noise."Upcoming: A Week of Madness! · 2:16am Apr 17th, 2018
As they say, hold my beer and watch this.
If you cast your minds back to late December, I gave y'all a bunch of teasers for upcoming stories. Many of those have been languishing unfinished in my created stories queue. That's basically one step past just being a gDoc, or (as is the case with some of my ideas) being at most a what-if prompt in a notebook or my cell phone or written on the refrigerator door in a hopefully erasable marker.
It's time to clean some of that queue up.
I could claim it's spring cleaning or something like that, although it certainly doesn't feel very spring-like here. Last Thursday, it was nearly 70 and birds were chirping and the sun was shining and Michigan was full of hope.
Friday the freezing rain started.
I'm lucky--I'm mostly to the south of it, so there was only a half inch or so of freezing rain at my house. Which I had to drive in, to get to work on Saturday. Then, a block away from the group home where I was working, the power steering on my van stopped working.
Luckily, that group house has a garage, so my van sat inside for the entire shift, and I was able to fix it and only get home five hours late or thereabouts. Zyrian, Uber driver extraordinaire and also a Fimfiction writer took me to Auto Zone to get the belt tensioner I needed (the spring broke in mine) and also to Sears so I could buy tools to fix my van. [One of the worst things about being a mechanic is that while I've got thousands of tools, they're all at work and not in my van.]
There was an element of improvisation to the repair; I didn't buy all the tools I should have, and I was hardly going to call him again to give me another ride to Sears. While it did delay putting the new belt on a bit, I was able to repurpose a plunger handle as a makeshift pushing stick. Overall, the repair wasn't exactly by the book, technique-wise, but it worked and that's all that really matters in the end.
Anyways, back to the main point at hand. Those of us who create stories for Fimfic know that there's a separate box at the top of your stories list for stories that aren't published yet. And mine's grown so big that that's the only thing I see until I scroll down.
So I'm fixing that over the course of the next week.
Back a little while ago, I told Present Perfect that I was holding off on publishing one particular story because I liked to mix up crackfics and more serious fics in order to keep my readers confused. Well, I think by the end of this week some of you are gonna be confused.
Given the way the weather's been here over the last week or so, I figure it's appropriate. We're somewhere between second winter and mud season.
If I were a smart person, I would have written the story notes for each of these in advance. Since I'm very much not, I figure I'll do it for all five at the very end.
Also, for all y'all who are fixing to come after me with pitchforks and torches because I'm being bad and not updating OPP, that's still very much on my mind. I should have it ready for pre-readers by Sunday, at least that's the plan for now. All of this that's coming over the next week has already been written. Some of it's carryover from last year, in fact.
Reminds me of that time I got stuck somewhere north of Mannheim for a day after it hailed two inches worth of ice in an hour. That was a weird year.
The weather these past few weeks has really been a case of "Fire those Weatherpony!" as Silver Glow would say...
Still, we got lucky over here, some small hail on Friday and some freezing rain this morning. At first we were expecting a snowstorm...
Sucks about the break down.
I keep a basic socket set in my trunk at all times, and a selection of several more tools on long trips. Year before last, on the way to bronycon, my transmission burped, and spewed tranny fluid all over my very hot engine. You could imagine the cloud of smoke. I pulled over on the shoulder and went to the trunk to get stuff. Some 'good samaritan' pulled over as well and asked if I needed a mechanic. I turned and smiled, blue gloved hands, holding tool kit and rag. The dude was just like 'oh, ok, nevermind.'
Another time I was driving my LeBaron on Lake Shore Drive, in the dead of winter, at night. Long story short, black ice, went over a curb, popped a tire. Luckily one of those minute men was right behind me, and offered to lift the car so I could change the tire. I pulled out the spare, my collapsible breaker bar, and cigarette lighter-powered air compressor. The dude was legit shocked. He said I was the most prepared person he'd ever come across.
4841800 I loved my Subaru wagon. Flat tire? Pop the *hood* and pull out the spare and jack (which actually was a pretty good jack, even if it lifted by the frame) Five minutes tops.
4841794
Fricking ice storms are about the worst. Best thing to do--if possible--is just stay home until it's over, and hope the power stays on.
4841795
Yeah, totally. This is the kind of thing that happens when your lead weather planner goes on a bender and then just hastily tosses together a schedule with a roaring hangover . . . or while still drunk.
