Gertrude

I guess I should start this by giving the poll results - 2 of you were right, except one of those 2 was Clinton, so that's cheating. The "other" vote was for "You should see the other guy!!" But the reality is that I dropped a car part on my head. Specifically, I dropped my babysitter's exhaust on my head.



Our babysitter’s suburban was acting all weird – like the transmission was going out, and the check engine light came on. So her husband went and got the codes read. The list was everything from plugs and wires, to a mass air sensor, and the catalytic converter. He did everything that was relatively cheap. And it still ran like crap. The last thing on the list was the catalytic converter. And it was doing exactly what mine did on the Pontiac when my catalytic converter was clogged.

So Clinton and I spent Friday morning working on her suburban.

First thing is removing the old catalytic converter. Which meant unbolting it and then discovering that we had to cut it out. (This is just 2 of the three pieces after we cut them out.)

The new part came in two pieces and we thought we could just slide the one piece past the transmission cross member. Not so much. We wasted about an hour trying to push it past that member, thinking it would be a lot of work to unbolt and rebolt the transmission cross member. Luckily it wasn't as much work as we thought and once we gave in and unbolted it, it slid right back in place and bolted right back up.

At one point I was holding up the exhaust and Clinton got up to get something - a crow bar or something - we were still trying to push it past the cross member and it wasn't going. And the exhaust seemed to be stuck in place. And I had no blood in my fingers. So I let go. Oh, hi Gertrude! Nice to meet you.

Anyway, 3 hours and one trip to the auto parts store later, our babysitter’s suburban “runs better than the day they bought it.” The good news is that when/if my truck catalytic converter gets clogged, we know exactly how to fix it, and we know that we should just take the cross member down and save time.

Clinton threatened that I would have to wear a hat for the rest of the weekend, that he thought people would think he beat me. To which I said, I’m not trying to hide it, they might think that if I was trying to hide it with make-up or something. But I am totally telling anyone who asks that you beat me with a ratchet.

We actually accomplished the entire repair without incident. Well, there was cussing. But not at each other. And Gertrude seems to have packed her bags, only a small scratch remains, and well, it's still bruised, but not so much red or swollen. I'm working on my inner Harry Potter.