Saturday, November 17, 2012 - San Antonio Mechanic Shop, San Antonio NM
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Tiredflower, Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, San Antonio NM, November 10, 2012
Dang - what next?
Poor Salvador broke three bolts getting the 20 year old water pump off. Three long bolts that go through the water pump and then through the timing chest cover into the block. Before he started, he pointed out to me that these three go through the water jacket in the timing chest and often seize up over time. He was right. Now the timing chest cover needed to come off to extract the bolts. He also suspects a long term leak around the old timing chest to block gasket. There is evidence of a trace of oil in the coolant. So all in all not a bad idea to replace this gasket as long as we are so deep into the engine.
We're getting in pretty deep here but this stuff needs to be done eventually and doing it now saves the considerable labor of getting this deep into the engine at some later date.
What does the open timing chest reveal? Why a stretched timing chain of course. More parts to order...
What's another couple of days sleeping with my head 10 feet from passing traffic in the grand scheme of things?
Night camp
Drycamped - San Antonio Mechanic Shop, San Antonio NM
It was the Crickets
Now then: it isn't so much that one way of dying beats another, though that certainly is the case, but rather that when you KNOW the jig could be up any second or any decade -- it's the awareness that's important -- that just might make a difference. I'm like everybody else, I have these moments and then forget, lapsing back into "immortality." But there was a thing that happened in my back yard maybe 18 months before we split from Maryland that hit me as hard as seeing their president drop dead on stage must have hit those graduating seniors.
It was the crickets. I'd gone outside one warm fall evening to shut the garage door and suddenly realized I couldn't hear the crickets! No wait, I could, but only if I turned my head a certain way. Oh God, oh no: I had almost no high-frequency hearing in my right ear, or was it my left? That doesn't matter. The point is, a part of me had shut down permanently. No, it hadn't happened suddenly, but I had finally noticed, and that was hard to take. I'd never again hear crickets like I once had. Never! I walked back to the house in tears. All right, I'm sensitive. But I understood at once what all this meant.