12/20/12

Today was fairly eventful, even though I didn't actually make it outside to work on anything. When Andrea took the car in to have the belts replaced recently they mentioned that the brakes needed work, as the rotors were heavily rusted. I had also started noticing a shaking in the front end, so she took it back to the shop to have both looked at. It turns out that the rotors need to be replaced, because they are too rusted to be machined. They've never been machined, and I guess eight and a half years and nearly 130,000 miles is a long time to go without doing this. The brakes also need replaced, as one of the pads was completely worn out. The vibration was caused by flat spots on the tires, which I still can't figure out, since the car has never been left sitting for more than a few weeks at a time. One of the tires also had a nail in it, and they were all wearing prematurely to the inside because of an alignment issue. I'm certain that, with my dad's help, I could have done some of this work myself. I'm also certain that I could have shopped around and found cheaper, and likely better, tires than what the shop is offering. This, however, is one of those situations where, since we can afford it, I'd rather just get the work done and know its is done correctly. I'd rather not have to drive the car now that I know what all is wrong with it. So we told them to go ahead and do the work, which will probably end up costing us a few hundred dollars more than if we had been frugal and tried to minimize costs. The good news, though, is that once this work is done the car should be good for several thousand more miles without any maintenance beyond oil changes. The shop wasn't going to be able to complete the work yesterday, so I took a few hours off from work and drive to Richmond to pick Andrea up. We'll have to go back and pick the car up once they are done, which shouldn't take more than a day or two.

After returning home I finished up my work day, then drove back into town to fill up the gas cans. The weather forecast is calling for snow and high winds, and some people a few counties over had already had some loss of electricity. I don't really expect us to see any problems, but I wanted to be prepared, just in case. There was a lot of debris on the road, so we're probably lucky that there weren't any power outages here.

Andrea spent the evening trying to patch an old quilt that I use when we're watching tv. It is fairly tattered, especially around the edges. She has made quite a bit of progress, but there is still a lot of work to be done. It might have made more sense for her to just make me a new quilt, but I really like that one, and hate to throw it away if we can still coax a bit more use from it.