Adventures in the outdoors

Saturday was my “get errands done” day, and I started off by getting the alignment checked on my car. Rather than go to a random alignment place, I went to the mechanic I went to during my oil filter fiasco. (I can’t remember if I’ve written about that incident… perhaps I should someday. But not now.) It was going to take a while, so while I left the car there, I grabbed my iPod and decided to just wander around Sunnyvale. I ate lunch, visited some random garage sales, bought a book for 50 cents, and managed to get a slight sunburn on the back of my neck. When I got back, they were just about to start. When they finished, it turns out that the reason why the car was tending so strongly to the side wasn’t because of the alignment, but because one of the front tires was of a different brand than the other three. Now, these are the same tires that I’ve had on the car since I bought it, but that’s one of the problems of buying a used car.

The head mechanic said he noticed it right away. This is the same guy who noticed right away that it was the wrong oil filter in my original visit. Twice now, this guy has right away noticed something that other people have completely overlooked. (If they had noticed that the brand of tire was different when they rotated them, they should have said something dammit.) They rotated the tires around until they got it as balanced as possible, but I should buy new tires soon anyway, which should fix the problem.

So, out the cost of an alignment check that didn’t end up being necessary, I went two doors over to get the car’s smog checked. The operation was a new one, and it consisted of this funny old man, the very complicated and official looking testing machine that he was constantly griping about, and the testing wheels in the ground. It took a few tries for him to get the machine to keep reading the RPMs from my car through the communications port, and I ended up having to sit in the passenger seat and hold the cable attached while it went through the testing procedures. Hooray for audience participation!

Afterwards, I continued my errands and bought another set of shelves and new shoes. I now have four sets of bookshelves in my room (one of which is ‘s, but he does have about one shelf’s worth of books in there as well.) And I ended up straightening my room on Sunday, it looks a lot cleaner now. And last night, I managed to gain not one, but two levels of Red Mage. Woo hoo!

And today I’m sore — my feet hurt from walking and the new shoes, my legs hurt from walking, and I have a bruise on my arm from moving the unassembled shelf box upstairs.