It’s been an eventful few weeks. Mostly because of new work activities traveling some. Funny story, without too much detail. A coworker retired, so I am covering a second location. I met with my coworker before he left, for a refresher on where things were at the site. I got there a week later, without him, and had the dumbest problem.
I could not figure out how to turn on the lights. In my normal location, everything is motion activated, at this location it’s not. And when I met with him, the lights were on, so I didn’t even think about it.
I did find the light switches, but it was a silly problem.
Then on I am not sure, my 3rd or 4th trip down there, a long term problem I’ve been ignoring with my car got worse. It has been having some idling issues for a few months, when at low RPM. This round, it was having issues even getting up and going at all. And of course, it started while in heavy city interstate traffic. I took the first exit I could and pulled over at a gas station to see if stopping for a bit would help at all.
It did not.
So i looked up repair shops, there was one shown about a quarter mile down the road. Now, I should also maybe add, the exit was… not busy. Like, I was just on the Illinois side of the Mississippi River, and still sort of int he busy St Louis area, but this particular exit, was very much nothing. No neighborhoods, barely any businesses. I headed on down the road to Bob’s Auto shop and sales. I think the sales part had a different name. I asked the mechanic if there was any way they could get me in to take a look, he took brief looked but had to wait for his boss, presumably the owner of this little mom and pop auto place, to make any decisions. I waited a bit and he showed up, he took a look and said they could pull it in for a closer look.
I already suspected something with spark plugs, and they did as well. In fact the OBDII reader I had and they had, both show Cylinder 3 misfiring, a LOT.
And they got me fixed up. I was extremely grateful. He even charged me way less than expected, though I kept insisting I was fine with paying more considering I was basically an emergency walk in. He was very friendly and just said he was sort of “paying it forward”.
I may still go by there and see if I can give him a fairly hefty extra tip one of these trips down that way. The problem as a whole is now fixed, they replaced the Spark Plug coil thing, basically it’s this strip that hooks in across the top fo the plugs, it was getting oil in it and shorting the plugs. They said the plugs looked fine, which was kind fo surprising considering I’ve got some 116k miles on the car and they have not been replaced in the ten years I’ve been driving it.
In other fun general activities, I got the rider lawnmower working again, finally, though I think technically I did it a while back but forgot to comment on it. I replaced the carburetor and the spark plug. At this point I’ve replaced basically all of the replaceable parts on the thing. Though it’s a much simpler engine than a car engine.
Music
I talked last time about my slick new Navidrome/Maloja set up. Actually it was a separate post. I have currently killed the Maloja scrobbling, as much as i kind of hated doing it. Not because it didn’t work, but because some stupid fucking web scraper bot found it a couple of days ago and was hammering the webserver across every domain trying to scrape it. I killed the connection, and blocked the IP ranges for the bot. Everything started working again.
On actually acquiring music, I have had this U2 EP, Days of Ash, sitting in a tab “to buy” for months now, and decided to get it this week. I’ve got a bit more free flow of money lately from the work traveling. I get mileage for each trip and as such I’m filling my gas tank from that instead of from my normal “personal spending” bucket. I also have not had any big pre orders come out for a bit now, so I’m getting caught up on covering those as well.
The Macon County conservation District (MCCD) has started their usual “Free Summer Concert” shows again. I missed the first one because I was sick. I caught the second one though, a sort of country bluegrass-ish guy named Tim Crosby. he had a couple of others playing with him but I forget who they were. His music seemed familiar but I don’t think I’ve seen him play there before, if he even has played there before.
I also completed my collection of Aurora Books, until the next one comes out at least. I forget if I talked about it, but I wanted to get the All My Demons book when it was announced. I loaded the website, went to pre order the signed version, the book was, I think like $35, not terrible, but the shipping, since it was from Europe, and the world is shit right now, was like, $40, maybe more. It was a LOT. So I skipped it. I found recently it was available through regular Amazon in the US, not signed of course, but way easier to get. I had it sitting in a tab as well “to buy”. I checked one day and there was one of those limited coupon things they do for like $5-6 off. So I went ahead and bought it. I don’t know if she will put out another one of these, or if she does, if it will be one or two more books. It feels like sometimes Infections of a Different Kind and A Different Kind of Human are treated as one album instead of two. Also, if I understand correctly, unlike the previous two books, the AMDGMAAF book isn’t the original song writing notes because those were lost at some point.
Toys
I could talk about what I didn’t buy because everything has gotten a bit more expensive than I’m willing to pay but that’s a little pointless. I do have a couple of things coming from Prime Day, but nothing super exciting.
Food
So let’s substitute with a food category for a bit. Because with traveling for work, and the mileage also basically being enough to cover eating out at local places while traveling I’ve gone to a few fun places to eat that I don’t normally go to, and probably will get to a few more over the next little while.
First trip, while my coworker was still there was this sandwich shop called Pickleman’s. Looking at their website there are quite a few of these all located in the middle of the US. They kind of remind me of a Jimmy John’s. I had the Asiago Chicken sub, it was tasty, I’ll probably go back here.
The next one is more local, with Steve’s Meltdown, inside the City Foundry. My wife got a kick out of the name on the bank statement. It’s basically, Fancy Grilled Cheese. I had the Buffalo Springfield, which is chicken, pepper jack, buffalo sauce on a ciabatta roll. It was tasty and surprisingly filling despite that it didn’t look that big. Overall it felt a little pricey though for a sandwich and soda. I may try this place again, but there are a lot of options in the City Foundry. Honorable Mention to Press Waffle Co., which I had a few weeks ago when in STL with my brother and his family.
Next up was Crazy Bowls and Wraps, which I found randomly on the map when looking for food. I had a Pesto Chicken bowl. I will say this, it was enough that I didn’t finish it. It was a better value than the chicken grilled cheese for sure. It did need a little something though as the pesto bowl seemed a little bland. I did get it without the zucchini, so maybe that was the issue. I will likely go back here, but get something else.
Lastly is Rally’s. Which is a large chain, I am not sure we have any near where I live though. I was in a bit of a rush because I was potentially meeting someone for work at any time so I decided to just get Rally’s, it was close, plus I wanted a burger. They had $3 double sandwiches so I had a double cheese melt and a double spicy chicken. Pretty good standard fast food, I’m sure I’ll get it again when I want something a bit quicker and closer again.
