(no subject)

I am stuck home today 'cause my battery was flat dead this morning despite my having charged it all night. I think it's finally given up the ghost. (This seems to have been a theme yesterday; need to try to replace a hard drive this weekend too.)

The nearest auto parts store being a full mile north, I walked two miles with a 40 pound battery to get a replacement. I will admit that I cheated a little bit. The Advance Auto Parts store I went to is right next to a Kroger's grocery store. In the Kroger's lot was a shopping cart belonging to a Farmer Jack store. I, ahem, borrowed it. It's now sitting in the lot of the K-mart next to my apartment building where it obviously doesn't belong. Then again, it didn't belong outside of Kroger's either so it all evens out.

I bought a cheaper battery because I wasn't concerned about enough power to get through the winter. I'm honestly not sure my car will make it that long. I got one with just a little over the minimum for that car. Upon trying to start the car, I found that it is not enough. The engine is just too old and cranky (can an engine that won't crank be referred to as cranky?); it wants more!

Ever since our trip to Wisconsin, the Olds has had a strange vibration and engine noise. It's been having battery trouble for a couple weeks now too. I am pretty worried about what's going on with the engine and I'm just getting really tired of stressing about whether something in the engine is going to go horribly wrong and explode or something the whole time I'm driving the car. *sigh*

I love that car. It's gotten (in reverse chronological order) me, my parents, the evil Bob, and the evil Bob's dad (who had it custom built to haul his 22 foot solid wall trailer; it has a super duty frame, overdrive tranny, and lots of other bells and whistles, most of which don't work anymore...) through the better part of 400,000 miles. On the original engine. I really thought it would make it the last 20k to roll the odometer again. But I have to think that it may be time to say goodbye.

Andrea and I are going to see about getting it into a shop, preferably one that will accept payment in trade. She's going to check with her contacts, call me back, and probably leave work early so we can deal with this thing today. I really like the mechanic I dealt with last time. Whatever is to be said about Darren, he can pick a good mechanic and I do appreciate his recommendation. However, money is something of an issue here. Especially if something big is wrong.

I've started looking at the car website that daveqat mentioned in his journal. Funny enough, there's an 83 Olds Delta 88 (exactly what I'm driving, but a coupe rather than a sedan) for sale a few miles from me for about $1500. We'll see what the mechanic says, but I think I'll start keeping my eye on the ads.

In the meantime, I'll resist the temptation to eat another consolative Boston Creme Roll (the raccoon girl went shopping yesterday and bought puppy treats! Yay!) and instead wait for lunch, and my star, like a good doggy.

(no subject)

Tonight we have a differant instructor than the last two classes. Not to complain about the last one, but I definitely prefer the new one. She has much more experience on the technical side of things and I'm actually thinking and learning in class. We're touching on a lot of aspects of win2000 server administration that I was vaguely aware of but had never had reason to need. Without reason to need them, I of course never managed to teach them to myself. I expect that, once we start really getting into networking type stuff here, I'm going to do some significant rearranging of my home LAN.

In other news, I have a rental car now. My old car is being looked at and I will hopefully know what's going on (and how much it will take to fix it) sometime tomorrow. I hope it's something minor. Somehow, I suspect it's not. But that's ok. I'm in a position where I can deal with that right now, and as long as I don't freak out and just keep slogging through work, going to school, and dealing with other life-associated complications, things can only get better. With wooisme in my life, they could never be truly bad. Just momentarily scary.

There was a brief discussion at the end of the break with a couple of my classmates about recovering data from destroyed hard drives. I've always had a pretty good idea of how this is theoretically (and practically I think) done. Why does that make me feel vaguley superior?

I've thought about this for a minute or two and I think that, rather than feeling superior, I really feel comfortable about that. Comfortable that, at least on that small level, I'm ahead of others in the class with me. And in the end, that's not because I want to feel like I'm better than everyone else; it's simply that I don't have a lot of confidence in myself. I feel like if I'm a step ahead at the beginning, maybe I have a better chance of finishing with the pack. Heh. A shining example of self-confidence I am not.