Life here is returning to a bit more sane pace, or maybe the past weekend has just allowed me to relax. In any case, I figured maybe almost a month and a half without a blog entry was a bit much. Kudos to Jeremy for putting the new KT theme in place; I know that it's been a long time in the making.

Christmas was good. Kari's family was in town. Usual family type stuff; food and fun. I did relatively well, giftwise. Her parents got me a couple of flashlights; one a battery/ solar/ hand crank powered thing with a built in radio, and also an LED flashlight. Kari's sister really hooked me up; she got me a set of glasses exactly like the set that Lisa took during the divorce (it was always a bit of a sore point with me since one of my good friends hooked me up with them).

Kari got me a Celestron Skyscout. It's an electronic doodad with a GPS, electronic compass, and some sort of inclinometer, such that it can figure out whereever you're pointing at in the night sky, and then tells you what that object is. It's pretty cool; you can figure out all sorts of starts without charts.

I'm putting the finishing touches on getting the El Camino ready for emission inspection, pt. 2. It failed the first check kind of miserably. I've been working on getting the idle all set. I should have realized that something was a bit rich when the car would start and run fine in the cold weather from a stone cold start. I've got the idle to where it's not so stinky, so that's a start. To work on the cruise mode settings, over the weekend I headed over to Loper's and picked up new jets, metering rods, and springs. In retrospect, I would have been better off buying the other carb of the two Edelbrock carbs at Autozone; that one had an electric choke, and apparently, was calibrated more for street cars. But no problem. I rejetted the primaries, from .100 down to .095. Initially, I also put in larger metering rods to lean it out some more, but it turned out that I really didn't need to take that step. It was a bit too lean. I went back to the initial metering rods, but went one step weaker on the step-up springs. The new combination seems to work pretty well; I've noticed that it's easier to do a burnout from a standing start; something that it just couldn't do very well before. I was amazed at how easy it is to change this stuff out. You have to pull the top off of the carb to change the jets, but it's not too bad. Changing the metering rods and step up springs is dead easy though; there are two plates that you just swing out of the way and pull the rod / spring combinations out.

Operation "new house" is going well. I'm all moved out of the apartment, and most of my improvements are in place. I put up the last ceiling fan in the new place today. Aside from finishing up the unpacking operation, the only thing I really have left to contemplate, house-wise, is whether or not I'm going to put in a water softener. I'm leaning towards "probably." Water here is pretty hard; I'd use less soap, and the washer, dishwasher, and water heater would certainly fare better in the long run.