bluhhh
A productive weekend. Sort of.
My sister-in-law came over Friday and brought her two kids. And a friend. And this friend’s child. Yes, two adults brought over three kids. I have nothing against kids, I just don’t particularly like them being in my house. Mainly because I like having shelves full of heavy pointy things and plenty of power tools, razor blades and pornography. Plus children carry germs and now my wife and I are both sick, much like the War of the Worlds or that episode of the Simpsons.
They went to see some 3D retooling of some movie in darkest Indiana on Saturday. Originally, I wasn’t planning on going, but since it made the difference between getting to have breakfast with my lovely wife and not, I chose to go. While they were in the theater, I dropped by the nearby Harbor Freight and bought a bunch of cheap imported crap… hose grip pliers, 5W solar panel, Kill-A-Watt (just what I needed to start my offgrid project), metric tap & die set, mitivac, box o’ nitrile gloves. Spent a lot of time looking at the milling machines & lathes they had… all of them were utter garbage. When I get the room for a shop, I’m going with old refurbished machines, a 3′ lathe and a Bridgeport knee mill would do me just fine.
Anyway, my lady bought a flybook off fleabay for hell of cheap, so we spent some time having fun with it and installing linux. She’s got to be quite the linux poweruser, far far faster than I did. It’s probably because she’s much smarter than I am and less lazy. I kegged my beer and put the CO2 screws to it to force carbonate.
Sunday I got up early and drove all the way to Janesville, WI, for a TDIclub get together. Did some work to ye olde Golf, such as rotate the tires, wired up the unused rear fog positions as brake lights, bypassed the clutch interlock switch, recoded the instrument cluster to achieve a 24 hour clock. Good folks, very knowledgeable, hell of nice shop. It’s amazing what you can get done in a heated shop with two jackstands and a floor jack.
On a similar note, the Al Warren Oil Company‘s Summit B11 pumps are now officially labeled as ULSD. This is absolutely fantastic fuel and with the cool weather my MPG is headed skyward.