First day of school for my two daughters. I took some time off from work to take them to school, meet their teachers, see their classrooms, etc. My oldest is now "too old" for me to do that so I just dropped her off in the car line. My youngest still wanted me to take her to school so I did. The three of us loaded up in the '86 Pontiac Firebird Trans Am, tops off, windows down. Like I said before, you can't be a cool dad if you don't have a cool car and I have two cool cars ... and a cool motorcycle so yeah, I've got all of the bases covered. I am so blessed to be able to take personal time to be with my children during important parts of their life ... like the first day of school each year.
I go to work about 8:30, load up and hit the road on a high speed / low drag mission to install as many wi-fi units at my site locations as I can. I take one of my employees (and friend) Jason with me. We stop at the local Sonic on 4th street and I discover that Sonic can produce this wonderfully heretofore unknown concoction called simply "blueberry (flavored) sweet tea". I am instantly in love with this and vow to drink my weight in it as I can.
Sometime during the late afternoon I get a call from my mechanic. The Daytona is ready. The problem with the AC was a bad expansion valve ... they put one in when they did the initial work but it was apparently bad out of the box so they replaced it with a new expansion valve and the AC is blowing icicles ... again. The oil leaking problem was a rubber hose that was fitted between two metal hard lines and fed the turbo. Yikes. This was the hose that I was going to get replaced in the near future because I was worried that at 25 years old it would probably start to leak or crack and I really, really didn't want to have engine temp oil splash all over a cherry or red hot turbo while I was going down the road. Can you say "fireball?" Another point of fact, I *always* carry a fire extinguisher with me in my toys ... especially the turbocharged toys as they seem to have a higher percentage chance of catching fire if not properly maintained. I was going to replace this (often) troublesome line with a metal line but my mechanic did that for me, taking the failure prone rubber pressure line out of the design and simply installing a piece of metal tubing with a pair of expansion ends to seal it. Bonus since that's what I was going to get done to this part sometime in the near future.
My mechanic says no charge for these fixes and I tell him to just park the Daytona outside, that I'll pick it up later tonight.
I get home and wait on my family.
I check the mail for the day.
My replacement title for the Lincoln has finally arrived. Now I can sign the Lincoln over to the buyer and get that car off my insurance.
When my wife and daughters get home they take me to pick up the Daytona. As soon as I sit in the Shelby and crank it I can tell that this air conditioning is working. Icicles indeed ... or at least icicles compared to what it was blowing. I'm hoping that the oil leak is fixed as well but since it is dark now I can't tell. I'll just have to park it in the garage, take it to work tomorrow and when I back her out I'll see if there's any oil underneath where the sat parked all night long. I'm expecting maybe a little residual oil, maybe, but I'll know if it's more oil than it should be.
And as I'm driving home I turn on the radio ...
And the radio doesn't work.
Sigh.
It worked three days ago when I dropped the Daytona off.
Never go in the dash.
Bad things happen when you go in the dash.
Nothing is ever the same after you go in the dash.
The radio lights up with the headlights and dash lights but doesn't turn on. I'm sure that the power plug for the radio is just undone behind it. I'll see what I can do myself when I replace some of the bad interior bulbs this weekend. So, end of the day and the (tentative) score right now is two problems fixed and one new problem created. Maybe this weekend I'll stop by the local audio shop and see if they can modify the stock Infinity II stereo / CD system and maybe replace the factory speakers with better, 21st century speakers to enhance the sound. I've got to do that for the TA as well.
Tomorrow I'm going to take the Daytona Shelby to work and give the AC a real workout there and back and I'm going to get some more blueberry flavored sweet tea at Sonic. If tomorrow is half as good of a day as today was, then it's going to be an awesome day.
And the Daytona is in my garage now, locked down, hooked up to a trickle charger to top off the battery and sharing the space with my '04 Honda and '86 TA.
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