Archives May 2016

Yesterday my new MAF sensor showed up so I decided to put it in last night.  I ran into various issues along the way.  Some of them were rather funny.  If you have 10 or so minutes to spend, take a look.  While I was in the middle of it my timer buddy John showed up to pick up some stuff he needed.  It’s always a unique thing when we meet up as it is rare to be able to talk timing with someone else that knows the pain associated with it.

After replacing the MAF sensor I cleared the check engine light.  I took the truck to work today so I can verify the  CEL is not going to come back on.  This morning on my first turn of the key I got a click followed by the truck starting normally, making me think I STILL have an issue with the battery cables.  I may just grab a new positive and negative cable and replace them.  The cables are inexpensive and the labor does not seem too bad, famous last words.  This recent rash of repairs will make parting with the old Tacoma a little less difficult.

This weekend I have A LOT of wish list items.  Tomorrow morning I am going to try to get Ali migrated over to my accountants old computer.  I would like to use my 100 foot fiberglass snake to get the security DVR cables routed from the attic to their mounting points on the perimeter of the house and I may just wind up swapping out the battery cables on the Tacoma.  A quick YouTube search showed no such how to video exists so that means it is fertile ground for me to make one.  We also have a Tarpons game to attend Sunday evening so I have a feeling this weekend will fly by just as most do.

Yesterday I started the ball rolling in rebooting my podcast on Itunes, something I last toyed with back in 2009. (search duf on itunes)  When I did it back then I had the bright idea that reading blog entries would translate into quality podcasts.  It didn’t.  This time I am going to convert my off the cuff vlog videos into podcasts.  I think that may work better.  Don’t think I am under any delusion that I am some sort of talented entertainer or skillful speaker.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  This is just another extension of me seeing what works and doesn’t work.  For instance if you told me a few years ago that amateur car repair  and head shaving videos would be among the most popular on my channel I would have told you you were nuts.  So anyway, if the podcast gets the official Itunes approval I will post the feed information here.

Getting back in the podcast business

Last night I was doing more tweaking after I got home.  During the day I had ordered an iHome smart outlet based on a recommendation from my buddy Joe.  I pulled the new WeMo switch I was trying to get to work with the coop door and brought it inside.  I reconfigured it to work with the fan we have in the bedroom for white noise.  “Alexa, turn on the fan” is now a thing.

I also did some more work on the old computer I got from my accountant, getting it ready to give to Ali.  I set up the system in the hobby room, connecting it to the 27 inch monitor I have on the top shelf.  It actually wasn’t a bad arrangement, as long as I was standing up and used the top of the tower as a mouse pad.

So all of the feedback I have given about the new Tacoma has been overwhelmingly positive.  Cindy and I both love the truck however there is one shortcoming that really makes no sense to me.  The TRD and above models include the smart key system which uses rfid proximity tech to allow you to simply walk up to a door and have it unlock without having to press an unlock button on your remote.  It isn’t new tech, my old 2007 Camry Hybrid and our 2007 Prius both have it.  It also allows you to lock the door by simply pressing a button on the door handle.  It’s very convenient.

So I was excited that my new Tacoma had the same tech.  With my 99 I still have been old schooling it, inserting the key into the lock to open the door.  I was confused when I realized Toyota only installed the tech on the driver side door in the 2016 Tacoma.  I am unable to understand the reasoning behind this since my nearly decade old Toyotas had it on both doors.  Is it a cost saving measure?  Is there some sort of technical challenge doing this on a truck?  I doubt it, I think it was just a dumb oversight.

I know in the way I use a vehicle quite often I first go to the passenger side to load up whatever stuff I may be lugging with me.  When I have the Prius it doesn’t matter how full my hands are, I can just reach for the passenger door and it unlocks the vehicle.  With the Tacoma I have to try to fish the remote out of the pocket to accomplish the same thing.  Sure it is a very minor thing but still makes no sense to me why they would do it this way. Oh well.

I forgot to mention the other night I had a bizarre dream.  It was almost like I was back in my Weis Market meat cutter days. I was processing chicken but they were not normal cleaned and gutted chickens, they were small and intact, almost like chicks that were a month or two old.  They were in a cardboard box packed with ice.

So I pulled some out and was ready to start the cleaning process.  All of a sudden I started to see movement, the chickens were alive!  They slowly opened their eyes and started to move more.  Although I don’t recall the details of how it came to be the next part  of the dream was me at home with once frozen chicks grown into full size chickens roaming the yard, happy as chickens can be.  I assume I quit the job.

