This past week and a half has been a boring blur. Nothing much of interest has been going on, and I keep losing track of which day it is because each day has been like the last. I spent several hours cleaning my truck on Sunday. Several hours may seem excessive, until you consider that it’s been a couple of years since I last washed it. I had already scraped all the dried mud off the wheels last week before I had the new tires mounted ’cause I didn’t want the guys at the tire shop to be pissed that they had to do it. I removed a couple of pounds of gravel, sand, and dirt from the floor mats (no, not carpet mats, luckily–the big meaty rubber kind). I found about a dozen toys or pieces thereof in the back seat. I’m pretty efficient at getting my money’s worth at the car wash–I was able to wash the entire exterior for only $4.75 in quarters, which was all I could scrape up around the house. Now that the truck is clean and shiny inside and out, you can blame me for all the rain (and subsequent mudslides) we’ve had lately.
I changed the air filter on the truck today for the first time since I bought it three years ago. I know, that’s terrible, but I have a good excuse, or at least a non-flimsy excuse. When I bought the truck there was a sticker on the air filter housing that said it had a K&N filter in it, and I had no reason to doubt that. Those filters are supposed to be good for 50,000 miles, and I’ve only driven the truck 16,000 miles in the past three years. I decided to check the truck today to see if the air filter needed cleaning, and learned that there was in fact not a K&N filter in it. There was so much dust packed into the air filter that a few taps on the ground yielded a very thick pile of dust. I replaced it with a cheap Fram filter from Checker, and even that was $35. I cringe to think of how much the Ford dealer wants for a Motorcraft filter. I took the truck for a spin around the block after replacing the air filter and there was a very noticeable difference in power. Stupid sticker.