Board Thread:Watercooler 2.0/@comment-6191693-20131230040409/@comment-6191693-20140313212749

As promised, here's an update on where I've been for the past...while.

First, a little background. There's this friend I've had a major crush on for pretty much the whole eight years or so that we've been friends. Throughout those eight years, she was pretty much always with someone else and I had pretty much given up on having a relationship with her and was content to just be friends. After college, we saw a bit less of each other because we both had so many other things going on and we didn't live very near to each other, but we still kept in touch. Lately (for the past year or so), we have been seeing a lot more of each other (in part, among other things, because she moved closer to me) and my old, sappy, romantic feelings were rekindled. Over the past few months, I have really tried spending more and more time with her, wondering if and wishing that she felt the same way about me. As the months went by, I felt like I was getting mixed signals and started suspecting I was seeing signs and hints that might not even be there. After a while, I gave up again, resigning to the assumption that she didn't feel that way about me and contenting myself once again to just being friends and still seeing each other just as often.

Meanwhile, there's this other very close friend. Way back in college, we had both had a crush on the other, but at different times and completely unbeknownst to the other. Years ago, we had been spending a lot of time with each other and she let it out to me that she was madly in love with me. Even though I liked her back tremendously, I didn't feel ready for a relatiionship at the time (a decision I regretted for years). We tried to keep in touch after that, but we sort of drifted apart and didn't actually talk again until our mutual friend's birthday party last October, where she came with her scummy boyfriend whom she'd been dating for a while. While at the party, we sort of rekindled our friendship, reminisced about old times and what have you. Then, thanks in no small part to the possessive boyfriend, we saw and heard little from each other from about October to late January or early February, shortly after they broke up. Turned out he was extra-scummy and is now in jail for serial scumminess. Over the past month and a half, we've been talking an awful lot and she started sending me all sorts of signals that she still had feelings for me -- signals which went completely over my head because I'm just stupid with that sort of thing. But, despite missing the obvious signals, I do still care about her an awful lot, yadda yadda yadda, and was considering maybe actually dating her this time.

Then we had a birthday party for another mutual friend at my house and both of the aforementioned crushes were there, along with copious amounts of alcohol. The three of us at one point went out on the porch and they both sat me down and told me pretty  much that they're both crazy about me, that I didn't have to make a decision right then, and that, no matter who I chose, there would be no hard feelings between any of us. Then, the next thing I knew, all three of us were on my bed and [REDACTED].

Needless to say, it was a rather unexpected turn of events. I also found out later from my best friend who was also there that, before the events mentioned above, the two of them had been pretty much fighting over me all night and would get really jealous every time I was off with one and not the other.

It was a night of many conflicting emotions.

I needed a few days (at least) to mull things over.

Then I got a really bad cold, on Sunday (the very next day), which I'm just now getting over.

In the midst of all this lovesickness and physical illness, my roommate asked me if I could help him change his oil and brakes. I have a bad cut on my hand from last week that I can't really get dirty, plus I felt like shit, but I told him I could sort of supervise him and tell him what to do (my supervisory position didn't last long, though -- I needed to jump in with a rubber glove on my injured hand once shit started getting weird, complicated, and frustrating). It's an easy, half-hour job. Or at least it should have been.

Changing his oil went easily enough, but when we went to change his brakes, we started on the passenger side and, since he has no hubcaps and it's an ancient and heavily abused Corolla with almost 300,000 miles on it, his lug nuts were badly rusted into place. I also found out that he had at one point replaced two of his lugs with nuts that were the wrong size, so his tire iron was no good for them and we had to get my socket wrench. Of course, I don't have a socket big enough for my half-inch drive ratchet (the one we should have used), so we had to use my 3/4-inch drive (definitely not meant for such heavy-duty use). Of course, after we got the first of the two misfit lugs removed, my ratchet broke (gears stripped) when we tried to get the second one. Fortunately, it's a Craftsman wrench and is covered by a lifetime warranty (I only have to make a trip up to Sears to get them to replace it for free) and I realized that the tire iron for my car happened to fit his misfit lugs, so I didn't have to worry about replacing my ratchet right away. However, once all four lugs were removed, we couldn't get the wheel off. It had rusted in place, right onto the brake rotor! (NOTE: THIS IS WHY YOU NEED HUBCAPS IF YOU DON'T HAVE ALLOY WHEELS, PEOPLE)

Turns out this is a particularly common problem on old Toyotas and GMs, especially if you don't have hubcaps. The solution is kind of ridiculous and slightly dangerous: loosen the lugs slightly, so that their tips are just barely touching the holes in the rim, then drive it onto the street and take a sharp turn at speed, then do the same the other direction. What it does is yanks the rusted, warped wheel loose from the rusted front of the rotor.

