"I want my children to have all the things I couldn't afford. Then I want to move in with them." - Phyllis Diller

Mondays are for eating whatever I want whenever I want (BACON!), watching Top Gear (reruns), and putzing on whatever task strikes my fancy. Today that included pruning a trash can worth of branches off the bigger of the two Palo Verde trees (there's 46 trash cans worth left), sanding and painting the steering wheel, attaching the dash console, and my gym workout. I also went over to my pull up bar in the garage throughout the day and did 10 sets of 10 pull ups each. That equals my PR, which I hope to best tomorrow.

I made a trip up to Home Depot to get the spray paint for the steering wheel:

Yep, all five cages were unlocked.

I feel like Im emerging slowly from my funk with a corresponding eagerness to get up to Oregon. Pam and I are going to make a trip up during one of the 7-day stretches she has off next month. It's an 18 hour drive I'll try to do pretty much straight through. Take a long nap during the afternoon, pick her up from work at 7:30 p.m., and head north. That puts us in L.A. in the middle of the night and up through the central CA valley during the morning hours. The Kia will be loaded with the sawsall and
a variety of tools so we can spend the next four days working in MoHo and demolishing the "greenhouse" so it will be ready for the chicken coop when that time comes. We may make the one-hour drive out to the coast for lunch or dinner one day.

Because this is a retirement community we see people who have moved here from a wide variety of states. On the way home from the gym this afternoon I was behind a Sorento with New England Patriots decals in the rear window.
And yes, his tires were under-inflated.

Yesterday afternoon Aron, a professional mechanic, came over to help me with the truck's initial fire-up. After double checking all the electrical connections and hooking up the battery the first step was to pull the plugs and crank the engine sans compression to make sure oil pressure comes up like it's supposed to.
It didn't.
After trying repeatedly and cogitating the issue Aron suggested the oil pump was sucking air and needed to be primed. Pull the distributor, take a hastily modified BIG screwdriver chucked into a drill, stick it down the hole and spin the pump at a high rpm...oil pressure! Close everything back up and turn it over again, this time to see if the fuel pump gets gas pumped into the clear filter bowl up by the carb.
It didn't.
After trying repeatedly and cogitating the issue we opened up the fuel pump to discover that over the decades this thing sat in a field the gas inside the pump turned to sludge. Pulled the pump, got that cleaned up, reinstalled the pump and turn it over again. Yep, gas fills the filter bowl.
Now we know we have oil pressure and fuel. Do we have spark??
Put the distributor cap back on, hook up the spark plug wires and try, for the first time, to fire up this engine.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfoYRQlkIwE&feature=youtu.be
That went on for ... a long time. But I figure if you've seen three attempts you've pretty much seen them all. Each time the engine fired and immediately died. Then Aron noticed gas coming out of the carb which reminded me that when I was rebuilding it I had trouble getting the float level set. Now I'm sure I got it wrong and that the engine was flooding as a result. Choke open or closed, throttle knob in our out, neither made any difference.
Today I got a new fuel pump - relatively cheap insurance now that I know the inside of the old one is iffy - and I'll install that tomorrow. In the next day or two I'll take off the carb and fix that float level issue. Then I'll give it another try.

Now it's time for the dinner Pam has for me in the fridge and some reading while I "watch" TV until Pam gets home a little before 8:00. That means I'll see her for about 30 minutes before my body insists it's bedtime.