I got home from work a little early last night and got busy.  I did light wet sanding on a couple of the spots I applied touch up paint to on the 99 Tacoma to smooth things out.  The quality of work is below average at best but at least those areas no longer scream “HEY LOOK AT ME” and instead blend into the rest of the truck from a distance.

I also have yet ANOTHER thing to address on the Tacoma before officially listing it for sale.  Over the weekend the check engine light came on.  When I checked it with my code reader the MAF (mass air flow) sensor came back as the most likely cause, something I have replaced 2-3 times over the trucks lifetime.   It’s easy to replace and not horribly expensive but I can not believe the run of bad luck I have had with repairs on the truck just as I am ready to sell it.

When I think back through the sequence of events, everything that went wrong has happened since I thoroughly blasted the engine bay with de-greaser and a garden hose.  I can’t help but think that all of these problems could have been avoided if I just left the engine bay dirty. I know I have said it before but hopefully THIS is the last thing I have to do before selling the truck.

I spent a lot of time out in the coop trying to get my new WeMo switch working with the chicken coop door.  For whatever reason it just does not want to work despite my repeated attempts to reconfigure it.  The switch appears to go through the set up procedure cleanly but when I try to access it from my phone it just drops off the list of devices.

My situation is a bit more complex than the typical Wemo scenario where all the smart switches will be talking to the same wi-fi network.  I have a secondary wi-fi network in the coop which I need the switch to attach to.  However depending on the conditions, sometimes the wifi from inside the house is visible in the coop which can cause issues.  I have another WeMo switch in the coop already that has been controlling the light for months so I’m not sure why this one is being such a pain in the ass.

I also got inspired last night to try to run the security DVR cable to the front and back corners of the attic.  I put on my jeans, long shirt and paper face mask to crawl into the very hot attic.  Once I got up there I surveyed what would be required to get to each mounting point and it was ugly, very ugly.  The mounting point at the front of the house looked pretty much impossible for a human being to navigate.  The front office has a vaulted ceiling which is where the cable would need to go across.  There just is no space and would almost surely result in some part of my body punching through the ceiling.

The spot at the back corner of the house had more space but was just as treacherous.  The roughly 30 feet I would have to travel is buried in a couple feet of blow in insulation. What exactly is hidden below that insulation is unknown but likely includes electrical and other wiring which could be hazardous.  Never mind trying to crawl in a way that keeps all of your weight on the roof trusses and off the drywall.  I just sat up there for a few moments and looked at both spots, weighing the misery and potential disaster that awaited versus the benefit of having two additional security cameras on the property.  I gave up, telling Cindy it was just too much hassle.  I exited the attic, dejected.

When I bought the security dvr system I justified it’s purchase not only as a race timing safety net but also as a surveillance system for the house.  For whatever reason not fulfilling the second part of that plan bothered me.  I put everything away that needed to be moved to get into the attic away, feeling like a failure the entire time.

Even though I proclaimed “no mas” the gears in my head were still turning.  This morning on my way back from the dentist I stopped in at Home Depot and bought a 100 foot fiberglass snake.  My hope is to reverse the game plan, poking in the snake from the outside and navigating it to a reachable spot where I could attach the wires and pull it back out.  In theory it should work.  We will see how that translates to reality.

So I kept busy last night.  I ordered an additional WeMo switch to control the automatic chicken door.  My thought process was it would allow more precise control of the door instead of the analog timer it is running on now.  I plugged the motor that controls the door into the WeMo switch and configured the switch via my Iphone to close and open automatically on a schedule.  When I checked the coop video feed last night I saw the door had indeed gone down as scheduled so I figured we were good to go.  Well this morning the door did not open as scheduled so I had to go out there and manually hit the power button.  It looks like I have more tweaking to do tonight.

I also applied a second coat of touch up paint to the spots on the Tacoma I painted Sunday.  The color match is very good and makes the truck a legitimate 20 footer, meaning from 20 feet away it looks half decent. Cindy is supposed to try to paint the beat up Toyota logo on the tailgate flat black to give it one more tweak. Tonight I hope to finish it up with a little wet sanding so I can list the truck for sale.

