1/7/13

Well, we did make progress Saturday at the shop.  I need to keep reminding myself that ANY progress is progress.  I just don’t feel like we did all that much.  Granted, the problem was that we got a late start and that was upon me.  Here’s how Saturday went down.  I picked John up at his house at 0815 h or so… perhaps 0830 h, I'm not 100% sure.  From there we went to Metal Supermarkets to get the 1.25” thick aluminum we needed for Lil' Wiggly's caliper mounts.  John also bought some steel to make a motor mount, but that’s not important… well, it is important to him, but not to the narrative.  Yes, I AM that self-centered… in MY blog.  Anyhoo, when the dude tried to run my card, it was declined.  I thought it odd and asked John if he had sufficient funds.  He did so I owed him $30.00 for my chunk of aluminum.  From MS we went to a branch of my credit onion in Arlington and had to wait for them to open the doors.  Inside, I was told I had $0.00 in checking and $7.00 in savings.  “Well,” I says, “that explains it.”  I wondered what had cleared twixt the last time I checked the balance and then and finally realized it was my car payment.  Well, better THAT was paid than not.  I took $200.00 out of another account and we headed to Smiley’s for my springs.  We shopped Smiley’s for a while and wound up just buying the springs.  From there we stopped at an Ace Hardware to buy some sticky-backed sandpaper so I could finish hogging out the insides of the coil over thingies.  We wound up buying bolts to mount the calipers to the new aluminum brackets as well.  Finally we made it to the shop and got to work.  John started messing with his motor mounts while I finished the out-hogging of the coil over thingies.  We marked where we wanted the holes in the caliper brackets and I drilled them.  We fingered out which side needed to be counter-sunk for the bolts and I did that.  Now, I'm not 100% sure we did the right thing when we flipped the bracket and counter-sunk opposite sides for the two units.  I sure hope we didn’t screw up.  When I had the holes drilled and counter-sunk, we tried a bolt… it didn’t fit.  I wound up grinding down the large flat “washer” on the bolt as well as a socket so we could get them in the holes.  When we were sure we could bolt them up, we decided to try and cut the two brackets apart from one another.  Now I'm wishing we hadn’t done that since it is going to be a King Kamanawanaleia BEEOTCH to drill and counter-sink the holes for the strut bolts.  Oh well.  At some point, while I was drilling and counter-sinking holes, John modified his motor mounts and needed welding.  I zooked the part together for him and he painted it while I washed up.  He washed up and then took some pictures of the “progress” we’d made.  Since I had to touch dirty stuff in order to get the pictures, I had to wash up again.  Now, this wouldn’t be such a big deal except that the water was friggin’ cold as a mo-fo!  We hopped back in Fifi and headed to Mercado Juarez for some meskin food.  We each had the steak topped with some kind of sauce but John's came with an enchilada, refried beans, and Spanish rice whereas mine had three or four bacon-wrapped skrimps.  On the very first bite of the steak, I got enough gristle stuck between my teeth to make another whole cow!  It wouldn’t come out either.  It was about to drive me nuts until I finally flossed it out at home.  But before that could happen, I took John home.  Sunday, Larry texted me to say he was too sick to go to the gun show in Not Texas that day.  I'd made a sign for the tactical 7.62x39 Saiga and was thinking that I might go on my own but decided that since he wasn’t going, and I had the JNC Car Show at Freebird’s that evening, I would give it a miss as well.  I wound up waiting for mom to get home from church and then we went to lunch.  I goofed off all afternoon and finally drove across town to the JNC thing.  It was friggin’ cold.  We hung out for a while and then I drove home.  It was friggin’ cold… until I got to about Ridgmar Mall.  Then it got mother fucking cold!  I parked The Seven and called it a weekend.  This morning I got a call from the boss asking if my e-mail was working yet.  It was not.  He had me call the home office to confirm something and when I went to call him back with the answer, his phone number didn’t work.  I got up from my desk and walked to his building.  While I was wandering campus, I got an e-mail on the work Dingleberry.  Apparently my e-mail started working again so now I can officially get back to work.  Of course that means I came in here and started telling y'all about my weekend… ‘cuz that’s whut I do.  A Telecom dude just left from hooking me up with a LAN drop so now I can get my new printer finally.  And that’s about all I have for y'all today.