I'm back in Oklahoma this week for a whole entire week, because my mom's visiting.

Of course, I've been traveling for nearly the last two weeks straight. This has engendered a number of interesting circumstances, chance meetings, and general good times. Naturally, these are balanced out by general irritation, stress, strife, bad weather and other unfortunate circumstances, but that is. by and large, life.


The first weekend of travel, I was in Denver, refereeing a bit for the Zone 7 skeet shoot. This was pretty fun the first day, as the weather was fine, but the second day was the pits, because, in true Colorado fashion, the weather went to perdition overnight, with a 25 degree temperature drop, 10-15 MPH winds, and a rain the seemed to come from everywhere at once. This did not stop the shooting, however. I was rather put out since I hadn't brought rain gear, as I expected (foolishly) that the weather would be nice. Also in that weekend was a visit to Boulder where I ran into a bunch of Mudd friends, and sat in a pub playing hearts and spades for an afternoon while drinking very nice java porter.

Also, I had Big City Burrito twice in one day. Twice! That is a feat worthy of mention. The burrito making people even remembered me the second time I was in and asked if I hadn't just been there an hour and a half ago.



In Florida, I had some excellent-quality hanging out with asrapture and incidentally did some working and meetings. They went okay, I guess. Gas there was pretty spendy, especially since I'd gotten upgraded to an SUV because they nice gay guy at the counter was annoyed at the woman in line before me, and decided to be nice to me since I rented from them on a regular basis.



The review part concerns the Mitsubishi Evo VIII. This car can corner. It is quite literally glued to the road. I didn't use the brakes except to stop the car at stop signs. You didn't need them in corners, just downshift and turn the wheel, and you go around the corner at about 40, with no unseemly tire-screeching or body roll. It accelerates like a sheep fleeing a randy Scotsman, too. If it weren't for the really high maintenance costs ($900 brake job, new $200/ea. tires every 10K miles...) it'd be an awesome car to own. You shouldn't buy one used, though. the one I test drove hadn't been broken in properly, so it burned oil. I guess the original owner couldn't wait to floor it after buying. That's the major problem with a turbocharged car. You wouldn't want to buy one used unless you knew exactly what the previous owner drove like.



This weekend in Colorado, I spent every waking hour immersed in swapping the clutch on my Mom's Saturn. I tell you, if I ever meet the engineer who was responsible for the design and layout of that car's mechanicals, I'm going to kick him square in the nuts. Then, when he asks me why I did it, I'll kick him again, even harder. It's been designed so that the wheel bearings need to be pressed in and out, they can't be changed unless you have a bearing press, and then you'll need to align it after you're done because you've had to take off the steering knuckles. On most other cars, once you take off the hub nut, you can just slide the bearings out.

That's not the worst, though. The worst is that you can't change the clutch without either a) removing the entire engine or b) removing the entire front subframe, neither of which is exactly a trivial task. So, we had to yank the whole engine out to get at the clutch. I was amazed that we got it back together as quickly as we did, first time, with no major difficulties other than those inherent in pulling an engine.

However, I am never again buying a front-wheel drive car, nor will I ever voluntarily work on one ever again. I hate them. They are not designed to be worked on. They are designed to generate revenue for dealer service departments who have all the special tools and jigs and fixtures to deal with them.

Driving back to Oklahoma yesterday, I made several observations.

- You never have a tarp when you need it, nor is there ever a store that sells them in a convenient place.
- If you don't have a tarp, it will rain, torrentially, soaking everything exposed to said rain.
- If you're driving into Oklahoma, it will rain hard enough to cut visibility to about three car lengths and make your windscreen wipers next to useless.
- Some car manufacturers (to wit: Ford) need to rethink their windshield wiper designs so that they will actually wiper the windscreen at speeds above 60 MPH.
- There is NOTHING on the radio southeastern Colorado and western Oklahoma. There is one preachy station and one country station. Not my thing. However, western Kansas has a good NPR station.
- One day, I will build a car for highway cruising. It will be geared to lope along at a good clip and get decent mileage, it will have huge gas tanks, extremely comfortable and supportive seats, GPS navigation and satellite radio. If anyone sees a '71-'73 Buick Riviera with a reasonably good body, let me know...
- Oklahoma thunderstorms can set off the window sensors for my house alarm. I found this out when I got a call from a friend telling me that my alarm had been going off all day and the police had been called to investigate.
- Delta is bound for bankruptcy, doomed by their own inefficiency. I was offered the following itineraries for a flight from Fort Lauderdale, FL to Denver, CO: 1 Ft. Lauderdale, FL -> Cincinnati, OH -> Denver, CO 2 Ft. Lauderdale, FL -> Salt Lake City, UT -> Denver, CO 3 Ft. Lauderdale, FL -> Atlanta, GA -> Denver, CO. The shortest one wasn't the cheapest, either. Stupid airlines, I hate them all.

That's about it for now. I may rant more later, once I remember more things that bugged me (there were lots).

Also, courtesy of Little Evil Jessie amusing stuff. I want the "It takes a Viking" shirt.