Category: Uncategorized

Well I write half a blog post that was going nowhere fast and then lost the entire thing, I decided it must not have been worth writing to begin with. Instead I took a little time and finished a drawing I was working on for awhile now. This is simple graphite drawing on Strathmore 300 series paper. I think going forward I will remember that sketch paper is for practice and anything I want to be permanent needs to be done on heavier paper.

Next I need to finish a reproduction of the first edition of One Piece that I am doing for my son Trevor. I have been nervous to start inking it for six months now, probably because any errors and it would be scrap. Here it is in its current state.

Just one of those Sundays, everyone in the house wakes up with a sore throat and is coughing and miserable. So, I may as well write about the state of the Mini since I finally got up the nerve yesterday to pull the oil filter and see how some of the bottom end of the engine is looking.

Here we have the pump removed.

After turning it over and letting the oil pour out I was greeted with the following, several pieces of plastic that fell out and a filter screen full of plastic. Not sure yet about rebuilding the pump but that is for another day.

The first gut check came when I took the plate off of the bottom of the block to look around and discovered plastic wrapped around the crankshaft. At a minimum, this is a full engine rebuild.

The next big gut check was the drop of antifreeze on the bottom of the engine and what looks to be a crack in the block.

I just cannot wrap my mind around what to do next. I need funds to work on the car but before I spend anything on the car I need to eliminate the debts that have already piled up over the years. That means the next step is to turn my book into a best seller.

Tonight is the 42nd presentation of the Ledger-Enquirer’s Page One Scholarship awards. My son Trevor England is the nominee in Mathematics for Jordan Vocational High School and I could not be more proud. At the end of the day, no matter what the results are, Trevor is a giant among men and I wish I could stand on his shoulders and see the world. He does not like for me to write about him or his struggles, he is a private person much like myself, however, his story needs to be shouted from the mountaintops. The pain that he has overcome from his migraines and which I still see raging behind his eyes at times kept him homebound for the better part of two years. He chose to withdraw from school last year and I will be honest I was afraid at the time that the pain would keep him from returning. Now just weeks away from graduation and a nominee for a prestigious scholarship in the Columbus area, I am just in awe of him. All that and a gentleman as well, who knows how to say yes ma’am, hold doors for people, and give every bit of himself in service to others.

Update. Trevor did not win but his Mother and I sure did, looking over after the mathematics nominees are walking off the stage and there is Trevor, ever the gentleman offering his hand to help the young ladies down the stairs from the stage. He is just awesomeness.

So you want to be pimping yourself to the world as a blogger and author, where do you start? A couple of hours of web searching will get you some solid advice and a whole lot of “Hey sign up for my blog and I will tell you how to grow yours.” So you give them your email address, which in turn gets you an email, which pitches you on a free webinar, which tries to sell you a very special offer exclusively to respondents for some price, and it probably just walks you through signing up for paid premium services with another company from which they earn commission. So for only $49.95 or $99.95, depending on the number of followers the person has, you can pay to get a recommendation to buy the premium version of Yoast SEO for WordPress.

So other than creating your own Multi Level Marketing scheme and learning how to be a grifter you are left with this simple formula to success; write great content consistently, network, sacrifice time and energy on the altar of hopes and dreams, network some more, cultivate a following, do some more networking, pray, cry. I am thinking I am more suited to the Conan method of marketing “To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women!”

Probably best that I have a good steady job.

I think compiling my book, an effort that has taken over two years, may have been the easiest part of all. The actual marketing and selling of the book is heading into a territory I find foreign and fearful. I have always joked that I could not sell a bottle of water to a lost person in a desert. Now I have to sell not just myself,  but a small book of poetry, prose, and musings.

Maybe I need to spend some time learning how to do sales. I could just see myself driving around trying to get a Tupperware party together, maybe sell a few vacuum cleaners door to door, or better yet live life boldly and sell lingerie and makeup. That would be too funny, some husband having a heart attack after seeing me show up to sell his wife and her girlfriends lingerie. Probably would not go over well at church either.

