Monday, January 5, 2009

No More Stinking Smelt.........or Sardines...


I'm supposed to create some new years resolutions, but the fact is, if I give up anything else you might as well bury me. I'm already the most boring guy in captivity, but just to keep everyone thinking, I've decided to give up smelt, the little fish. I've never tasted one, but the only food on the planet that my deceased father wouldn't eat was smelt. Assuming it's hereditary and looking at the little bastards, I just know I won't like them. So I'm officially giving them up, along with sardines, for 2009..

Well, the Jeep is gone. I lost my ass on it, but it was one of the catalysts that made me realize that the car business and I should part company. I bought it at the auction in May and it had a "check engine" light on as well as a miss in the engine. I paid a lot of money for it since it was a 1997 with only 68,000 miles on it and it was a Limited model too. I've experienced dozens of cars that had the "check engine" light on and it's usually the O2 sensor or, in view of the miss in the engine, a plug or a wire. Not this time. In all of the years I've been doing this, I never had to do a valve job on a vehicle until the Jeep. So, it got a valve job and it needed brakes and when the noise in the tires didn't go away when it was driving on a lift, we realized the rear end was bad to boot. So mechanically, the Jeep was a nightmare and then I made things worse by trying to dye the cracked leather driver's seat with the wrong color dye. So it got a brand new velvet interior, because if I were to sell this recently reconditioned vehicle, I had to make it pretty. It got a pretty expensive interior and along came Mike, looking for a first car for his 16 year old daughter and this velvety Jeep evidently had her name written all over it. I paid $4000 for the Jeep and another $2000 making it right and sold it for $5000. Happy 16th Birthday Miss Moore. That was a pretty nice "SWEET SIXTEEN" gift, from her folks and me.

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