About a month ago a guy from work, who goes by Jazz, came up to me while I was leaving for the day. He was interested in my car because my daily driver is one year newer than a car that he is working on as a project. He told me that he could get parts for me cheaper than what I had been getting, which was nice because I needed a few things. One concern that I've had for months is that my driver's side door handle was broken, I also had an intake that was broken and held together with duct tape. I also needed to get a new fan blade since mine got a bit busted up when the water pump went bad and one of my belts snapped. (That little incident parked my car for a few months.)
Just about a week ago Jazz found a car in the junkyard that had a few things that I needed. He picked up the intake for me right away and just today he brought a fan blade and door handle. I paid him for the parts plus some for extracting them from the junk yard and I still got a better price for the whole lot than I've seen for replacement parts online. Granted, I haven't done a lot of searching lately, but I still thought $30 was a nice price for those parts.
So... after returning home, I began the process of swapping out my door handles. The removal of the old one was easy, since it is broken... except for getting those old bolts out of the round nuts. Who ever designed that... well... I hope they've learned not to do that again. Anyway, I had go buy some locking vice grips to get them off. It took a bit longer getting the bolts back into the new handle... which seemed like it would have gone faster since I practically soaked them in WD-40 after getting them off, but it was actually easier taking them off than it was getting them back with the new, unbroken, handle. At least it's done now.
After I finished, my wife said, "Don't you feel like a
real man now?"
It does give me a great sense of pride be successfully working on my car... but I also feel a sense of pride when I work through a tough programming problem or make some function that people find really useful or cool. Unfortunately, it's true, computer programming doesn't seem to fill any sort of manly-action quota.
