Very interesting day.

Headed out to work this morning (“Hey, I cleaned up cat piddle, nothing worse can happen to me today!” heh.) and as I was crossing Grand, heard a little grinding/growling noise from under the right front side of the QX4. Traffic slowed, I tapped my brakes, and the noise grew to a full on metal-on-metal squeal. I got the car over to the right and turned off the main road, and parked with a lurch – felt like something seized.

Preliminary inspection showed the brake caliper assembly wasn’t in the right place – looking closer, the bottom of the caliper had dug a groove into the magnesium rim. If that had happened at highway speeds …

Called the boss, called the wife, and then started looking even closer. The bottom bolt on the caliper was missing. Plain not there. The top bolt was loose. Hmmm – maybe back where I heard the noise? I walked back the way I came for a bit, but didn’t find anything. TMBWitW pulled up, and we headed for the house. (sat at the railroad crossing for about 30 minutes as a train was switching back and forth, and I think they were building the train for departure).

Got home, changed clothes, headed up to the dealer (‘cuz I knew, in my heart, that the bolt was a dealer-only item. I was right), found out that the bolt only cost $4.74. I could pick it up on Monday.

Monday? Yup – the nearest copy of the bolt I needed was sitting in a warehouse in Tennessee and they would Fed-Ex it to the dealer and I could pick it up Monday afternoon. My mind was already racing, worried about transportation with only one vehicle and long commutes to work.

I couldn’t leave the QX4 where it sat – I needed to get it home. I called a member of boss’s networking group to have it towed, and they told me it would be about an hour to an hour and a half. I headed out after an hour, so I wouldn’t be rushed getting there when they called. As I drove along, thinking about how to get the transportation stuff done, something in the road caught my eye.

I though to myself “No way.” This was several blocks before the noise had started, so I didn’t think it was possible. I turned around, parked, waited for traffic to clear, and walked out to pick up the object – because it looked a lot like the bolt off my caliper.

When I got to the QX4, I checked it against the other caliper bolts – and it sure looked right. It fit in the hole, and threaded into the exposed rotor mounting point. I called and canceled the tow truck, drove home, grabbed the tools I would need, (cancelled the part order from Tennessee) and drove back. A little bit of mechanical work later, and the assembly was back in running order. I drove home, got TMBWitW and MEG (and Cinnamon, because she had an appointment today and TMBWitW was going to be taking her) and headed back to the QX4. Once I got the car home, I headed for the hardware store to get a new washer – hey, I found the bolt, I was more than happy to spend 30 cents on a split ring washer – and then tore the assembly apart again so I could put it back together.

30 cents instead of $4.74 and a tow bill? No problem!

Anytime something like this happens, that prevents me from going somewhere or doing something I had planned, I always wonder what God was keeping me from. I had extra toys in the car that were headed for the warehouse; that prevented me from switching cars with TMBWitW – and prevented her from being the one stranded with the broken down SUV. The caliper came apart on a fairly calm stretch of road, instead of on the stretch of highway in my commute, keeping me from having a more catastrophic event. If the caliper assembly had dug into the magnesium rim at highway speed, I wouldn’t have been able to stop before it sliced all the way through, possibly causing a loss of control and the resulting incident afterwards. Not to mention how much more expensive a rim is compared to a 30 cent washer …

All through this, TMBWitW and MEG are recovering from or headed into a stomach bug – MEG was throwing up last night, TMBWitW is feeling nauseous tonight – and the rest of the crew at the store stepped up and picked up my sudden absence.

Chat ya later…

Thanks for stopping by, In GOD We Trust, and Wear Red on Fridays!

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Obama(THHO) has decreed that we, the sheeple, should all drive the General Motors Volt. After all, it is electric (with a gasoline backup engine) and we all should know that electric cars are the future of transportation. So energy efficient! So inexpensive to drive! Cheap to fuel!

Let’s do some math, shall we? I know, Obama(THHO) doesn’t want us doing math and other stuff like thinking for ourselves, so let’s not tell him, OK? (that goes for you dhs bots, too, ok?)

Let’s start with my own vehicle for a starting point, ‘kay? We purchased a 1998 QX4 used in 2004 for about $18,000.

Yeah, it was a little high, but it was in pristine condition and Blue Booked for about 21k at the time. it had a tick over 50k miles on it. It is free and clear with no payment. It averages about 17 1/2 – 18 miles per gallon down hill with a tail wind. It has a 19 gallon tank. Let’s use an average of $4.00 per gallon (ok, fine – $3.999) for the sake of argument. At 17 gallons per week, operating costs (no insurance, repairs or maintenance costs are factored in here) are about $68.00. I have a 20 mile one way commute (24 if I need to swing by the warehouse on the way to work). This works out to about $.2285 per mile ($3.999/17.5), which means a daily cost of a warehouse run on the way and straight home after work would be $10.054.

The Chevy Volt must be incredibly cheap to drive, then, if it can be operated for less than that! Let me go out and plunk down $46,000 for a new Volt.

And a little more for a charging station. And even more for the storage fees needed to store the stuff on my side of the garage since TMBWitW sure isn’t giving up her side and park her Camry out in the elements.

OK, that was a little snarky. I’m sure I could find a cheap, HOA approved shed (less than six feet tall so it doesn’t extend above the fence) where I can store my table saw and other woodworking equipment.

