Baby's first bath

 "Can you remember who you were, before the world told you who you should be?" - Charles Bukowski

 Today was my one day off again this week - I've been covering a lot of shifts for other control room operators who are on vacation.  Most people work 80 hours in a two-week period.  I'm putting in 132 hours this time around, and we are well past the overwork caused by the annual plant outage :(

The riding mower has been clogging up the grass chute quite a bit lately, so I decided to see if there was anything that could be done to remedy that.  I took the chute off - it's about a foot in diameter - and scraped all the dead and dried up grass from the inside.  Then I used a green scrubbing pad to get any lingering grass residue off.  

Next, I used 100 grit sandpaper to smooth the interior.  There were plenty of rock dings and dangling bits of plastic that I was able to smooth down or remove with a knife.  Lastly, I applied a coat of automotive wax finish, to hopefully make the grass less likely to stick inside.  

It seems to have worked - we only had one chute plugging event this time around, and that was because the bag filled up, and the only place for grass clippings to go was to pile up in the chute.  Win, I guess.  It took about two hours to work over the grass chute.   

After cutting the grass and weed-whacking, I turned my attention to the S600.  I ran it through the car wash in February, but that didn't do a great job.  The car has also been rained on a few times since - and it's now pollen season.  So I decided to do the job myself.  I don't even remember the last time I hand-washed a car - sometime in the 1980's maybe.  Now I know why I stopped doing that - it takes a ton of time that I no longer have, and it's sweaty work.

Whilst I was doing this, I finally figured out why the left front tire keeps losing air.  The rim has a crack!

It's not going to be fun finding a replacement.  I poked around on the internet a bit, without much luck so far.  Hopefully I can source one in decent condition.  I tried to put an old bottle of green slime in, but the slime was pretty thick from sitting half-used for several years.  It kept plugging the valve stem instead of the leak, LOL.

On the bright side, the new cordless blower is working just fine, so at least there's that :)

Time now for some cute Siberian Husky pictures.