Busch Light Peak

There it stood. Just daring me. Had any man ever conquered it? Who could tell. Isolated in the back of the DaveCo Liquors store was a veritable mountain of Busch Light beer. Head for the mountains, indeed.

So I steeled myself and began to climb. Soon, the summit was attained to impart jaw dropping views of the whole store.

Hoping to avoid any late day rain showers, as so often happens at high elevations in the afternoon, I returned to base camp and continued my shopping. But I look back upon that quest as a hi-lite of my life. Truly inspirational.

Falling to Pieces

It’s been a weird last couple weeks. On Sat 16.Jun.07, I pulled the old 1988 Four Winns 200 Horizon out of storage to prep it for an upcoming camping trip. A little dusty from a winter under the tarp, but looking okay. Fired up fine (I trickled charged the battery all winter) and ran smooth. Then the water came. Spraying from some unknown somethingorother on the back of the engine. I shut it down; swore profusely; then went to find my tools. After a pair of blood letting cuts, I remove the offending part. A quick flip through my Clymer manual revealed the broken piece was the heat exchanger for the power steering system. It’s plumbed into the water-based cooling system for the engine as well as the power steering cylinder. It had a leak. I went looking for a replacement on the ‘Net and found prices ranging from $100 to $250. Ouch. We ended up getting a steam fitter friend of my father-in-law to repair the leak. I got it back in the boat this past Fri 29.Jun.07 and trouble solved. But I tore my tarp putting away the boat today. It never ends.

Last week on Mon 25.Jun.07, my custom-built HP Pavilion dv6000t CTO notebook PC went on the fritz. It seems the on / off switch decided to quit working. While I’m on the road at a client location. Luckily, the client is located in a major city (Dallas, TX) and I had plenty to choose from in acquiring a quick replacement. So I picked up HP Pavilion dv2410us notebook PC running Windows Vista at CompUSA (getting hard to find WinXP in the stores). I still needed to get the data off my old machine. CompUSA wanted $100 to copy over my key files (Not mirror the old HDD, just copy files! Highway robbery!). So for $50, I picked up a Mad Dog Multimedia MegaVault 3.5in Anodized SATA/IDE (MD-35ESUSB) HDD enclosure and proceeded to help myself to my files. Three hours later (mostly spent downloading / configuring various critical apps like MS Office 2007) I was in pretty good shape. Not sure I’m real impressed with Vista thus far, but holding judgment until I’ve used it for a couple weeks. FedEx comes tomorrow to get my old machine and haul it off to HP for repairs.

Then on Wed 27.Jun.07, Julie calls me. She was on her way back from seeing her folks in Omaha, NE when the car broke down about 50mi from home. I was still in Dallas, thus of little assistane. After sitting along I-76 for about 15min, the car decides it wants to start again and off Julie and the girls go. They make it to Brighton, CO before throwing in the towel and calling a tow truck. The car was still running, but performing very erratically. The tow truck arrived and hauled my pride and joy (2000 Saab 9-5 SE V6 Sportwagon) off to East of Sweden, my favorite mechanics. After a day with East of Sweden, it seems the fuel pump is no longer functioning at factory specified performance levels. Semi-big bucks to replace. Should get the car back today.

Not sure what the next 2wks will bring, but it’ll certainly be better than the past 2wks.

*UPDATE! Thu 12.Jul.07*

1. Boat’s fixed. But I ripped the tarp weekend before last. New tarp on order.
2. Old laptop is back from HP. It works. But they re-imaged my HDD as part of their repair process. Bummer. New laptop working dandy. Getting used to Win Vista.
3. Car got fixed. Then broke again. Then fixed again. $1,300 total for a new fuel pump and a crank position sensor (#%*@!).