I’m on vacation. Moving through Dullas airport in Virginia. Observations follow.
On what is supposed to be the busiest air travel day in the year… this place is a ghost town. Seriously. I feel like I’m in a Stephen King movie. One of the crappy movies. Not IT or the Stand.
Funny. A voluntary masked retard is sitting in the restaurant eating. She took her mask off. I’m confused. Does she think the air in the restaurant is safer than the hallway 5 feet away? I understand people caring about their health and wanting permanent mask status. But this one can’t seem to make up her mind about where in the mask spectrum she wants to be.
Edit: moving through Denver now. More of a crowd, but still nothing more than normal traffic. Where are all the people?
So… fixed the car last weekend. Then I notice the car is running cooler than normal. In fact it never gets to normal operating temperature. My diagnostics app says coolant temp is 150 and normal is 195. Then I get warning lights and other problems like low idle and transmission heat warnings.
I suspect the thermostat is bad even though it is brand new. It was in the kit of things I replaced last week. I go to toyota and get a new one, $50 (gasket alone was 10). I install it and everything is working fine now.
So I test the old original thermostat and the new one I just installed and then replaced. They are both supposed to be genuine Toyota OEM parts in Toyota boxes.
I put them in a pan of water and turn up the heat.
At 143, they are both still closed tight.
Then at 150, the bad one opens a crack. The sliver of white on the upper edge is the pan showing through.
Here, at 186, the bad thermostat is wide open like a drunk cheerleader on the team bus after the winning game. The “chaste” and pure thermostat, even though she has a lot of years on her, stays closed until her princely 190 temperature arrives.
Here is the older thermostat. Notice it has an 82C marking on it. That is the temperature it is designed to START opening. There are other markings too. This is a genuine Toyota part.
This part also has an 82C marking. And no other markings. This is a counterfeit part.
It used to be that you had to make choices between OEM parts or aftermarket third party vendor parts. You knew the third party parts might be lower quality and definitely lower price. But now, thanking to F-ing China, we all now have to worry about fake parts, pretending to be genuine. And they aren’t anywhere near as good. At least third party parts had the pride to put their own name on it. The Chinese are all about fake, fraud, deceit, and gouging a little bit more to get by. They have no cultural ethics about this. Chinese people should never be trusted about anything important.
Now I need to wonder if the other parts from that kit were also fakes. Changing out the timing belt and water pump may have shortened the life of my engine instead of lengthening it.
I have been putting off some required maintenance on my 2003 4runner. It is well past time to do the timing belt. In fact, it should have been done back when I bought the parts at 290k miles. It now has 334k. Well… better late than never. The timing belt recommendation is 60k. Mine has nearly 3x that.
So. I preparred by watching lots of youtube videos. In youtube-land, that job takes 6 hours. In my area it took 3.5 days. My car had rusty bolts that fought me every step of the way.
First: I started slow by replacing valve cover gaskets and cleaning oily sludge off the heads.
Then I started uncsrewing the coil packs on top of each spark plug. You can see the picture above shows the typical rusty bolt. Half of these stripped off. Most I could remove with an extractor socket. The one above I used a dremel to cut a slot in it to remove it. In any case, I replaced all 8 of those with new screws from Toyota. $1 each.
Then I get to removing the valve covers. 9 bolts each. Half of them are only finger tight. No wonder the gasket was leaking. One was OMG tight and the head snapped off during removal. To get the stub out I tried all the normal things. Vice grips, heating, PB blaster, heating, and welding a nut on top of the remnant. All failed. In the end, I decided 8 bolts would hold it just fine.
I changed out the spark plugs too. Recommended life is 30k. I doubt these have been changed for 200k. It’s been a while. You can see the picture above the old and new plugs. The old ones look like they could go another 50k. These are iridium plugs.
Then to the main task: remove radiator. Remove power steering pump, remove alternator (snapping off a bolt), loosening up the AC compressor, and then removing everything down to the water pump. This went mostly well, despite bolts being rusty and bonded with the base material like they had all been glued in.
As I take things apart, I put the screws into labeled zip-lock bags so they go back where they belong.
The main crank shaft bolt came off easily becaise I bought the special tool on Amazon, $34.
Everything went back together faster than it came apart. It took a few tries to get the teeth on the new belt lined up with teeth on timing gears. But it eventually worked. Alternator only has 3 connectors instead of 4 becasue the snapped off bolt is irredeamable like a Catholic committing suicide. It’ll be fine. Three bolts are plenty.
Bottom line: the original timing belt showed no signs of age, wear, or decay. It could have safely been used another 100k. Similarly. Water pump is fine. Fan belt is fine. No oil leaks from crankshaft seal. All the pullies and idlers are in new condition. Makes me wonder why I bothered. I suppose, if I lived in a high salt area (rust belt) or high heat areas (southwest), it would have been more needed.
I have seen other reviews and wasn’t going to watch it. But whatever, it’s not like they are destroying one of the great foundational pieces of fantasy literature of the English language…
I have to admit, it was pretty hard getting past the fact that there seem to be only 2 married couples in the series so far, and one “very close” couple, and they are all mixed race. Really, a community of less than 20 families has enough genetic diversity to have black “hobbits” represented? And I think I recall something about Dwarf women NEVER being seen, but this series decided that Durin’s wife needed to be a leading character. Why exactly? Besides a role for an ugly black woman, what does her character add? Do I really need to have my personal lack of Diversity and Inclusion rubbed in my face every time I turn on entertainment delivery? Isn’t it enough that all my commercials have erased people like me as potential customers?
The lead role obviously goes to Galadrial. She somehow manages to pull off full bitch face for 400 years. No wonder her people mutinied and sent her to the “West”.
