So Very Busy

I've started the new job and I am on brain overload at the moment. I've been going to trainings and reading procedures and SOPs all week. My head is already stuffed full of movie quotes and lists of people who have wronged me so I'm a bit tight on space as it stands anyway. So how is the job going? Ok I'd say. I mean, this is only day 4 but I think it will be ok. Right now I'm in a temporary spot (or so they tell me...I hope to jeebus christmas this is only temporary) as far as my seating arrangement goes. I'm sharing a room (can't really call it an office although it does have a door. It's just a back room near the central files area) with another dude who sits directly behind me. He's a nice guy and all but I gotta say, I find it ... let's say distracting ... to have someone RIGHT BEHIND me all day. Here's hoping I get my own space sooner rather than later.

The Mercedes Project (a.k.a. "The Sour Kraut") hasn't really kicked off yet. We just got the car last weekend and I drove it to Andy's place. The poor old girl really needs some help. It tried to kill me a few times on the drive over as the steering is a tad on the vague side. The brakes work ok (but it does tend to nose dive quite a bit even when being gentle on the pedal. Gotta check the suspension bits) but the major issue is the transmission. More to the point, it doesn't like to shift especially from 1st to 2nd. There are a number of vacuum leaks in the engine so I'm hopeful that if we can sort out the vacuum stuff we may be able to help quite a few other issues at the same time. Also, I think the turbo is toast. This may all sound like a horror show but honestly we're looking at this thing like a frog in biology class. We're going to dissect it and see if we can figure out what goes where and why. We may even attempt trying to get it back into good enough shape to pass inspection some day but if we can't, that's ok.

Oh, did I mention that the driver's side foot well was soaked in oil and there's a hole in the floor pan under the accelerator pedal (which is missing by the way..no gas [ok, diesel] pedal)? Yea, I didn't think I had. I have to admit that this really bummed me out. I hope we can trace that leak down and fix it. Thus the name The Sour Kraut. It has been abused for a loooong time. We did give it a hose down and scrub (Andy even went to town on the interior, scraping off years of cigarette tar and sopping up most of the oil) but all the floor mats had to be tossed out. They were totally nasty, especially the driver's side.

We have a repair manual winging it's way to us at this very moment so I'm hopeful that we'll be able to get moving on some of the repairs fairly soon. Updates as events warrant.

What else? Hmm. Oh, yes, I've picked the bass up again. I haven't attempted to play since...holy crap...like 1991 maybe? Wow. I'm frickin' old. I have an old Crate amp that was sitting in a closet forever and my friend Gary loaned me a bass guitar so that I can practice. Right now all I can do is make noises but hopefully I'll eventually be able to make those noises sound good. Why am I doing this? Why not?