So we did that, brought the car back in, jacked it back up, and set about replacing the brake pads we had started to change on the passenger side. Aside from a bit of extra grunting and swearing due to rusty and stuck bolts, the passenger side didn't give us any more trouble after we got the wheel off. So down that side went and up came the driver's side. That's where the real trouble started. OK, wheel off, brake caliper off, old brake pads off, new brake pads on -- so far, so good. Then we go to put the caliper back on and there's trouble -- the weird little squishy receiver bolts that the caliper bolts screw into (not sure what they're actually called) wouldn't depress like they were supposed to and we couldn't fit the caliper back on without doing so. Usually, they'll get stuck when the grease inside gets all dried out and crusty and the way to free them is usually to rotate them with a wrench. With a bit of grunting and swearing, we eventually got the top one to move. The bottom one was one stubborn motherfucker, though. We sprayed all kinds of extra penetrating lube on it to try to free it, but it wouldn't budge.

After an hour of my roommate's brute force and swearing, it bent. Bad. If we couldn't get the motherfucker out (fat chance), the whole caliper bracket would have to be replaced. Of course, we couldn't get the caliper bracket off, either, thanks to some bolts that I suspect may have been salvaged from the Titanic. It was getting late and we decided to go ahead and make an AutoZone run early, just to make sure we got it before they closed (my roommate had to be at work the next day, so putting it off another day was not an option). So we called our local store to see if they had the part in stock. Of course they didn't. And of course the only store that carried it in stock was across town.

Off we went. We picked up the part, plus some PB Blaster, and went home to attack it some more. Spray the penetrant, wait a bit, figure out a way to fanagle my breaker bar into the narrow space so we could get a socket around the bolt, a voila! it was loose. We removed the old caliper bracket and go to install the new one, only to discover that the new one did not come with the caliper bolts we needed (since the old ones were still stuck inside the old bracket and one was bent). It was getting late, so we jumped in the car and zoomed off back to the AutoZone across town. On the way, I gave them a call to find out when they closed, which was 10:00 sharp (due to company policy, they could not let us in past that). It was 9:30 and the store was 35 minutes away. I threw caution to the wind, broke every speed limit (often by at least double), and even ran two or three stop lights and we made it by 9:55.

Of course, the bolts we needed didn't come with the little rubber boot that's supposed to fit over the weird squishy bolt to keep that grease from drying out (also what gives it its springiness), and of course, they don't sell the boot by itself; you have to get it as part of a brake kit that costs like $45. The AutoZone guys admitted it was a ridiculous price and recommended we just carefully cut the heads off the old bolts and reuse the old boots. Sounded good to us, so we paid for our bolts and went off back home. My roommate sat outside to babysit the tools and try to clean some of the rust off the bolts we would have to reuse while I took the old caliper bracket with its stuck bolts inside to cut off the heads. First, I tried a hand saw with a metal-cutting blade because I didn't want to damage the boots or my fingers (it was an awkward angle for a jigsaw). That proved to be profoundly slow, so I put a heavy welding glove on the hand I used to steady the part, crossed my fingers, and went at it with the power saw. 25 minutes of cutting later, I'm only halfway through the first of two bolts (it turned out to be really hard steel).

My roommate and I were both getting pretty impatient because it was almost 11:00, we both had to be up before 6 the next morning, neither of us was feeling well (especially me), and we both desperately needed showers. We agreed we should just chance it and try to stretch the boots over the heads of the bolts. With a bit of wiggling with a flathead screwdriver, we managed to get all of one of them off (just in two parts) and the top half of the other one. It was definitely not perfect and I would never do it on a car I planned on keeping, but this car is nearing 300,000 miles and is already in its death throes. He's planning to sell it in the next few months; even if the car survives to its next brake job, this is the last one either of us will ever do on it, so we said "fuck it" and deemed it "good enough." Slapped them over the new bolts, fitted everything together, and the rest of the job went as smoothly as it should have from the start.

By the time I was all showered and fed (neither of us had had a chance to eat any dinner during this whole ordeal and we were both starving) and ready for bed, it was well past midnight. And I had to wake up at 5:20. And I had planned on spending 30 minutes supervising the two easiest bits of automotive maintenance you can do and the rest of the evening resting on the couch and getting better. No. Of course I didn't get that.

Meanwhile, what had happened at the party on Saturday was still weighing really heavily on my mind.

I've decided that I'll go with the first friend I mentioned, for a number of reasons I won't go into. I wanted to tell her this week, but she's swamped with preparing for a show she organized and is performing in this weekend (she's an actress) and has not had any free time whatsoever and will have incresingly less spare time until after the show. She had said she could come over tonight (I was going to make my famous catfish), but she got pulled away and now I'm all bummed out. Meanwhile, I'm also upset because I have to find a way to break the bad news to my other friend. It's so upsetting because I do care about her -- she's certainly a very dear friend of mine, despite our long period of noncommunication -- and this will be the second time I've rejected her. To add insult to injury, she's also been going through a tremendously tough time lately -- health problems, family problems, and having to deal with her scummy ex. I feel like I'm just one more piece of bad news :(