midnyte

At this point I'm inclined to want to beat my head agianst a wall and say what was I thinking over and over until I knock myself out!

I fixed all of this shit on my car (fixed not really being the right word) maybe more like replaced, and I have exactly the same problems I had before I started!! ARGH!!! What in the world? WHile dismantling the car I discovered a band fuse for my auxillary fan was blown, so I ponied up the 8 cents and replaced it only to find that with no key in the car and it being fucking cold out the fan was going full speed! I removed the fuse. pulled the battery, replaced all of the fuses and relays in the car and replaced more rubber and vacuum line. In the process of replacing a vacuum line I destroyed some weird little check valve. No place carries this and Mercedes has to order it and it would cost like $40 for something the size of a stack of 10 pennies. I also thought the rubber trim at the bottom of my windshield looked yuck, so I decided to hit up the MB bone yard. As seems to be the case, those boneyards are always in the worst neighborhoods. On the way there i blew a fuse on the G wagon as well. WHY ME!!??!! So anyway.....


They couldn't find me a car with one of those valves. Eventually I found a car that had everything gutted from it EXCEPT the little regulator thing that the little valve goes to. $10 and I had new rubber stuff ($75 from MB and 4 weeks to get it from Germany) and a new little valve.

The whole reason I started this project was because my A/C fan wasn't working. After I got it out of the car I clipped it to a vice and hooked it directly to the car battery to test it, and it hopped out of the vice and rolled down the driveway, so it DOES WORK!! But it doesn't work in my car. ARGH!!! I have replaced everything I can think of the replace that has anything to do with this. I don't get it. I put most of the car back together in the dark with only a few shitty shop lights, put it together enough to hook the fan up and see if it now works. And of course it doesn't. On the plus side the car did seem to start up with more vigor. But on the minus side, it kind of ran pretty ok before I started all of this, so now I'm just depressed.

I feel like such a failure

I don't even know what else to look for and wiring and electrical stuff is really not my strong suit and my brother (who is a genius and knows everything about cars though he hates the MB's with a passion) is at CES (that big car show in Vegas) for a few more weeks, so I can't even get his brilliant mind to look it over or offer me any insight at all. I always try to fix stuff myself and then feel like such a tool when I have to take the car half dismantled to the shop for the repairs. The mechanics always give me this "stupid girl" look or tell me how they could have diagnosed the problem in no time and saved the cost of anything I had tried replacing myself. Maybe some day I'll learn, but really I want to learn more about fixing my own fucking car because when I DO fix it myself it feels pretty good, and I take the time to fix other stuff while I'm at it, or if I pull some foam padding loose, I'll go buy new foam padding and replace the park I knocked off, or I'll fiberglass something I crack or whatever. I just spend a lot of time on the details. Of course if I can't fix the fucking problem, I guess it doesn't matter.

I'm so totally going to start crying.

Seriously, crying

And the water pump on the other 4x4 blew up too, so I now have 3 cars with problems. G wagon with some electrical issue and won't pass emissions. My sedan/daily driver/car I like to take to the store and tool around town in is on the fritz and in pieces in my garage and the Vehicross is in the driveway leaking toxic coolant which I'm sure is just there waiting to poison another of my pets (ok, so I have a pile of kitty litter under it, to absorb that shit, but still, what if the cat decides to try and use said litter?) On the plus side I did realize this afternoon that the Vehicross is still under warranty, so I can just drop it off next week at Isuzu and let someone else deal with that one. I wish I had thought of that sooner, that one has been in the driveway since before Christmas with me not wanting to touch it. That V6 scares me. And it is so high off the ground I'm on my tip toes just to look in there. I spent about 1/2 an hour messing with it and then gave up. That is what the warranty is for. I just have too much going on with my car to even want to deal with the trucks. Now my weekend cars are my daily drives and it annoys me. Giant knobby tires are not fun for in town driving. Rumble rumble rumble, bump bump bump.... pleh....... Off road, they are great, anything else, not so much...

And to top it off... my KItchenaid mixer decided to fuck off this week too. I was making cinnamon rolls and it suddenly made a HORRIBLE sound. I thought these things were indestructible. I have one from 1946 that still works. The bowl for it corroded which is why I don't use it anymore. And they don't make parts for it anymore I had taken it apart to put new grease in it and WOW, it was built AMAZING. I think a bomb could hit it and not destroy it. I was disheartened when I took my new one, bought about a year ago, apart and found the insides to be plastic and shit metal. It turns out a little piece of plastic shit that holds the gears snapped off and knocked a spiral shaped gear out of place (or stopped holding the spiral gear IN place which then in turn ground the shit out of the gear it is supposed to turn. So now, I have a destroyed fucking mixer. I'm going to try and get parts for it, but I hardly even want to because it is such a piece of shit. It looks like the old ones on the outside, but inside, TOTAL SHIT!!! My exes grandma had that mixer and used it all the time from 1946 until she died in the 80's, then it sat in a box for 20 some years until I discovered it and my mother in law gave it to me and I used it until I left the bowl for it sitting with water and something acidic in it and it corroded. The main unit still works. This one, I have a year and use about 3 times a week and the gears fucked off, the up and down lever on the side hardly works (don't even get me started on the unimaginably shitty design short cut they took there) and it is just shit!

So now I sound like my dad.

Anyway..... When it rains it pours. DAMN!!! At least I don't live in South Africa.... That is about all I can say. Just too much annoying.



So... To recap my day...

Woke up at 10:00 and let the guy in who was fixing my washing machine.
Put on thermals and got to work on the car.
2:00 started making phone calls to find the part I destroyed
3:00 headed out to the boneyard
5:00 got home from the boneyard and started putting car back together
7:00 came in and screamed at my son for not cleaning the kitchen like I asked him to
7:30 started cooking dinner
Made:
Organic roast beef with a new recipe I'm not in love with
Mashed potatoes
Onion gravy
2 loaves of French bread from scratch and had to kneed the dough by hand
French onion soup from scratch using the beef drippings
Cheesecake pudding
Dilled carrots from scratch

Finished coking dinner at 10:30
Watched part of "Meet the Fockers"
Got bored and went online looking for how to fix my car
Now at midnight I'm writing this blog post just to let it all out.

I guess now I need to put dinner away and clean the fucking kitchen so I can do the same thing I did today tomorrow

FUCK! I'm exhausted. And my hands are red and cracked and bleeding from the cold weatherand all of the Gojo scrubbing I had to do to get the grease off before I could cook.