Thrown into the mix

Thrown into the mix was Originally Posted on September 22, 2003 by lavarock

Just before my old Camaro went up for sale, the fuel pump went bad. I bounght a new one but opted to have a repair shop replace it rather than the dealer. That saved over $100 and paid for the fuel pump! During repair they found the sending until was bad. The unit is a variable resistor on a pivot with a float on one end. It looks like that thing that controls the water level in the toilet. When they quoted me the price of it, I went into shock! It was over $400 as I remember and I’m not going to replace it. Let the new owner guess at how much fuel is in the tank. I can’t see putting a new unit in there and have no time to look for a used one.

The repair took almost a full day’s worth of work, spread over 3 days. They had to drop the whole rear end of the car (which means removing lots of parts, for you non technical people). Had Chevrolet just cut one hole in the right place, this would have been an hours worth of work instead.

I won’t even go into the “chicken vrs egg” routine with the car. That one involved driving the car with no registration, to get the tailpipe welded. Without the tail pipe fixed there was a chance the car would fail and thus, no registration and no valid current tags on the car, which are required to drive it to get the tailpipe fixed… I snuck it up to the emission station where the car failed, so I could get a 30 day waiver to fix it. It looks like it is just running rich and burning too much fuel. THAT I should be able to fix easily. That is, when I return from Paradise.

As for my delay on the farm, I pretty much convinced myself on option 3, “The Preview Trip”, or is it “The Vacation”? I will travel to my new town, do lots of measuring and thinking and come back with a Hawaiian drivers license. I’ll check out how my internet phone works out there, and if it performs poorly, have time to rethink my toll free process.

Speaking about option 3, I think all of the KonaWeb people chose that for me and all but one friend also thought it was a good idea. The friend chose “Just Move” and thinks I should have just gotten a very large dumpster at the beginning. He is probably right and has shown pretty good insight over the years. He does seem to take the road less traveled however. He is the only one who still has a Betamax VCR and yes, I admit, Beta was superior to what the rest of us have used ever since, but it was never a commercial consumer item and thus, the rest of us went with the cheaper and more readily available, VHS machine. Beta is what the television stations used and probably many still do, although pure digital should be in wide use by now.

I went online last night and found I could use my Delta frequent flier miles easily to get a ticket. I don’t know why people say it is hard, unless they are very narrow with their travel choices. I picked a departure date and a return date and for the least number of miles, only had to move both dates by 1 day each to get the bargain. Because I need to travel soon, I’ll book the Honolulu to Atlanta leg now, but will hold off on the return leg until I get a better idea of when the closing is.

Rather than throw out clothes, and since I need money rather than a tax writeoff, I will be selling my jeans to a local store. They pay for used jeans and they seem to pay more than you get from a yard sale!