Kevin Standlee: Fandom Is My Way of Life

Yesterday, Lisa started working on the Rolling Stone. She used "Liquid Wrench" to get the nearly-frozen screws to loosen up, and she had access to her full set of tools, which allowed her to get the fasteners loose. This meant that she could get the bracket that holds the air intake filter off, and get closer to the ignition system. She also took off the "doghouse" cover from the inside. It's still very cramped inside the RV's engine compartment.

( Identifying Potential Issues )

One other possibility was that something was wrong with the fuel feeds. If that were the case, the engine would start if you sprayed ignition fluid into it, but would die shortly thereafter. Lisa tested that. She sprayed fluid and after getting clear told me to try to start it. No luck. That's actually good news, because it points in the direction of the ignition system (distributor/rotor/coil), not the fuel system.

All of the parts (Ford Motorcraft brand) are available from O'Reilly Auto Parts. We'd have to order them, but their system says that they'd be here the next day. We'll place an order once Lisa is ready to start moving on this.

After work today, we tried starting the Rolling Stone and it started right up, so we decided to go with Plan A and simply drive to Yerrington to collect the RV from Wild West Chevrolet without turning off the RV, then driving home.

The minivan was waiting. They did a lot of work on it, replacing the condenser (the most expensive part), which had been leaking, an AC hose assembly (second most expensive), and bunch of other parts. There was a whole lot of labor on this as well. The total cost, including some difficult to source parts and labor, was over $3400. The total cost including the work done in February: $10,300. Still cheaper than buying a new car, but also painful.

Speaking of painful, it took us a whole lot longer to get home than expected, for reasons I will explain tomorrow. However, the Astro ran just fine, and produced lots of nice cold air for the whole trip. Lisa and I talked about how much more comfortable the Winnipeg road trip would have been last year had we had working AC and didn't have a Service Engine Soon light on for the entire trip.

( And We're Home )

I am too tired to write about the problems we had with the Rolling Stone, so I will save that story for tomorrow. For now, suffice it to say that I'm very glad I keep my AAA dues up to day at the AAA plus level.

No winners on our lottery tickets this time. I have $8 in winners from the previous draw. I have six months to collect them, and I'd rather wait until I'm going that way (at least somewhere in California) to cash them rather than make a special trip.

Using the Rolling Stone for errand-running is harder than it might look. The RV doesn't handle very well, even with a steering stabilizer, and it's clumsy to park. When we were dropping the recycling, I managed to back into one of the dumpsters. (No harm done, thank goodness; I was going less than 1 mph.) Parking is always an issue with the RV, and so making a bunch of different stops around town causes stress that is not always obvious. Today, I found myself feeling badly out of sorts, and have called off all further planned chores that I'd hoped to get done today. Besides, it has been snowing off and on again, albeit that nothing is sticking.

If I'm really lucky, I'll get to bed early today.

Yesterday afternoon, Lisa and I drove to Sparks to collect the Rolling Stone from Big O Tires. I paid $1539 for major brake repairs. To my annoyance, I discovered after I got home that they hadn't deducted the $25 discount from the coupon offer I gave them when I checked it in. You would think they could at least give me that.

( Back Home Again )

Since we were in Sparks anyway, we went to WinCo Foods for grocery shopping. I wish we had not done so and had put it off until the wee hours of Saturday morning as we often do. The queues were huge. I think we spent more time queued than we did actually shopping, even after Lisa sent me to get in line while she took a second cart to get other things. We spent the queue time trading off while one or the other of us went back to get things we'd initially forgotten.

After WinCo, we went to Raley's to get some higher-quality things that we cannot get at WinCo.

We like WinCo, but it's essentially too popular to shop there during daytime hours. While standing in the queue, I told Lisa, "Next time, we'll come shopping at 2 AM Saturday," and the person in line ahead of us was astonished to learn that the store is open 24 hours a day. It only says so in big letters on the outside of the building.

For the 2 1/2 months that the minivan was in the shop, I had to use the Rolling Stone as my "runabout," a role for which it is not at all suited. On top of its horrible gas mileage (about 8.5 mpg), it has needed a brake job since before the Astro went into the shop. Now that I have the Astro back, it was time to get to work on the RV. A discount coupon from Big O that arrived in yesterday's mail may help cut the cost somewhat.

After work this afternoon, Lisa and I convoyed in to Sparks, and I turned the keys over to them. I made it clear that I assumed this would take several days, and besides, I don't want to have to come back to Reno/Sparks until the storms that are moving in tomorrow have passed.

Lisa and I did some grocery shopping in the Astro since we were in town anyway. We balked at WinCo, where the queues were huge. (There's a reason we normally only got to WinCo during the wee hours.) Raley's had enough for us to supplement what's already in our larder, so we headed for home.

We did have an annoying setback with the Astro on the way into Sparks, about which I'll write tomorrow. It looks like the repairs on the minivan aren't over yet.

I called Wild West Chevrolet in Yerrington this afternoon to check on the minivan. The good news is that they haven't forgotten about me. The bad news is that some of the parts needed to repair it are difficult to get and that they are still working on it.

I continue to have to use the Rolling Stone as my regular vehicle, which is expensive, and probably about to get more expensive as I'm pretty sure that the RV needs an extensive brake job. The brakes still work, but it's unclear how much needs to be done. Also, with the Big Orange Van offline and the Small Orange Pickup needing a bit of reconfiguration if it is to carry more than one person in it (and person 1 is always Lisa as I can't drive a manual transmission), we are running out of spares for me to put the RV into the shop for repairs.

How long before the dealership gets the parts for the Astro, nobody knows.

