2021-10-27 — Four Down

No excuses.

Day 4 was a bit more challenging, in several ways, but still good. Every day is a good day, right?

Up at 5, check. 5×5, check (shower even cleaner, room cleaner, carved up a whole rock hard dirt bed to make the soil soft [easier to pull up any weeds that should grow while we figure out what to do with that particular bed], driveway cleaner, etc. etc.

Exercise, check (better today, still needing improvement). I tried to do sit-ups again today, and it was harder, since the muscles were a little more tired than normal and a tad sore, but I managed to do 5 minutes of sit-ups without a break, so that was kind of cool. Wish I would have paid attention to what it was the other day (these are sit-ups done on a weight bench with my legs locked into the leg lift end, by the way, so not knees up sit-ups… these are legs flat and being held in place, so a good bit easier?)

Meditation, check (focusing on affirming what I want most and the attitude I want to have in all circumstances (cheerful, unfailingly optimistic, grateful, energetic, indomitable [I love that word 🙃], etc.). Breakfast, check. Planning, check. NP time, check (more working on name ideas that I’ve posted the appropriate site page), tax time, check (going back through every. single. purchase from 2019 to verify what it was and which category the purchase falls into for reporting purposes.

Morning was the lightest part of the day. Didn’t take long before things went sideways while working on cars. But… bring it on (it’s amazing what positive progress, determination, refocus, and whatever else you might want to call what I’ve been doing lately can do for the psyche and general sense of well being!).

First car was a 2011 Silverado that… threw me for a loop. The customer called with oil-pressure concerns, and in a Chevy truck, every single time, that’s meant a bad oil pressure sensor. Well, I got to the truck, checked the codes, but there were no oil-pressure codes. What there were were lean codes for both banks. I tried to start the truck, and it just cranked and cranked and cranked. I couldn’t hear the fuel pump, so I opened the fuse block, and… there was no fuel pump fuse. Nor was there a fuel pump relay. The slots were completely empty. 🤷‍♂️

So I put in a fuse and swapped the relay over from the fog lights to the fuel pump, and it took it a bit, but it started (oil pressure fine, by the way). But then… after a minute or two, the oil pressure dropped down to 0. I chatted with the customer, and he said no one messed with the fuse or relay, so I took them both out, and the truck still started. 😶

That’s… not possible. Except… it happened. 🤷‍♂️

So then it was back to being an oil pressure issue. I pulled the oil pressure sensor out, and then I pulled the oil pressure sensor filter out, and the filter was covered in gunk, so I figured that was the issue, as that’s a very common issue with those, so I spent a good while cleaning out the filter, and then I put in a new sensor (no sense putting back the old one as they’re such a commonly needed part anyway and not very expensive), fired it up, and wahoo! pressure was good.

For a while. 😕 After a few minutes, it dropped right back down to dangerous levels.

?!?!

Side note, it was pouring down rain, so that was… fun. I also dropped the sensor pulling it out, and Chevy puts the sensor in an awkward place, and so when the sensor fell, it fell somewhere on the back of the transmission where you can’t really reach and can’t really see anything.

Gratefully, and mostly thanks to the gazillions of motivational speeches I’ve been listening to on YouTube, I was able to much more quickly push out the poor reactions and zero in on how the kind of person I want to be would react when things go sideways.

So that was really neat. Plenty of opportunities to practice today, and plenty of poor initial reactions and just as many or nearly as many quick pullouts. 😊

So that was good.

I tried to test the oil pressure, but my oil pressure tester kit didn’t have the right adapter (go figure. 95% of all oil pressure sensors that go bad in my experience are on GM products, and that’s the one size my tester kit doesn’t have. Right. 🙃 Anyway, so I ended up calling it at that point, rather wet from lying on the ground in the puddles to try and find the lost sensor (which I did finally find), and having spent a lot longer time there than I wanted to, and not being able to charge what I’d expected because I didn’t really get a complete diagnosis because I couldn’t test the actual oil pressure itself, just cleaned the filter and replaced the sensor (the latter of which it didn’t need). Realistically, it probably needs an oil pump, which is a very costly repair–probably around $1500).

Second car was referred by a taxi service that uses me regularly when they need help. He thought it was a bad fuel injector. I went to his work, picked up the key, went to the Jeep Liberty where it broke down, no misfire codes, and when I finally got it to start (quickly pulsing the gas pedal), it made an awful racket. Pulled the oil dipstick, and it was bad… coolant and oil sludge mix.

Time for a new motor.

I drove back and gave him the bad news, and he was steamed. He’d just replaced the engine–twice!

Third car was one that’s been on the docket to get back to for a good while, and it wasn’t one I was looking forward to (thermostat in a 2007 Mazda CX-7). Not that it’s a bad job. It was actually easier than I thought, but it looked hard at first, and so I wasn’t looking forward to it. But when I got there to work on it, I went to drain the radiator after pulling the power steering pump out, and I saw coolant at the bottom of the radiator, so I was like, great. He’s got a bad radiator, too. He’s been waiting two weeks, and now it’s gonna get delayed further.

I wanted to be sure, so I grabbed my cooling system pressure tester set, and pressured up the system, and I heard a hissing, but it wasn’t from the radiator: It was from a little rubber hose on the back of the engine buried underneath a bunch of turbo and other stuff.

Loverly.

Not only that, but the coolant level was low, which threw me for a loop, because I’d checked that before, and it took like a half a gallon to fill back up. Come to find out, the customer has been driving it, when I told him he could ruin his engine driving it.

Go figure. So that’s why it was low. Leaking hose in the back (and possibly radiator), and he’s been driving it like that.

Well, in the process of taking things out to get to the busted hose, I found a split turbo intake pipe, the pcv hose was so stuck on that it came out in pieces, and the turbo intake boot was also split.

Loverly.

Needless to say, the job wasn’t getting done today, which meant he needed to rent a car, and parts won’t be in until Friday, so… I’ll be back again probably on Saturday.

So it’s been a long day, and I didn’t make much of anything, but I did a lot better in becoming who I want to become, so that’s… the most important thing.

Wahoo!

I’ve wanted to be a motivational speaker for years, and listening to all these speeches has resurrected that in spades. Maybe I can incorporate that as part of my nonprofit. Who knows.

Love to all.

Lift the World. 🙂

~ stephen

p.s. My costume came today! Funny! It came next day instead of on the 29th. Perhaps I didn’t need to spend all that dough on the really expensive shipping. Though, I didn’t want to risk it, and I don’t take the decision back. I’d do the same thing over again.

p.p.s. No movies, no tv, no news, no sports news, no porn. Check. 4 days.