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
Emptiness
Emptiness shouldn't be thought of as a negative. A lot of people misconstrue that as meaning the opposite of something is nothing. But this is something slightly different. I don't want to get into comparative religious things because that's a complicated topic. But if we were to think about it, the problem of life and death has to do with what comes in between, and what comes in between is an awful lot of suffering. We're not just talking about the pain of suffering, we're talking about suffering. Our common everyday parlance it's called stress. That's a kind of suffering and we die from this. From the standpoint of Zen Buddhism this life isn't some sort of stage mock-up for something else that comes after this. This is what we have. We're right here and we're being in this present moment. What you want to think about when you think about emptiness is a way in which to stay present. Just as, in a way, in a very strange kind of concept, there really is no such thing as time. There's no dress rehersal for anything.
The Artful Mind, Reverend Sohaku Flagg, Rinzai Buddhist priest, in an interview with Nanci Race, Jan/Feb 2003