Well, not BIG ONES. Words, actually. Some of them are small, while others are a bit longer.
Just passed the 70,000 word mark on the current novel in progress. The draft is currently just over 250 pages, double-spaced in 12-point Times New Roman with one-inch margins. Feels like about about halfway through, though you never know at this point.
I have at least one chapter that is completely out of place–doesn’t really lead to anything. I’ll either have to cut that one or find a way to connect it to some of the other threads in the narrative. It’s all about tying things together.
Last Thursday I drove from Phoenix to Salt Lake City. Early in the trip, I noticed that my manual transmission was getting harder and harder to shift. I would have to use some real muscle to go from 5th to 4th when I needed to climb a hill, or back to 5th on the straightaways. Getting into reverse was a real grind. Seriously … a grind. Shifting into first from a stop was almost impossible. Something was obviously wrong.
I finally stopped at a service station once I got over to I-15. I had done some Googling along the way and had come to the conclusion that my clutch fluid was probably very low. I bought a bottle of DOT-3 and poured some in, only to see it dribble right out the bottom of the clutch master cylinder reservoir. DRAT!
One of the service station mechanics saw it before I did. The plastic nipple that provides the connection between the master cylinder hose and the reservoir itself had snapped off cleanly at the base, leaving a gaping hole in the bottom of the reservoir and causing most of the clutch fluid to leak out. Without any fluid in the reservoir, I had no hydraulic pressure to actually make the clutch … clutch.
Naturally, they didn’t have a replacement clutch reservoir in Beaver, Utah. That would be too easy. I called ahead to a couple of parts stores in Fillmore, and ended up with zip and zip. One of the guys from Fillmore said that the master cylinder reservoir was probably a dealer part, so I called the closest dealer, which was a couple hours ahead of me in Provo.
After keeping me on hold for 10 minutes, the dealer’s “parts guy” said they don’t sell the reservoir by itself. He transferred me to the service department, which kept me on hold for another 15 minutes before telling me I needed to talk to the “car guy.” (He was apparently the “truck guy.”) When I finally got to talk to the “car guy” he told me in no uncertain terms they would have to replace the entire master cylinder assembly at the same time, and quoted me a price (including parts and labor) of $370.
Since it was obvious that I wouldn’t be able to get the car fixed on Thursday, I limped into Salt Lake and forgot about the repair until after my interview. Friday afternoon I called around to at least a dozen auto parts stores, junk yards, “pick a part” lots, and so on. Nobody had a replacement reservoir. When I searched online, there were plenty of online dealers that offered a full clutch master cylinder for my type of car, but none of them had the reservoir. The forums for Neon repairs were filled with desperate pleas from shadetree mechanics looking to get their hands on “just the plastic reservoir–not the whole assembly.” I obviously wasn’t the first person who had encountered this particular problem.
My buddy Doran was convinced that we could simply repair the part. So on Saturday, that was exactly what we set out to do. After discussing various possible strategies, we ended up buying a $2.50 brass “hose end” and a $5.00 package of JB Weld. I cleaned out the reservoir thoroughly with detergent and drilled out the bottom to receive the threads of the brass fitting. Once the fitting was threaded in nice and tight, I mixed up some good ol’ JB Weld and coated the seam liberally both inside and out. We put the new-and-improved “robo-nipple” up in the laundry room so the epoxy could cure for a full day.
On Sunday, we pulled the ol’ ox out of the mire and installed the reservoir back into my little car. It was as easy as slipping the barbed nipple back into the tube and then securing the bracket in place with a single nut. I poured some DOT-3 inside and pumped the clutch a bunch of times. When the cap was back in place, the clutch worked just as good as new!
The entire repair cost under eight bucks, and I feel pretty good about cheating the Larry H. Miller estate out of $362. Maybe, if you share this blog post with all of your Facebook friends, I’ll get a good SEO bump and then all of the other thousands of Neon owners with broken clutch reservoir nipples will eventually be able to see how I stuck it to The Man by fixing a poorly designed plastic part.
