. His day rate minus my eight hours of salary is a difference of $32.00 in his favor. He told me to let him know by 1900 h tonight so he can get to bed early if I do want him here. I'll know whether or not my springs are here by then so it will be a call I make when I get home. Here’s what I'm thinking about for this evening. If my springs are here I'll call Jeff to cover for me. If they are not I'll go to Sutherland’s and buy 200 pounds of sand to carry in the bed of Fifi. Why? Because they are predicting the possibility of some ice on the bridges in the morning and if I'm not doing the springs on Darth Versa, I'm not going to drive him to work either. Oh, yesterday there was an odd sentence that I think I can ‘splain. It said, “It never did crash or shut down unexpectedly, but it is so slow that Internot Exploiter gave up on the requested site a few times prompting me to for a reload, or refresh, or whatever.” What I typed was, “It never did crash or shut down unexpectedly, but it is so slow that Internot Exploiter gave up on the requested site a few times prompting me to (less-than sign)f5(greater-than sign) for a reload, or refresh, or whatever.” Apparently the “less-than” and “greater-than” signs are some kind of computer geekuguese that got edited out somehow. I'm not sure if Spiderman did it or if Blogspot did. It doesn’t matter, I just wanted y'all to know I didn’t have a stroke in the middle of that sentence. I meant for y'all to know that I hit the “f5” key to reload, or refresh, or whatever whenever Internot Exploiter got confused. That’s it. Ok, I feel better now. Remember how I told y'all about the twenty 42-gallon contractor bags of trash yesterday? Well, in addition to that we had Mr. Wiggly full of books. Now, Mr. Wiggly isn't the most weatherproof storage device known to man. In fact, he leaks when it rains. It isn't as bad as before I pookied up the rusty holes in the drip rail, but he does still leak. I didn’t want those books to get ruined sitting out there so I decided to take them to Half Priced Books to see what they’d give for them. I drove Mr. Wiggly to the lace and went in. I told the lady behind the counter that I had a van full of books to sell and she gave me a wheeler and a cart to go get them. Seven trips to the van later, I had a mighty impressive pile on the floor in front of their counter. She went through them and filtered out the damaged and totally useless ones. Fortunately, that pile was only about 1/10^th of the total. She counted them up and went to the computer. “Mr. White,” she said, “we can offer you $110.00 for these.” I said, “I'll take it!” and did. When I got home and parked Mr. Wiggly back on the lower back porch, I went in and asked mom how much she thought they paid. She said “Fifty dollars?” I said, “Cool, I'll keep the other sixty then.” She was flabbergasted. She really wasn’t, I just like using the word “flabbergasted” from time to time. Flabbergasted! Anyhoo, I gave her the $110.00 and she gave me a twenty for my efforts. It was effortful as well. Hmm, I would not have believed that “effortful” was actually a word. I thought I was making something up to be cute. But I digress, what I meant was the shifter in Mr. Wiggly is really getting to be wonky. The neutral gate is really hard to find in order to pull up into first and reverse. I'll have a look at it sometime, probably. I'd still like to look into a floor shifter for it but it will be a really weird setup. I'd have to mount it really far behind the seat and have a long snaky shift handle. I wonder if a cable shifter from something could be mounted to the doghouse. Interesting. I'll have to look at that. Oh wait, I think Enrique is going to hold me to the plan of selling a bunch of stuff, including Mr. Wiggly, and taking that money to the credit onion to refinance the Darth Versa loan. I guess I'll just see what’s making the column shifter wonky and move on. I really do like that van though. We’ll see. Well, I've been staring at the screen again. That usually tells me I'm ranted out for the day. I guess if y'all get a rant tomorrow then my springs didn’t arrive and I came to work. If you don’t, they did, and I didn’t. Yeah, that’s what I said.