Our Dumb Blog

Berck and I spent the night at the new house last night. I had to literally make our bed. We got up and fortified ourselves on salt & vinegar potato chips, the breakfast of champions, and set to work on the car.

Berck decided to get some sanding pads to clean the gasket sealer off the top of the engine block, since our scrubbing with carburetor cleaner had only marginal results. The rest of the contents of the storage units arrived after noon, and the house got a lot fuller with disassembled furniture and unpacked boxes. It also meant the appearance of the drill press, so Berck could drill through the stud stumps in the catalytic converter. The only problem is that we couldn’t find the chuck key to change the drill bit. We searched through all the boxes marked workshop but to no avail. Finally, I went out to Lowes to try to buy a new one. Unfortunately, they didn’t have any big enough. So I found a Home Depot; they had larger ones, but I was still 1/16th inch short. I looked at the drill press they had on display, pulled its chuck key off the side of it, and thought about putting it in my pocket and walking out with it.

I informed Berck of my failure when I returned. He called his dad, who said he would look for one at Sears. A little later he returned with success. He had gone into the Home Depot and told them his drill press he had just gotten didn’t have a chuck key, so they went in the back and gave him one. I guess if they won’t sell you one they might give one to you.

The end result is that we don’t have to buy a new catalytic converter. All of the stuff we ordered has arrived except for the stuff we called in this morning. Berck called the guy at the machine shop who told him to “check wi’ me mawr e’nin,” and he told him, “Hmm, at’ll be MAWR e’nin.”

Grandmother decided that she absolutely had to move into the new house today, despite not having a bed yet. So now the thermostat is turned to 80 degrees. We closed the vent to our room and will probably sleep with the window open. After Berck cleared an area of her room of boxes and inflated an air mattress for her, she asked Berck’s dad, “I thought you said you had a comforter I could use?” He set up a TV for her in there and gave her a quilt.

Yesterday Berck’s dad took her to the doctor for a persistent cough she’s got that she’s been complaining about constantly. When the doctor came in to see them and asked how she was feeling, she smiled and answered, “Oh, just fine!” When they left, Berck’s dad asked her if the doctor had given her anything for her cough. “No, he just said if it wasn’t gone in a week to come back and see him.”

Berck’s dad is a physician himself, so he was furious that he’d gone through the trouble of taking her to the doctor if he wasn’t even going to do anything to treat her symptoms. Berck and I went over to Aunt Robin’s house last night to meet his dad to go out to dinner, and I popped in to say hi to grandmother. She asked if I could do her a favor and gave me a prescription and a $20 bill (because clearly I’d have time to fill it on the way for the three of us to go out to eat but her son hadn’t on the way home from the doctor’s visit). “I just don’t want to bother him,” she said.

Berck’s dad rolled his eyes when I told him this and complained to the pharmacist, when we stopped at a Walgreen’s after supper, that this was a waste of time, filling a prescription for a placebo. We got back, and Berck’s dad took the prescription back to his mom. He came out of her room furious. “You know what she just told me? ‘I forgot to tell you…’ The doctor gave her a cortisone shot.”

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.

Monday, December 11, 2006
Southern Tour — Day 3, Sokoban

We started off the day with a big breakfast at Perkins. Then we drove our Miata out to Berck’s dad’s new house. He and Berck’s grandmother bought it so he can take care of her. It’s a huge house. Next we took grandmother home to Aunt Robin’s house (all three of them are staying there presently) and went to rent a truck.

Berck’s dad went to U-Haul, despite Berck telling him he’d be sorry. He had called to reserve a truck an hour ahead of time. We got to the place, which had more U-Haul trucks than I’ve ever seen at one time before. It being a weekday, there were plenty to go around. The clerks told us we could have the truck until 6 o’clock. Berck’s dad said he would go ahead and get it for 24 hours, since it would be the same price anyway. They said he could only have that truck until 6. Why? Because it was reserved for the next day. We walked out in disgust. This is how U-Haul always is and why Berck and I go out of our way to use Penske or Budget.

The storage place where Berck’s dad has his stuff has a truck you can rent, and it was for the same price as well. The girl who waited on us was very helpful, giving us a half day instead of a full day’s price. It turned out that we only needed 2 and a half hours to load up most of a storage space, drive it to the new house (which is way out on the southeast side of Memphis), unload it, and bring it back. She didn’t even fuss at us when we told her we forgot to fill up the tank before we brought the truck back.

We moved the contents of the one storage space because it had the tools in it, the tools Berck needed to work on the car. So we drove back out to the house, stopping at Sam’s to get some good oil and Advanced Auto to get a jack, jack stands, oil filters, cheap oil, and antifreeze and Auto Zone to buy some latex gloves.

While Berck started taking apart the car, his dad and I started unpacking the kitchen boxes and finding places to put things. We got most of them done by the time it was time to leave.

Berck had called the Mazda dealer in Birmingham where we orders all of his parts and discovered that they should all get here tomorrow (and they had a special on free shipping). He also called Flyin’ Miata in Grand Junction, Colorado to get their advice on our predicament. They said that it was quite possible that he had a warped head (but we already knew that), and he could probably take it to a machine shop, and they would grind it down to make it fit again. If we’ve got a cracked head, I don’t know what we’ll do.

The three of us then went out to eat at a very yummy Chinese restaurant. Currently, Berck and his dad are at the flight simulator training headquarters for FedEx, where they have two hours booked in an Airbus sim.

We were supposed to be attending a bris for Berck’s cousin Michael’s new son in the morning, but the pediatrician said, because he has a rash, it should be postponed. I didn’t know the timing on these things was negotiable. Berck’s dad seems to think the pediatrician is an idiot. Aunt Robin is bummed, because she had planned a big event afterward.

And I am heading to bed, because I worked hard today and am very tired.

Southern Tour – Day 2

We ended up eating at Chili’s last night after driving around and not being able to find anywhere else we wanted to eat. There were tons of cars parked downtown, which meant there were hundreds of people going out somewhere nice, I’m sure, but I couldn’t figure out where. So we gave up and had cheese sticks and chicken fingers at a place we could anywhere in America. The good part is that they had Shiner Bock on tap, and after an exhausting and frustrating day, all we wanted to do was sit and relax for a bit.

When we returned to the motel, Berck decided that we did indeed have a busted head gasket, if not a cracked or warped head as well. So then we had to decide what to do next. All of the tools are in our apartment in Colorado, so we could try to make it back home. On the other hand, Memphis is closer (and on our route), and Berck’s dad probably has most of the tools we would need. He also has a new house with a garage in which we can work (something we don’t have back home). So we decided to press on to Memphis. Berck will order parts on Monday, which will hopefully get in Wednesday. Also, Berck has time scheduled in an Airbus simulator at the FedEx training headquarters (not for any good reason other than his dad knows a trainer there).

We stopped in Broken Arrow for some huevos Mexicanas then got into Memphis around 5. Street Atlas failed us as our exit was blocked off, then our alternate exit didn’t exist. But we finally managed to get off of I-40 and to Aunt Robin’s house. She and Berck’s dad and grandmother and we all went out to a delicious Vietnamese restaurant.

Berck stopped every couple hundred miles to refill the radiator, so it’s a relief to be somewhere where we don’t have to worry about the car dying.