Cars

Day 1962

Gah.  Had so many entries written, edited, ready to post, then time compresses and nothing goes anywhere.

The holidays, in a nutshell, were good.  Seems like everyone got things they really wanted but wouldn’t buy for themselves.  One of my favorite new toys has a name.  It’s either Samantha, Serena or Karen depending on if I want to hear American (blah), British (ooohh!) or Australian (too grating) accents.  There are male voices too, but I’m thinking they’ll do nothing for me.  Unless maybe it’s James Earl Jones  (Darth Vader, “This . . . is CNN” and the blind guy in “The Sandlot”)

Zach, being married and having a house & all got some very neat stuff, or some very boring stuff, depending on your view point.  We did the boring thing and helped him out with new family room furniture.  Unfortunately, that was a couple months ago, so we got him some odds & ends too so there’d be stuff under the tree for him.  Eric made out pretty well, got all his wish list items and the girls got spoiled rotten too.

No bowling for the last two weeks.  Amazingly, my thumb seems to be healing nicely.  Still plenty of callous & dry skin, but nothing more than the norm for this time of year.  Finally get back to bowling this Thursday.  Can’t wait.  The last session left a very bad taste in my mouth that I can’t wait to rinse out with some good scores.

Finally got the snow blower running this past weekend.  Just in time for this weeks weather.  The starter motor is definitely shot – looks like one of the rotor windings has a bad connection.  If the motor happens to stop with the brushes in contact with the bad winding, the motor – she don’t go.  When you’re holding the starter in your hand, it’s simple to just grab the gear, pull it out and move the rotor a little.  Get it back onto a good winding and it hums along fine.  Now the starter motor is back in place, dead, just to keep crap from getting into the engine case.  Costs about $100 for a new motor.  I’m not really inclined to replace it.  Eric was able to lend his back to the pull starting effort.  I think my problem earlier was that I had completely drained the fuel.  After re-filling the gas tank, I probably didn’t prime the system enough and the fuel just didn’t fill the system.  My last attempt, after a few tries with the (now dead) electric start and a few minutes yanking the crank, I got nothing.  I pulled the spark plug to see if it was maybe flooded or fouled and smelled no gas at all.  Figured the carburetor jets were plugged. Turns out that maybe the carburetor bowl just wasn’t full.  It’s that, or Eric flashed his badge at the motor and it decided it’d better start, or else.  He got it to pop on the first pull.  I fiddled with the choke & throttle and it was up & running in two more pulls.  Nice to have strong, young backs around from time to time.  For the record?  I started the blower with one pull last night – so I still got it.  It’s just deeper.

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