"This is by Elvis Presley..." (then in a low whisper) "or just Elvis for short."
Heidi and I about fell out of our chairs laughing.
On a related note: a side-effect of having lots of kids and having a pregnant wife is that you eat out a lot more than you want. As I said the other day, I'm not much of a cook, and I don't always feel much like cooking after working all day. Heidi is usually exhausted and physically uncomfortable and doesn't necessarily feel like cooking, either (and I can't say that I blame her...I bet I wouldn't, either). So we go out. It saves time and energy, but it spends extra money.
I don't think I'd mentioned this yet, but I had to get rid of the Ramcharger when we moved. That was very disappointing to me, actually. While it had its issues (e.g., it looked like a old, junky, beat-up piece-of-crap truck...so it would've fit right in here on the roads in Oklahoma), it was really easy to work on and fun to drive. I even had it loaded and ready to go the week of my move, but I got it out on the road and it started having trouble. I figure the carburetor needed to be rebuilt, but I didn't have the time to get a kit in and do the rebuild before I needed to go to OKC to start the new job. So Heidi got it sold for me before we left. (I'm still bummed out about it, actually. It wasn't much but it was all mine.) So I got here and with Mom and Dad's help I got a 1998 Honda Accord LX. Dad's main customer right now is a car dealership in Tulsa (Keystone Chevrolet) that he's worked with for over 15 years, and they give him really good deals. So they got this Honda on a trade-in and sold it to us for the same amount that they gave on the trade. (It worked out for them as well because they were just going to send it to the auction and probably get the same amount or maybe less.)
It runs really strong, which was important to me; I don't mind working on cars but I wanted to have something that would run well for quite a while, and the quality and workmanship of Honda is unquestioned. The car is over 10 years old and now had 207K miles on it and still runs great and gets me 26-28 mpg. (BIG improvement over the Ramcharger, which got me 10-11mpg at best.) One issue it has is recurring codes indicating a problem with the EGR system. This isn't a huge deal and is usually pretty easy to deal with. After some online research, I decided to take off the EGR valve and clean out the passageways through the manifold. (I needed a little relaxation, anyway, after all the stress lately.) So it took the valve off and started cleaning it out. It seriously looked as though someone had poured mud straight into the engine. Now, gunk in the EGR passages is not uncommon on any car, but it's usually very dark, almost black. Exhaust gas is very hot and any oil or fluids or blowback of any kind flowing through that system is hot, gets burned, and sticks inside the passages. But this gunk that I was cleaning out was almost dark red, like Oklahoma-mud red. It was the DIRTIEST gunk I've ever seen inside an engine...and that's coming from someone who has a 26-year-old Ford Mustang. Ugh. As I said, the engine runs OK and isn't throwing any other codes, so I don't think it's as bad as it looked. I've cleaned it out pretty thoroughly twice and I've even replaced the EGR valve, so keep your fingers crossed.
Thanks for reading along.
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