10/24 - 10pm

wife took the day off to help use up her use-or-lose leave. From what I've read on other diaries here, that is a wierd concept...being forced to take vacations....

So I got up around nine, and after a while we went into town in her sporty little car. The top was down, the weather was nice, it was fun. We even went to the feed store to get hay. Oh...pay for hay that is, they'll deliver it on a truck.

When we got home her odometer said 50000 miles. Exactly. hmmm.

Little steving and I went on a test drive in the free truck, to the car wash, to clean off the engine some so it won't stink so much from the oil that leaked out of the valve covers onto the exhaust. I tightened up the valve cover bolts but it still had lots of oil there. So after washing off the engine with the high pressure spray thingy, it started right up, ran a few seconds, and died. Then it tried to start a little bit, then the battery died. I looked at the date code on it...J-8 which means it's 7 years old! Car batteries only last 5 years. oops. Called wife and she and the other boys came in the cop car with the jumper cables and the 7mm wrench. After dinking around with it for a while it still wouldn't start, so I decided I had to pull off the distributor cap and dry it out...not too easy on that thing, but I did finally get it done and it ran just fine. Except for the hissing noise where the power brakes had a big vacuum leak, apparently I busted a dry rotted grommet while dinking around in there. We all went to PPPizza, me with very hard to use brakes. So then I took the cop car down to the parts store, got a grommet, came back, put it in, and all is well with the world.

Guess I'll buy a battery tomorrow.

T is coming the day after thanksgiving, flying in from Vegas, to get the truck. Bringing his daughter, who's the same age as little Gary and Kevin, and will need something to drive in a year or so...I guess the little truck is it.

this is what little Steving looked like putting stuff in the little truck to take to the dump last week. or the week before?

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