Perhaps I should go to Walmart and pick an aisle to work and try to sell something on it to everyone one that comes down the aisle. That would probably go over real well, as long as I could sell the cops on not arresting me or having me committed. Watches and jewelry out of my duster, have them all neatly hanging, find a alleyway to pop out of with a little flourish. Even better jewelry on one side, lingerie on the other, and a cooler full of ice cold water for that poor soul lost in the desert.

In and out of my mind is now on sale and can be purchased at the following location https://www.createspace.com/6851798 for only $6. It is also available for Kindle

 

After getting frustrated with the progress on my car and the rising costs that it will take to repair, as well as frustration with money situation in general, and frustration with cognitive behavioral therapy; I threw myself into my work. Now, I am not about to start blogging about my work out of professionalism, I think it would be too easy to get complacent and say the wrong thing. I will however throw this out there that writing regular expressions in python can turn your mind to mush. Hopefully I have tortured myself with it enough the last week or so that I can start doing other things with my nights and weekends.

Do you ever feel like you just cannot get some things right? You see the destruction you leave in your wake, often way too late, and you just want to make things right or fix what you broke. The problem is that you do not trust that anything you attempt to fix will be any better than what you originally broke, but you know you have to try something.

The hard part is when people tell you that “not everything is your fault” when you can clearly see what you did wrong. I do understand everything is not my fault, the point is I value personal responsibility and have to take ownership of my actions or inactions. Some of it goes beyond just personal responsibility though, when we end up causing pain to those we love that should give us the desire to make things right and running away just is not the answer.

Things to think on.

That is what I am supposed to be working on with my Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, being mindful of my thinking and emotions. The difficulty I am finding is that there is so much going on in my head I feel like I need to write the next iteration of War and Peace but I do not have all day to sit and write about my emotions, there is work to be done. I am trying though, spending just a little time here and there trying to capture how I feel and why I think I feel that way.

I am also trying out two apps on my phone, Pacifica and Mindfulness in order to put more tools into my hands. I figure since I am tied to the phone I might as well try and use it for some of this work.

Maybe in my mindfulness I can figure out how to bring in extra money to pour into my car.

 

Well, all of the parts and tools arrived, I had the day off yesterday, so I jumped right in. I started out by pulling the intake manifold off in order to remove the timing chain tensioner.

Upon removing the intake manifold I found quite a bit of oil had blown back into it which is a bit concerning. I went ahead and pulled the exhaust manifold as well and found oil in cylinder 1. Proceeded to pull the spark plugs and all four had oil on them which is a bit of a concern that there is oil in the combustion chambers. Decided fine I will address that after I remove the timing chain.

I started by taking off the top guide and started getting nervous as you can see from this picture comparing old and new there is a large piece of plastic missing. So this will be a bit like where’s Waldo, or more likely Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego.

After removing the timing chain and guides I was able to fish a few pieces out with a little grabber. Before showing the picture I would just like to say that I am a bit pissed that step one of this process did not say remove oil dipstick, in fact, I read back through after mangling the dipstick and fighting to get the assembly extracted but nowhere does it say remove dipstick. Well, the dipstick runs down through the timing chain guide on an R56 N12 engine, I will use pliers and straighten it back out. Now back to the plastic dilemma. Here are the guides and what I was able to fish out after removing the guides, unfortunately not nearly enough, there is also a piece in a hole halfway down the engine, picture is misleading as that hole is 11 inches down from the top and the gap is just over an inch wide, extraction will be difficult. Next, I dropped the oil pan and look at the mess. Unfortunately, I have not found enough of the plastic to account for the entire missing piece.

At this point, I have consigned myself to the fact that I will need to pull the cylinder head and inspect for damage, clean and find all of the plastic I possibly can. I am also starting to accept that my engine may need to be completely rebuilt top to bottom. What this means though is more and more money. Money that I do not have to spend.