Bologna Skins

My wife is heading to Fargo today for her friend's mom's funeral. Yesterday I got the tires rotated on the car she was taking. Turns out the reason it's been a death trap skid machine in the snow this winter is that two of the tires were worn down to the steel belts in spots and had no tread left. Stupid Hyundai and their shitty OEM tires. (33,000 and two of them are toast and the other two have like 6000 miles more in them maybe.) I guess that's how you drive down the purchase price.

So I decide to lay down some decent money for two Goodyears that have a 65,000 mile warranty on them. I figured that if I bought a set of shit tires, I'd just be replacing them in 33,000 again rather than these that should last twice as long so it's actually a bit less than replacing them twice, saving on the mounting and balancing fees.

The tread on these new tires is sick compared to the old ones, even when they were new. I'll be able to rally car it in the snow next year, since I'll have to replace the other two by then.

So I guess I've been cheating death for the past few weeks on the bald bologna skins that could have failed at any moment due to being down to the steel. Glad I found out before my wife took them another 1400 miles though, and what else would I want to spend the first month of my promotion raise on rather than two new tires?

I can't think of anything.

You Have to Know the Answer to this Question.

Narrator: [Tyler steers the car into the opposite lane and accelerates] What are you doing?

Tyler Durden: Guys, what would you wish you'd done before you died?

Ricky: Paint a self-portrait.

The Mechanic: Build a house.

Tyler Durden: [to Narrator] And you?

Narrator: I don't know. Turn the wheel now, come on!

Tyler Durden: You have to know the answer to this question! If you died right now, how would you feel about your life?

Narrator: I don't know, I wouldn't feel anything good about my life, is that what you want to hear me say? Fine. Come on!

Tyler Durden: Not good enough.



I didn't feel good about my life this morning. I was tired and angry, and I didn't want to be awake with the kids, and I didn't want to go grocery shopping, and I didn't want to be in Peoria, and I didn't want to be working a job I find no meaning in anymore.

Luckily we went skating this afternoon. Carter was able to let go of the buckets and just hold my hand and skate. His fourth time on this ice and he's almost on his own. Pretty impressive. Oz is just too young. Somehow he fell on his but and bit his lip and was bleeding about 5 minutes into the whole thing. Poor little guy. He looked so tiny on the ice, totally out of place. He's not even two yet.

Then tonight while most people were enjoying the Super Bowl, I found a spot on one of my basement tiles. Devil water... There is no containing you. Turns out I had fucked up my drain line routing on my kitchen sink back when we did it a year or so ago. I didn't have the straight far enough into the trap so the little ring didn't have enough surface to seal on. So I ran over to Lowe's and grabbed and extension and put it in. No leaks after running a bit of water through it and the dishwasher draining into it. I probably should have looked for a vacuum breaker since my vent pipe in that line is also fucked, (I'm guessing a possum is stuck in the line, or so my Canadian friend and I have theorized) but I was in a bit of a hurry at Lowe's so I didn't stay and look around much for the breaker.

Tomorrow we are supposed to get like 5-7 inches of snow. Maybe I won't have to go into work, or Tuesday maybe.

I told my wife I had a good feeling that some company was going to call me this week. Either that or the feeling relates to some other looming system failure in my house. I guess I'll find out.

Dear United States Government

While you are working so hard over the weekend, I would like to propose a rider, or amendment, or whatever the hell it's called (I guess I didn't pay attention in ninth grade government class... sorry Mr. Topp) to the 700 BILLION dollar bailout of all these greedy banks and insurance companies. I would like you to add an extra .00000214% to that and give me like 150,000 dollars.

The money would be spent to pay off the $105,000 remaining on my mortgage which we can pretend is sub-prime and is destroying the economy.

The remaining $45,000 will be used to pay off credit card debt, student loans, and my car loans which we can pretend were predatory in nature and are destroying the economy.

The result will be an extra $2150 I can pump into the economy every month. So in less than 6 years you'll have all that money circulating back into the economy. Won't that be awesome.

Gee you guys and galls are swell.

So I'll just wait for that check, and remember it's Lawryde with a y not an i. We wouldn't want to have any difficulty at the bank would we?

Expiration Date 08-08

It seems as though everything I own is hitting its expiration date, my dog, my DVD/VCR combo, my stereo, my water heater, and my outdoor water spigot.

Friday I got the part to fix my water heater. Apparently Whirlpool flamelock water heaters are pieces of crap with a faulty design in the thermocouple. It went bad a couple years ago and we had it replaced, but it started acting up again. I called this warranty number and they sent me a free replacement for the front burner assembly. I still had to pay for shipping and if I was the kind of intelligent person who has no real world skills I would have had to pay for someone to swap it out for me. Luckily I rule first period gym class, and have the ability to do dangerous natural gas burner swaps. It wasn’t too bad of a job. I unhooked the old one from the main gas valve and cleaned out the inside of the combustion chamber, swapped the main burner onto the new assembly and then hooked everything back up. I relit it and the pilot tube was leaking a bit so I tightened that up, same was true about the main burner line, but I didn’t have it seating in the valve quite right. After I got the leaks taken care of it seemed to be functioning correctly. It took about an hour, and we still have hot water so I guess that fixes the problem.

Total cost: $11 +1 hour of $100/hr billable engineering time. I guess I won’t charge myself though.

On Sunday my decade old stereo broke, and I have no idea how to fix that so it’s just another piece of electronics I need to buy. The list is now, TV/DVD player combo, DVD player, Stereo. I’m considering going on a mad spending spree and throwing all of them onto my 0% interest credit card and paying them off next April when I get my bonus.

Then, when I was playing outside with the boys, I noticed that my outdoor water spigot was dripping even though it was “turned off”. Fucking needle valves suck my balls. Spend the money and put ball valves in, they don’t have packing nuts that fail. Luckily amateur plumbing runs in my veins. The only problem is that the inside shutoff for the outside spigot also doesn’t work, it’s also a needle valve. So we go further back and we get to the main shutoff, also a needle valve, also kind of scares me every time I have to shut it off. Really all three have bad packing nuts and I wasn’t up for shutting off the water at the street and replacing all of them. I would need some sort of moral support to do that kind of major surgery.

Since I get paid to come up with clever solutions to complex problems, the solution presented itself to me after I decided not fuck with the main shutoff. I ran to Lowes with Mr. Oz while Carter took a nap. I grabbed one of those dual spout brass valves with the ball valve shutoffs and a bag of hose seals. I made the female cashier’s uterus ache as we left because my wife and I have the talent of making cute babies. I crossed my fingers and screwed the new valve over the old shitty valve. It didn’t leak. I don’t know if it will last when everything freezes, it wasn’t a freeze proof spigot to begin with, which was most likely the problem. The freezing and thawing destroyed the packing nut.

Total Cost: $9

So I spent like $20, and because I didn’t have to call a plumber I saved like $400. Maybe I can consider that and buy all the electronics shit that has crapped out on me.