I also started redoing the used system I got from my accountants, blowing it away with the set of four system restore DVD’s.  Doing so reset the system back to it’s Windows 7 Pro SP1 starting point.  I plan to upgrade it to Windows 10 with a SSD hard drive before handing it off to Ali. The combination should be pretty damn quick, even on 3-4 year old hardware.

Saturday morning I was out the door before 8 am to head up to Fort Myers.  I had two brand new HP computers loaded in the trunk of the Prius for my accountants, a husband/wife team I first met when I lived in PA.  They moved to SW Florida permanently last year.  One of their systems had been having a ton of lock up problems the past few months which was terrible timing since it fell in the middle of tax season. Although I had plenty of stuff I wanted to get done around the house this past weekend I wanted to get their systems migrated instead of having it hanging over me.

Going in I had delusions of getting done around lunch time.  I instead wound up spending all day there, pulling out around 4. They just had a lot of data and a lot of little hurdles I had to get around.  I methodically knocked down the problems one at a time until we got to a point where they were both up and running with their data intact.  We sort of have a barter arrangement in place where I help them with computer stuff and they do accountant stuff for me.  They also gave me the one computer that was locking up.  I may fix it up and give it to Ali since her computer is about 95 in computer years.

While I was working Cindy was as well, painting the garage floor.  We spent all that time cleaning and reorganizing the garage but it still had the ugly bare cement floor that had countless stains on it.  Cindy painted it a solid gray to match the accent color on the walls.  It was a nice finishing touch to the space and makes the garage look officially renovated.

Even though I only got home about 5 we wanted to still get out to go see the new Captain America Civil War movie.  It was playing every 15 minutes at Coconut Pointe so we headed there.  I brought GoPro with to film our review of the movie.  Of course it went off the rails and included other random subject matter.

We were happy to see the theater was not overly crowded thanks to the numerous showings and the snowbirds migrating back north.  Before we got seated I made a bathroom pit stop.  As I was washing my hands a large man stood in front of the urinals behind me.  Thanks to the mirror I got a horrific view of his urinal technique.

The man apparently wore elastic band shorts.  Instead of just pulling down the front of his shorts to gain access to his penis he instead pulled his shorts down until they were resting at mid-thigh leaving his entire ass hanging in the wind.  I stared briefly in disbelief before getting the fck out of there.  It was a visual that will likely be burned into my mind for the foreseeable future.

The movie itself was quite entertaining, keeping the bar set quite high for anything Marvel related.  I am not sure why the film was pitched as a Captain America film instead of Avengers 3.  It had more super heroes than any previous Marvel movie.  Regardless of the branding we both found the movie entertaining, fun and left us hungry for the next installment of the series.  It was odd seeing the good guys beat the shit out of each other and the thought process of the head bad guy in the film didn’t make much sense to me but it really didn’t matter.  Despite being some 2 1/2 hours long the film got a solid A from both Cindy and myself.

Sunday morning we wanted to take advantage of what likely will be our last batch of cool mornings for 6 months or more to get out and run.  We first dropped off Sadie who was visiting for a couple days.  We then headed to the water park to get our run in.  Our normal run around the perimeter of the park is two miles per lap.  That course includes running through sections of grass.  We wanted to avoid grass and get 3 miles in only using one lap so we did a new route that included several back and forth turns to get additional distance in.  It was my first run in a couple weeks so I didn’t feel strong or fast.  The best thing I could say about it was I my lower body didn’t hurt too badly during or afterward.

Shortly after we got home Cindy’s daughter came over for Mother’s Day.  Cindy loves nothing more than to spend time with Katie and that was what they did for the majority of the day.  They spent most of it working on refurbishing a small doghouse they found at a yard sale.

I kept myself busy with my own projects, the most time consuming was me working on cleaning up the 99 Tacoma for sale.  I used the pressure washer and fine grit wet sanding to try to clean up the peeling and oxidizing clear coat as much as possible.  I also applied a couple layers of Nu Finish to the roof and hood of the truck which actually brought back some degree of shine to the 17 year old paint.

I spent a lot of time and energy trying to refurb the exterior to at least an acceptable level.  As a last step I pulled out the matching touch up paint I bought a few weeks ago to try to make the area on the fiberglass fender that had no paint left on it look better as well as a few small spots scattered on the truck.  I want to apply a second coat of the paint and then wet sand again to smooth it out.  It looks far from professional but still an improvement over how it was.

