blog.marcwiesner.com

Fun couple of days.

Yesterday Mike and I (with V-dawg’s help, natch ) changed the brake’s and rotors on the Stratus. That evening about two-thirds of the Manchester and Park houses had a night of cartoons and games.

Today I was mistaken for a grad student twice. Is that what hair does? Makes you look older? Or just more downtrodden? Commuted up to Palo Alto for Foothill’s Intermediate Chinese three course and to hook up with some of the gang for Maria’s birthday (oh! Maria! Maria!). Went out for Thai. Ooh….so good and so spicy ^_^” . Fell asleep on the bus commuting back down, but woke up in time to hop off at Monroe.

Props to Mike for shrugging off the burden of automotive transportation! Today was his first day (of many, I hope) as a bike-and-train commuter. We’re going to try to hit up some bike swap-meet this Sunday and find him a truly fly ride (hopefully with spokes with clickity-clacks ).

Just spent the last….several hours tooling around on my bikes. Got the freewheel off of an older mountain bike so I was able to put together a substitute for the warped rear wheel of that Magna. Got it running alright. Still need a foreword brake cable. Got replacement brake pads for the road bike and corrected the alignment of the handle bars so it’s in better running order (and has brakes).

After talking with my homeboy Max I’ve decided to go off to Hong Kong earlier than I was thinking. Max’s even offered to put me up while I’m saying in HK, what a mench. I started looking at airfare. Looks like I’ll be able to get over there for far less than I was expecting. Hopefully a trend that will continue throughout my journey.

I heard back from a school in Hangzhou asking for a copy of my passport and my CV…good news, I’d say. Now to wow them

I still need to do reading for one of my classes but that’ll have to wait until after dinner. Yummy….potatoes, cabbage, and tofu…..again. :}

Being the old man of the group about half the time, I’ve seen more than a couple friends get their first car (almost a rite of passage here in the USA) and proceed to fret over getting the scheduled maintenance all done on time. 5,000 miles, 7,500 miles, 10,000 miles…you get the idea. I guess I’m a sceptic; I just don’t see that sort of thing as being necessary as long as you do some reasonable and timely maintenance.

Here’s my example. Mike had bought this Miata that started misfiring. I figure, electrical. What’s the quick fix? Change the spark plugs. Pulled the first one out; rusty. I shit you not the plug was rusty as fuck. Second one, more so. Third one…wire was burnt apart. hehe…there’s your misfire.

How rusty were the plugs?

This rusty

Oh yeah..and that peice of sparkplug wire is there also.  *shudders*

So I just got back from two days in Barstow, Sunny Southern California. I left Saturday night with Cpt. Wu to arrive in between the a patch of city sandwiched between desert and more desert at about 2 am Sunday morning. My brother was driving a car back from Texas when it overheated during a fuel-up in Ludlow, Ca. He had it towed to Ludlow with the help of the greedy, advantageous bastards of Ludlow Auto and Tow where the Captain and I met him with tools ready. Turns out the car was spraying coolant from where the thermostat housing bolted onto the water pump. From the look of the silicone gaskets it had looked like the guy who sold my bro the car failed to mention a problem with the cooling system. During the 10+ hours we spent in front of the engine on Sunday we re-gunked most of the cooling system between the radiator and the engine and got the system burped at a great shop down the block from the hotel. By Monday noon we had that car back on the road.

Barstow was unbelievable. 24 hours a day there was the sound of squealing brakes from the freight trains there were constantly coming and going. I can hardly imagine what it would be like to spend a year trying to get a decent night’s rest with those brakes singing all the time. Tools for that car were nearly impossible to get. You leave the Bay Area and all of a sudden an 8mm crow’s foot is a “specialty tool.” No body had it. If it weren’t for the Captain I don’t think we would have been able to get one of the bolts without a drive to L.A. for the tool. The town was being over saturated with franchise and chain stores targeting people who would have otherwise driven trough without batting an eye. I’m sure the Wal-Mart there was at lest half-staffed with people it had just run out of business. Even the people we talked to said that they couldn’t wait to get out. I’ve got to say though that I was thrilled to find a place that was able to make an awesome vegan nachos for me.

I can’t say how happy I was to be back on 280 where every third car is an SUV with a single occupant cutting through traffic at 80 mph and you can go through a dozen cities without leaving the cityscape. I may hate the gas-guzzlers but I am happy to be back home. I can’t wait to get a few good nights sleep an let my lower back recover after a hay hunched over an engine compartment.