Life's Good!

Friday, September 21, 2018

Yes, yes, yes! It's FALL!

♪ It's the most wonderful time .. of the year .. ♫ Well, for me it is. I LOVE Fall, can't you tell?!

Here's an impression, from around the campground:

There's berries, (some) colored leaves, asters and even some mushrooms!
The temperature has been down overall, although today is one of those fluke 80-something days, but not for long! The forecast for the whole next week looks great, 60s and low 70s! Yeah!
I'm so happy!

OK, moving on, James did a big job on the truck this week!
We've been leaking steering fluid for months already and knew we finally had to do something about it, so with our finances in a little 'rosier' place, we ordered a (refurbished) steering box ($425) and while we were at it, we also got a new steering column (we only needed a small part of it but they only sell the whole thing so .. sigh .. it is what it is ..).

Look how shiny!

But first came a lot of nasty, dirty, knuckle-busting dismantling! Thank goodness James got 2 new tools (a Pitman arm puller and another ) otherwise he would have never been able to get it done.
It set us back another $85 but otherwise, as James kept reminding me, it would have cost us $1000 to bring the truck to a repair shop ... whatever!

I forgot to take a picture of the steer box we removed, but it looked something like this:


Eeewww!

(We had to pack this up to send it back to the manufacturer to get our money back).

It took about 4 hours to get everything done after which we, sorry, James, also replaced the part at the fuel tank he 'mickey-moused' together last fall when the thread of a blown tire ripped it off ..

By the way, here's a look of all the Ryobi tools James owns (and that's not even all of them) that couldn't get the job done .. can you imagine?
What other tool can you possibly need .. sigh ..

Any-who, we're very happy that it's done, and that things went really smoothly, and that we're not leaking oil anymore, and that the steering has greatly improved and that the fuel tank cannot explode on us anymore .. just kidding ..

I got a few nice walks in this week and snapped some random bird-shots.

That's a cute little Downy Woodpecker on the left, and on the right the first of some of the ducks that are going to pass through here on their winter migration (hopefully).

I even spotted some Green-winged Teals. These are females and they're so cute, about half the size of the Mallards above!

Also, I missed this sign last week when I did my collage. Actually, it might be my favorite ..

With the temperatures dipping in the 50's at night (true!), I started some new, warm socks:

I love these colors and it's self-striping, so cool!

Let's see, what else did we do ... oh, we had a little impromptu BBQ, put on by Patrick, one of the guys James works with, who had bought too much steak and invited us over to help eating them!