Yesterday morning Girlie Bear and I got into the van to get to school and work. When I turned the key the lights came on, the radio started playing, but no cranking. After repeated attempts with no luck, I figured out that a relay was clicking over under the hood, and I could hear the starter whirring. But no cranking.

I transferred us over to the truck, and we made our way to work and school. I took the afternoon off to try to fix the problem or make arrangements at the shop.

I did some research online and in my Haynes manual, and it could have been a loose connection to the starter, a bad relay, a bad battery, or the starter itself. I checked out the cables, and they looked OK. I trust the relay because I can hear it clicking when I try to start the car. I took the battery to the parts store, and it came out of the test as a good battery. So I’m down to the starter.

According to the manual and the internet, it’s a matter of disconnecting the battery, disconnecting the starter, and then unbolting it from the engine.

Disconnecting the battery took about 2 minutes total. Bonus!

Disconnecting the starter from the electrical system took almost an hour. It was only 2 nuts to remove and one wire to pull out, but to get my big meathooks into the small space the starter is in was painful, ungainly, and maddening. Bogus!

I removed the first of 3 bolts from the starter after doing some real yoga-like contortions with my wrench. The other two bolts remain hidden by other parts of the engine, waiting for my hands and forearms to heal enough that I can try to figure out the 3d puzzle that is a Chrysler engine compartment and remove them.

I will have a replacement starter tomorrow morning. I will probably wait until Saturday to try again.

But I have made a decision. It will be a cold day in hades before I purchase another Chrysler product. I loved my first Chrysler, a Dodge Shadow. It was a crackerbox, but it was comfortable, got good gas mileage, and was really reliable.

When I finally gave in and got something else, I stayed with Chrysler and got a used Sebring. That car lasted 18 months, and then its transmission broke going 70 miles an hour on the freeway at 10 PM on a Friday.

I had been considering getting another car anyway, as this car wasn’t as comfortable as I thought it was. I didn’t think anything bad about the car, because it was used, and I didn’t know how hard the previous owner had driven it.

So I got the Caravan. And it’s a nice, comfortable daddymobile. I’ve had it almost 3 years. It’s on its second transmission, has blown almost every lightbulb in the car, and has started getting gas mileage in the F250 range.

The only reason that I pause before dumping this van and getting a Ford or something is because it’s almost paid off, and I’m looking forward to not having a car payment for a while.

This is not a complaint about the people I have worked with at Chrysler. Between us, the Irish Woman and I have bought 5 cars from the same salesman at our dealership. I also really like the people I’ve worked with in the dealership like the mechanics and technicians.

But good customer service doesn’t make up for the continual need for me to maintain this heap. And when I do work on it, the unreasonably tight quarters of the engine compartment make what should be a 20 minute job into a multiday exercise in knuckle busting. No amount of styling or good service makes up for that.

Just saw this on Cnet. Basically, a short lived MMORPG is being used to discuss possible solutions to food and energy shortages, massive disease outbreaks, and major social problems such as refugees. At first glance, it looks like http://folding.stanford.edu/, but using actual people to find answers instead of computers.

Basically, a problem is posited, and lots and lots of people put together proposals on how to deal with the problem.

Kind of like my staff meetings, but in this instance, something interesting is coming out of it.

OK, full disclosure. I used to be an instructor at the MI Schoolhouse, of which the 304th MI BN is a part. I’ve seen a lot of articles like this over the years. They’re normally done by junior officers, usually students, and are more of a “what if” scenario than anything else.

This article follows that pattern. My guess is that some young lieutenant or captain wrote this as part of a class, and it got published in the battalion newsletter. It doesn’t mean that the MI as a whole believes that Al Qaeda is using Twitter and camera phones to carry out attacks. It means that some bright young officer was able to do some research and figure out how these tools could be used.

The author raises some good points, specifically that tools that we use in our daily lives can be used by bad guys to do bad things. Camera phones,GPS, microblogging tools, and Internet chat can all be used to find targets, recon them, and then control an attack. Heck, I’ve used the camera and GPS in my iPhone to scout my deer hunting areas, and I’ve chatted from the field with my buddies when I have a 3G signal.

As the author notes, Twitter has already been used by protesters at the RNC in Minneapolis to spread information. The article also makes a good point that microblogging by military personnel can be detrimental to OPSEC.

Hopefully, this article will be used to raise awareness and not create hysteria or over-reaction, either in the public, political, or military spheres.

This caught my eye. Looks like the Air Force did a Map Exercise using China as the Red Force. They were trying to forecast what air power they would need in order to fight a conflict in the Pacific Rim with a near equal opponent.

A lot of the strategies that they are proposing seem oddly familiar. Things like dispersion, forward staging of repair and supply units, communications, and mid-air refueling are big on their list of things they want.

I’m not a Pac Rim guy. I was an Eastern Europe/Russia guy. But these things they are saying for are the same things they wanted when I was a kid living next to a SAC base in the Dakota’s.

Their suggestion that we get basing and transit rights in Japan and South Korea may be problematic. We are slowly drawing down our environments in those countries, and they are integrating themselves economically and socially with the rest of the Pac Rim, including China. In the event of a crisis, I’m not sure we could rely on these two countries to not do the calculus and see that China could do a lot more damage to them than a loss of our good graces could do. And there’s a precedent in the Iraq War. Turkey refused to allow our troops to cross their territory to get to Northern Iraq, and to my knowledge there haven’t been any repercussions. We need to have back up plans to project air, naval, and land power into the Pac Rim in the event that one or both of these important allies go cold on us.

