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I Am Brian’s Colon

Yesterday I had a colonoscopy boys and girls. You don’t need to look that up in any medical dictionary, colon + scope, means they were looking at my innards from the inside. The worse part is the prep. If you have had it done, you know what I’m talking about and if you haven’t, I don’t want to spoil the fun.

During the actual procedure they sedate you and depending on who you talk to who has had it done, that means anything from knocked out to partly aware. When the nurse put the needle full of fuzzy juice into the IV she said to me, “Now think of someplace pleasant you would like to be.” I started to decide which place I thought I would like when the next thing I knew I was coming to in the recovery area. And when I say coming to, I really mean just peeking my head above the fog.

The next few hours I was in and out. I remember my wife feeding me cookies and a Diet Dr. Pepper. My next memory is of being helped out of the wheelchair into the Miata. There is a brief window into lucidity at the CVS where I picked out a book to read. I remember reading some of it during my doctor prescribed bath. I read a little more on the couch before putting it down to go take a 2 hour nap. I was “sedated” at around 1:30 and it wasn’t until around 7:30 that continuous memory was regained. When I went in tonight to get the book I kind of figured that I would have to start all over reading it again, I did, but I didn’t have far to go, the dog eared page marking where I stopped last night was page number two.

Most Fun In The Miata Since…

Today we had more fun in the Miata since, well, Donna would just as soon I didn’t blog about that. 🙂 A couple in the Master’s Miata Club put on a time/speed/distance rally for us today and it was a blast. Maybe I’m just saying that because we finished 2nd and didn’t have the humiliation as others did of having to open the emergency envelope.

7500 Mile Service

Today was the 7500 mile check up on the Miata (done at 8010.) An oil change and a tire rotation basically. I had a couple of things I want them to address while we were in there too. The trunk was creaking when you opened and closed it, there were a couple of missing plastic fasteners on the splash guard on the right front wheel well and the driver’s side top latch was looser than the passenger’s side.

We have always been treated right personally by the folks there. We even got a loaner car to do some shopping when the service was taking longer than expected. I’m not so sure about the car. When we got back in the car to drive away there was this almost overpowering smell of solvent or cleaner. We opened the windows the first chance we got and that helped a lot. By the time we got home I kind of figured that it was lube for the trunk hinges. The car is in the garage with the trunk open now hoping the lube will be all dry and the smell gone by morning.

Past experience with tire changing at any place other than my driveway requires checking the lug nut torque. Sure enough, the lugs were replaced using an impact wrench with out any sort of torque limiter. I had to use a 2′ long breaker bar to loosen them up (and on a couple of them I feared for the longevity of the breaker bar.) Good thing I didn’t get a flat on the way home, I’d have never gotten the wheel off with the puny lug wrench in the trunk.

And because tomorrow is a Master’s Miata Club’s TSD Rally, I washed off the car to make it pretty.

Clocks

Don’t hate me, OK? I usually listen to Radio Paradise while sitting in front of the computer and just now they played “Clocks” by Coldplay. I love that song.

Fog Lights As DRLs Revisited

Finally accomplished what I set out to do all those weeks ago. To prevent to possible immolation of the dashboard I hooked the same +12v that goes to the fog light relay to where the voltage would be applied to the switch normally (how Mazda does it, just with a different source.) I then hooked the ground from the switch directly to the metal frame where the relays are mounted, bypassing the headlight switch, allowing the fog lights to operate without the need for the low beams to be on. Now if the ignition is on and the switch is pressed, the fog lights are on. I will now train myself to turn them on in the day and off at night, unless of course there is fog.

While I had the combination cruise control and fog light switch out of the dash I swapped the two colored light bulbs. For some odd reason the fog lights had a green lamp and the cruise had an orange one, while when the cruise is active there is a green light in the speedo cluster that says, oddly enough, CRUISE to let you know it is, well, active. My swapperoo matched greens for the cruise. The orange for the fog lights will make sense too when I do the future mod of getting some of that protective film in yellow to put over lights…

Fog Light DRLs

I managed to get my hands on a copy of the wiring diagram for the fog lights and as a bonus the headlight circuits.* I’ve had it for a while, but today I decided to attempt the mod again (my first ended in failure.)

With careful study of the circuit wiring diagrams it looked like for the fog light relay to trip, turning on the fogs, it needed +12v coming from the headlight relay and a ground available when the headlight switch is in low. My ideal situation would be to have an ignition on twelve volts applied to one end of the relay and a ground applied to the other whenever the lights are off. This would disable the fog lights as fog lights, but make them daytime running lights – always on when the car is running and off at night.

First thing I decided to do was cut the red/yellow wire. I really didn’t want to, but I could never get the relay loose from the connector, so snip I did. Hooked up the barrel splice to the +12v wire I found in my original attempt and the red/yellow wire running into the relay connector. Figuring that this would not change any operation as the ground from the headlight switch was still missing, I tested the setup. Much to my surprise when the key was turned to IGN the fogs came on. Not only were they on, but the light in the switch was on, even though the switch was not depressed. I tried turning the lights on, another surprise awaited, as when they came on, the fogs went off (along with the light in the switch.) So I pushed in the fog light switch and the fogs came on, they also went out when I turned on the high beams, just like they are supposed to.

Following the diagram out, I must be getting a ground from somewhere I’m not supposed to be, through either the left front low beam or somewhere in the instrument cluster. Seeing as my +12v is only applied when the ignition is on I won’t be running down the battery or anything. The current draw to trip that relay is probably small enough that I won’t do any damage to anything, but I would still like to know where it is coming from. When we go for a drive tonight I’ll see if I can figure out which one by looking at the headlight and the instrument cluster in the dark.

Here’s A Couple Of Them

They are fresh, not really new experiences. They mirror my previous experiences with these same places, so you would think I would have learned my lesson, but I am dense.

The first is Wal-Mart. We were in Hilton Head and needed one item and wanted another, figuring we could get them both at Wal-Mart we went there. Hoping that it would be different, but it was not. It must be corporate wide, because it was Saturday night, prime Wal-Mart shopping time, they only had 4 checkout lines running and there were at least 8 people in each line. We placed our purchases on an empty conveyor belt and walked out.

Second was at my old friend Popeye’s here in Aiken. We have had the worst luck at lunch time during the week, but we figured it was Sunday, might be different. What do you think? Right, same old song and dance. Both Donna and I love the food, but it is such a pain to get anything. They had a total of 3 employees handling the Sunday lunch rush, 1 counter person, 1 drive-up person and 1 cook! Not only that, but the cook was deep frying each person’s order separately or something because it was taking a long time to get each person’s order to them. So long that they asked you to sit down and they would bring it to you. This is smart, now the time that would be better spent making or taking orders was spent delivering food to customers. I vowed never to return. Who am I kidding, I’ll probably go back, I think it makes the food taste all that much better if I have to suffer for it.