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.