Jim & Alie

Well, the motorized barstool incident has come back to bite me again.  My ankle has been a little sore the last month or so with the cold weather.  Then, this past weekend, I played some basketball with some friends and managed to sprain the ankle again.  I’ve now been hobbling around the past few days and to make it worse, mother nature has decided I didn’t have enough snow or ice to walk on.

Have I mentioned before how much I love Ohio weather……..

David brought the family up last weekend and helped me pull the transmission from Alie’s Jeep.  It took a majority of the day, but we got it out. On Monday, I put the transmission in the trunk of the car Alie is driving and she brought it to the transmission shop located near her workplace on Tuesday morning.

After looking at it, the shop is recommending a total rebuild for $1200… yuck!  It does have 180k miles on it though and they told her that this model transmission usually needs rebuilt before that.  So, it’s possible that her spin a few weeks ago didn’t damage the transmission and it was just a coincidence that it died about the same time (though it probably added some extra wear to help finish it off).

Hopefully, in the next couple weeks we’ll get the transmission back and David plans on coming back up to help me put it back in the Jeep.  The Jeep also needs a new battery and tires.  The brakes are warped a little and should get replaced, but they are going to have to wait.

OK.  It’s been a while since either of us posted anything, so I figured I’d put out some updates.

• Alison just received a job promotion and should be starting her position in about a month or so.  The duties shift to a little different area, but I think she’ll do great and will enjoy the challenge.
• Mount Carmel (where I work) has just laid off @300 workers in non-patient care areas, including my friend Jeff’s wife Jessica. 
• I started back to class last week.  I am taking “Object Oriented Programming” and “Advanced Graphic Design”.  These should both be classes that I excel in and enjoy.  They’re much better than the last few classes I’ve taken (Algebra, Stats, etc.).
• Alison spun out her car on the highway a few weeks ago when we got a small ice storm during the afternoon drive home.  She was fine, though a bit shaken.  The car initially just had a small dent in the passenger rear corner that I was able to get out mostly.  Since then though, the transmission has lost reverse gear.  I suspect it was damaged in the spin when she was backwards.  So, she is borrowing her mom’s car (thanks Belinda!) to get her to work and her car is on stands in the garage. Unfortunately, this means we are now parking outside instead of in the garage and need to clean the cars off each morning before leaving for work. In my spare time (the little I can muster), I am going to pull the transmission and likely take it somewhere to get rebuilt or trade it in for one that’s already rebuilt if possible.
• It’s going to be in the single digit temperatures the next few days with wind chills down to a possible -20 and some snow thrown in for good measure.  I decided that was my cue to take the rest of the week off so I’m going to sit this out at home where it’s warm.  I’m going to to attempt to get ahead on my school work, do some work on Alie’s car, and do some other misc things that need done around the house.

Well, that’s it for now.  I’ll try to update more often.