adventure time
brad - 3/8/10 - 9:33 pm	comments (0)

Come along kids.

It's...

...adventure time.

Q. How many people does it take to fix a 2000 Saturn SL2?
A. I still don't know the answer to that.

Michelle's car was due for inspection in February. She brings it in to Mr. Tire, as I usually do with mine. She needs two tires minimum and any bonus fixes that come up on the inspection report. She comes home, I figure all is well and done. Apparently this isn't the case. Price tag is over $900 for parts and labor. A wheel bearing, tie rod, and "mandatory" wheel alignment are needed to pass. Okay, "Plan B": call another place. I have her call Merchant's, and after explaining the issues, they insist on bringing the car in so they can look at it and give a proper estimate. So we do that. Close to $1100, and somehow the opposite tie rod is the one that needs to be replaced instead of the one Mr. Tire diagnosed. Okaaay. Still, way too much money. We call Dad. As I have explained before, Dad is the go-to for all car-related issues, since he knows enough or knows people who know enough to give proper advice. "Plan C": buy parts ourselves and find a different mechanic to install them. This already proves to be the right move, since buying parts ourselves from Auto Zone or Advanced Auto costs less than half of what the shops were charging. Note to self: never buy parts from mechanics. They markup the part like it was the last one that existed in the galaxy. Step 2 is to find a good mechanic. My go-to for service people in the area is Carly, who already recommended a good electrician to install a grounding rod for my FiOS internet and cable. She pointed us to a mechanic near Dulles Town Center who has been reputable for quite awhile, so we figure that's the best shot to get these parts installed.

Two weeks pass since the initial inspection, due to delays. The day before Michelle planned on taking her car in, she calls me in the parking lot at Dulles. Her driver side window is stuck all the way down. It's dead in the water. I can't pull up the window manually, or coax the switch into giving way one last time. It's dead. So that moves up the plan a day, and we take the car over to the new mechanic, and I become the shuttle bus. Later that same day, it of course starts to rain a little bit. We brought the car in at 9 am, and by 4 pm they still hadn't even looked at it, and most likely the light rain is making its way into the car. So she calls them and they finally pull it into the garage. I didn't bother to ask how full their schedule was, but it must have been packed if it was sitting out for 7 hours with no one touching it. At least it was in the garage now, and they would look at it first thing the next day.

While Michelle's car is in the shop, I get to have problems of my own. The power went out in my neighborhood for close to an hour. I don't know why or what caused it. I have each of my computers plugged into their own UPS units. The old computer which I still use the most was plugged into the one that has a weaker battery. So I scramble to shutdown my computers as the UPS units beep at me. The newer, faster computer turns off with no problem. The older, slower one is taking it's time while the UPS unit is beeping louder and louder to indicate it will die soon. And sure enough, near the end of the shutdown sequence, it cuts out, and everything is off. I figure that shouldn't be too big of an issue. Later on after the power returns, guess which computer didn't come back up? You guessed it. The older computer turned on but sat with a black screen and no indication it was working. I damned the power company, damned the UPS unit, and damned everything in sight until I decided to open it up to work on it. After a while of picking at the insides, I decide to start swapping drives out to see if they survived. I have another old HP unit in my closet that does function, which happens to be almost exactly the same model as my current old one. So I hook up the hard drives, and hey! They work. So it has to be a dead motherboard or something, right? Nope, the memory didn't work in the spare, but the spare's memory worked in the other one. Hey, what do ya know. Somehow, the only thing that got fried was the memory chips. Totally bizarre. So basically, thanks to Windows XP's inability to shutdown properly, my memory is fried. I make the trip out to Micro Center to purchase some memory. DDR vs. DDR2, what is the difference? $14 a stick more... for the OLDER memory. That's right kids, the more out of date the computer is, the more the memory costs. Because that makes sense. So I phone up my boss since I was at the store and asked if there was a difference. He told me no after a Google search, so I was quite disappointed to come home and find the DDR2 memory's notch was one pin off. Yeah, it wouldn't fit in the motherboard. Of course not. Collaboration fail. Also, IT skills fail on my part, because in one of the other dead computers in my closet sat a computer with 2 sticks of perfectly fine 1 GB DDR that I could just pop in my dead machine in a go. This lead to returning the sticks of memory the next day to Micro Center for a refund, and two hours of wasted time sitting in rush hour traffic to the store and back. I really need to get a hold on my personal inventory. That was straight up embarrassing and a hassle I could have easily avoided. Over the weekend I bought a replacement battery for my UPS unit, so that's back to functioning at full capacity.

