Halcyon Repose

It’s been a long time between posts, so I’ll try to play some quick catch up.

Car

My car is still doing well, in the first two months, I am approaching 3k miles, which is more than I would like (esp considering gas prices) but she still runs like a dream. I did have one small incident involving my door handle and the side of the garage (after I spent 3 hours detailing it no less). Good news was that after checking it out and then walking away in disgust, my roommate was looking at it a few days later and noticed that it didn’t seem to be a scratch into the door handle, but stuff on the door handle. Sure enough, after I attacked it with a buffing cloth and pocket knife, I was soon rewarded with an almost mint condition door handle. Three coats of wax for the win!

I normally do something minor to my car within the first few months, and I always left the damage there as a ward against other mistakes, but not getting my handle fixed never even crossed my mind. When I thought of the body work I was going to have to get done if the paint was damaged on the handle, I immediately realized I needed to get into gear and sell my old Integra to help cover repair costs. I was planning on doing some more work to it, but I wanted money fast, so I cleaned up the exterior as much as I could given the car’s dire need of a new paint job. I grabbed some images for posting on recycler.com and craigslist.com, and planned on cleaning up the rest of the car the next night. Not 10 minutes after I posted the ad on craigslist.com the next morning, I had a phone call asking about the listing. Throughout the day I had about 15 phone calls and 5 emails. With that much interest I wasn’t going to drop the asking price one dime till every one of those people turned me down. I told people that I was going to be home at 7, and all of them wanted to be there right at 7. I sort of feel bad for not making appointments, I mean I didn’t want 4 people there trying to outbid each other (that would have been nice though), but in the end, the guy who called me first showed up an hour early, and ended up paying the asking price for the car without even taking it for a test drive. The whole process felt rushed, but I had the cash and his contact information to give to the DMV, so I am not too worried about it.

I took part of the money and upgraded my home computer, and some more to buy a NICE stereo for the car that integrates VERY well with my iPod (since I wouldn’t be able to afford to get either for a long while), and shunted the rest into savings. I am very happy with both purchases and it makes going back into leaving from paycheck to paycheck a little easier. The disadvantage to setting my car payment as high as I could absolutely afford is that my disposable income is going to be nil for a very long time.

E3

I wasn’t very trigger happy with the camera at this year’s E3. I do have a few pictures to put up, but most of them revolve around the huge Illidan statue in front of the Blizzard Booth (the Demonic bad guy in the next expansion for World of Warcraft), and some pics of Ed and Frances posing with Frogger, Ryan getting Frogger in a headlock, and of course Frogger’s revenge. But where I didn’t take any pictures, there were those who did step up to the task. Manny snapped some pictures through out the day, and Jamin brought his camera to the party. I haven’t yet gone through them and to do my typical web resizing, but they are there in all of their glory. I am actually in a number of them, which is strange because typically people with cameras tend to avoid me.

Around the House

This past weekend was extremely productive for me, even though I still haven’t figured out why. Starting off on Saturday, I got to fill in for Brenden in his fencing classes since he was out of town for a tournament. Getting off from there I went home with the intention of collapsing, but instead Kenny and I both mentioned to each other that the back garden needs to be cleaned up. I didn’t take any pictures to serve as before shots to show you how bad it was, but believe me when I say it was extremely bad. My roommate’s girlfriend had started a garden over a year ago, and when she stopped weeding it, I refused to help as it was her baby. As of this weekend, the weeds were easily waist high, and a huge eyesore. I ran to the hardware store to equip us with the necessary tools, and when I returened; Kenny, his girlfriend, and I launched our attacks. The end results were three and half trash bags of nothing but weeds, and two triumphant green gladiators. After removing the weeds and cleaning a bit, it actually became apparent that we actually do have a back patio. We stopped by the hardware store again to resupply on our weed killer so that we could finish the roots, and while we were there, Kenny decided that what our back patio really needed was a new grill. What do you know, but The Home Depot actually sells grills! We rented a truck (no I am not putting a grill in the back of the new Mustang), and carted Kenny’s new prize home. Once we returned the rental truck, we then promptly broke in the new grill with some fresh grilled hamburgers, grilled corn, and home-style french fries (yum!). We are thinking of just trashing all the current soil in the patio planter, and going with fresh new soil so we don’t have to worry about surviving roots or seeds from the weeds, but that will have to be a project for another weekend.

While I was at the hardware store earlier that day, I had found a seal repair for the toilet in my room. It had a slow leak into the bowl that means the valve turns on once every 10 minutes or so to refill the reservoir. I purchased a new seal, and that night I tore my toilet apart only to find that the seal I had wasn’t going to help any. Of course at 11pm at night, no hardware store is open, so I left my toilet and in pieces spread out round my bathroom and the next morning I ran and got all the parts necessary to completely redo the internals of the toilet. After a few hours of work, I had a new working toilet, and with the parts I pulled out of my toilet, I was able to replace the valve on the downstairs toilet so that it is now back in tip top shape as well. All in all not a bad weekend’s worth of work. Now for those of you who want pics of me repairing the toilet.. sorry, but I felt they would be in bad taste.. I apologize for the disappointment. ~