7/21/08

Ok, so I was going to throw y'all a non sequitur about dying at the “hands” of something I love versus choking to death on a Brussels sprout to complete the thought from Friday afternoon, but I'm not. I forgot to mention that the check engine light came on in Darth Versa again Friday morning. I swung through Thornhill’s service department out of the way home and told them about it. The dude mumbled something about a recurring problem they had seen on another Versa and that it was a vent tube check valve or something. He scheduled me to come back Tuesday morning to drop it off. I'm going to have to head up there at the butt-crack of dawn to catch the 0730 h shuttle back home so I can make it in to work. Mom is leaving town with my sister this morning, you see. So Saturday morning I text John to see if we’re still going to the shop. It was apparently his anniversary so he decided to spend the day with family, having missed Father’s Day by going to Houston for the movie shoost with his car. That was cool with me because I had been informed that my oldest brother was coming over and mom wanted me to join them for lunch. Well, I was already in the car when I got the news about John so I went to Automotive Machine to check on my stuff. The heads were still on the shelf waiting to be done but Explodotron was ready to go. They rebalanced it and machined the surface. It looked nice. I paid the $68.00 to get it out of hock and headed to the shop. Oh, I had my transmission blanket in the car as well to deliver to the shop. I got to the shop and had a quick glance at Shi-Chi for blanket fitment. It was too hot already so I bailed. I did have a look under the hood of Darth Versa to see if it would be possible to wire up the park lights as daytime running lights. Much to my surprise, I noticed a DTRL spot in the fuse box! I drove home to have lunch with mom and brother thinking the whole time of how I could utilize that to make them work. See, I'm not having any luck training myself to always turn on the park lights and it pisses me off every time I discover them off while driving. No, the little sticky notes on the instruments don’t help. So, thinking I have a solution in hand I go to have lunch as happy as a little girl. FOR NOW ISS ZE TIME ON SCHPROKETS VEN VE DANCE! Sorry, I was channeling Mike Meyers just then. I know, you can’t channel someone who isn't dead. Get over yourself will you? I'm the pedantic one here. So, I get home and mom tells me that Bruce, my brother, has stopped in Arlington to pick up Peggy, my great-niece Margaret, and is on his way. I tell mom I have a subsequent engagement because I don’t like kids. Well, I don’t tell her I don’t like kids, she knows that already. I don’t like kids so I tell her I have a subsequent engagement. Yes, that works better. Ok, we laugh about that and I stay to go to lunch with them anyway. We have Spring Creek Barbecue. Yum. After lunch we all take naps in various rooms around the house. Once everyone is up again, I head back to the shop to have a look-see at those DTRLs. I grab a nine volt battery for my multi-meter and go. With the battery in the MM, I start to check on wiring in the fuse box. Damned if that DTRL port isn't hot constantly. I was hoping it would be a switched hot lead so I could just tap it into the park light wire but no. I tested all the other empty sockets in the fuse box and they were all constant hot as well. Crap. I closed the hood and went for a hoon, I think. I got home to find my brother and Peggy still there. They were eating dinner so I had a few steak fingers with them and then they left. Sunday morning I texted John again to see if we were still on for the rescheduled shop day. We were. We both headed out around the same time and showed up at the shop. The plan was to look at doing something cool to his 1200. I'm not going into it here though, not yet. Turns out it wasn’t going to be as simple as we had thought but we’re still cipherin’ and figgerin’ on it. I'm not sure why but I'm not ready to give up on the idea. We took a break from his car and had a look at Shi-Chi. Holy crap that engine is going to be a pain in the ass to change. We decided to go ahead and run the “stroker” A-15 bottom end and stock cam with the fresh head for the time being. Well, we will once I get it back from the machine shop. The inevitable, “So, what’s for lunch?” question came up and we started closing up for the day. We wound up at, yes, you guessed it, Genghis Grill. We were both good and only had one bowl each. Out in the parking lot we discussed wheels and tires for Darth Versa. I commented that I'd like to run a set of 225/50-16s but they would be way too wide for these wheels with this offset. John said he’d buy me a set of tires and mount them on a set of Velox wheels with a more suitable offset in exchange for the Watanabe wheels on the car now. I said, “Send me a picture of the wheels and we’ll see.” He did and I approved. We picked out a set of tires on the Tire Rack website. I decided on the Kumho Ecsta something or other tires for a dollar more each since they look cooler and will have better wet traction. That car is wicked scary in the rain! So, I guess a “there you have it” is in order. Perhaps I'll have something to say tomorrow. Maybe I'll go into the justification spiral again since I'm having “I really ought to cull my herd” thoughts right now. We’ll see.