I'm living in Interesting Times

This has been an interesting week.

Last weekend, someone backed into my car while it was parked in front of our house and drove off (minor paint damage on my bumper by the rear wheel; haven't had time to get an estimate for fixing it). Then on Friday evening, I was going to help my mom pick up her new TV, and she was going to take Theo for the night. She picked him up, and we drove our separate vehicles to Best Buy. Along the approximately 2 mile trip, I noticed that it didn't feel right while I was driving; so after I parked, I took a look around my car... and notice that 3 of the lug bolts on my front passenger-side tire have sheared off.

No, I don't know when it happened. I can only assume it was on this trip, but maybe that was just the last one, and the other two have been broken off for a week or more. I don't typically look at my lug nuts to make sure they're all there. I look at the tires to see if any are losing air, but not the lug nuts themselves.

So today was a learning experience in trying to replace the lug bolts. They are technically replaceable, and the replacements are only about $1.50 each, plus another $1.50 each for the new lug nut to go with it. The problem is that they apparently never expected you to want to replace these on your own. You can knock them loose from the hub/bearing assembly, but there's no clearance behind that to get them out. You have to remove the entire hub/bearing assembly... for which you need a 35mm socket and then a torque wrench that can handle 250+ N-m for when I need to put it all back together. So I went and got a 35mm socket (cheap, from a local warehouse tool store) and got a torque wrench, and brought them home and then.... it didn't fit. I happened to find a 1 3/8 socket while I was looking through the tools that are in my mom's garage, and tried that one and it fits almost perfectly. If you do the math, 1 3/8" = 34.92 mm. So the cheap socket I bought is apparently cheap for a very good reason. On the bright side, I have a socket that fits, but by that time it was too dark to do anything.

I am really grateful to Graham for his help in all of this learning today, and hopefully there's not too much more learning involved tomorrow and I can get this behind me.

To top all of THAT off, Andrea got sick today, and that's never a good thing, no matter how many times it happens (I think this is at least the 4th time in 3 months).

Well, I hope the next week is nowhere NEAR as interesting as this week has been.

Our cute little pumpkins

Here are a couple of pictures of our boys in their Halloween costumes, and aren't they adorable? Here's one with them posing together, and another of them posing with the pumpkins that we decorated (Theo and his Mama painted the little ones and he helped me carve the big one).

Professional Beach Bum

This kid didn't need a vacation; he was this happy to begin with!

How I spent my summer vacation, part 1

We're on Vacation! We made it through 2 flights with 5 adults and a three year old and a three month old, and all made it with all of our luggage. It was questionable for a while when there was a delay in leaving OKC for the first leg of the flight (to Detroit). Because of weather, they re-routed the flight to go all the way over Nashville before turning north to Detroit; this resulted in a 30 minute delay while they reprogrammed the route in the plane and then realized we wouldn't have enough fuel to make that new route. So we had to taxi back to the terminal to add some fuel.
All of that meant that we only had about 15 minutes to make it 30 gates in the Detroit airport with the aforementioned three year old, three month-old, and the associated car seats. We were the last ones on the plane, but 'luckily' we were also in the very last row at the back of the plane, so that was fun.
But we did make it to Maryland at the scheduled time, stopped for food on the ride to PaPaw and Mimi's house and then everyone went straight to bed. We all got up and PaPaw made pancakes for breakfast before we went to their church (which has been around since the 1600s). After church we went back to their house, loaded everything back up and went to lunch before we got on the road for the 3.5 hour trip to the beach.
We made it to the beach house and after unloading the cars, we all made our trips the half a block to the beach. Theo didn't really care for his first trip, but he was very tired after a long day in the car with not much of a nap. After a pizza dinner for the first day, we all settled down with our separate activities: John on his laptop, Adam holding Max and then bathing Theo, Erin and Andrea each reading a book, Mimi and PaPaw went to bed, and I'm typing this blog entry.

And now we're all headed to bed, so good night from our vacation in Maryland!

I'm amazed

One of the books I ordered, Learning Python, is already here! I just ordered them Friday evening. It isn't the most recent edition of that book, but still, hard to beat for the price.

And now I bet you're all amazed that I've posted again!

Father's day

I had a pretty good Father's day. Andrea finished painting the trim on the outside of the wall, and it looks excellent! If you haven't seen it, you can see a picture on her blog, here. I didn't do a whole lot, Theo helped his mom paint, and I got to cuddle with Max on the couch for a while.

This afternoon, Max was having some fun laying on his playmat thing, and he almost rolled himself over from his back to his front. I think if he'd straightened the arm he was laying on out a little more, he would have gone right over! He probably would have started screaming at that point; he's not fond of being on his belly.... we keep trying it, since according to the professionals, we're supposed to do that to help them work those muscles, but he really doesn't like it. I'm guessing that once he figures out that he can start moving that way, he'll enjoy it a lot more.

My new office

I recently got to move into an office at work. Ever since I've started, my desk has been out in the operations area with two of my co-workers and next to the printer room. I like the office, it's a bit quieter. Just to the right of where I was standing when I took the picture is my new bookshelf. It doesn't have much on it at the moment, so for Father's Day, I'm getting myself some new (work- and computer-related) books from half.com. The "under $0.99," used book section is dangerous; but I did just order 5 books for under $25, including shipping!