YAY! Which was pretty much the high point of the weekend. Well, that, and actually getting a few moments of time where I could crawl under my lovely lumpy hunk of Swedish iron and change the oil.
You know how long it's been since I actually changed my own oil? Nope--I don't either. Long time, though. It sure was satisfying. I was waiting on Catherine to get her bath Saturday afternoon so I could take her over to the house of one of her little friends for a birthday party, and there were no baskets of clothes to fold or to put in the washer, and the dishes were in the dishwasher washing, and no one was pulling anyone's hair, and Reba was upstairs cleaning out the nest of magazines on her side of the bed, and so I snuck out the door and got to work.
Wow. There sure is a lot of oil on the underside of my car.
Turned it on and steered all the way to the right to give myself room to ooch under there and pull the plug, shoved my new oil recycling jug under there to catch the outflow, shoved my massive bulk behind the wheel (hoping I had remembered to set the parking brake, just in case the transmission decided to let go), fiddled with the plug, SUCCESS!, wiped it off, flipped the crush washer (not a good idea if you really value all that oil staying in place, but hey), plugged it back up, moved the jug over to the area where the filter lives, ooched back out from under the thing, ran over to the topside and grabbed the filter with my patented oil filter removal tools (i.e., my grubby hands) and thankfully it came loose with no cursing. Primed the new one, put it on, replaced the filter magnet (couldn't hurt, you know), spun it back on, cinched it down, pulled the jug out and let the old filter drain, and poured in the new juice.
Fifteen minutes. Not bad, if I do say so myself.
And quite a nice change of pace from the remainder of the weekend, which consisted of alternately spending huge amounts of money and hauling people everywhere and making sure each family member was appropriately slaved over. BUT, at least there was some ice cream in there, too. And seafood!
Anyway, I have 156 things to get done this morning, so you'll all just have to entertain yourselves for a while so I can get those whittled down to something below a hundred and have time to play.
Posted by Terry Oglesby at January 30, 2006 08:53 AMBut sadly no ponies.
Posted by: Sarah G. at January 30, 2006 09:13 AMDo you do Dodge pickups?
Posted by: Larry Anderson at January 30, 2006 09:16 AMNo, no ponies, Sarah. Unless you count the Barbie one I stepped on.
And yes, Larry, I do, but since it's so hard to make money in this business on a volume basis (what with all the express-type lube joints) I have decided to concentrate on those who want more out of an oil change, and are willing to pay big money for it. I figure I charge $10,000,000 per oil change. All I have to do is get one person to let me change it, and I can retire. The attraction to allow me to change it rather than someone else is that, umm, well--ahhh...well, that person will have paid for the world's most expensive oil change!
Posted by: Terry Oglesby at January 30, 2006 09:28 AM