cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- No Car, No Beer, No Chocolate I remain trapped and probably sort of fucked. Still no car and no transportation at all. I cannot do much of anything. A few friends have puzzled over it on FB and we think we know that my car has one of 3 things wrong with it, all of which will cost less than $100 for the parts. The trouble is that the car is 22 miles away at the old house and I have no way to get to it. Tomorrow after work Paul is supposed to come over and pick me up and we're going over to fiddle with the car together. Paul used to work in a Nascar engine shop so he knows what he's doing. We're going to try swapping out the battery, and if that doesn't work we'll bang the starter solenoid with a hammer and see if that gets it going. If so, I need to replace the solenoid for about $25 plus my own labor. If that doesn't do it then its probably the starter, which will cost me at least $65 in parts but at least we will be able to push-start it with a bad starter. Push-starting will be a bitch, since the car is parked at the end of a long slight slope. At least its a very small, light car. And thank God its a standard transmission or else I couldn't push start it at all. One way or another, I expect to drive the car home tomorrow night. The only question will be whether I can keep driving it or if it will have to hang out in the driveway until I can buy the parts. If it just needs a battery swapped out then I can trade Paul an old window air conditioner for a battery he is bringing out to test with. Here's something really annoying; when Trish totaled that other car in February (or January or whenever it was) I said to Bob the next day that we really ought to bring it into his barn and rig up a hoist from the rafters to pull out the engine and keep it, just in case we need it. It was a perfectly good V6 engine that was undamaged in the crash. Also I wanted to pull out the battery and a few other parts. But Bob said no, he didn't want to deal with it. And since it was in his driveway and Trish is his daughter, I let him just tow it out of there. So now here I am, less than 2 months later, with two dead cars which could each be fixed with one of those things. Trish's Taurus could take an engine swap instead of dealing with the $1,000 worth of blown head gasket on the existing engine, and my car could use the battery. Motherfucker. I should have insisted on salvaging those parts. I want beer. And chocolate. And there is absolutely no way in the universe for me to make those things appear. I'm stuck in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night with no car and no beer and no chocolate. 12:23 a.m. - 2011-03-22 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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