Mower Drama

Okay, so I haven't posted anything in over two months. I guess there is stuff I could write about, and probably will, but for now, here's what I was up to last night:

[WARNING: the following mower drama is rated Y-14. Some scenes of mower abuse may be too intense for younger or more sensitive viewers. Parental caution is advised.]

Last week, while I was mowing happily along, the 10-year old MTD suddenly started running really crappy unless I pulled the choke out, and then it died on me altogether, and wouldn't restart, which meant I had to do the rest with the ancient, 20", non-self-propelled push mower. Not cool.

I resisted the strong urge to set it aflame and push it into the busy street, and instead, rolled it around back till I could mess with it, which was last night.

It would run for about two seconds, and stop. Pulling out the choke didn't help. I knew it had to be a fuel delivery problem, because pulling the choke out had bought me a little time, and it would start, but only run a few seconds.

I replaced the spark plug anyway, just because, though when I pulled the old one, it was still in great shape.
Next, I replaced the fuel filter, because I could see it had some dirt in it, though I had verified that fuel was still running through the line (and all over everything) when I had it disconnected.
So, I had verified that fuel was getting _to_ the carb.

A shot of starting fluid yielded a start, and if I kept spraying, the mower kept running. So now, I knew the problem lay somehwere between the fuel getting into the carb, and getting srayed out into the throat. Probably a stuck needle or gummed up jet.

Sure, a carb rebuild would have solved the problem; but if I had to invest that kind of time and effort into a 10-year old mower, it was going to be time for me and Mr. MTD to part ways. I already had eyes on my next concubine: one of those sweet, sexy, zero-turn mowers.

I tried one last thing: I dumped about half a container of STP fuel system cleaner straight into the carb throat, and hit the starter. It blew smoke out the exhaust, and STP out the throat. I dumped a little more in, put the rest into the tank, and let it sit for half an hour.

I came back, fired it up... and it died in two seconds. I shot some more starter fluid into the carb, hit the key again. It sputtered to life, then started to die. I cranked the throttle back and forth to confuse it, and voila; it was running on its own. I let it run for a few minutes to run some of the stuff inthe tank through, and the stuff in the carb out.
Then I hopped on, dropped the blade, and made a few passes around the back yard, just to make sure it was going to keep running, and not quit like a little b7tch as soon as I dropped the blade, or tried to move forward.

Success.

Plus, I have killed every mosquito for blocks.

The End

Two Posts in Less than a Month!

Well, lookie that. I lied. Here I am posting, mere days after my last post.
I'm mostly just posting to vent my frustration at my job...
When I signed on, I was told that "every few weeks or so", we had to work on Friday night at around 10PM, for about an hour, to update software on our site.
Now, I wasn't thrilled by that, being someone who values my free time highly; but it was the first serious "bite" I'd had in a few months, and the job seemed otherwise pretty cool. And my boss is cool; which goes a long way, sometimes.

Well, you guessed it: "every few weeks" is usually at least every other week, and sometimes is as often as twice a week. Oh, and it's not usually at 10 for about an hour - it's occasionally as late as 2 AM (hell, one time it was 8:30 AM Saturday!), and has yet to take less than two hours. And that's if everything is working right.
I was here last Thrusday for 12 hours, and I just found out I have to work this Saturday morning at 2 freaking AM.
This is just insane. I have to get out of here.
If they'd fix their process, I'd gladly stay. But they won't. Someone somewhere up high enough seems to believe this is the right way to run things, and I can't change that.
My résumé is out. We'll see what happens.

In happier news, I played with my "new" band, Cataplexy (me, drummer Jeff from Synergism, and "super-bassist" Joe) last Saturday for the first time in months, and we wrote pretty good chunks of three songs. Pretty productive. There are still some scheduling issues with that band, but I think it's going to be worth it if we can get it off the ground.

Okay, that's it for now.

I'm not dead...

Man. Do I suck as a blog writer, or what? This is why I never stuck with being a writer, although it's always been one of those things I keep imagining I'd be good at (despite the grammar in that sentence).

Well, let's see. Since I last wrote, we had a nice Christmas, I got a job at Zix Corp - http://www.zixcorp.com/ working on their Pocketscript product, and as a result, I've had exactly zero spare time.
I also forgot what the password was to this blog, and it took me a while to figure that out, and then my computer went down. I'm typing this from a brand new Sony Vaio, which I am really digging.
So, I'll try to post a _little_ more regularly, but I'm not promising anything.

Things have been pretty dead in the studio, too. Nobody too exciting, though I did record a band called 4 Foot Fall that is pretty good. Other than that, mostly my normal rap customers, all squeezed in on the weekends now, since I'm working during the week.
Ugh...

Well, that's it for now.

Wanna take bets on how long till the next entry?