I am quite certain that automotive engineers hate people. I imagine them to be something like Wally from Dilbert; they are not inclined to do any work and on the rare occasion that they are actually forced to design something they maliciously draw up the plan so that theoretically the part can be changed out with standard tools, as long as the person changing the part has the ability to bend their left arm into several acute angles and hold a flashlight with their right hand while craning their neck up and to the right and squinting one eye. That is the situation I found myself in while changing the oxygen sensor on my truck. I actually found myself in that position several times this week, first to verify that I was in fact ordering the right part, another to get the connector disconnected, once with a wrench that wouldn't quite fit in the little space provided for movement, then with a special socket adapter that allowed me to ratchet the part off with tiny half-inch movements with several breaks to reposition the socket one more hex-face. But the part is changed and we saved a bunch of money, so I guess that's good.

I may have a new job lined up on the local military base. The details aren't all ironed out yet. If it is at the lower pay rate I'll be taking a fifty-cent per hour pay cut but hopefully it will be a full-time job and the extra ten or twelve hours a week will make up for that. If it's at a higher pay rate then I'll be getting a fifty-cent raise as well as the hour differential. I'm not sure on the status of medical benefits or if I'll be able to continue working as a part-timer at my current job.

And in the realm of trailer-park drama, my sisters and brother-in-law have apparently got a feud going on with the guy who lives behind them. A few days ago he started a fire in his back yard and left it unattended. My sister saw the fire and called the trailer-park managers who went to the house and knocked on the door, but the guy wasn't home. So my sister took her garden hose and put the fire out. Today the guy saw my brother-in-law and started yelling at him over the fence for not minding his own business about the fire. They had an argument and didn't really reach any resolution. The guy maintains that he has the right to have illegal fires within ten feet of several highly-flammable trailers. Later on my brother-in-law came over to borrow our lawnmower and his neighbor just happened to be doing yard work in my neighbor's back yard. The guy kept calling out stuff like, "Hey! You don't like me, do you? That's okay, I've been not liked before," and, "I'm a nice guy once you get to know me."

And on a completely random note, today I though to myself, "Wasn't there a band in the 90s with a guy whose only job was to dance?" Indeed there was. It was The Mighty Mighty Bosstones. Ben Carr is listed as "manager, dancer, and Bosstone." Also, after I wrote in one of those "tell us about yourself by answering fifty questions" e-mails that The Beatles are tremendously overrated a friend from my missionary days forwarded me a link to an article that goes into the subject in more depth than I ever could. It's a pretty good read, especially if it happens to confirm long-rooted feeling that you've never really been able to put into words.