Feb 5 - recovery

Actually I didn't feel all that bad. I did, however, sleep until 6:40, jumping out of bed, chugging down coffee and off to 7am Mass.

Then what did I do ? Well, I did the rear brake pads. In some ways that wasn't as easy as the front. I had the technique down pat but the pads were more worn and it was hard to get the pistons compressed back enough to get the pads over the rotors. I had to do it in two steps, hanging the calipers back on with one new and one old and compressing again. That's because I don't have a proper C-clamp and have a limited range of movement. I should have bought that $9 C-clamp when I saw it at Advance Auto Parts !

I took the car for a spin and all seemed ok. The brakes are stopping and going :).

Stopping is easy to check. If one brake isn't doing anything the ABS system goes crazy, thinking that wheel is in a low traction situation. Going is something that I have to monitor, that the wheel frees up and those old pistons don't stick. So far so good, but it was a short hop. The rotors were all the same temperature ... to hand touch. I should probably pick up one of those IR temperature readers before I truly burn my hand on a rotor !

That's it for now, other than an oil change sometime in the next week or two. I've done some more reading and searching on the rear control arms; two of them on each side are easy to replace, the major one is not mostly because bushings have to be pressed out and in and shocks have to be reinstalled. If I really-really want to do it I could go back to Tire Kingdom and pay them for the 5 hours work which could end up being 7-8 hours work with the bushings work.

Now that I've done a bunch of this, I see that I could have spent a little less money by buying parts kits online. Entire sets of control arms, ball joints and bushings can be had online.

If George were here, we could do my car and his together, because the Range Rover has the same setup, albeit with different parts of course. He thinks that he's probably due for some work, not because of the miles DRIVEN on the RR but because of the miles TOWED + DRIVEN.

I didn't do much else yesterday. We went over to the SYC for a drink at 5, intending to be there for a short while only. As it turned out, we met a couple who live on Yacht Club Island in the gated community right beside the SYC tennis courts. We chatted with them for about an hour -- they're from Sweden -- and exchanged phone numbers.

The Tiki was practically deserted. Everyone else but the Swedes and Canadians were watching the Superbowl somewhere. I saw from the paper this morning that the Giants won, so Father McKay (pronounced McK-eye (Irish) will be happy. He let slip in some post Mass announcements that God would be on the Giant's side ... whoops ... the winning teams side :). Of course he also mentioned that God's game is really soccer :).

Anyhoo ... we had shrimp for dinner, with rice and asparagus. Abby had ... well Abby had the same food as always. She's had a semi-consistent (no pun intended) semi-diarrhea problem lately though that we have to get looked into.

That's it.

Onward !