Work and Maintenance
*Exasperated sigh of discontent*
Morale is waning and so is my pocketbook. Trailer Park supervisors and Karen with the H.O.A. are issuing fines and sending emails. Parents and neighbors watch in disgust. Girlfriends and wives are reviewing bank statements and questioning our sanity. Vehicles are on blocks, boats are sitting on the ground and motors are in more pieces than they should be, patiently waiting on parts to arrive from amazon or funds to be allocated. Shoot Advance Auto Parts is even trying to sign me up for a commercial account. Heck I’ve been in town so many weekends in a row that folks at church are starting to recognize me again.
With only the Super Bowl (some sort of strange concert people watch on T.V. while eating tasty potluck finger food (they should change the name to “The Snack Bowl)) and a rain-delayed Daytona 500 as entertainment, we have turned to working on those long overdue projects. “I’ll do it when it warms up a bit” or “I’ll work on it after duck season” excuses aren’t working anymore, and the piper must be paid. Plus, I will need my boat to be fully functioning very soon. There’s a short window of time here to get some stuff done and it's really not a bad time. Thankfully we had our first fake spring this week which made these activities much more palatable.
My personal objectives were as follows. The ongoing and seemingly endless repair of my first vehicle, a 1999E Chevrolet K1500 because some drunk brat smooth centered up on my legally parked vehicle doing about 70 through a neighborhood. The transforming of a 1997 Saturn SL2 into a hotshot series dirt track car. Rebuilding a Mudbuddy Sport V that suffered from a catastrophic mechanical failure during duck season (you wouldn't believe what parts cost). Trimming and maintenance of the swamp road at my father’s hunting lease. Unfortunately, this barely scratches the surface of the amassing to-do list.
One great benefit to these couple of ongoing projects is the educational part. Most people are scared to work on stuff because they haven't done it before. Fair enough, but my gosh there's a YouTube video for everything. Or you can do what I do and just constantly call those two or three buddies that actually know how to work on stuff. Heck I “learned to weld'' over FaceTime a couple days ago. What are you going to do? make it worse? You might, but you can fix that too. Double education. There aren't many man-made things that you can mess up beyond repair; worst case scenario you have to find a machinist. Replacing a piston and rings on a Honda Rancher from 2004 for the first time will teach you a lot about mechanic’ing, but it will also teach you a lot about yourself. It's kinda like owning a dog, it’ll bring all your imperfections to the surface where you can address them. You’ll learn a lot about whoever’s helping you too.
I didn’t know it until recently, but Valentine's Day is positioned quite appropriately. Somehow ol’ Saint Valentine must have known how expensive motor parts were, and that relationship mending would be called for some time middle of February. Now if only we could appease those nosy busybodies who think my future racecar is “unsightly”.
By: Benjamin Smith