4841800
I'm rarely that smart. I usually improvise with what I have, and honestly given the piles of crap I drive, it's a wonder I don't spend more time by the side of the road with a broken car.
I've fixed electrical problems on two friends' cars with a big thermos (good whack on the battery cables, and they're ready to go again) and more than once fixed the shift linkage on my old C-10 with a Gerber tool.
Now I've got a set of Craftsman sockets and wrenches in the van, though. And I'll probably expand upon that somewhat here in the near future.
4841812
Whereas for the longest time I drove GM trucks that didn't have a spare tire at all, because the cable had rusted through and it had fallen off sometime before I got the truck.
My old Chevy pickup had the jack under the hood, where it doubled as a battery hold-down. I'm not sure that GM had that in mind when they designed it, but it worked pretty well for that purpose. It sure as hell wasn't much use when it came to jacking up the truck.
4841795
I wonder what Silver Glow would have thought of the weather that hit Minnesota over the weekend? 20+ inches of snow and several records, snowiest April on record and most snow on a that day. Heck our international airport had every runway closed for around 7 hours!
Today I had a random 10 minutes of heavy rain. No where near as bad as what you had, but still out of no where.
That sucks about the breakdown. My parents had to replace their car recently. Apparently something went wrong with the timing chain and messed up the engine pretty bad.
Frankly, I'd be more surprised if Estee wrote a happy blog post. But, as they say, good news doesn't sell.
Saved by plunger stick?
All hail the inanimate carbon rod.
In the last three days, I've had a beautiful sunny day in the 80s followed by a storm that dreamt of being a hurricane, followed by a lovely sunny afternoon in the 60s... followed by a brief smattering of rain. The entire weather department needs to be sacked for criminal insanity.
Also, I too have an Unsubmitted list that I have to scroll past to get to anything. I need to take care of that.
4841837
So that's why they promised us a snowstorm! They thought you were going to share it with us!
Yeah, she would be pissed off. "Who [explicit language] schedule [very explicit language] snow after winter wrap up? [very very explicit language]!"
4841837
"Silver, you're looking awfully floofy."
"Yeah... Your Earth weather [CENSORED] sucks. It's [CENSORED] June, and I just [CENSORED] [CENSORED] grew another [CENSORED] winter coat!"
4841837
She'd probably be pretty annoyed at humans' sloppy weather-keeping and not making spring start after the snow stops . . . but I think she'd find it interesting that it set a record (and maybe brag that if there were more weatherponies on Earth, they could beat any snowfall record, anywhere).
If she was feeling frisky, she might have decided to land at the airport just to show that pegasi can land in weather conditions that airplanes can't.
4841857
That was today. Well, not rain, but more unforcast snow. Apparently they wound up closing a couple of highways around Ann Arbor for a while due to the ice.
Ooh . . . depending on what broke and whether or not it's an interference engine, that can be pretty nasty. One of my former co-workers, who wasn't the smartest crayon in the box, tried to pull-start his car with a damaged timing chain . . . wound up putting valves through the pistons.
4841920
I always say, use the tools you've got.
Sticks--preferred by 9 out of 10 cavemen.
Raptors prefer knives.
i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--ZkH-qDPe--/c_fit,fl_progressive,q_80,w_636/17n4s6w0mv04tjpg.jpg
4841870
I'm sure that somewhere in Estee's hundreds of blog posts, there's a happy one. I hope so, anyways.
4841932
Spring is drunk. That's the only possible explanation.
Really, the only sensible thing to do is pick a week and post them all.
4841938
Wish they'd kept our ice storm, too.
Snow again on Thursday, they're saying. Then mud season begins again.
It's not all bad, though. There aren't any mosquitoes yet.
4842084
I wonder if that can happen? Probably with Equestrian magic, it can.
Also, an appropriate image:
derpicdn.net/img/view/2013/2/16/245695__safe_screencap_bon+bon_neon+lights_spring+melody_sprinkle+medley_sweetie+drops_magical+mystery+cure_animated_gif_ouch_snow_snowfall_sunburn.gif
4842245
Don't know the details, but they ended up getting a new car. Apparently the engine was smoking, didn't catch fire though.
4842929
Yeah, probably some sort of catastrophic timing chain failure followed by even more catastrophic engine damage. Depending on what kind of car it was, it could have also had the oil system or the cooling system fail with the chain (some cars have chain-driven water pumps or oil pumps).
4843570
It was a Lexus ES 350 (an older model). the engine was shot apparantly.