This may be old news, but it's new to me: They finally found out what the frequency is, Kenneth.

What the hell? Two days ago it was 80° outside, and I was preparing to install my new swamp cooler this week, and today I wake up to snow. If this crap keeps up, my plans for this week will be shot. I keep blabbing on about how I plan on finishing the dining room, but the end never seems near. Granted, I didn't work on it much this weekend--most of my Saturday was spent trying to get rid of the camper, and Sunday I spent hours and hours just touching up the paint and I only got halfway done. The textured plaster in that room was literally 10 times more difficult to paint that I imagined, and it's impossible to mask off since the tape won't stick to all the crevices. I'm doing touch-ups with an atrist's brush, since it's the only thing small enough to get in all the cracks without splooging paint all over the wood trim. I actually got the new ceiling fan and light kit installed and it looks awesome. I was hoping to cut, paint, and install the baseboard today, but I don't think I want to brave this cold weather. The weekend looks like it'll be decent weather, but I might be so sick of being cooped up in the house by then that I'll want to go hiking or biking and put off working on the house for yet another week.

I just got the Mazda back from Grako's, and I can't believe the difference in handling. Even starting and stopping are completely different--no whiplash whenever I come to a stop. I apparently used to brace myself whenever coming to a stop without even realizing it, because now I stiffen my body but the jerking back and forth never comes. It turns much better now too, with a LOT more response, instead of that spongy feeling I used to get when I turned the wheel abruptly.

I didn't end up getting the Rancho shocks, because they wanted too much for them in the first place (about $10 apiece more than I could buy them for online), and because they said when (or if) I eventually lift the Mazda, I'll need new shocks to compensate for the new height. They threw on some Gabriel shocks instead, which were cheaper and had a lifetime warranty (not that it will do me much good). I'm just happy now that I can drive long distances without carrying two spare tires with me or having to worry about wearing a tire down far enough to cause a blowout.

I spent some time Saturday leveling out the new topsoil in my front yard, and this morning I woke up to tire tracks going across it (again). This is the third time one of my asswad neighbors or their friends have driven through my front yard, and as usual, the police officer who came out this morning to look at it seemed disinterested. I understand that they just can't cite everybody who lives in that house, but with as uncooperative as my neighbors are being, you'd think the cops would be able to do something.

I told the officer this morning that I couldn't afford to put up a fence just to keep those jackasses from doing what they shouldn't be doing in the first place, and he asked me why I didn't just put a metal pole on the corner to keep them from driving in my yard. Well, that got quite a chuckle out of me--I told him about how I had been told by a different officer to remove a metal stake I had placed in my yard for just that purpose.

He said that he'd talk to the police chief and the guy who told me to remove the metal stake, but I don't know what good that'll do. What I'd really like to see is for the owners of the house to be cited, and maybe they could pressure their tenants to behave like civilized people. But then again, the owners of the house can't keep their tenants from driving on their own front lawn (they've staked down 8x8" pieces of wood to keep them off the grass).

Update: Apparently all the talking Officer Cartwright did with his superiors and such was only to find out what I could do about keeping this from happening again (putting up a fence or pole, etc.), but nothing to do with actually punishing the neighbors. I suppose that job will be left up to me. Not that I'm likely to do anything, simply because it would be just my luck to get caught retaliating, while those jackasses nextdoor manage to do all kinds of stuff without the cops being able to do anything about it.

You might notice that there's one fewer link on the left side of my main page--I sold the camper today, finally. A guy stopped by this morning (got me out of bed, actually) and wanted to look at it. He was in a newer Dodge 3/4-ton short bed, and he asked if we'd take $800 for it, which I said yes to, but he just wasn't sure if he'd be able to haul it around in a 6' bed. He said he'd think about it and get back to me, and he ended up coming back in less than an hour to buy it.

