travis' brain dump

so… i’m putting around on the internet this morning and saw this video up on CNN.

link to said article & video:

http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/offbeat/2007/08/01/vo.philippines.prison.dance.reut

Apparently in the Phillipines you’re not only put in prison, but forced to dance… *scratches head* *shrug* I figured YouTube had to have something up on this and found some videos and a funny hack video of it… I so had to share. I kind of find it an entertaing way to handle inmates. hehe

Be warned… it’s disturbing.

“Thriller” 

“Radio Ga Ga”

and the hack jobs… these were some of the better ones…

for those that wanted the original and requested it to compare… lol

well… this has been a pretty exciting last few days. (can you feel the sarcasm there?)

A little history…

Ever since my trip in May my car has had an odd idle/sound to it. I took it lightly as I had no other symptoms and the car seemed to be running fine, despite sounding like a subaru, lol. The major issue that arose I thought I was past. I had to replace my turbo a week after I returned due to blown oil seals. (it had 86,000 miles on it. i’d say it had a good life) A few weeks into May I noticed I had a little steam or what appeared to be steam coming from the PCV system on the valve cover. (fresh air side) It was puzzling, but again no major symptoms. A week or so later, I noticed I was burning oil still. Not major, but just a little hear and there. Again, no major issues. So this continued and I noticed the “steam” was getting a little more and more as time was passing. While a concern for me I wasn’t freaking out quite yet. A couple weeks ago, Mike was following me and said I was smoking pretty decently. It smelled a lot like fuel but showed up during a decel and when I got on it. We marked it up to be a possible problem with my drain line from the turbo. It was something we had considered changing anyway, so last week I did so on Friday. Well, Saturday morning I get up to head over to the store to pick some stuff up and as I’m driving I start blowing smoke out from under my hood, tailpipe and anywhere else that had an opening into the engine. Panic struck. When I got to the store I popped the hood and there was oil ALL OVER. Now, at this point I’m about to just give up. Anyone who has been following events the last few months knows this pretty much was the bitter icing on the worst cake ever made.

I got the car back home (after shopping, lol) and started tearing the engine down. I figured it must be a blown head gasket or something. I honestly thought worse, but I was trying to be optimistic and keep my head up about things. I got the cylinder head removed that afternoon and wouldn’t ya know it… blown compression ring. My “steam” was blow-by from the crank case being pressurized. o.O So, this was quite possibly the worst case scenario at this point for me. I might as well have thrown a rod or cracked a piston or something. The only positive in all of this? I keep a supply of motors in my garage. LOL I called around and got an engine crane from a buddy of mine. Andy and I headed over to pick it up so I could start the project. Luckily Andy was off.

So I got the whole thing started and had the motors swapped by 10/11 Sunday night. After a job interview and some errand running, we finished up the rest of the connections in about four hours last night. Total project time. ~14 hours. Not too bad for a complete swap of motors and such. I did have a panic moment at one point when we couldn’t get the car to shift into first. Turns out it was just a misalignment of the shift linkage on the transmission… *whew* So, now the car is running well again. No smoke, no “steam”… I’m running a stock clutch right now and dropped the boost down to 8psi while I debate my next move as to what I’m going to do with the car. We shall see.

Well, things to do. So… later. 🙂

Well, nothing really has been too blogworthy lately, except the stories i’ll share shortly. *shrug* It has been much more recent (those of you in the public world who don’t see the private posts) than June 16th since my last post. Again if you’re a friend/family/etc you can always request a login. 🙂 Things are still counting down for the wedding in December. So much to do still. It’s going to be an incredibly busy 5 months getting things around the house done before the end of the year. But it will be worth it. We can start the new year out somewhat relaxed hopefully and just enjoy being a family rather than putting out fires. *knocks on wood*

So…

Arwen shaved her head yesterday. Ok, so she didn’t shave it, but to my shock and horror, she cut a huge amount off. In the time it took me to post 6 resumes and reply to two emails, little Arwen the wonder monkey, scaled up onto the counter and on top of the fridge to fetch the scissors. She was a child with a mission and nothing was going to stop her. She proceeded to sneak upstairs and into the bathroom and go to work on her new hairstyle. No more than thirty minutes after I had last seen her watching TV in the living room, I happened upon her in mid-style. My first response was ‘ WHAT ARE YOU DOING!? ‘ to which she dropped the scissors, jumped over the toilet and dove into the bathtub. However humored I was, shock had already taken over and I was losing it. At least I held myself together enough to try to figure a way to resolve the problem at hand. I assessed the situation, sent pictures via mobile snapshot to Amanda and my mom and cried right along with her while I evened out the mess before taking her over to have the rest repaired by Shelley over at Arvada Hair Co. Shelley did an amazing job though and thanks to my mom for footing the bill. 🙂 Pictures of Arwen’s new do will be posted up in the next few days in the picture section.

