leapinggnome.org

It’s been a long time since I’ve made a post here. What can I say, this semester has been a busy one. It’s not been all bad, some of the time I’ve been busy snowmobiling or hanging out with friends, but classes have been hard too. I’m at the midpoint of my spring break right now, hanging out with family in Alto. It’s too bad all my friends from back home had their spring break last week.

Monday I had an appointment at the eye doctor and he hooked me up with some contacts. I’ve wanted to try them out since I’ve had problems with my eye glasses fogging up while snowmobiling. They work out alright, but aren’t quite as clear as my glasses are. Apparently my astigmatism is bad enough that contact lenses won’t ever be clearer than my glasses are, at least not with current technology. Ah well.

Well, it’s been a month since I’ve last updated this site. A lot has gone on since my last post. Most notably, fall semester is over and grades are in. A new semester has started and everything is fresh again, white like the newfallen snow on the ground.

My snowmobile is together and running well now, which is good news. While we were putting the engine together the first time, we didn’t know exactly where to set the timing at, so we left it at where it was. It ran after that, but it was running rough and not really producing as much power as it should’ve been. I was also getting about 4 MPG…

So we took the flywheel back off (after much effort and a few broken tools) and set the timing to where Chris and I thought it should be. The shop manual I checked out from the library didn’t really cover it, so it was more of an educated guess based on a few markings on the stator. Anyway, we put it all back together and made sure to sync up the carburetors properly. Now it runs really, really well and I’m quite happy with it. I’ll try to stay more on top of posting here since school is back in session and I am back on broadband.

Well, maybe not so much anymore. I had 3 exams today. Unfortunately all the hard exams got scheduled for today, and now I have to stick around to take the easy one on thursday. I think I touched on this before. The good news is that after my exams today, I will pull out of physics with a B. I fear the scores on the rest of my exams will be bad news, but oh well. Next semester will be my semester to shine. I swear.

Speaking of things that are under pressure, there’s the front quarter panel of my car (!). Sometime between midnight wednesday and 11 thursday morning, my car was hit in the parking lot behind my apartment. The damage is rather significant (aesthetically, anyway) and as my luck would have it the perpetrator did not leave a note. There’s only one vehicle in our lot that could have left the particular marks on my car, and of course he denies everything. Ah well, I guess there’s not much I can do about it. I plan to file a police report tomorrow, we’ll see what becomes of that. You can view a picture of the damage here. I guess the only thing I have on my side right now is that my car is/was one of the most popular cars in America (in one of the most popular colors). Hopefully I can find a wrecked one in a junkyard with back end damage. Swap out that quarter panel and things will be almost as good as new.