I told him up-front about the problems I'd had with the left-front hydraulic jack, but it had never given me enough problems to bother replacing. Well, his Dodge is a hell of a lot taller than my Ford, and that jack gave us all kinds of problems--it started leaking hydraulic fluid, and eventually just shit out completely. He went to his dad's house just a few blocks away and borrowed a sheepherder's jack, and we managed to get it into his truck using that (after literally almost two hours), but I swear, the camper just about fell on us at least a few times--scared the shit out of both of us. I felt so bad about the jack not working that I told him that if he got a new one to replace it, I'd pay for it, but he refused. He said since he knew about it up-front and offered me $150 less than my asking price, that we'd just call it even (a new jack is probably only $45 anyway). So at least I don't feel too badly about it, but I'm extremely glad to have my driveway back. Now I can back my trailer in and get it ready for the camping season, since the camper being in the way was the only thing that's stopped me from doing it up until now.

I'm finally going to get the shocks replaced on the Mazda on Monday. I'm planning on getting Rancho RS5000's on all four corners. The only problem is that one of the shock mounts on the front-end is broken, and some moron who owned the vehicle before me welded a nut onto the radius arm and bolted the shock to it. It looks pretty crappy, and I doubt that any respectable auto shop would re-use that method of mounting, so I'm expecting to have the radius arm replaced. They list at $47.53 from Ford, which isn't as bad as I'd have expected, but I have no idea how much labor will end up being. The shocks themselves should be somewhere near $40 apiece, plus $55 for installing all four. All that, plus a front-end alignment, and it'll probably cost me around $300.

It's already chewed up two tires on the front. I put the spare on the rear and rotated the existing rear up to the front on our way back from Las Vegas (as I mentioned before), and since then I got a used tire mounted on the other front rim, plus another used tire mounted on the old front rim to be used as a spare. So I've got a mismatched tire on the left-front and on the right-rear. Once I get it all fixed and aligned, I'll probably have to get yet another used tire mounted on the right-front, since that one is already pretty bad after just over a month of use. Hopefully that will last me long enough to save the money to lift it and squeeze my 31"x10.5" tires under it and replace the hubs.

I just hope that after all this money I've already sunk into it and what I'll be putting into it, that it'll have been worth it. It seems like I'm always buying shitty vehicles, throwing shitloads of money at them, and still having shitty vehicles in the end. How I long for the day when I can buy something brand-new and not have to worry about paying for repairs for at least three years. Dream on.

Nelco finally came around yesterday and poured a new sidewalk in front of my house, and they graded the torn-up parts of the yard and dumped a load of topsoil. Up until yesterday I had planned on fixing the sprinkler system and then planting grass, but now I'm just not motivated enough to go through that much trouble. So until next spring, my front yard will just be dirt. It's no big deal, my lawn will match that of both my neighbors now--each of them stopped taking care of their yards last year for some reason, only mowing the weeds when they got too tall. I'll probably still fix the sprinkler system this summer, but there's no hurry now that I won't be planting grass.

We'll finally be finished with our dining room this weekend--we've actually got some color on the walls now, and I'm hoping to get started on cutting the new trim and paneling before the weekend. I've only been doing little bits of work here and there, and this project has dragged on for what seems like forever. It'll be nice having my living room back, since it's been serving double-duty while we had the dining room emptied of all its furniture.

Jeez...some pussy-ass loser ganked one of my geocaches just a few days after I placed it. There's also another one (not one of mine) that went missing around the same time just a few miles south, and possibly others in the area--nobody has reported them missing, but that's because nobody has visited them recently. Whoever it was must have been using a GPS--neither cache was in a place where it could just be stumbled over by somebody wandering around in the desert. I'm planning on returning and replacing another cache in the exact same location, 'cause fuck them. My next cache container will be a little harder to just walk off with, but that won't keep somebody from stealing the contents. I'm simply not willing to let some pussy drive me away, though.

We went cachin' with my sister and her family yesterday, and it was a blast. One of them required a pretty exhausting hike, and I made the mistake of wearing brand new hiking boots, so my feet got pretty sore. I thought it would be a good hike to break the boots in before I did some more serious hiking, but I didn't expect this one to be so rough. It was still a good day for caching, even though we only found two out of three that we'd planned on. I just hope that whoever took the two missing caches doesn't make a habit of it--or else they might get the opportunity to meet me in person.

