A Good Day

I had a good day today. Since so many folks routinely experience *bad* days, I thought I'd share this.

Mostly it was a good day because I felt a sense of accomplishment, doing a couple things on my property that "needed doing": weeding, and working on my car (SUV).

Weeding: weeds have been the bane of my existence ever since I became a home owner some 17 years ago. And I don't want to be the guy in the neighborhood known as the "weed guy". Nonetheless, I once again let my non-grass-covered back and side yards get overrun with weeds this season and I've known I have needed to do something to make my yards more acceptably beautiful.

My city has helped with this. Previously, any weeding work I've done (since I live in Wyoming I prefer to think of this as "clearing brush" instead of "weeding") has out of necessity caused me to have to pack the weed refuse into 30-gallon yard trash bags and then dole them out on trash day one at a time. But my city recently has put in place several nearby large collection bins for yard waste. Therefore, instead of having to pack weeds into a smallish garbage bag, I've been able to just clip and pull them then throw them on a tarp. Then when I'm at the end of my stamina I just roll the tarp up , throw it in back of my SUV, then drive to one of these nearby receptacles and dump the contents into it and retrieve my tarp for the next load. This is excellent because it means I can do more work with less effort (not having to pack weeds into a bag), I don't use bags (which saves me money in the long run), I don't have to store full bags in my garage then dole them out one at a time on trash days, and, perhaps most importantly, I'm not contributing to yard refuse and more plastic bags in our local landfill (which the city estimated had previously accounted for around 20% of landfill usage). So yay for less work, and thanks to the city for providing this good solution to yard waste.

Car work: I've never been much good at working on an automobile. I don't change my own oil (mostly because of how dirty a job it is, I don't know how to collect and dispose of used oil, and it's not too expensive or inconvenient to go to an oil change shop and have them do the job for me), and I'm pretty much lost as soon as I pop the engine hood. Yeah I can gas up my SUV, clean it inside and out and check the oil level, but beyond that is beyond my skill level.

So last week when my battery died in a McDonald's parking lot after closing (I swear I was gonna order a salad), the local Nissan shop helped me out by giving me a ride and changing in a new battery. I paid for this service, of course, and it was expensive. But the new battery gives me hope that it might last longer than the average of 4 years per battery I've had in this SUV since 1998. This is my fourth battery.

But in the process of them coming to my rescue, we also noted that the hefty neutral/ground/black cable that attaches the battery terminal to the metalwork in the engine was very very corroded and almost ready to fall off by itself. Luckily, it just barely worked with the new battery. The shop didn't have a replacement cable in stock, so they ordered one for me--dang $55 bucks for a cable--then called me a couple days later to tell me it had arrived.

Originally I was going to have them install the new cable for likely another $40 or so, but when I looked at the cable it didn't seem like it would be over my head to do the work myself, so I elected to try replacing it myself.

Seems like nothing is ever quite as easy as it looks. First time I tried to replace this cable a couple days ago I got stuck by not having all the right tools for the job. In particular, I discovered that the nut/bolt combination that held the old cable on the battery terminal was long, and the nut was a bit corroded itself. So while I do own a couple sockets sets and I did have the correct size for the nut (it's a Japanese car so they use the metric system--10mm in this case), I had no way to do even the first simple step of removing the nut on the bolt that holds the cable to the battery terminal. I tried using a couple different adjustable wrenches for the job, but they weren't very good quality wrenches, and there really was no room for me to use them to extract the nut.

The tool I needed was a 10mm combination wrench. At the time I didn't know the right size and whether I needed metric or US sizing so I brought the replacement cable with me to a Walmart and figured out the correct size myself. Of course they don't sell this kind of wrench individually so I had to buy a set of 6 combo wrenches for about $13. Not too bad though I guess: still $27 cheaper than if I had the shop do it for me, plus I get to keep the wrenches.

Anyway, so I managed to replace the cable. It took me maybe 40 minutes, removal of the battery, some serious torquing to release a couple bolts that hadn't been touched in 12 years, and a few minor scratches on my hands and arms, but I managed to get the job done and I was ecstatic when I started the SUV after I was done and everything worked. Of course I had to reset the car's clock again, but that's a minor thing.

Now, I'm certain there are tons of auto enthusiasts out there just laughing their asses off about what a big deal I've made over changing out a car's battery cable. But hey.... like I said, I'm not comfortable inside a car's engine. I can take apart and put back together a computer with ease, but a computer won't careen off a bridge and kill me if I do something wrong. So I'm pretty proud of myself :-) .

And now I might be more confident to take on more complex engine work in the future! :-)

So, accomplishing these tasks successfully today made me feel good and I hope you had a good day too!

--SDP