When Hatred Drives You To Start Small
No, I’m?not talking about hatred for the street sweeping. Nuh-uh. I’m talking about hatred for the *#!%$!%$ FIFTY dollar ticket we got last week because, randomly, the truck decided not to start which, therefore, kept me from moving it out of the street sweeping zone. The truck. Truck discussion counts as house blog stuff right? It IS the truck that hauls all the stuff for the house projects. Right? Right. P.S. do you know how frustrating it is to know you’re going to get a $50 ticket and not be able to do anything about it? Pisses you right off.
I was pretty sure the battery had just given up any desire to hold a charge. It was pretty old and I did leave the lights on all day a couple of weeks ago. Turns out 1980 trucks don’t ding at you when you try to exit the car with lights a-blazin’. (Ok yeah, here comes the “start small” portion of our story.) So I thought, we’ve done a helluva lot of stuff to this house successfully. Changing a battery can’t possibly be harder than, say, installing a toilet, drilling post-holes with a gas powered auger, moving electrical outlets, or putting in an insinkerator. If we could do that, we could swap the old truck’s ticker. Turns out yes, that is a task that is well within the ole skill-set. And that small step has effectively determined what the post-house project will be: restoring the truck. Bring it.
Note: Because I’m now used to the random weird stuff you find when working on an old house, I was not suprised AT ALL to find similar weirdness in the old truck. Turns out the battery hold-down bracket which should keep the battery snugly in place was missing. The battery had been bouncing around the inside of the truck like a big electrified, acid-filled lego block. Nice.
