On Friday night, after driving to my parents house and then on to Hoopeston (to eat), the Honda decides it doesn’t like it’s original battery anymore. My parents jumped me from their Honda, drive over to the grandparents house and see my aunt for several hours. Playing poker at 10:30 pm, so my parents were nice enough to let me drive their car, and they took mine. It even started using the headlight trick. Saturday morning, Dad hooks it up to the roll around battery charger, and nothing. Oh well, it’s got 7+ years and 67,500 miles on it, more than you could expect from most things anymore. I’ll drive it back to Champaign and run to AutoZone in the truck and pick up a new battery, no big deal. Broke even at poker, got to sleep at 2 am.

Dad has been slowly fixing up his loader tractor, an Oliver 1755, replacing parts here and there to get it to run better and start more reliably. He noticed that there was no fuel filter, even though the shop manual said there should be one inline after the sediment bowl. Looking at the fuel line routing, it seemed like we could get one in there with some creative thinking. We ran over to John Deere in Hoopeston and picked up one for a 3020 Deere, came in a CarQuest box, so I’m sure it’s probably just a standard part. Once we got back, we cut out a couple chunks of the steel fuel line and slipped in the filter, not too tough, but it took quite a bit longer than we thought it was going to. It started easier and ran better than it has in almost as long as I can remember.

Next, we went over to Fred’s house and picked some sweetcorn for me to bring back, and he gave us a whole bunch of jalapeno peppers. Guess I’ll be bringing most of those in to work to give away. Then we went home and had lunch. During lunch, mom happened to get up to get a soda from the fridge in the garage and looked out at the shed door. Sitting there next to the door was a groundhog. Of course, he chose to run IN to the shed. We spent 15 minutes finding him, and the dog finally tipped us off that it was under a pallet with dual wheels stacked on top of it. And, without moving a bunch of stuff, there was no way to get the forklift to the pallet. We managed to tip the first wheel off without too much trouble, but on picking up the bottom wheel, dad dislocated his pinky finger. After that, we spent some time beating on and trying to chase the groundhog. He didn’t want to leave the pallet, probably didn’t help that the dog was barking and biting at him. After a bit of stabbing and prodding, we decided to lift up the wheel and pull out the pallet. That worked, but he ran the wrong way, back into the shed. The dog cornered it again, and we ending up having to stab the groundhog and kill it to get rid of it. Haven’t heard how dad’s finger turned out yet, they were headed to the emergency room as I headed back to Champaign.

Changing the battery went smooth, $49 later it’s got a new economy battery with a 1 year free replacement warranty and a 6 year prorated warranty.

And now I’m at work because one of our SDLT librarys decided it didn’t like life anymore late last night. Hopefully the firmware and driver updates for the SCSI interface card will fix that.