In other news. Amanda got through some car trouble this week and I’m really proud of her. She went out yesterday morning to crank her car and much to her surprise, dead. Evidently her battery had corroded over pretty well and there wasn’t enough connection to conduct enough power to crank. Oops… 🙁 Well, she called up her brother who came over and jumped her car off and got it started. Sadly this wasn’t the end of the problems, just the beginning. Now her car was stalling and hesitating while she was attempting to drive anywhere and not acting very happy. She took her car over to her brother’s house after work for an oil change and to take a look at the problems at hand. No luck, the car still ran horrible. Tyler and I both suggested she take her car over to Autozone and get CEL code checked to see what the problem was. P1580 — At least it pointed to the problem right? Despite the fact the person at Autozone had NO idea what that code meant at least we got it. Luckily I had the chart with all the codes on it. 🙂 Well, good ole Volkswagen in all their German ingenuity can’t seem to make the throttle actuator alignment survive a dead battery. Go figure. So I had Amanda go over to Checker Auto and pick up a 10mm wrench (for the battery terminals) and terminal cleaner. Yay! After about 15 minutes the terminal clamps and the posts were nice n shiney and we let the car sit for a few hours to clear out any settings stored in the ECU. We got back on the phone and Amanda followed the steps perfectly to realign the throttle alignment actuator. She did awesome and wouldn’t ya know it? Car runs great now. :) The car still has a couple issues with it, but I’ll take care of those soon enough. Already know what those are thankfully and it shouldn’t take too much effort to fix. Hopefully we don’t need a new switch unit though. That wouldn’t be fun, but alas not the end of the world. Again proud of ya babe, you did great working on your car today. 🙂

Well, I think thats pretty much it. Other than that, things are going pretty normal around the house. Garden got all finished, lawn looks great, trees are pruned… outside is all done. lol. I’ve started working on the guest room again however. At the rate I’m going I should have it all done within the next couple of weeks. Just glad I’ve got everything needed to finish the walls. The new carpet, retiling of the hallway/entry and the new door will have to wait a little bit, but overall that’s easy stuff I can do on a Saturday afternoon so whenever I get some extra cash, I’ll knock that out pretty quick. Next major projects… two new windows for the front… Gotta knock those out before winter for sure. At least then I’m down to just one more main window (upstairs master bedroom) and the little windows in the bathrooms and kitchen… woohoo! 🙂

Well, it’s time to wind down for the night. Got a busy day tomorrow building a deck with Brett and it starts early.

later.

You know, sometimes I just don’t think I blog enough. Then again, not much as been going on recently in the way of new news. However, I noticed today I never made a post in the public section about this but Amanda and I set a date, so to all of you out there… December 27th in Colonia Juarez, Mexico we’re getting married! 🙂 I can’t wait… probably apparent most by the countdown clocks at the bottom of my blogsite here (still trying to figure out how to integrate it north) and the top of Amanda’s site… hehe You’d think we were anxious or something huh? lol  

So, that’s probably the single most important piece of news that anyone could have missed, so don’t worry, I’m not continuing to hold out on anything too exciting. Everything else has been pretty calm around here, nothing really new. Continuing to do some housework, so things are getting nicer around here little by little. I’ve been really focused on the yard more than anything the last week. Trying to get all the tree limbs from a windstorm we had last week as well as other prunings and such all staged up for hauling off the last weekend of this month. I’ve also been clearing out a second section to expand the garden area some. I know Amanda is stoked about that as she’s looking forward to having a garden next year. I just have to figure out what I’m going to do with the overabundance of grape vines back there. LOL

Well, that about covers it. Maybe I’ll find something new and funny to post up for all of you this week. Until then… stay tuned.