I took the whole family with me yesterday and we placed two more geocaches--one along the Mounds Reef, and another several miles south of there near a place called Marsing Wash. Since I had Traci and the kids with me, I couldn't really spend the time and energy that I'd have liked in finding a really great hiding spot, but the places I picked should be adequate to keep the muggles away (and easy enough to take kids to). At least we all got to have a little fun together.

Whenever I get the time to do another cache, I'm going to make it a hard one. I'd prefer to do a little work to get to caches that I'm looking for--just driving up and finding it isn't very exciting. This cache was my favorite to find, simply because it involved an hours-long hike through dense forests and across huge boulder fields, with no trail whatsoever. I don't think the next cache I hide will be that difficult, but I certainly don't think it'll be kid-friendly--then again, Michael is really damned good at hiking and climbing, so it might be worthwhile to bring him along.

I worked on painting the dining room pretty much all weekend, and all I got done was the windows. I can't believe what a pain in the ass this has been. The wood in that room is original to the house, so it's almost 75 years old, and this yellowish color kept bleeding through the primer. There are probably six coats of paint on all the wood around the windows, and there are 23 individual panes of glass, so you can see how that would take awhile.

I need a break from working in there today, but tomorrow Traci and I will start up again. The walls and the wood trim need a coat of primer (the wood probably needs two or three coats, actually), then the wood trim will need a finish coat of white. After that dries for a day, we can mask off the trim and paint the walls and ceiling (each will be a different color). Then it's just a matter of cutting the beadboard paneling, baseboard, and chair rail, painting it white, and installing it.

When this is all done, I think this will be the last home improvement project, at least inside the house, for the rest of the year. It's past time that we started doing outdoor things, like camping and hiking and biking and geocaching, and all those other "ing" things.

I managed to get the Mazda home last night after working on it for half an hour. It did turn out being the positive battery cable--it was corroded really badly underneath the shielding. I ended up removing the cable from the terminal and cleaning it the best I could, then I clamped it back down really good. I'm still going to replace the battery cables and terminals because they're all in bad shape--I don't trust the temporary fix I made last night to hold for very long. It's been raining or sprinkling here most of the morning, and if it doesn't clear up I probably won't be able to get started today.

I've got a wisdom tooth (my second one) that's starting to come in, and it's killing me. My gums are swollen, and my jaw muscle on that side is in excruciating pain whenever I open my mouth more than about an inch. It's forcing me to be on a sort of diet--I can only eat soft foods that I can chew easily, and most of the time even that's too much to bear for very long, so I end up not eating very much. I absolutely dread going to the dentist to get it fixed--I had two teeth pulled when I was in 8th grade, and it was a very unpleasant experience. I think I'll wait it out and hope that it gets better. My last wisdom tooth never hurt quite this bad, but I was able to wait that one out.

It looks like my plan to stay in West Valley this weekend is shot. Me and the family went to Wal-Mart to pick up a prescription for Bradley, but when I tried starting the Mazda on our way to leave, it wouldn't turn over. All I got was a single click, and the tachometer bounced a bit for some reason. The dome light was really dim and the headlights wouldn't light up at all, not even really dim. I assumed it was a dead battery, so Traci called her mom (the only one with enough car seats to pick us up without having to move ours) and she took us home.

When I got home, I hooked up a spare battery to the charger, then after awhile Traci and I took my truck back to Wal-Mart while my mom watched the kids. I first tried just hooking up the battery I brought with me to the Mazda with some jumper cables, but it didn't do a damned bit of good. I don't completely trust my battery charger, so I figured that maybe it hadn't charged that battery at all. There weren't any open parking spaces next to the Mazda, and I didn't want to block the main aisle with my truck in order to try jump-starting it, but there were two empty spots in the next row over. Luckily, I had pulled the Mazda through another spot to park in the spot I was in, so I could roll forward into one of the empty spots, then I moved my truck next to it. But hooking up jumper cables didn't work at all--I still couldn't get the dome light to brighten up or any other electrical accessory to work.

