Life is so cruel.

My xbox was shipped back to me 3-day select shipping! Wooohooo! It was shipped on Monday...wait...uh...tuesday...wednesday...thursday...emmmer effin effer! Its going to get here on friday, sure, plenty of time to pack it up for vacation, yay, but I'm going to be in Philly looking at King Tut's dead ass so I won't be available to sign for it. Stupid signiture service. Oh, and hey Erica at UPS, you SUCK. The only way you could have been less helpful is if you spoke french while you were being unhelpful. I don't know you, but believe me, your stupidity will be legendary. My children's children's children will still be laughing at you and your piddley little brain.

Tell me, how does a company advertise a product and make well known that its pulling well over a 250% profit on it and still sell it? I'm talking about the iphone of course. Sure, its hecka cool, but they already advertised that the thing costs less than 200$ to make, so all you fools paying 600$ for one of them...you're whats effing wrong with america, well you and american idol anyway.

I've been told repeatedly to not drink the lehigh river water. I don't know why, I still drink it on occasion, and I'm not quite dead yet. It occurred to me, as I was taking a leak in the morning, that I was in fact pissing in water that Iraqi's would kill to drink. I'd never drink water out of a toilet, but the truth is that our toilet water is cleaner than 70% of the rest of the world's water supply.

I think its funny how if you actually do something to damage someone's property, they get all pissed off. If I were to take my mac 10, and bust some caps in your ride, you'd get a little bent about it; same if I put a baseball through the back window of your SUV; however, if I put little stickers that look like bullet holes on my car, or a stick on baseball that looks like its stuck in the window, people think its cute.

67 Million people tuned into "America's got talent". I wish I had a reverse microwave emitter that could travel backwards along the cable that comes into my house that would actually insert some sense into those people's brains, or melt their brains, either way the problem is solved and the world would be a better place.

I think I want to move to the dirty south. People in the south don't have to pay high energy bills, and I don't want to pay 12% of my salary to the natural gas company anymore.

Bleh...if I had an xbox to play, I wouldn't have time to think stupid stuff like this, I would just be like every other mindless american, happily engaged in my world of gagetry and chinese take out.

The Dirty South

We just won the Chuck Cup in my hockey league. Since its the first annual cup, we've decided to name it after our goalie Chuck. The dirty south started with a 7 game loosing streak where we just couldn't pull it together, but then we clicked and steamrolled everyone we played on the way to the strongest finish ever in scranton roller hockey history.

Little kids were standing at the side of the rink chanting "dirty south! dirty south!", a couple girls took off their shirts and threw them at us, and the president of the united states himself handed us the cup and did a little speach. It was beautiful. OK, none of that actually happened, but we won just the same.

Finally some free time.

Between hockey, river guiding, and the new girlfriend, I can't even find any time to squeeze in a blog.

As far as hockey goes, we start the playoffs next week and we've got a pretty good shot at winning the thing. Our team lost like 6 straight games, but we're on a 3 game win streak in which we've dominated everyone.

River guiding is fun. A few of the older guides told me that this job would make me start to steroetype people because of their race, and I didn't think it was true, but it is. Indian people can't paddle, its in their genetic coding. They make fine engineers, and they're good at peddling gasoline, but stick a paddle in their hands and you've just turned them into comic relief.

French people can paddle when they need to, but they're so effing lazy that they can't be bothered to paddle. They'd rather throw each other out of the raft. I hate the french.

Happy memorial day. I'm not sure what memorial day is, but WTF, I don't have to work, so yay.

I'm now...

...officially a river guide. Saturday I'll get paid to kayak.

First trip.

Today I ran OTT(on trip training). That's when you are out of the initial training phase, and now actually running with a mentor on the river with a real trip. Waking up this morning was the first good thing that happened in a series of good things that accumulate into maybe this being the best day ever.

Today had it all. The best part of the day was when I went over a rapid and ended up upside down separated from my normal source of air. I very calmly set up for a roll and went for it. I nailed it. My first combat roll. Next thing I hear is a bunch of clapping and people yelling "yeah matt!". I look over at the shore and the entire group of trainees from a different training trip were sitting there clapping and yelling. Most of those guys were there during the times when I failed my roll and ended up swimming, so it was a pretty satisfying moment.

My guide mentor today was awesome. She's actually a chick that caused me to internally say "wow" the first time that I met her a couple weeks ago. Not just cause she's super cute, but because she's got an awesome personality and she's into cool things like kayaking. So having to spend an entire day kayaking next to her and chatting was definitely not an unpleasant experience. Of course I didn't know if she was single or not so I wasn't going to go about making a foo out of myself by asking her out....turns out I didn't have to, she asked me out at the end of the day. Sweet.

Today started off good, and just progressively got better. Who knows what the heck else can happen before its over.

mechanical advantage

It turns out that an upper timing chain guide is so absolutely worthless that nissan completely removed the part from the altima design in 97, that's why there aren't any on the market, because most people just remove theirs. Score one for the good guys.

The altima is purring like a kitten now. It has a new battery. The rattle from the engine is gone, and the bad motor mount is replaced, and now it sounds good again. Just need to replace the front brakes and rotors, get it inspected, clean up some scratches in the paint and sell her.

The beauty of all this is that if you went to a mechanic and said "I need you to replace a motor mount, put in new brakes and rotors, a new battery, and check out that noise coming from the engine", there's no way you're walking out of the shop with less than 1000$ in repair charges. So far, for me its been 60$ motor mount, and 60$ battery, the brakes and rotors will be about 100$. That's almost 800$ savings just by knowing a little bit about tools, having a repair manual, and not being afraid to do some things yourself. I owe that to my dad for making me help bleed his brakes when I was a kid, and always having some sort of broken piece of electronics around that I could pull the capacitors out of and play with.

Some things are obvious

Some things....not so much.

I had 4 beers left over in a case from friday night. I saw my neighbor sitting on the porch and thought "he likes beer, and I'm not gonna drink em, so I'll give em to him." So, being the nice guy that I am, I gave him the beers, to which his response was "Is that that yeungling shit? I can't drink that."

Ok, dude, seriously, you steal shit to sell just to get a couple of bucks for beer and you're turning down yeungling? You're drunk when I wake up in the morning, and even worse off when I'm going to sleep, and you're turning down free beer?

OK, now i've seen it all.

So, I set my sights on doing some minor repairs to the altima, replace the battery, and maybe figure out which motor mount is bad. That's when I decided that I would open up the engine and see if I can figure out what's causing the rattling noise inside. I opened up the engine(I've done that before) and stared at it for a little bit(cause that's what people do). It took a good solid 3 minutes of staring, but eventually I noticed the hairline fracture on the upper timing chain guide. It was completely broken off and free to rattle to its hearts content. See, sometimes just staring at stuff will actually help you fix it. Its not just something that stupid people do.

Now, if anyone can tell me, on a scale from 1 to 10, how important an upper timing chain guide is, I'd be grateful because they're damn near impossible to find in a store and currently the altima doesn't have one. Now it doesn't look very important, but then again, my neighbor doesn't look like the type to turn down free beer either.