Oh, I’m tired. Just plain worn out today. It’s been a typical hot and humid Arkansas day, with the last several work hours taking place on the hot, radiating blacktop.
The sweat just poured.
After the rain we received, the humidity has returned, so instead of 103 degrees and super hot but relatively dry air after months of no rain during our flash drought, it was mid 90s and… humid. So I was drippy drippy. There was so much sweat I just had to laugh. I’d lean over, and my head was like a badly leaking faucet. It’s just amazing that a body spit that much water out through its skin–multiple drops per second slipping from my face and splashing on the ground.
Nutty.
Just nutty.
So despite trying to stay hydrated, I’m dehydrated right now with a little bit of a dehydration headache.
But not too bad.
Four cars today. First was supposed to be an alternator replacement. I’d diagnosed it several weeks back after putting a starter in it. I started it up, fixing the first problem, but then the alternator wasn’t charging. So today I went back after several weeks, and before swapping out the alternator, I decided to test it again, and today it was all working just fine.
Go figure.
So… me being the conservative mechanic that I am, I recommended not changing out the alternator unless/until it has issues again. We let it run for a good while, but it was fine the whole time. That was a 2008 Buick Lucerne.
Second car was a 2005 Mazda 6 that was hesitating on accelerating. It had a pending misfire code on cylinder 5, and given the description by the customer (hesitating while accelerating and hesitating a lot at a particular speed), it sounded exactly like a bad coil.
Malaki swapped #4 and #5 coils, and they took it out for a test drive, but the misfire wouldn’t come back enough to trip even the pending misfire trigger, so I explained what he’d want to do going forward, that it was likely a coil, and if the misfire came back and switched from cylinder 5 to cylinder 4, he’d just need to replace the coil, which he could do himself, just needing an 8mm socket and ratchet. I also gave him a heads up on a likely CV axle issue. He’s heading back to Little Rock, so he should feel a lot better now knowing what he’s got going on.
Third car was a 2002 Ford E150 van with a window that came sliding all the way down and wouldn’t go back up. As per usual, it was a window regulator that had grenaded itself, and because it was a Ford, that meant rivets instead of bolts. In the past, I’ve just replaced the rivets with bolts, washers, and nuts, but today I was like, no, I need to get the right rivet gun (I had a rivet gun, but Ford uses extra large 1/4-inch rivets, and none of my adapters fit that big of a rivet), so I went to AutoZone in Fayetteville, off of MLK,
No dice.
Then I went to Lowe’s and figured I’d be solid finding one there.
Nope.
So I looked up online to see of O’really’s had one, and it said they did, so I headed over, passing Tractor Supply along the way and thinking I’d swing by there next in case O’reilly’s didn’t have what I needed, but they did, thankfully. I bought the rivet gun. Malaki was waiting for me with it all apart when I got back, and he finished up the job after that.
We’d had a lot of other jobs get canceled or postponed, so that was the last one for the day, and it was still pretty early.
On the drive home, however, we got a call for a 2011 Nissan Maxima that died while driving. Turned out to be a bad alternator, and that was the beastly hot job on the blacktop for… four or five hours until the sun went nearly all the way down, and the wind made it tolerable.
That one kicked my butt a bit. I’d done an alternator on a 3.5 Nissan I don’t know how many times, but I guess I keep forgetting how I do it because I thought I had it all figured out, but then I didn’t. So I tried another way, and that didn’t work, just added another 40 minutes to the job. Finally, Malaki managed to find a way to get the alternator out without doing some of the things I thought might be necessary.
So that was super good. Big kudos to Malaki for that one. He’s doing better. Still making mistakes that could be pretty costly, like forgetting to put a clamp on a coolant hose. That can be a catastrophic mistake, but he’s learning quickly, and most important of all, his approach is shifting to looking up everything, not assuming he knows, and that’s fabulous. That’s the approach that’ll make him successful, being careful, checking on everything until you have the experience to not have to look some things up because you already know them well enough. Even after six years, though, I look up stuff all the freaking time. It’s just how it is when you work on every make and model out there. You learn on nearly every car you go to. It’s not like the dealer where you do the same jobs on the same cars day in and day out and it’s all the same.
Mom came home today. That was cool. Good to have her back for the relatively short time we have her. She’ll be flying out again Thursday and likely starting to split her time between Arkansas and Utah going forward. I think that’ll be good for her, and with our lives here in upheaval as we prepare for where we’re going to next (Thomas and I, anyway), it’ll be… interesting to see what’s on the horizon.
Tired. Thirsty. Little headache.
I’ve been a little preoccupied today. Today is the anniversary of a day that has a lot of history for me in my life in some really hard ways over multiple years. But I’ve been able to stay above it all day, so that’s good, and if I can hit my head to the pillow without thinking about it further, we’ll call that a victory.
New Zealand? I… haven’t decided yet.
Alone…
Anyone want to go? 🙃
Thinking I’m going to go to the New Zealand part of the trip but not Australia. That would be stinky for my all 7 continents goal, as I lack only Australia and Antarctica, but… can I really take six weeks off right now with everything so crazy, to travel around the world alone when I’m about to turn 41?
Who knows. Gonna think about it a bit more tomorrow and either pull the trigger on what I’m going to pull the trigger on or just let it slip by. It’s not a big deal, honestly. So… we’ll see. There will be both disappointment and relief if I don’t go and excitement and anxiety if I do.
Hope you all had a happy Saturday.
Love and hugs.
Lift the World
~ stephen
Lift the World 
Your true love could be waiting for you in New Zealand. A travel partner would be ideal. But every step you take will make a difference in your future. Utah seemed to have lifted your spirits.
40-41…you’re still very young. Travel while you have the energy and freedom to do it.