At this point, I'm pretty sure it's just a bad battery cable. I'm going to return tonight around when the store closes, and hopefully the parking lot will have emptied out enough to try a push-start. If that fails, I guess I'll be towing it home with my truck. When I eventually get it home, I'll have to start tracking down all the cables running from the battery terminals (there are seven of the damned things) in the hopes that one of them is bad and can be easily replaced. If that doesn't work, then I'll have to start looking at more expensive things, like the battery, alternator, voltage regulator, starter solenoid, etc., but I doubt any of those are giving me this problem due to the dome light not brightening up when hooking up the jumper cables.

So, instead of spending tomorrow getting ready to head up to Mike's, I'll spend it working on the Mazda. And since I expect that replacing the battery cables will be a piece of cake, my usual bad luck (or is it just karma?) will kick in and it'll take me all weekend.

Wow...when I said in my last post that I thought Bradley would be walking before he got any teeth, I wasn't too far off. He took his first real, deliberate steps today, and since then he's taken a few steps here and there, sometimes without any provocation. It's probably only a matter of days before he really gets going, at which point there'll be no stopping him.

I didn't buy any of the things that I need to build the fence in my back yard while I was up in Orem on Saturday--Lowe's didn't have a few of the things that I needed, and I didn't think I'd be able to fit it all onto my utility trailer anyway because the box that the swamp cooler came in is huge. So instead, we're all heading up to West Valley to stay at Mike's this weekend, and I'll try my luck at getting all the fence stuff in Salt Lake. I'm also going to help Mike replace the clutch in the '97 Subaru that he bought last week. The repair manual for my '88 Subaru also covers his car, and they look similar enough that it should be a piece of cake (since I've already pulled a few transmissions from Subarus).

I finished reading The Stand this week, so updates to the site will probably be a little less sporadic now--not that there's been much to post about anyway. Although, Bradley finally had one of his teeth poke through a couple days ago. Damn, I thought that kid would be walking before he got any teeth! As it is now, he can stand up on his own for about 10 seconds before either his legs tire, or he just wants to get down and crawl. If only I could get him to take a step towards me while he was standing, he'd be walking in no time after that.

Traci and I still haven't finished our dining room--we're just lazy. Having to sand all the old wood trim and window frames has been the most annoying part, but we're pretty much done with that. All we've got left is to clean up all the sanding dust, primer and paint, then install all the beadboard paneling and new trim. Oh, and install the new ceiling fan, which we'll be getting tomorrow.

We're heading up to Orem again with the utility trailer to buy tons of stuff tomorrow. We're getting materials to build a chain-link fence in the back yard, a new swamp cooler (since nobody in Price carries them yet), fabric and foam to recover our couches, fabric and foam to make cushions for the new window seat in the dining room, some ammo boxes (to place a few geocaches in), and I'm also getting some good hiking shoes so I can start hiking more. Hiking is the only thing I'm really looking forward to doing this summer (besides the camping that'll go along with it), but I don't think I'll have as much time for it as I thought I would last year. All this home improvement stuff is taking too long, only because I sit around wishing I could be doing other things...sort of a conundrum.

I found out that the reason the tires on the Mazda are being chewed up so badly is not because it's out-of-alignment, but rather the shocks are so shitty that the tires aren't sticking to the road like they're supposed to. I've decided (and gotten Traci to go along with me) that I'm going to get a whole bunch of work done on it at once, which will hopefully save me some money in the long run. I'm going to have Grako's do all the work, since they're the only place in town that hasn't ripped me off at one time or another. I'm having all four shocks replaced, and I'll have 'em install new coil spacers in the front and Warrior shackles in the rear, giving it a little bit of a lift. I'll get new Warn manual hubs to replace the broken automatic hubs, and I'll have new rims and tires mounted. I've already got four 31x10.5" tires, but the rims currently on the Mazda are too narrow for them. I'm going to buy four new American Racing series 767 rims in 15x8", for that utilitarian look (oh, and because I can't afford nice chrome rims). It should look very much like this Explorer when I'm done with it. I'll eventually get a roof rack to hold a full-sized spare tire, and some black fender flares, but those'll have to wait until my bank account recovers from all the other work.