Uh oh. Look what crawled out of the garage. I have been dreading working on the car for a while now. Last time I tried to start it I was defeated. Today I decided to spend a little money and a lot of time on it and see if it wouldn’t get going. I changed the oil and filter and installed a new positive battery clamp with a quick disconnect to replace the old, cracked one that was causing problems before. I also took off the air filters and housing, put damper oil in the carbs and fed it some starter fluid. No new air filters were to be had at the autozone but, oddly enough, Amazon has them so I think I’ll just order them from there. It finally started after a few tries and more starter fluid although it sounded bad a couple of times when cranking and was a little smokey when it first got going. I let it run for a while, pulled it into the driveway, let it run some more, pulled it back in and then shut it off. At this point it made a hissing noise and spit a little coolant out of the top of the radiator. So, I guess it probably needs a flush and some new fluid now. Joy. I cannot imagine that I will be up to that tomorrow but I suppose we’ll see. At least it runs now. It also needs the brakes bled because I let them go too far when last it was drivable and got air into the lines. I also noticed that I am missing a lug nut from front passenger side wheel. No telling where that went. Yay project car. If I can get the coolant and brakes done it’s probably ready for registration and inspection at which point I could drive it to somewhere more thorough work could be done on it.

Came across this today.

The Third & The Seventh from Alex Roman on Vimeo.

While you can watch it here I suggest following the link, selecting HD and watching it full screen. For maximum astonishment, please keep in mind that the entire film is Computer Generated.

Everything’s coming up Milhouse. This was already a good week. The presentation went well at work and work became permanent. I’m still very excited about that. Before I started my contract in May I signed up to take the GRE. The idea is to go to grad school for materials science. UT has a really cool materials science institute that is multidisciplinary and has faculty from all over the university in it. They’ve done some awesome nanotech work and I’d like to learn more about that. Anyway, I digress. Step 1 in going back to school is to take the GRE which I did today. The GRE these days has a writing component, a multiple choice verbal component and a multiple choice quantitative component. Since they have human beings score the writing I won’t hear back on that for a couple of weeks but they give you the scores on the multiple choice bits after you’ve finished the test. The score range for each is 200 to 800. I got 730 verbal and 800 quantitative which is about as good as I think I can expect. I’m really happy about the 800 quant. Those scores are better than I did on the SAT back in the day. I don’t think I knocked the writing out of the park but I managed to avoid drooling on the keyboard so I’ve got that going for me.

Of course, if I actually get accepted to grad school then I will have a hard decision to make but it’s better to have the decision to make yourself than not. I think I owe myself something nice. I may go wander around the Crate and Barrel and look at all of the pretty furniture I don’t need and then go to the arts at the Blanton this evening. Tomorrow to celebrate the independence of my country from the rule of the hated English I will clean the kitchen and mow the lawn. If I’m feeling especially patriotic I may clean the bathroom too.

Huzzah!