I can’t help but think that the death of an Elf is somehow more tragic than the death of a human, since elves are losing so many centuries of live and humans only lose 5 decades before they start to decay anyway.
Naturally, the scenery, animation, graphics, and music are every bit as good as the Jackson version of Lord of the Rings.
There seems to be quite a bit of foot dragging on the script. Lots of character development in a multitude of locations that don’t seem to be leading anywhere or contributing to the story.
The Harfoots are obviously supposed to be the hobbit ancestors, yet if all their female children are obstinate adventurers, how do the Hobbits ever get the reputation of staying in their own places and never going out? It was such a scandal when Bilbo did it, but it seems the Hobbits have had such people since the beginning.
I am guessing the old guy is supposed to be Gandalf incarnation. What sort of half -baked idea was it to put him on the Earth naked and with his brain missing, like a stroke survivor learning to talk again? When he returned to Earth after fighting the Balrog, he could speak and fight, and, more importantly, contribute to story progress.
Recent General motors commercial doesn’t advertize their cars any more. They advertize their people. Their diverse and inclusive people. Ok. No thanks.
Now today, the new Ford commercial hits the waves. Talking bad about people who “tear things down and then fly away on their personal space ship”. Who on earth could that be? Bezos? Musk? When were they “tearing things down? Why is Ford spending advertising dollars to demonize people that the car buying public cannot relate to: fictional people. Did they run out of real people to claim villainy about?
Then the Ford commercial goes on to talk about their awesome workforce. Their inclusive diverse workforce. Not their cars. Again. No thanks.
Why do they do this? Do they really not care about selling cars? Exactly. The companies who make commercials only have one type of customers. It’s not car buyers. Their customers buy commercials. And those buyers don’t sell cars either. They work in marketing departments and they think the most important thing is to show how virtuous they are. And they don’t care how much of GM’s or Ford’s money it costs.
This story tells us that Russians are fleeing from Russia and crowding all the border crossings and airports.
The problem is… those aren’t Russians. Just yesterday Western Europe, Poland, and Bulgaria as well as the USA, advised their citizens residing or visiting Russia to leave immediately. Then… BOOOM… like magic, all the border crossings are crowded with people “fleeing” Russia.
If there is anything that really ticks me off, it is the lack of any credible information coming out of Russia and Ukraine.
It seems the movie industry is not satisfied at having ruined Dune, Star trek, Star Wars, Aliens, Wheel of Time, Sword of Truth, and the entire f-ing Marvel universe. They have left untouched another sci-fi classic story.
BABYLON 5 is getting a reboot treatment, 25 years after the original.
I can’t wait to complain about how bad it is compared to the original.
I believe I have mentioned before how little I care about this and how little I understand the mania behind royals watching. It might be related to Disney Princess syndrome.
So everyone in the captive press is going out reading the same three Wiki articles on how royal succession works so they can all seem like experts. The bottom line is: It’s a closed club. No new members are allowed. You will never be invited to join, even if you marry into it.
So Charles gets to be King. There was some doubt about the outcome of that since the Queen was looking like she would outlive him. We can say with certainty that Charles is not going to sit the thrown as long as dear old mum. And he will accomplish even less.
As we look at the accomplishments of the Queen for her 70 year reign, we see lots of accolades for things that happened while she was alive, not that she had any role in that. Example: The fall of communism.
She isn’t getting nearly enough credit for the entire collapse of the British empire during her reign nor for her country being over run by invaders. One wonders how long it will be before a Sing, Mohammed, or Patel is the reigning monarch.
She is credited for raising over a billion pounds for charity. Not her own money. That would have been notable. No. Like other celebrities, she just lends her name recognition, fame, royal authority and imprimatur and then other people donate their money to her favorite charities. Like Princess Di got credit for ending AIDS and eliminating land mines.
This is a great opportunity for the British people to decide that their flirtation with monarchy has run its course and they are ready to try something else.
I would comment about how important such a role could possibly be when they allow a doddering old woman to sit the thrown for so long, but then our country selected Biden.
It does bring up the question of what is the best way to select an HMFIC. Obviously, the neutered monarchy in Britain is a shallow Disney version of itself. Even calling them a figurehead is overstating their importance. Not only could they be replaced by robots, they could all be replaced by statues of better monarchs. But the question remains. Is heredity any better or worse than the other methods of selecting a chief? The principle harm of such a system is that it is closed and no one from the outside may hope to achieve it regardless of merit. That encourages men of merit to go all war of roses on their asses and replace the whole families. Fortunately for the current “family”, the current monarchy is powerless enough that no one wants in the club bad enough to kill for it. Further, with the extent of the current family, one would have to kill a whole bunch to clear the decks. Just not worth all that effort.
So. After procrastinating for a while, I knuckled down and finished the trim in the new kitchen. So here you can see the undercounter lighting, using LED strips, tile backsplash, and cove trim on top.
Undercounter lighting is remote controlled and color selectable for mood lighting. It’s plugged into one of the outlets I put inside the cabinets.
Add that to moving the electrical outlets to the cabinet undersides. This had the advantage of not needing to cut the tiles to go around the backsplash.
Of course, that means I lose some inside cabinet space, but with adjustable shelves, it’s reasonable.
Finishing the cove trim was a pain. Getting rounded edges to match up takes a little effort. I wasted several feet of the materials getting the corners to fit right.
The backsplash is alternating pieces of marble and aluminum. I used my wet tile saw to cut them. This type of tile comes in preset patterns in 12″×12″ squares with a fabric mesh backing. The mesh backing cannot be cut on a wet saw because it bunches up and the marble and aluminum pieces get pulled out of alignment. So for the edges, I have to pull off the tile pieces and cut them one at a time. Topped it off with some Schlutter plastic edging.
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