Berck woke me up at 1 am last night when he and his dad got home from flying the Airbus simulator to tell me all about it. “That was well worth coming to Memphis for.” Maybe he can write more about it here… if he ever stops working on the car.

Berck got me up this morning to say it was time to go work on it. His dad drove us to Sears to buy a torque wrench and 12 mm socket, then out to the house. My assignment was to find a machine shop in Memphis to take the engine head so they could grind it down and make it level again. Street Atlas doesn’t have “machine shop” as a category, however, so I didn’t get very far. I called Comcast to see if we could get the newly installed Internet connection working, but I got tired of being on hold after a minute.

I set to work putting our bed together when Berck’s dad came in to say that he had to take grandmother to a doctor’s appointment, so I should go back to Aunt Robin’s house with him to pick up his Miata and take it back to where Berck was continuing to work at the new house.

I packed up our stuff at Aunt Robin’s, so she could have her bed back and we wouldn’t have to drive back and forth to work on the car. I also got a list of machine shops off the Web and printed it out. Then I stopped at Target to get a shower curtain and some other supplies.

I started looking up locations of the machine shops on Street Atlas, but I didn’t have zip codes to go along with the addresses. Street Atlas had to search through all 27 zip codes for each search, so I thought I’d wait on hold for Comcast while I was waiting. Of course, this time, after wading through the menu options, I was connected to a human being right away. The Comcast guys got me connected, but while I was on the phone with them, Berck decided that he needed to take the engine head to a machine shop right away and went through my printed out list by himself, settling on a Napa auto parts store with a machine shop in the back on the other side of town.

Before we headed over there, Berck had to put the top down on his Dad’s car, of course. It’s weird being in a place that gets hot in December again, especially when his dad keeps the heater in the house on all the time.

The shop is in an older part of Memphis, with a barbecue place on either side of it. The guys at shop gave Berck a hard time about having the top off. The fellow in charge told him to get back with him tomorrow evening about the engine head. He didn’t seem concerned about fixing it at all.

In other news, the parts that were supposed to be delivered today hadn’t come by the time Berck’s dad checked his mailbox. That may put a kink in our timing, since parts keep breaking or Berck keeps remembering to order things the day after he put in his last order. The latest is the catalytic converter, which had one of its studs unattach itself as Berck was trying to disconnect the exhaust. A new catalytic converter is $200, and this one is far from being used up, other than the unattached stud. Berck is wondering if he should try to extract it and the other studs that he assumes will break off as well with the drill press or save himself the trouble and order a new one. Which takes longer—for the new one to arrive after a cross-country journey or to jerry-rig the existing one—is up in the air.

In Internet news, Comcast took over our cable provider and changed our IP address. Berck called them to try to find out what it was (so we can get our mail and put the blog back up), but they couldn’t figure out how to give it to him. So we will remain silent for all of those who have no idea how to get here.

Tomorrow: (sigh) Memphis.