Now – the commute. The QX4 has a cargo area with the seats down of 85 cubic feet. The Volt has a cargo area rated at 10.6 cubic feet. Hmm. That means my commute just went from 24 miles with a warehouse run to over 50, since I would have to make multiple trips to the warehouse. Eight, to be exact. 24 miles warehouse commute, two miles from warehouse to store means 24 miles plus (7×4) 28 miles for the extra runs equals 52 miles one way. OK, so I have to leave a lot earlier too, to drop MEG off at the babysitter and then get to the warehouse and the store and the warehouse and the store and the warehouse and the store warehouse and the store and the warehouse and the store and the warehouse and the store warehouse and the store and the warehouse and the store.

I received an email from my friend Dave T.:

Eric Bolling (Fox Business Channel’s Follow the Money) test drove the Chevy Volt at the invitation of General Motors.

For four days in a row, the fully charged battery lasted only 25 miles before the Volt switched to the reserve gasoline engine.

Let’s see … after 25 miles, the Volt is running on a gasoline engine. It takes ten hours to charge the 16kwh battery. That would put a big dent in the day’s schedule, so the gas engine it is. Hopefully, I’ll have enough time after getting home before having to leave earlier the next day to get a full ten hours of charging done.

Where was I?

Oh, yeah – so, if you can’t count on the electric motor for more than 25 miles, then the vaunted Volt no longer gets the 95 miles per gallon on the electric motor alone. Once you figure in the 9 gallons of gas, the average drops to around 30 mpg. $3.999/30 = $.133 per mile. But wait! I forgot the electricity. 16kwh x 1.19 per kwh (the average cost of electricity) = $19.04 for a 25 mile charge per day. $19.04/25=.761 – $.761 per mile for twenty five miles, then $.133 for the remaining 47 miles works out to $19.04+($.133×47)=$25.291 per day.

So I need to sell my QX4 for about $2500, finance another $43,500 and lose an hour and a half of morning time to reduce my carbon footprint and drive the Volt, which costs more than two and a half times more to operate than my QX4.

If I was a liberal, left leaning DemocRat with Obama stars in my eyes, I might believe that this is actually a good idea.

I would like to take this moment to do two things: mourn the death of common sense, and thank Dave T. for the email that started this line of thought.

(just so you know, i am not selling the QX4 anytime soon, and i am certainly NOT buying a chevy volt. ever.)

Chat ya later…

Thanks for stopping by, In GOD We Trust, and Wear Red on Fridays!

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(shh – it’s my day off. tmbwitw and i are going to spend the day together – movie, lunch, that sort of thing – while meg is at auntie’s. i won’t be online or anything – because it’s time to be with themostbeautifulwomanintheworld.)

Chat ya later…

Thanks for stopping by, In GOD We Trust, and Wear Red on Fridays!

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Sunday was a weird day for me – I woke up – if you can call feeling like a truck rolled over me twice while Tony Stewart was doing donuts on my head “waking up” – with stuffed sinuses and a major headache. Every muscle in my body hurt. TMBWitW got up and took care of the animals, and handed me some meds. I don’t really remember taking them, but I do remember the phone ringing and ringing and ringing thousands of years later. It was Papa, asking if we were OK – because we weren’t at the fellowship yet, and it was almost time to start the studies. I assured him, in what little voice I had, that TMBWitW and MEG were on their way and I would not be there. At least, that’s what I thought I said. I’m not sure if that’s what came out on his end of the phone.

The next time I woke up, TMBWitW was asking me if I was OK, and if I needed anything before she headed back over to Pastor’s house for the afternoon. She gave me another dose of something (oh, how trusting are we when we can’t hold a coherent thought?) and I fell back asleep for a while. I woke up again, just in time to watch the last quarter or so of the game.

At one point, I recall getting a Tweet from Texas Fred regarding the gullibility of some people – and of course, I had to call him. Good talking to you, Fred. We gotta do that more often.

Other than that, Sunday passed quietly and uneventfully. Well, for me, anyway.

Monday I was feeling much better.

Today great progress has been made. The chiropractor has been visited, dry cleaning has been picked up, and the appointment with the Eye, Nose, Throat doctor is on the agenda. Tinnitus is such a drag. It has gotten worse in the last four months, for whatever reason, to the point that without something in the background all I can hear is a constant static ringing loud enough to be distracting when it’s quiet and I’m trying to concentrate on something like reading.

On the up side, one of the insurance companies involved with my wife’s accident has sent a settlement check – but of course, they want to buy her off cheap. The repairs on the car may not be as cheap as they think. After all, they recommend used parts, and the car is not going to be rebuilt using used parts. My wife deserves better than that – since the parts being replaced weren’t used before the accident. We are insisting on OEM parts.

Chat ya later…

Thanks for stopping by, In GOD We Trust, and Wear Red on Fridays!

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My day off has switched to Tuesdays. It may change again in the future, depending on the scheduling needs of the store. We’ve been training a new closer, and so far so good. It will be nice to be back down to 45 hour weeks again …

Since it’s my day off, I will be working on the cars. Mine, because it’s old and needs nearly constant attention, and TMBWitW’s, because it has decided to cop an attitude now that it’s paid off. For instance, today it wants a new starter, I think – I’m going to have to jumpstart it and get it to the nearest diagnostician.

And then there’s the cats.

They have decided that they want to live outside, so I will be building them an area of safe refuge in a shady corner of the yard. You know, keep the dogs out of their food bowls, someplace to curl up and take a nap without worrying about the dogs using them as chew toys, etc. MEG keeps asking when the “Cat House” will be ready for them …

Well, the longer I use the computer the longer the chores will take.

Chat ya later…

Thank you for stopping by, In GOD We Trust, God bless you all, don’t buy or breed cats or dogs while homeless pets die (spay, neuter & adopt a pet, one by one, until there are none), Wear Red on Fridays, and support Warriors for Innocence!

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