While the car was in the shop for the second day, we went out for lunch with Eric & Carly at On The Border. My god this place is amazing, which I say every single time. I did get the taco salad again and devoured it, but there's another item that I now endorse which are the brisket tacos. Mish tried them out and was amazed by them, and I ate her leftovers a day later and agreed. Afterwards she went thrift shopping with Carly and I made my way out to Micro Center to return the memory before we all convened at E&C's for Chinese food and more Super Mario Wii. Trying to beat Bowser is proving to be an impossible challenge. Meanwhile, the car sat at the mechanic's for most of the day again until they looked at it. Good news! Both tie rods are fine. What? How can two different places tell us two different tie rods are bad, and yet this place says they are good to go? Ya know, that completely turns me off of the chain mechanics. I'm done with that. Local or bust for now on. They also determined it was the master window control switch in the middle console that was causing the window not to work, not the motor or anything else. So they placed the order for that and it would be delivered and installed the following day.

Car in the shop, Day 3: Mish gets a call. Bad news! The left front axle needs to be replaced. What? From what the guy was saying, he thinks whoever took it off previously tried to screw it back on and completely ruined the threads on it. Mish says that Merchant's had the car apart on the lift, so we think they are the ones that jammed it back in wrong once we told them we weren't going to pay their outrageous prices. So me, on 5 hours of sleep, gets the call from her about the axle. Auto Zone was out of axles, so I gave her a couple other places to call. Advance Auto had it in stock, so I quickly shower, drive out and buy the part, then drop it off at the mechanic. I go back home, plop on my bed for a couple hours. Get a call from Mish again, pick her up from the airport. She tells me the mechanic called her again, and the part wasn't correct. It was apparently too short of an axle. Thanks, Advance Auto. The mechanic was able to find another axle at a discounted price from his parts guy and installed that. Oh, and then there's the window switch. He orders a switch through his parts guy. Not only did the part get delivered to the wrong place, once he got it, it was the wrong switch. His parts guy is a moron. So it takes a little longer to get the switch, and of course the master switch is $100 more than any of the other switches. But there finally reached a point where the wheel bearing was installed, the correct axel was installed, the correct window switch was installed, everything worked, and a new inspection sticker was put on the windshield. I brought Mish back to the mechanic, picked up the car, took the wrong axle back to Advance for a refund, bought a burrito and called it a day. What. A. Pain. In. The. Ass.

That was pretty much what most of last week consisted of. Minor stuff included upgrading all my webpage counters; catching up on all the amazing race episodes (except the newest one); getting a haircut; misc hockey; no jobs. Oh, we also had our first soccer practice of the season on Sunday. It went well, there was more than 10 people there for the first time... ever... and yes, I'm ridiculously sore the day after. Not good when my first game with my other team is early next week. I's is outs ofs shapes.

My cousin Becca and her boyfriend Derek came up from NC for the weekend. He's applying to the DC Capital police force, and his test was today, so they made a long weekend out of it. So we've been hanging out with them for the past few days. Plenty of good times, good food, and stuffing my face rotten with sloppy joes, wings, bean dip, and tostadas. I need to start running this week.

That is all for now. Remember to check out anything I deem worthy over at Linkfest!