We cleaned up and headed out to take Cindy to a Mother’s Day dinner at Iguana Mia since Cindy is a big fan of mexican food.  The last couple times I have gone there my meal was less than spectacular.  Unfortunately the streak continued.  Katie and I both got blackened fish tacos and both of us thought they sort of sucked.  The fish was dry and basically tasteless.  Even though I am not a big fan of spicy sauce I dumped a bunch on my tacos so they at least tasted like something. Cindy enjoyed her meal more than us so that was good.  Even with the less than spectacular meal Cindy had fun.  She loves when the three of us are all together.

Keeping busy this weekend was a good thing as it didn’t give me much opportunity to focus on this being my second Mother’s Day since my mom passed away. Despite the passage of time it’s very easy to moisten my eyes by simply thinking for a few moments about her unexpected death at a relatively young age.  I miss having her around and still have a difficult time grasping that she is not.

I had an odd dream last night where I was at my grandparents home in Birdsboro.  The dream didn’t really focus on any people being there besides myself.  It was basically me going around the house remembering focal points.  There was grandpas basement that was loosely organized chaos filled with countless tools and items.  On the main floor I remember the sunroom that was off the kitchen, leading to the back yard.  In that backyard there was a garage and another shed, both of which were packed with additional stuff.  The back of the yard was framed by railroad tracks that I used to explore on a regular basis when I was there for holiday visits.

Back inside the house I vividly remember the grandfather clock and smaller clock on the mantle of the living room which would chime on the hour.  There was a small library filled with books that never held much interest for me since I was almost exclusively a magazine reader at the time.  Upstairs I remember a couple things.  I recall the toilet in the only bathroom in the house had some sort of damage to the bowl that made it look like someone abused it majorly every time I lifted the lid.  I always wondered how that could happen.

In my Uncle Randy’s old bedroom I remember a small globe that had what looked like a psuedo weather vane inside.  It had 4 paddles that reacted to light in such a way that it would spin when exposed to bright light.  I always thought it was cool.  From that room there was access to a weird second story porch that I may have snuck out onto once or twice even though I was not supposed to. The attic was on the third floor and I only recall ever venturing up there once or twice in my life.  Again it was a treasure trove of stuff.   I also remembered a small coin bank that looked like a treasure chest but now that I am awake I am having a hard time remembering if that was at my grandparents on my mom or dads side.

Anyway I am not sure what flipped my subconscious back to the Birdsboro house circa the late 70’s and early 80’s.  It was a simpler time for sure.

I took the new Tacoma to work yesterday,  Once again I had the GoPro mounted and used it to vlog whatever came to mind.  I was surprised when I totaled up the footage at the end of the day and saw it was over 20 minutes long.  In normal conversations I will typically tap out much quicker.  For some reason I am able to speak to a camera longer. I cover a variety of unrelated subjects you may or may not find interesting.  You can see the latest episode here.

Last night I was frustrated working on the new computers for my accountants.  I had advised them to buy two additional SSD drives that I would install to create a RAID 1 software array for redundancy.  Although I never used Windows to do RAID before (always used hardware), the process appeared to be pretty easy.

After attaching the second drive I tried to mirror the original drive to it.  Well Windows 10 would not allow the mirror to be created.   Without getting into a long technical explanation, basically the way HP has the original drive set up it won’t allow for a software mirror to be created.  So my option would be to blow away the factory Windows 10 install and start from scratch.  I don’t like that option.  I could still install the second drives which could be used for daily image back ups but it doesn’t offer the same redundancy as RAID 1. They could also return the drives but since I already opened one of them I don’t know how returnable they are.  I spent a LOT of time trying to make it work, unsuccessfully.

This weekend will busy as always.  Saturday morning I am taking the new computers to my accountants home to get them migrated.  I’d like to get the 99 Tacoma sale prep work done.  We also would like to get out to see the new Captain America movie.  I am also picking up Sadie on my way home tonight for a visit.

Mother’s day is a different sort of holiday for me since my mom passed away.  I hope to not focus on it and instead make sure Cindy has a great day.

So even though we had some torrential rain during the afternoon yesterday I wanted to take advantage of a small break in the precipitation to look at the ground on the old Tacoma.  The driveway was still wet so I already accepted my back was going to get wet.  When it started to rain rather heavily 10 minutes into the work the rest of me got equally wet.