We no longer keep B-52’s and B-1’s doing circuits on a 24×7 basis, but I don’t think that’s a permanent situation. China is going to be a major competitor to us for the foreseeable future, and I don’t see that relationship as friendly in the long term. Even if the communist government was to disappear tomorrow, the issues that force China to look for more land and resources are still there.

I’d suggest that we beef up our basing in Guam, and do something that draws a very bright line in the sand with Taiwan. Something on the order of recognition of that country and basing of Air Force and Navy units there.

Well, I got a lot done over the weekend, but not quite all of the work I had planned.

Saturday I got to sleep in until almost 9, and the Irish Woman had a hot breakfast waiting for me. Kinda nice. We spent the rest of the afternoon doing some house cleaning stuff, and then we went to the Halloween Party.

Baby Bear was as cute as expected in his Yoda costume, and we got to see a bunch of friends we hadn’t seen in quite a while.

Sunday I did a lot of the outside work. The gutters got cleaned, and I cleaned the chimney. Now I understand why a good chimney sweep is so expensive. What a nasty job!

Junior Bear continued his labors against the leaves from our maple trees. He’s kept his head above water this year, and he should be done in the next couple of weeks.

It got COLD last night, so I may be having our first fire of the year tonight.

No hunting this weekend, and I will probably go to Knob Creek this weekend to get practice in with the Mosin before gun season starts next weekend. This fall is just flying by.

Two fishermen off the coast of England caught a dog almost a mile from shore. Lucky dog.

That is one pooch who will never willingly get into the bathtub again.

Only a few more days until this election cycle is over. Personally, I’m sick of the whole thing. I figured out who I was going to vote for a couple of months ago, and I’ve been trying to avoid thinking, talking, and writing about it since then.

This is the longest political race I can ever remember, and the nastiest I’ve ever seen.

Of course I hope my candidates will win, but if not, better luck next time. Hopefully the majority of people will have the same attitude. I have hope on that one, but not much.

It should tell you something when police departments start getting ready for civil unrest over an election. Again, I hope people will act like adults, but I don’t have much hope for that one either.

Go vote. Celebrate or mourn on election evening and the day after. After that, sober up, get back to work, and try to remember we’re all supposed to be working together.

Got up this morning to a pouring rain. Supposed to stay that way all day, but it’s nice to hear it hitting the roof and trees while I sleep.

Got Junior Bear off to school wearing a heavy duty rain coat, and Girlie Bear helped me with Baby Bear. He has started holding his own bottle, which makes things a little easier. We’re also only a week or so away from full blown crawling, so my life is about to get complicated.

Work is work. The Windows people are rushing around patching everything that doesn’t move. I’m not going to say anything about Linux on this. It’s only a matter of time before we have to do the same thing. I’ve got a couple of things to do this morning, then I’m off to a doctor’s appointment.

We’re going down to a friend’s farm for a Halloween party tomorrow evening, which is always fun. Hayrides, haunted forest, bonfire, and really good barbecue. Irish woman is making her famous yellow cake muffins with homemade caramel icing. Those things are like nails in my coffin, but I’ll die happy.

If the weather clears, I’ll do the fall weatherizing tomorrow, and I may go bow hunting on Sunday afternoon. I went hunting with the muzzleloader last weekend with one of my buddies, and had a really good time. At about sun up, a big group of turkeys walked through the area and made a heck of a racket. No deer came into the area I was watching, but one busted me when she saw me from the field behind me. She stood there huffing and pawing for a few minutes then ran off. Unfortunately, she was on property where I don’t have permission to hunt (I was on the property line facing away from the field she was in), so she got to walk and I got to watch.

It’s finally starting to turn cold here. The warm spell we had in September and October is over, and they’re predicting highs in the 40’s and 50’s for the next couple of weeks. The leaves are absolutely gorgeous now, and the weather man says they should reach peak color this weekend.

Irish Woman picked up Baby Bear’s first Halloween costume yesterday. He’s going to be Yoda. “Yes, a bottle you will bring to me”.

Not much to blog about today. It’s been really quiet here, and nothing in the national or local news gives me an idea for a thought or a rant. So I thought I’d bring you all up to speed on how things are here at Case de Oso.

I’ll be taking the kids out to get their Halloween costumes tonight or tomorrow night. Junior wants to be the Geico caveman for a party he’s going to, Girlie Bear wants to be a witch, and we’re going to find something cute for Baby Bear.

We’re all getting over a case of the funk, but otherwise doing OK.

Work is work. Had a lot of stuff to do over the weekend, but that should be the last big weekend push we have until the end of the year. We’ll be gearing up for the Christmas season soon, but that’s not too bad.

Heard from my brother in California today. His health isn’t as good as mine, but his spirits are up. He’s been going through a lot of the same things that my mother did, but he’s actually doing as his doctors say, so here’s hoping he’ll come through it OK.

You park at the post office, go in to do a little business, and come out to find your rental car has been crushed by a falling piece of metal.

I’m sure this guy isn’t complaining that the line in the post office delayed him a few minutes. Or else this would be a case of man killed by falling anvil. Cue the Bugs Bunny music.