Sometimes I forget how much real life can be an adventure until it happens to me.  I had plenty of adventure while I was in the service, but I still find adventure as an ordinary citizen, and it usually comes in two types: parenting or disaster.

For those of you who are not parents, I think it is the grandest adventure of all time.  Guiding my child and watching her learn, react, and grow is simply amazing.  These adventures I live for.  The other I can live without.

Disaster.  Now I use this term loosely, because it could either be in the form of a true distaster, much like the flooding my area recieved earlier this summer.  Or it could be on a much smaller scale, like I encountered this past week with my car.

I had to take a week hiatus from blogging due to the fact that I have been wrenching on my car.  Whilst driving, a balance shaft belt (connected to the crank) broke and left me dead in the water.  I am fairly mechanically inclined, and I love to work on cars, but only when it is at my leisure and not through necessity.

In fact, my other hobby is cars.  I am currently working on a 1948 Chevrolet Coupe when I can find the time.  My daily driver is a ’99 Mistubishi Eclipse Spyder GST (which is a mouthful).  It is what people would call a tuner car, and it has a turbo charged 4 cylinder engine.  I pretty much dislike all the ricer stuff (loud coffe-can exhausts, non functioning wings/spoilers, vinyl graphics, etc.), but I love the curves on this car.  I like the “go-fast” without the flair.

Anyways, if any readers are familiar with maintaining/fixing modern cars, you almost have to yank the drivetrain to accomplish anything.  If you have a garage work on it, you are looking at 10X or more the price to fix shit.  So I tend to do all the work myself, with the additional support of my father as he has a nice facility to work on cars.

The adventure began with towing it to my dad’s shop.  We normally have a trailer we can wench vehicles onto, but not this time, because my less than responsible brother has taken off with the truck that can pull the trailer.  Needless to say, it was an adventure getting through a couple of towns without the assistance of power steering and brakes.

Then the real fun begins.  I think I have snapped the timing belt, so we open up the valve cover to see all the destroyed valvetrain, but it is in perfect working order.  Next, we remove all the belts, pullies, brackets, and a motor mount so I can get to the balance shaft and timing belts so they can be replaced.  I then find that when the balance shaft belt went, it took some expensive sensors with it.

I go to get the parts, the local store doesn’t have it.  I instead have to drive on the other side of Indy to get them, twice.  Because one of the parts they gave me didn’t fit and it was marked for the wrong year in their all knowing computers.

So I finally swap in the new shit and low and behold, the car won’t idle.  Somewhere, my idle speed control went too.  So I just unplug the damn thing and manually dial the idle in.  Finally, I am back on the road.

That was my adventure for the past week. What a pain in the arse.

I am sure you are wondering if I have a point.  I do.  I am thinking that almost all the characters we portray in RPGs that we force through dire adversity would quickly call it quits on adventuring if they were real.  Adventurers must be a masochistic bunch of greedy assholes to put themselves through dungeons, haunted towers, and crazy shit all the time.

Listening to: Nonpoint – Statement – What a Day

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