So in order to find the ground I had to remove the two piece skid plate from beneath the engine compartment.  Of course these parts were quite dirty/oily and that dirt quickly spread to various parts of my upper body.  Once the plates were off it was easy to locate the negative ground, it was right next to the oil filter.  This seemed like a less than ideal place for it since filter changes always resulted in oil sort of coating that area.  As you would imagine there was a lot of sludge and grime on the grounding bolt.

I unbolted the ground and cleaned the bolt, the wire terminal, and the grounding point on the engine block with degreaser and wiped them off with shop towels.  Putting everything back together was a bit of a pain in the ass and made more annoying by the rain pelting the portion of my body hanging out from under the truck.  A quick turn of the key verified the truck still started.  I now feel I fulfilled my self put responsibility to make sure the issue is taken care of as much as I could.

I hopped in for an early shower to get the grime off.  After dinner I had a bunch of things going on simultaneously.  I received two new computers that are for my accountants that live in Fort Myers.  I am going to be installing the systems for them but wanted to do some prep work at home before I go to their home to do the migration.  They have been having big problems with one of their systems for the last few months which is terrible timing since it has been the heart of their busy tax season.  Somehow I need to find the time to get up there to swap out the systems soon.

Warning, tech talk  to follow. In addition I was doing remote work at the office, upgrading our internal instant message platform and upgrading the operating system on our main domain controller from Windows Server 2008R2 to Windows Server 2012R2.  I initiated the upgrade via a Teamviewer session to my workstation at work that in turn was connected to the server initially by a remote desktop session.  When I tried to start the upgrade it would not continue via RDP since it saw the console session as being active.  I had to disconnect and connect to the console via VNC and restarted the upgrade.

So during the upgrade I lost connectivity to the server since the upgrade requires a couple reboots.  I also was unable to connect via RDP. I was worried that the upgrade was stuck on a screen that required some sort of question to be answered.  I had one other way to connect, our multi-system keyboard monitor switch that is connected to the network.   I first tried using the APC application to view the screen but it would not connect.  I then tried to connect via browser.   It began to start to launch the Java viewing app but would not complete when Java security settings killed it.  The switch is probably at least 10 years old at this point so the java applet does not meet the minimum requirements modern day browsers require.  Even if I added the site to the security exception list in Java it would not allow it to run.  Mother F…

I am certainly far from a technical genius.  I don’t have an encyclopedic memory or a comprehensive understanding of all things IT.  What I do possess are good trouble shooting skills and resourcefulness.  So when I hit what at first seemed like a java dead end I came up with one more path to get to my goal.  I remembered I had Virtual PC with an XP mode virtual machine set up.  I found it and started it up.  It had not been fired up literally in years.  Once I got it up and running I opened the IE8 browser and tried to connect to the KVM switch.  It complained no version of Java was installed.

I then had to find an old version of java to install that did not have the same stringent security requirements modern java does.  After some searching, being careful to avoid the various trap web sites, I found a 3 year old version of java which I downloaded and installed onto my virtual XP machine.  After doing so I finally was able to successfully connect to my KVM switch over the network and gain access to the domain controller.   It took a long and twisting route to get there but I finally navigated the way.

For the first time this week I brought my new Tacoma to work.  I had the GoPro along which I used to shoot another vlog entry which I’ll post later tonight.  In the vlog’s I try to speak about subjects not necessarily in step with whatever my blog topic of the day is.  I don’t know how good/bad these videos are and to be honest it isn’t a big concern of mine.  It helps me work on my off the cuff speaking which without a doubt is a big weakness of mine so I will keep throwing them out there.

I downloaded the latest game from Blizzard, the company that has entertained me for over  two decades with games like Warcraft, Starcraft, Diablo, World of Warcraft, and Hearthstone. The latest title is called Overwatch and is a first person shooter, something new for Blizzard.  I used to be a HUGE FPS guy.  I cut my adult gaming teeth on games like Doom, Quake, Unreal Tournament, and Call of Duty on the PC.  I was never great at the games, my twitch reaction just was never quick enough to compete against high level players but I enjoyed the genre nonetheless.

Eventually that type of game faded from the forefront of my gaming tastes with World of Warcraft dominating most of my allocated gaming time the last 10 years or so.  Well Overwatch might be a reason for me to jump back into the FPS world.  Up until yesterday the game was in closed beta with access only being given to a limited pool of players.  They now have a brief open beta period where anyone can play for free till the retail game is released later this month.

