Old HBlog - Rover Hell

Each morning I get up and try to look at the Flatirons and decide that, much like some of the spots I've seen in all my days on the mesa in Utah, that it must have been a truly awe inspiring feeling in the minds of people who had travelled all the way across great distances to finally say "fuck it, I'm stopping here."

It's wierd when you get to thinking that there aren't many, if any places on this planet we haven't seen. It's so passe that we take it for granted a great deal of the time.

But enough sophmoric bullocks, onto the kindergarten level pap you've grown used to....

I'm in a Catch 22 situation with the Rover, it took the trip a lot harder than I toriginally thought. This isn't due to limitations of the Rover, but my ignorance of judging a proper load for such a trip on a car with almost 150K miles and barely any real maintenance. (No matter what they tell you, changing the oil every 3000 miles is not enough to keep a car happy, healthy and long lasting.)

So far the diagnosis is the rear U-Joint is fried and about to go as well as in it's worn state causing a great deal of heat, (which it probably had most of the trip cross country) that has caused the actual drive train to warp, which in laymans terms means "very expensive".

And the brakes, which felt odd the whole trip but was attributed to the trailer and it's weight, have essentially worn grooves in the disks as well as warping them. So.... the calipers (I almost sound like I know what I'm talking about don't i ?) have been abused and the rear ones are leaking brake fluid , mostly on the disks, which causes the brakes not to, ummmmm, stop the car.

Therefore, the front brakes have been doing all the attempted stopping, and they were in rough shape anyway, because I had the tire come off in Newburyport and we landed on the Left hand disk, which in turn developed a weakness where it hit, which becomes the first spot to heat up, and then become the source of the front disk warping, which makes the right hand brake soley responsible for stopping the (rather heavy) truck.

Nice huh ? And all on pavement. One would think if I was going to do this much flippin damage to the car, I could at least get some mud or even dirt on it.

This leaves me at the moment without a car and a new job (more in a sec) that requires I drive to various locations... Thus my Catch 22.

I don't mean to be negative, but Opie, this sucks.

So it looks like I got the Contract to do a Mac OS9 to OS-X conversion for the Jefferson School district. And they are, oddly enough, finding a number of their established Windows users are very anxious to get on Mac OS-X instead of WIndows XP as well. Seems they are sick and tired of doing clean installs when their browsers start redirecting all their users to "Freakies' Farm Site" and sending all their address book members unsolicited email .

So this next week is going to, in many ways, be a real test of my sanity. They want me 3 days this week, and B&N doesn't want to change the schedule I'm on because it's drunkards, err I mean student, rush and we are very busy. So I have 40 hours there and then whatever I can fit in Jefferson, and I guess I better factor in some hitchhiking or something. They aren't exactly bike distance, maybe for Lance, but not this lump of flab.

My mechanic is trying to help out and cut some corners and postpone some repairs, but at this point the Nader would declare the Corvair safer than my car at any speed. And I have to get CO plates, license and inspection soon or I'll be talking to the man....

So.... that's the fun news from the back nine, hope all is well with all of you and yours, and I'll keep writing this as long as I can bear the server speed. I think I'm off to try another piece of XML editting with all my copius free time.

Off to feed the garden gnomes,

H