Nate, Meg and Ian at one of the caches we found on Lookout Mountain
My fabulous wife gave me a Garmin eTrex for Christmas. It’s a basic handheld GPS unit, but it’s exactly what I needed to give “geocaching” a try.
For those of you who know nothing about the “sport” of geocaching, it has kind of an interesting history. Back when the Department of Defense built the Global Positioning System (GPS), it was meant for military use only. Because of this, the signals put out by the satellites were intentionally scrambled. If you weren’t in the military, your GPS device was only accurate to about 100 yards. This was just fine for navigation purposes (i.e. getting from town to town or port to port), but terrible for any application that required real accuracy.
In early 2000, the DOD removed the restrictions, allowing civilians to get positioning information that was about ten times more accurate. Just days after this happened, a guy in Oregan hid a bucket of “treasure” (really just a few trinkets) and published the exact coordinates on the USENET newsgroup sci.geo.satellite-nav. In less than a day, complete strangers were using the recently descrambled satellite signals to locate the bucket, sign the log, and trade for trinkets.
Since then, over a million “caches” have been hidden, and millions of people have taken up the pastime of searching them out.
It’s easy. You sign up for a free account on Geocaching.com, where you can search for “hidden treasure” by address, ZIP code, coordinates, and so on. You pick a cache and get the latitude/longitude coordinates, which look something like this:
N 33° 38.966 W 112° 00.015
Then you simply enter the coordinates into your GPS device (or even your GPS-enabled mobile phone) and go out hunting. Eventually you’ll arrive at the place where the cache is supposed to be, and then you’ll have to start really looking. Sometimes the cache will be a box under a pile of rocks, or a Tupperware container tucked into a hollow tree. “Urban” caches often involve creative use of magnets. Even with my limited experience I’ve already seen a huge variety of containers and hiding spots–including a small plastic tube embedded in a tire tread on the side of a road.
You’re welcome to take something from a cache as long as you leave an object of equal or greater value. There’s almost always a log to sign. When you’re done, you’re supposed to re-hide the cache in exactly the same place so the next person can find it. Then you go online and register your “find” on the Geocaching website.
It should be obvious to anyone who knows me why I would be so attracted to this whole concept. Geocaching is just such a cool combination of technology and the outdoors. After all, geeks like me need a reason to go out and stretch our legs and ramble around in the countryside!
Plus, it’s really fun for the kids. Here’s a great video that my buddy Doran put together to document one of our early cache hunts:
Watch the video and ask yourself: what other activity would get two geeks and several of their children outdoors on a Utah December afternoon? How likely is it that any of us would have decanted ourselves from in front of our computers, Kindles, iPads, iPods, Android devices, Boxees and so on to climb a frickin’ mountain?
The jaunt in the video was our third or fourth cache hunt. Since then, I’ve logged another 16 “finds” in both Arizona and Utah. On Monday, my kids and I spent almost three hours hiking around Lookout Mountain in Phoenix, locating seven of the eight caches we set out to find. It was a great afternoon.
On Wednesday, I took the next logical step and placed my first cache. There are a bunch of rules, so I familiarized myself with what was required, then put together a cache. It was just an Altoids tin (they’re curiously strong!) covered in camouflage duct tape. Inside I placed a small plastic bag containing the standard note of congratulations, plus some slips of paper for people to sign. I also included the requisite trinkets–in this case, they included an American flag pin, a “Vegas” pin, a small carabiner and a guitar pick. I hid my cache under a flat rock behind some bushes in a park near the house I grew up in. Then I took the GPS coordinates and registered the new cache on Geocaching.com.
The Geocaching website requires that all new caches be reviewed by a volunteer before publishing. At about 8:00 this morning, I received notification that my cache had been posted, and at 8:31 I got another e-mail telling me that someone had just logged the FTF (first to find). How about that? Within half an hour of my little Altoids tin making its public debut, a complete stranger:
It’s kind of an amazing idea, and a very fun hobby. Tomorrow I’ll be driving back up to Utah for a second job interview, and I’ll probably look for a couple of caches along the way.
