Re: When not to trust the manual

[Scott Fisher <sfisher71@domain.elided>]

--- "Wm. Nick Leppert" <nleppert@domain.elided> wrote:
> Scott, it would have been worth it to buy a lottery
> ticket today. 

So I hear!  Several of you wrote to say that the
method in the "period correct" documentation I'm using
has been superseded because it poses some real dangers
if the bolt is loosened too much (and apparently the
difference between "enough" and "too much" is
minuscule).  Thanks to all of you... so I guess the
manual I've got that says that the Pony Express is the
fastest way to get information across North America
may also be suspect???

Since I've still got a tiny bit of the slap/rattle
sound going on, I'll try the engine-off method later
and see if it all goes away.  And I'll use that method
exclusively from now on, every 6000 miles.

Whew.  It's like the time I ran out of gas in the
Junior, somewhere waaaaay out in the middle of nowhere
in the Sierra foothills.  I stuck the car in neutral
and coasted.  Making matters more interesting, we were
on a family vacation -- my wife (5 months pregnant
with our third child) in the front seat, and my
daughters (8 and 5) in the back.  They were as silent
as the engine as we coasted down, down as far as we
could.

Just as the car started slowing, we rolled around a
corner and saw the first gas station we'd seen in
close to an hour of driving (and probably 5 minutes of
coasting, which is a LONG time coasting).  I rolled up
the driveway, braked to a stop at the pump, and my
wife turned to me, eyes like hubcaps.

"I'll pay," she said.  "You pump."  She walked out to
the office; I turned to the girls in the back seat.

"Girls," I said, "if you're ever out in the forest and
you see a little shimmering golden light under a
treetrunk, and you walk closer to it and you see it's
the Queen of the Fairies, and her wing has been
trapped by a fallen log, and she says that if you free
her she'll grant you a wish, and that for your wish
she will make you either very very rich, very very
smart, or very very lucky -- PICK LUCKY."

The 8-year-old got it and laughed.  The 5-year-old
wanted to know what color dress the Queen of the
Fairies was wearing.

--Scott "Golden with green sparkles, of course" Fisher
  Tualatin, Oregon
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