Big Red is painted and reassembled. Tomorrow morning the bedliner gets re-sprayed, once the bedliner dries the cap will be reinstalled and re-wired on Friday. I expect to have Big Red back midday on Friday.
The Sound Made By The Needle Scratching the Record
Sometimes life comes to an abrupt stop, but you just got to pick up the pieces and move on.
20 years ago, it was a common sound effect on television shows when a scene came to abrupt stop, to have the background music stop with the effect of a needle dragging along the grooves, as one carelessly took the stylus off the record. When you wanted to start listening to the record again, you would try to find your place, and drop the needle on it. It would make a loud clunk and the music would start playing again.
Much like a record suddenly paused in the middle of a song, one sometimes has a moment in their lives that turns everything up on the table. Where everything was going to plan, until suddenly something goes terrible wrong, and you spend months rebuilding and trying to figure out where you where on the record before you lifted the needle off the record.
It’s often not easy to go back where you left off. Times change, experiences change your perspective on everything. Part of your innocence is forever lost. You struggle to find your new identity and to make up for lost time. The world has evolved and things have changed, ever since the needle left the record in that sudden fashion. Much like the record that continues to spin around, time marches along while you recover.
What happened, happened. You have to tell yourself that, and hold your head, and move forward. You can’t get back what you lost, most of important the time. But you can move forward, seeking new direction and new experience. You have satisfied with the best you can do moving forward.
What Your Car Color Says About You
I never knew I was a "go-getter", but I like red. Red attracts mosquitoes and apparently other automobiles.
Didn’t Make It To Moose Plains
Yesterday, I was planning on going up to Moose River Plains to do some fishing, hiking, paddling, and plinking with the air rifle I had picked out and was going to pick up on way up. The pellets that air rifles use are very affordable and easy to get unlike .22 LR ammo which is next to impossible to get right now. It was going to be a really fun long weekend.
I had my truck all packed, and started heading up there with the kayak on the roof, and my truck was rear-ended in one of Albany’s many construction zone by another motorist. The kayak rode just fine during the crash, but things got pretty crumbled up on bed, bumper, and tailgate. While I was able to continue on and safely to get an exit ramp along the expressway to wait for the police, but apparently damage to vehicle’s gas tank or emissions system made it impossible to restart, and it had to get towed to the body shop. I was so hoping to continue on my trip.
I am a somewhat sore this morning, but for the most part I’m uninjured. None of the camping equipment that I had brought with me was damaged, and everything will be fine once the truck is rebuilt again. It’s not like my truck hasn’t been to my local body shop before, after it was struck in a hit and run crash two years ago on the driver-side, while parked at home while I was at work.
I’ve never liked the factory rear bumper on the Silverado. It’s made out of chromed sheet metal, and every little tiny ding and dent show up on it — and that’s just ugly. I am eventually thinking of putting an off-road bumper on the back, so it will hold up better when I bump things in the woods backing up, or even just snag the sides of bumper with an electric fence, as I did when the truck was almost brand new, years ago.
Certainly this all sucks. But at least everything else I’ve added on in the truck, like the CB radio and inverter are undamaged. I’m sure insurance, once it’s all worked out, will get things pretty much to same way there were before the collision.
Fixed My Second Battery/Isolator in My Truck Again
Last weekend when I was up in Brookfield, the second battery on my truck stopped charging again on my way home. Yes, again. I heard the low battery alarm go off, and I thought it was an issue with the battery isolator exciter line coming loose. I had accidentally broken the crimp terminal on that and had just bolted down the exciter wire directly to the isolator, during the earlier spring excitement when I was playing with fuses.
It was a temporary fix, but got me back up camping. I figured the temporary fix had failed. after hitting bumps. I figured the fuse had blown in the process, so I went bought a box of small ring connectors and fuses. Get back with my volt meter, discover the fuse is fine and the problem wasn’t with the excited wire on the isolator, but with the ground from isolator. But I did replace the ring connector, and wired it back to spec.
Then I had to go back to the auto parts store, return the fuses I didn’t use, and get a larger ring terminal to go over the battery’s ground, and more wire then go back to the isolator. The ground nut was a bit of bitch off the isolator, but a little WD-40 fixed that. Once I had the nut off, fabricating a new cable was quick, and I just had to tighten the bolts up and tie the wire back down.
Now on the CB Radio, the Car Radio, Inverter, and Lights in the Truck Cap work. I can go camping again. Plus I like to listen to tunes while driving, and really miss not having the CB radio. But now I’m back in luck, until the next thing breaks.
I swear, they did a nice looking job at the shop when I had the second battery wired up. But as soon as I got it home, and out on the rough dirt roads, everything started to fall apart. I’ve replaced fuses, wires, fuse holders, and half a dozen other things, due to issues I’ve had over the past three years with the wiring job the audio shop I took it to.