As I mentioned on Monday, this has been an interesting week. Tuesday was an altogether horrid day. I went to the doctor for my shoulder and he decided to try and "fix" it with a shot. It was a mix of a numbing agent and steroids. He told me it might hurt going in as he sometimes "bounces it off the bone." I braced for the worse and didn't feel anything...until after he removed the needle. It felt as though my shoulder had a baloon being blown up inside it. Not so much painful as uncomfortable. He then told me the numbing agent would take an hour or so to fully kick in and that he wanted me to keep track of the pain over the next couple of hours. The pain didn't go away at all. In fact, about 4 hours after the shot it started to slowly build. By 6pm it felt as though someone was beating on my shoulder with a sledgehammer. So, I think the numbing agent worked to mask the pain, but the pain intensified after the shot. All I know is that my shoulder really hurt.
That was Tuesday. Yesterday, I got off work early (thus no post) to pick up the kids since Laura was in Seattle, picking up mom. I mowed the yard including weed eating. I then Trimmed the hedges and cleaned up the mess. My shoulder ached, but nowhere near the pain of the day before. Laura got home just as I finished the yard. I then left to finish my friends bathroom. That was going well, until about 10pm. I was connecting a clamp to hold the shower head in place. There was a lot of clamp to tighten so I used my drill to tighten it. It was almost tightened when my hand suddenly protested. That's when I discovered that I had managed to get my middle finger caught between the screw and the clamp. I now have something to take my mind off of my shoulder. The plumbing is done, now for the cosmetics. Should be able to finish that tonight.
Now that we got that out of the way, I will continue with what should have been yesterday's post. Since I promised to have a happy post once a week, This will be it (albeit with a slow start). It's amazing what the years do to childhood memories. Things we once remember as horrifying, embarrassing, or just plain painful are transformed into lessons we learned, funny stories to share, or maybe even a fond memory. I find this phenomenon quit interesting to say the least. Take for instance my truck. The first car I owned that I was able to drive was a Plymouth Arrow. The reason I specified the able to drive part was that my first car was actually a AMC Pacer. Dad drove it home and it never ran again, thus I never drove it. Anyway, for those of you unfamiliar with the Arrow, it is a small truck. It was Plymouth's version of the Luv. The reason you've probably never heard of it was that it was only around for a couple of years. Turns out it was a Mitsubishi truck that was re-badged was a Plymouth. All in all it was a decent truck. Or would have been, if it hadn't been re-engineered by a previous owner. Seems that the original motor gave up the ghost sometime in the 80's. So the owner replaced it with a Mazda 4 cylinder. Turns out, Mazda and Mitsubishi aren't really compatible. So to make it fit, rubber bumpers about 2 inches thick were used to align the mounting holes. Needless to say, the engine wasn't all that sturdily mounted. The other side of this is that the mechanic (and I use the term loosely) that switched engines didn't know how to make the electrical cross over either since I didn't have a tachometer or a speedometer. This made guessing my speed interesting. I tended to just get up to 4th gear and put the pedal on the floor. Since it had the approximate acceleration of a turtle on Valium, the only time I got to top speed was in a 5 mile stretch of highway between 2 towns. It wasn't until I had been driving this way for almost a year that I was informed by a friend in school that that equated to about 90 mph downhill (he had to "get up to 120 to pass me"). I really loved that truck. It was great until the day I discovered why rubber blocks do not make good engine mounts.
I was out with a couple friends driving the back roads. I was flying down a dirt road and managed to hit top speed (at the time I still didn't know what top speed was and we simply called it max RPM). As we approached an intersection we were able to see we had it clear and wouldn't need to stop. The intersection in question was on a hill. To cross it you went up a hill, crossed the road and continued up the hill on the other side. The road we were crossing was gravel and thus maintained...and level. This meant that the road we were on abruptly stopped going up, went level, then started going up again. At 90 mph you can probably guess what happened. All I got to say is, yes, you can make a 4 cylinder small truck fly for the 50 - 60 feet it takes to cross the road. Amazingly enough, we survived. The truck wasn't happy about it though. The aforementioned rubber blocks compressed as the engine bounced and drove the fan into the radiator. The shifter, being more rigidly mounted, stayed in pretty much the same position as the transmission moved with the motor bending 2 shift rods and locking the truck in 1st. It took me a few months to finally get the truck running again and on the road. That doesn't mean it ran the same. After that, it developed a "personality" and a bad one at that. It would turn itself off at will, which is fun at 50 mph on the highway. It would refuse to start for an hour then not shut off after you finally got it started. All in all, just driving it was an adventure.
Well, I hope that holds you off for a while. I thank you for this trip, however painful it may be. Have a wonderful day.
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