Well the cottage was fun, as always. Jogging 3 days, swimming every day, and fishing twice. Total fish caught by my family: 1. By Jeff. I think it was just a minnow with a tumor that caused it to swell a bit. My Dad got to go this year- he hadn’t been in like 5 years, so that’s cool. On the last day, he decided to go on a walk by himself and saw a bear. He didn’t tell us about the encounter until we were watching the pictures from his digital camera on TV (that’s the only thing we use the TV for up there). This upset us, as we had been looking for a bear the entire week and only seen bent shrubs and the -erm- results of what bears do in the woods ;-). How he can see these things in the forest is amazing. You’ll have to see the pictures he took, but the bear appears small in them, and that’s through a telephoto lens. When he first noticed it, the bear was completely hidden except for it’s ears- I probably would’ve walked right by without seeing anything.
Anyway, on the way home, just inside Ohio on I-70 the waterpump in my grandma’s car siezed up and the serpentine belt broke. This I noticed almost immediately as I had no power steering or air conditioning. We were planning on stopping at a gas station in Eaton anyway, so when we stopped I looked under the hood. I didn’t know that the water pump was what siezed up, I just thought the belt broke. So I pulled out the remains of the belt and thought about what was connected to it. A/C, Power steering, Power breaks, and the Alternator. I thought the water pump was attached to the timing belt, as it is on my car. This just makes engineering sense since the engine can’t run at all without the timing belt, and on my car as long as the engine is on the coolant pump is running. The car can, however, run without the serpentine belt, so I suggested we try to press on to Columbus- about an hour away. On the road, I was keeping an eye on everything electronic since I knew the alternator wasn’t running. I didn’t pay attention to the engine temp, so without the water pump it of course overheated and left us on the side of the road. We had it towed to a shop outside of Dayton, which was of course closed on Sundays. So we spent the night and took it in the next day. The engine was shot. Andrew drove my car out to pick Jeff and I up, and we stopped at Young’s Dairy on the way back for milkshakes. They were excellent.
So yesterday, since everybody else had to work, Joey (who is in town visiting for the weekend) drove me out to pick it up.
Later last night we got drunk and watched Aladdin. Robin Williams rocks, and every time Iago (the parrot) would get hurt we’d yell “Aflac!” (Gilbert Gottfried is the voice of both Iago and the Aflac Duck). With how much Iago got hurt, he certainly could have used some supplemental insurance!
Oh, and it looks like the web site is staying the way it is for now. Creating a new wordpress template is more difficult than I originally expected, and I’m bound to screw up the cool way it looks.
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