Nov 4 - the sounds of silence

Whew. What a relief. I can listen to music again !

We took the car to Tire Kingdom first thing and they did their thing with the wheel bearing. I picked the car up around noon and voila, silence. Or is that lack of voila ? Anyway, what a treat.

Too bad it wasn't a rear bearing. The rear bearing is only about $10 more expensive than the front bearing but it's already mounted in the hub that comes with it, necessitating a little more than one hour shop labor vs almost three hours for the front. Oh well. I guess that's like saying too bad it wasn't a tire valve cap that needed replacing, largely irrelevant :).

Next on the list is the thermostat and I'm still studying online instructions and diagrams thinking that I can do that one. If it wasn't for removing the fan and bleeding the coolant, it would be trivial ! My real struggle with this one is whether or not to do the water pump at the same time. Once the fan is off and the coolant is drained, the water pump replacement is almost a breeze. The thermostat is $65 and the water pump is $59. It's 2.8 hours of shop labor to replace either one or both ... plus the parts, of course, plus coolant. The web sites seem to recommend BMW coolant mixed half and half with distilled water, but I'll do some more reading on that.

The house rental has sparked interest, but I won't count my chickens until they hatch. Both people who saw it yesterday want it ... one doesn't quite have the deposit money yet but the other is bringing in the deposit money on Monday.

The latter, apparently, called the agent yesterday morning with "don't tell me it's rented already !" ... and apparently her husband has a landscaping company. To me, the house that's perfect inside married to a landscaper is a perfect combo ! Had the outside been as perfect as the inside it would have sold eons ago. All I have to do is put a series of mirrors in front and back of the house to make the property look bigger.

The property is a pushed over rectangle, with the width being the longer side. Part of the depth is taken up by mangroves, further accentuating the lack of depth. None of that bothered us, since we weren't looking at resale value or attractiveness of the outside, rather the inside. If someone told me we had to move back to that house, I wouldn't mind a bit ... but I would miss watching the dolphins play !

Sandy did some work in the garden, cleaning out dead stuff and doing some planting. I staked the small tree that had fallen over and was leaning against the house at the screened-in area. I also did some mangrove trimming and more trimming of the bananas. I picked and ate some more papaya. Yummy !

Sandy was over to Saxon a couple of times, once before and once after the showings. I also got over to the UPS Store after picking up the X5, dropping off the two disk drives for their return. The new WD drive works ok in the external housing formatted as NTFS -- not a permanent setup, but good for backups.

We cheaped-out for dinner last night and had steak. That sounds kind of funny but it's cheaper or as cheap as anything else. Two t-bones at a pound each left more than half of that for a stir-fry another day.

Today ... going on a bike ride.

Tomorrow, with a little luck, I won't get to Mass an hour early ... :).

Onward !