"Forty for you, sixty for me. And equal partners we will be." - Joan Rivers

When the toaster goes down.

This will be a brief and hurried post so errors of all kind might be especially frequent.

I belong to online forums for goats, VW restorations, Chevy truck restorations, and now Mustang restorations. They can be a great resource for help if you can get past the condescension and snarky manner of some respondents. That seems especially prevalent on car sites where the male ego comes into play. Goat people seem like a much nicer group.

I posted the problem with the gas tank leak and got a dozen "Yep, happened to me, too" responses. The consensus seems to be that Vaseline is the key. This morning a professional mechanic wrote that the seal replacement can be done without removing the tank, so that's the course I took this morning.
He also recommended a particular gasket compound that will help hold the O-ring in place "for 24 hours while it sets. Then put more on the outer surface and apply the retaining ring."

I took the thing apart (gas running everywhere!) and discovered the O-ring is too big, the diameter is bigger than the groove it's supposed to sit in. Did it get stretched during my first attempt? I do NOT want to do this a third time so I've ordered another O-ring (99 cents) that I'm hoping will arrive while I'm gone (see below). I'll do the install when I get back and hopefully be done with this task.

The rest of the day was spent taking humus (the non-edible kind) from my compost pile down to the raised veggie garden boxes. The chickens thought they were in heaven with all of that fertile scratching.
A layer of top soil over that and we'll have a great setting for all kinds of veggies. Plus the bees to pollinate.

On the way to small group tonight we stopped by Enterprise to pick up a Ford Focus. I'll leave about 5 a.m. for Seattle to spend a couple of days with my folks. Dad got some kind of an infection that had him hospitalized for 3 days and is now in a rehab center so PT can help him get some strength back in his legs. Until that happens he's not allowed to stand without someone present so the falls that have been too common lately don't happen again. That's how he got that infection - a fall wound that went south.

I'll get to Seattle about noon or a little later and drive home Friday. My older brother is there now from his place in Spokane and will leave Thursday morning. Tomorrow afternoon we'll all meet with a case manager or someone like that to talk about dad's situation going forward and what should be done to reduce his risk of falling and make life generally safer. I'm hoping he gets to go back to their unit at Ida Culver House soon.

This rental car is a Ford Focus. In the 20 miles I drove it tonight...
Pretty good acceleration.
Too many fancy controls and features. Buttons everywhere with a steering wheel that rivals an F1 car.
A digital display that tells me everything except soy bean futures in Iowa.
No indication on the dash where the gas cap cover is located.
No release button or pull for the cover. I looked everywhere!
Comfortable seats and a steering wheel that moves up and down plus in and out.
A rear view mirror on the windshield that sits so low that it obstructs my line of sight badly.

It will get me to Seattle and back just fine, Pam will have the Kia to use here, and it's all good.