Ouch

This past weekend was a scorcher. That's bad enough to deal with, but when the lawn and the car needs work there's no waiting.

I did my usual lawn chores on Saturday which yielded a lawn looking like a rich green carpet in front of the house. I was exhausted and dehydrated by the end of the job. A shower never felt better than it did after that.

And Sunday was car day. The car needed some fresh transmission fluid. The old tranny oil was looking more like maple syrup. If you don't know better, it's supposed to be PINK! The car has a drain plug so the job went rather quickly. It was also a good day to wash the poor thing. As I did so I noticed the exhaust seemed to be a little loose. Upon closer inspection I found the rear hanger snapped off taking a large piece of the intermediate pipe with it. I didn't have the energy to replace this at this time so I wired it back into place and clamped some sheet metal over the hole. That's that.

After a shower we headed to the inlaws. I fixed my guitar amp that the father-in-law had borrowed. Somehow the fuse blew, and he chose not to tell me about it. My brother-in-law was working on the brakes on the Lumina. A lot of these jobs can be done by one person, but having the extra set of hands around makes it all easier. I assisted as much as I could. I did some gofer work getting brake lines and stuff. Somehow I have good hands when assembling those things, so did some of that. And in good time it was all over with. Mostly new equipment in the back of that car and it felt like new.

But what is this? Why are the brake lights not working on one side. Crap. Neither will the hazards work on that side? Phuc. What is this? We swap out the bulbs. Same thing. ok. Let's try a test light. Juice to one side, but not the other. What gives? After a lot of testing and checking the schematics it turns out to be the switching system in the steering column. That's a $100 part and you have to pull the steering wheel. Crap. I'm glad it's not my problem, but it IS Manny's, so I wish him an easy job on this.