As I mentioned in a previous entry, my dentist recommended removing and replacing two crowns. The cost per crown is $1800. My insurance only covers $1000/year. So today I took a half-day off from work to drive to Reno and have the first crown removed. We'll do the second one on January 2, when my dental benefits reset. They will then send the casts off to the lab to be done, and when they come back, they will install the new crowns. Until then, I have a temporary crown on the first tooth.

This will actually be the third crown on that tooth, because it was crowned once, and then the crown had to be removed to do a root canal on that tooth and a second crown installed. That's the only root canal I've had.

The removal procedure wasn't too bad; nowhere near as bad as the original root canal. I now have the removed gold crown here with me. I expect to take this and the other crown and see if there's any money to be made by selling them for the gold value.

I was grateful to discover that there is on-street parking near my dentist's office, because maneuvering the Rolling Stone into the spaces in their parking lot is tricky, whereas on-street parking is relatively easy.

After paying the $800 that's my share of the first treatment (thank goodness for my healthcare savings account!), I thought I had enough time to get the oil changed in the RV. It has been almost four years since I changed the oil in the Rolling Stone, and while for much of that time I didn't operate it — there was a year where it moved less than one mile — I did think I should get the oil changed. I had a 3 PM chiropractic appointment in Fernley, but I had several hours, and I've rarely been at Jiffy Lube more than an hour, so I headed over there.

It took them nearly three hours to get the word done. There were only three vehicles ahead of me, but one of them must have been immensely complicated. Once they had the RV on the block, it did not take that long, even though I also agreed to have the rear differential fluid changed. It looked awful: dark and sludge-like rather than the relatively light, clear oil that it normally should be.

I called the chiropractor when it became clear that I wasn't going to make the 3 PM appointment and they told to come at 4 PM. I though that would be fine, but as I didn't get out of Jiffy Lube in Sparks until after 3 PM, I though I was screwed. Fortunately, there wasn't a lot of traffic working my way from the shop to I-80, and the afternoon crunch hadn't happened yet. Once I got clear of Sparks I put the pedal to the metal, which is something I really do not like doing with the fuel-hungry 460 engine, but I did not have any choice.

Luck seems to have been with me: I made it with five minutes to spare, and the chiropractor's office was running slightly late anyway, so all was well.

So as I said, this is the first of two crown renewals. For most of the next month or more, I'll be living with temporary crowns in the upper right and later lower right portions of my mouth.

When we started getting the Rolling Stone ready for use again thanks to the work Lisa was doing on the Astro, initially the van wouldn't start at all. We figured that was because it had set for nearly a year. Lisa put the van on the battery charger and all seem well, although we had the setback with the power windows. After Lisa fixed that window regulator, I started using the RV while she undogged the Astro and looked into the issue with the EGR valve. Unfortunately, the day before yesterday, the RV wouldn't start again. It had some power, but not enough to start the vehicle.

This afternoon, Lisa pulled the vehicle battery (there's a separate "hotel" battery for the RV appliances) and we took it over to O'Reilly, where we bought this one originally in January of 2021. When we got there, we realized that we were still within the 36 month warranty period for this battery. It took them a little while, but they were able to eventually find my original purchase, and we did a like-for-like swap, saving me more than $200. Lisa bought a new battery cable (just in case) and we headed for home.

( Battery Swap )

The RV started up immediately. That's one of the few times a warranty has worked for anything I've bought. But perhaps I should run the vehicle at least once a month from now on even if I'm not using it as regularly as I was when I was living out of it in the Bay Area.

[Back-dated due to an internet outage]

We now have four solid new tires on the RV; however, not all is well yet.

( At Last )

With the road tires settled, we went to take the RV for a short drive to make sure everything else worked. Unfortunately, after sitting for several months, the battery was dead. While I went to a chiropractor appointment, Lisa jump-started the RV from her pickup, let it charge up for a bit, and made sure its air conditioning seemed to work, and drove it around the block.

We needed to get groceries for Lisa as I'll be away for the next two weeks, so we though we'd drive the RV given that its AC works. Except that when I started it up, I realized that the driver's side mirror needed adjusting. I tried to roll down the window. Nothing. The power window didn't work. While investigating this, we ended up rolling down the passenger side window. In this case, both the up and down buttons rolled the window down and nothing rolled it up. So we shut things down again and Lisa went to work on the passenger side door. While Lisa worked on this, a thunderstorm rolled in, which make the temperatures much cooler, but also started getting things wet and harder to handle.

After Lisa removed the paneling from the door, she was able to access the window mechanism, but not to get the power window to move up. She was able to force the window back up and jam it into place temporarily so that we could secure the RV again, but this is only a quick patch and once again we'll have to put off a fix until I get back from the Bay Area.

I got the email from TireRack.com this morning, so this afternoon when I got off work, Lisa and I drove over to USA Parkway and the warehouse, backed up to the retail customer pickup lot, called the designated phone number, gave my particulars, and presently a worker appeared with a cart containing our tires. I showed my ID and credit card with which I'd paid, and at our request, he set the tires on the dock and allowed us to load them ourselves. They fit just fine.

( A Tiring Day )

To my great annoyance, we knocked loose several black widow spiders while doing the wheel work. I'd never seen a black widow with white spots on its back, but I later confirmed that some do have spots. We dispatched everything we could find. I'll poke at the next removed wheel tomorrow before putting it into the minivan to take it to be removed and replaced. I don't like spiders, but black widows are the worst. I'm glad we don't have to deal with their even worse Australian cousins.

So that's one tire down, and three to go, or actually four because we have to swap the best of the remaining tires on to the wheel for the spare. I hope that we'll get this done by the time I leave for the Bay Area on Friday evening.