Oct. 26, 21: Early Teaching, Oculus, Garage Putzing, TV, and Games

Up right about five this morning, but fell asleep pretty early last night and ended with a solid eight hours. 🥳 I guess the proof is in the pudding as I spent the afternoon out the garage and achieved my goal for the day (and for the last like four days).

Did the usual morning routine and was happy to find MATIC posting some nice green candles! 👍 I’m certainly in the money as far as that investment goes, but I need it to do well enough to make up for my massive losses on FIRE. Speaking of which, it actually went up for once! An entire penny per billion! Woot! 😛🤪

Got busy into all that stuff and doing some chores (the kitchen sink backed up, so I had to plunge it and run some Draino through) and then did the dishes that were sitting in the sink. Got into watching Dragon’s Den on YouTube and before long I needed to get ready to go teach (I also prepped my lesson for the day) and hadn’t even started my post! 😱

I quickly got the bare bones done and scheduled…didn’t get a chance to go back and edit, but the only thing that was particularly remarkable about the day was the nice gold foil card I got for my daily quest; not bad, around twenty-two bucks! 🤑

Other than that, headed in and did my teaching for the day. We started properly into power series and representing functions using power series. We primarily focused on geometric power series, as those we have a firm grasp on, but we also covered lots of examples of finding the intervals of convergence for different power series.

We ended class just about on time and then I stayed after and fielded some questions for a while. The drive home went pretty smoothly, though, and I still had a good portion of the afternoon and evening remaining after I grabbed some lunch.

I struggled with myself to work on something, but wasn’t really feeling it, so I played some Resident Evil 4 on the Oculus. Had a couple hardcore fights and a close-quarters battle with a serious boss, but made it past (after a few deaths) and locked in my progress at a save point.

Have to say, it is nice to have a fun game to come back to for several days, usually I either plow through them in a couple hours or they get impossibly hard and I get fed up. The difficulty is ramping up, but it’s not so bad that I’m completely stuck. Been finding most, if not all, of the treasures so I’ve been fairly well funded for upgrading and such. I am running thin on healing stuff, though, which is a bit worrisome.

Anyway, felt good about how much progress I’d made in game and felt like I should chase the same feeling in the real world. It had been my (vague) goal to get the oil pump out and cleaned up, really since I took the pan off. I’d tried pulling at it, and even ventured to hit on it with a hammer, but it hadn’t budged.

The last three or four days I’ve been firing penetrating oil down in there. Not sure how much it helped, but probably loosened a little. Today, that was my goal, get the pump out.

Of course, there’s a hundred other things to do as well…procrastinating is fairly easy, so I took another look at the oil pan. I hadn’t yet turned it over to check how the top edge had turned out. It was mostly well covered, but it did seem like, depending on the gasket, there might be some unpainted metal that could show, so I hit the top with a little enamel as well.

It didn’t stick quite as well as the rest since I didn’t want to overspray primer and have to fix the bottom again, but the proper exposed edges are primed and painted and then there’s a bit of a coat on the top. I don’t think it will be a problem, just keep there from being exposed metal. Looks pretty good:

Then I spent a bunch more time scraping the old oil crud out of the timing gear ⚙️ area and particularly cleaning out all the gunk in the bolt passages…looks like that gasket had more or less failed and the oil wasn’t leaking out from those bolts simply because it was all crusted in there.

Scraped off nearly all the old gasket material and got what all I could see and reach cleaned up. By that point I was getting frustrated with myself because I was doing anything other than what my actual goal was (but still needed to be done anyway) and so I finally faced up to it.

At first I tried again by hand, hoping the penetrating oil had done enough for me to break it loose, but no go…didn’t want to hammer much harder on the casing than I’d already tried, so I took a different tack and decided to try and go from the top.

At first I couldn’t find anything that would fit down in the hole, but I got a long screwdriver and was able to find the pump and still have room to swing the hammer. A few solid taps and it started to move! 🤩

I’d been afraid that hitting on it from the top might knock it loose and send it crashing to the floor, but it was still kinda stuck in there. A little wiggle with my hand, and she slid out! 😃 Now you can see straight through the engine from top to bottom:

Still some crud down in there where it was stuck, but get that out and hopefully it will slide, slide, slippity-slide.

So far, from what I can see, it seems to be ok. Hopefully clean her out and get her spinning again.

I kinda’ figured when I opened the engine and it was full of muck that I would find it everywhere…never wanted to take it this far apart, but it definitely had to be done.

I’m fairly certain that this is not an original…should have two screws on the top to take the filter casing off; not positive about that, though. Either way, if it works, I’m going to leave it. It will be inside and not visible anyway.

Wenche made us pork chops and potatoes and veggies for dinner and we watched some show on Amazon, can’t think of it now…a comedy horror about a sorority where the students are getting murdered. Pretty much all we could even find…😡 That was it for the day, fell asleep watching the tube.

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Hmmm, I suppose dShitty is only five sixths shitty today.

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Went in a couple times today on CryptoBrewmaster and got one ingredient and started another, but still not the ones I need. Just building up for later, I guess.

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Did a couple missions and a lesson on Rising Star. Same old, same old, pretty much.

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Played quite a bit of Splinterlands in the evening. Was a Little frustrating, but made some progress. 👍

Got my three wins without neutral monsters from yesterday done still in Gold II:

I finally broke back up into Gold I, but with three days or so left in the season, I’m going to need some good matchups to have any hope of getting to Diamond.

Had Sneak quest for my daily quest today and got it done in Gold I. Not too bad overall for today, six cards and some DEC:

I’m currently saving up my vouchers to get the bonus for buying a hundred packs…I’m still really back and forth with that decision, though. I did realize that the packs also add to the SPS airdrop points, so that kind of sweetens the deal a little as well. 🤔

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Average Last 7 Days: 13,381

Lifetime Average: 15,449

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Longest Streak: 53

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Longest Streak: 7

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Highest Floors: 120

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Mindfulness Diary:

Health: 93%
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Energy: 89%
Productivity: 86%

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