A couple of the podcasts I listen to have hosts that have played extensively in the beta and they have been saying how fantastic the game was.  So although I was quite busy last night I took the time to download the game and play briefly through the tutorial.  The visuals and fluidity of the game are impressive as hell.  I didn’t have time to do more than scratch the surface otherwise, only playing through a brief tutorial.  I hope to get a chance to dig in deeper before the open beta expires so I can decide if I want to lay out 60 bucks for the final game.

Cindy told me that my tonneau cover for the new Tacoma had arrived yesterday so it immediately took front and center of my evening plans.  The “Vanish” model I bought was a roll up variety, different than the trifold and snapping covers I have had on my old Tacoma.  A friend of mine had recommended this cover as he has one on his 2015 Tacoma and is quite pleased with it. As is the case with most of my automotive work, I had the camera rolling.

It did not take very long until I became frustrated.  The instructions for the install were not well done.  The descriptions were vague and the accompanying pictures they had in there were low resolution and small, making their usefulness limited.  Repeatedly I found myself having to read sections again and again, trying to interpret exactly what I was supposed to do next.

I then got to a point where I was supposed to be attaching an adjuster assembly to the front of the cover.  The bolt I had seemed ridiculously short, I could only get a thread or two to catch.  When I went to attach the cover to the side rails it was impossible.  By this time I had Cindy out there trying to help me make sense of it all.  Finally I realized that the problem was ultimately mine, as is often the case.  All the bolts were the same type but some were slightly longer than others.  I figured out that I had used a couple of the longer bolts for the side bracket mounting where they weren’t needed.  After swapping the shorter and longer bolts around the problem had been solved.

Yes the error was mine but the manufacturer could have made more effort to distinguish the different length bolts to avoid this confusion.  Even in the parts list it does not indicate how many of each size you are given.  Instead it is just listed as “nut’s, bolts, washers”. Anyway, the install took much longer than I expected.  By the time I cleaned up the tools and went back inside it was almost 8PM.  The good news is the new cover does indeed look nice and is much easier to open and close than my trifold cover.  This was the last current upgrade I needed to complete on the 16 Tacoma.  Now I can just get moving on simply enjoying the truck.

Yesterday was an interesting one in the presidential race.  Bernie won the Indiana primary after being behind in the polls leading right up to the election, a scenario that has been repeated several times thus far.  No matter how much big money pushes the Hilary campaign ahead, Bernie refuses to go quietly into the background.  Regardless of what you think of his ideas and policies, it is unlikely you question his honesty and commitment to his ideals.  The guy believes what he says and does so without influence from the mega-money conglomerate that runs the majority of American politics.

I was much more surprised to hear Ted Cruz drop out of the race, especially since as recently as Monday he vowed to stay in the race until the end, regardless of the Indiana primary outcome.  I guess I shouldn’t be surprised since Trump has famously nicknamed him Lying Ted. Hell a few days prior he seemed to double down on his commitment by oddly naming Carly Fiorina as his VP, something that is typically not done at this stage of the race.  Watching her frozen botox face creepily sing at the press conference might have been enough to finally sink the ship.

I am curious what else changed in the span of 24 hours to force Ted to adhere to his namesake one final time.  I am happy with the end result regardless.  It’s too bad that Kasich has no shot at this point.  I have really come to like him as a candidate and somehow he has managed to avoid the incessant mud slinging that has become a foundation of the 2016 Republican presidential campaign.

On the drive home I hit heavy rain during the last 10 minutes of the commute.  For some reason people in southwest Florida seem to have similar reactions to driving in heavy rain as people in the northeast do when driving in snow, they suck at it.  Without fail when we start getting heavy rain after prolonged dry spells accidents explode all over the roadways.  Less than a mile from our house there was a full size pickup laying on it’s side in a ditch.

When I got home last night I had planned to put the 99 Tacoma up on ramps to take one more peek underneath.  I want to pull the skid plate so I can find the ground point on the engine block to check it out.  I would feel better if I found it, cleaned it, and re-secured it just to make sure that there are no future flaky ground issues for the truck’s future owner.  The wet conditions postponed those plans.

It did stop raining eventually so I stepped outside to get a quick 20 pull ups in.  The chickens were milling around the bar park when I went out there, almost like they knew my intent.  Doing pull ups on a wet bar is always more challenging but I managed to hang around until I got my 20 reps in.

Today my tonneau cover is supposed to arrive for the new Tacoma.  If the installation looks simple enough I may try to get it installed before the sun sets.