6/18/10

So I get a call from mom the other day. She’s at some store with a dead battery. Oh, I remember telling y'all about that now. Well, yesterday I try the starter before I leave for work and the car is dead. I tell her I'll roll it out and jump-start it after work and we’ll take it to the Boys of Pep to have it checked. She reminded me that at some point in the recent past, we’d bought a battery for that car and I installed it in the Furr’s Cafeteria parking lot. So when I got home last night, I tried to roll the car out. Now, I'm willing to roll a 1,000 pound “Lotus” out of the garage and jump behind it to make it stop. I might have even been willing to attempt it with a 1,500 pound Datsun. I had no intention of trying to stop a 3,200 pound Nissan Altima from gallivanting across the street by placing my body in its path. I held the driver’s door just open enough to push while I sat in the seat. Unfortunately the door caught on the support pillar in the middle of the garage before I could get stopped. I was not too happy about that. The car was fine and I got the pillar back into position but I need to use the house jacks to put the shims back under it. Once outside, I jump-started it and we headed to the BoP. There, I discovered I'd forgotten my wallet. Oops. We talked to the service dude and told him we couldn't remember how long it had been since we bought the battery. He gave us our options on replacements and then pulled the dead one when we chose the 680 CCA battery with a three-year warranty, just like the old one. He came back in to tell us that the date sticker on the old battery was 07/07! we had one more month on the three-year free replacement! We had them drop in the new battery and we were on our way. OK, they did charge $19.75 for the labor, but the $99.00 battery was free. So, mom’s car is good for another three years, battery wise. As for me, I did stop off at Blood Bath & Beyond on the way home and had another look at that .45 Colt Lever Gun. I just do not like the big loop. I had to walk away. I might go to Winchester Gallery this weekend and see what they have, but most likely what I'll wind up with is the Travel Agents’ gun. I think I can hold out one more week, unless Winchester Gallery has something for me of course. We'll see. So I get an e-mail from Pat this morning with a link to a Craig’s List listing for a $300.00 1980 HL-A10 Violet (510) Station Wagon. I basically told him I wasn't interested in it but that he was welcome to go get it. He wants it but has no place for it nor the money to spare. I'd offer to help him out but for two things: 1) it has running and/or clutch issues and B) it has no title. I'm not going to talk him out of buying it, since I think he’s done that already, but I'm not going to enable him either. Were it a B-310 (210) Wagon, Sedan, or Coupe, I'd probably offer him the money and a place to keep it. A B-110 (1200), or B-210, definitely. A PL-510 Wagon or Sedan, maybe. But a non-running HL-A10, not so much. We'll see what happens over the next few days. One last tale and then I'm calling it a rant. Mom is having a new shower installed in her bathroom. The guys showed up yesterday at 0700 h to install it. Mom had to leave at 1430 h so they called it a day with the job half-done. They scheduled to be back at 0700 h this morning. I figured since I was an hour early for work, and plenty of dudes and dudettes ride their Hardly Dumb-Assed Ones to work in this heat, I could drive The Seven. This I did. It took almost as long to “secure” the car after I parked as it did to drive here! OK, not really, but the tonneau cover really is a pain in the ass. I might install the Birkini top before heading home. We'll see. And on that note, I think I'm going to call it a rant.