……. when you really need it. This is ridiculous. We’re literally counting the sleeps until we leave for Guadalajara. For me that should be the end of the cold. I don’t plan to come back to Regina when we get back into Canada. Marilyn on the other hand will have a couple more months of deep freeze to look forward to. But by the time we get back to Calgary the days should be getting noticeably longer which always makes it a little easier to bear.
In the meanwhile though its just damn cold. Yesterday we thought we’d let the crowds settle down a bit and let the weather warm up a bit. We waited until noon before starting the truck and venturing downtown. I’d say we failed on both objectives. The crowds were gawdawful and it was still gawdamn cold. I could only put up with the crowds for an hour and a half before Marilyn brought me home. She carried on into the early evening and judging by the shopping bags she arrived home with must have had fun.
Its hard to get enthused about writing a weblog post when there’s not a lot going on. I’ve got a couple of minor projects on the go but I’m having more success with procrastinating than I am with progressing them.
How about those we’re-still-idle protesters? They’re gonna kill that poor deluded chief. She started her stupid little hunger strike never thinking that she’d have to carry it through until she starved to death. I’m sure her ill conceived plan anticipated the PM caving in and meeting with her before she even really noticed that she was hungry. In most cases those stupid protests quietly fade away over a big dinner but not this time. She sorely misjudged the will of the PM but she also misjudged the fervour of her so-called spokesmen who have seized on the opportunity to create a martyr. Now she’s in a can’t win situation being advised by people with an agenda and the agenda requires her to starve to death. Meanwhile her brain which was demonstrably feeble to begin with is (likely) now further addled by starvation. Not a good situation and it has to end badly.
Meanwhile the so-called protesters that have jumped on the bandwagon of the chief’s impending death are no better than the hooligans that burned Vancouver or Toronto. There may be the occasional well meaning participant but most of them are just looking for a chance to be part of a mob.
The only other item on the news these days is the famous fiscal cliff which has now apparently been turned into a fiscal slope. “Fiscal cliff” must have been deemed too scary for the sheeple to hear repeatedly so it has been downgraded. Smoothed off with an editorial grader so to speak. Its all BS anyway – the cliff or slope that they are trying so desperately to blame on each other doesn’t even come close to addressing the fact that the US is bankrupt.
I think there will be some real buy and hold bargains in the market by about mid-Feb.
And finally, how about that internet? What a resource Google has become. I can’t imagine life without it. Lately I have been trying to do as much of my vehicle service as I think I am capable of. First off I kind of like pulling wrenches as long as I’m not on an agenda. Second I get pretty well paid when you consider what the service shops think their time is worth. And finally with the assistance of the internet I think that – most of the time anyway - I can do a better job than I can buy. I’ve done pretty well all the mechanical work on the boat since we bought it with the exception of hiring little short Pat to change the motor mounts in Seattle. And I don’t think anybody other than a tire jockey has put a wrench on the frenchy-bus since Luke released it from his shop in Vineland.
The project for today was tightening the parking brake on the Lincoln. I was dreading starting it because I remember well past experiences with parking brake adjustment nuts that were frozen up solid from years of road salt. In this case the car is 10+ years old with likely the original parking brake cable so I was prepared for a fustercluck. First step for every new-to-me service adventure now is to research it on Google.
Mr. Google pretty quickly pulled up that picture but it took quite a bit of searching to figure out where the adjuster is located. Fortunately our Lincoln is on a really popular platform. Most of its siblings call themselves Crown Vics or Grand Marquis but once you strip off the chrome they’re all basically the same car. I was thinking probably directly under the driver’s right foot but it turned out to be immediately ahead of the rear driver side wheel. And it turned out to be a really good, incredibly simple mechanism. The arrow points to a U-clip that straddles the cable. You slide the clip off (but it is caged so it doesn’t go flying off to lurk forever in some dark corner of the shop). Then you let the spring take up the tension on the cable and slide the clip back over the cable. It took about 4X as long to run the car up on ramps as it did to make the adjustment and the whole project didn’t cost me any blood. Gotta love that on a miserably cold day in Regina – or any other day for that matter.
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