I’ve been fairly quiet for a while, but the last few weeks I’ve been fairly busy, and I’ve undergone a few transitions. The last 6 months or so, I haven’t had employment, due to dealing with a variety of personal events, and I had to leave my job as a mechanic. As of this upcoming Monday, I will be working at a high school with students with special needs. I’m excited, as I’ve always worked some sort of production related job, or a job requiring teamwork and cooperation with adults. Working with kids and young adults will be an interesting change from what I’m used to. I’ve never worked in a school, nor with kids, so I expect there to be a fairly steep learning curve. However I believe that I should be able to handle myself and whatever the responsibilities of working with high schoolers will have.
I haven’t updated the maintenance blogs with anything, despite the fact I’ve been extremely busy with the fleet of vehicles I cobble together. The long story short is that the Bandit stopped running well, then started running well, then I blew the fork seals out and had to replace it, then it stopped running well again, and then it started randomly running well again, and I can’t make heads or tails of it. At this point, I’m just accepting the fact that sometimes it doesn’t run well, and the lack of an error code isn’t worth chasing. I’ll just ride the motorcycle until whatever is causing the issue definitively malfunctions, and I can decisively address the issue then and there. On top of that, I had to tear the Shadow engine apart again because when I tried firing it up, the engine went CLUNK, and wouldn’t turn over. The transmission was not reassembled correctly by the machine shop I took the bottom end to for assembly, and one of the gears lost a tooth. I’ve rebuilt the whole bottom end by myself, and I’m going to reassemble everything else over the course of the upcoming week. Finally, I went skiing, and my truck’s parking brakes froze while I was at the mountain. I decided to lift the rear wheels up, pull off the brake calipers, and pull the drum brake shoes off. I essentially deleted my parking brake. I then had a very pleasant drive through the snowy Cascade Mountains along Highway 20. It was very beautiful.
Overall, the last month and half or so, since my last post on the website, have been on the up and up. The last few years, I was dealing with depression, and I feel as though I’ve finally fought through the worst of it. While the recent events in my life are only tangentially related, I do feel as though things are on the up and up, and despite the small challenges I’ve faced as of late, I’m overcoming them. I’ve always struggled with addressing issues head on, and I now feel as though I’m capable of handling whatever is thrown at me. I’ll definitely be updating more often now that I feel more stable, and have a great support network.