Dink around a little now, or dink around a whole lot later...

 I’m going through the twice-a-year “rearranging of the parts vehicles” this week, which is a semi-religious ritual right up there with Christmas and Easter for many in the hillbilly regions.

Not that there’s much of a point, but when you get down to it, that can probably be said about a lot of rituals. 

It does however give the Farm Manager some hope that I am doing something with that junk, as she likes to frame it.

The Subaru fired up after only half an hour on the battery charger, which led me (quite prematurely) to think I was heading into a productive day.

Due to not having an extension cord long enough to reach the F-150, I figured I’d wire it up to the Sub to get it going. Got things hooked up and got a few promising noises out of the Ford. Let them sit another fifteen minutes with the Subaru idling while charging up the truck battery. Tried her again, and… oh so close! Just didn’t catch.

So I sat in the Subaru and gave it a little throttle, hoping to send a few more amps to the truck, when suddenly there was a thunking noise and the motor stopped dead. That’s when I remembered that the Sub had been running low on oil and I’d meant to top it up before running it again. That’s what you call an “oh shit” moment.

Well, I guess I’ll let the Subaru cool down and assess the damage later, and in the meantime I’ll see if I can splice together that extension cord I ran over with the lawnmower last summer. No point buying a new one if you can fix the old one, and that’ll give me enough cord to get the battery charger hooked up to the truck.

Of course, then I couldn’t find my wire strippers. Normally, when I don’t need them, I’ll see them several times a week, but I don’t pay attention because I’m not looking for them. Checked the basement, the kitchen, the attic, the garage, and the barn. Nothing. So I set to patching up my extension cord with a pair of side-cutters and the same manicure scissors I use to trim the buds on the pot plants.

Figuring this operation could take some time, I hooked the battery charger to the Pontiac Torment, which I had cleverly positioned within one extension cord length of an electrical outlet back in the spring. Both the Torment and the Subaru are only here because I had balked at what I was offered for them as trade-ins. You know how that goes… “what, I’ve got twenty grand in that piece of shit and you’re gonna offer me a thousand bucks?!”

Ya. It’s worth at least two…

Both those vehicles could and should have been traded when I got the Toyota, but I’d been car shopping for a week and I was fed up. After having two brake jobs done on the Subaru in under 10,000 kilometers, the brakes didn’t work. The fluid goes somewhere. You start off strong and after a few miles the brakes go away. I knew a can of brake fluid woulda probably got me safely to the Toyota dealership, but I was done dinking around.

That was a year and a half ago.