As some of you already know, our car died last week and we had planned to work on removing the alternator this weekend. I have never worked on a car before but we didn’t let that stop us.We had our little manual for the job, it showed photos and directions for getting the tasks accomplished so we bundled up. Headed out to the freezing garage to shuffle boxes and make room for the car, we didn’t want to work on the car in the snow. Once we made room for the car we put it in neutral and used another car to push it into the garage.

We spent about 1 1/2 hours trying to get the damn car on the jacks so we could get under it.. Nothing we tried raised the car high enough to slide the jacks under and eventually we gave up on raising the car.

We got the battery out of the car and were starting to loosen the pulleys for the belts that we needed to remove that were almost impossible to reach. We spent forever trying to loosen a stinking nut so we could remove the belts. We were trying so hard that when the wrench finally moved an inch or two our knuckles slammed into another part of the car scraping them all up and even slicing!

We look like we put out hands in the garbage disposal or something! Those nuts were freaking stuck on good, we were so determined to get it off that we actually stripped the nut more than we loosened it. That took about 3 hours.

In the end, about 4pm we still had made no progress, our backs hurt from trying to maneuver ourselves into workable positions, our toes we cold and our hands were bleeding. I threw down the wrench remarked at how much we didn’t get done and that we were out of time now (we had to do a secret shop that evening).

I went inside, slammed the front door real good and then sat on the floor in the kitchen defeated.. My kitties came to check on me and to smell the blood oozing from my hands, the dog even tried to paw me with hopes I would snap out of it. I was mad and very irritated. Working on cars sucks, how do they expect you to be able to see what you are working on and to get your hands in there to do the work when it’s all jammed in there like that? N reminded me that in Japan (Nissan is a Japanese car company) they usually have smaller hands and maybe getting to certain areas in the car was no problem for them.

That didn’t lessen my anger and I proceeded to get ready for our mystery shopping when N came in and said the car was running. What do you mean it’s running? How is that possible?

He said he just reconnected some hoses and tightened the things we loosened.. then he tried the car just for curiosity and it started! So, technically we fixed the car, it wasn’t the alternator we fixed but banging our knuckles on stuff and jiggling things around seemed to do the trick.. Nice huh?

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Yesterday I tried to go out back and chip some ice off the sidewalk. We have these French back doors that we will need access to when we are moving all our large furniture out of this place. Unfortunately, the inches of slick ice covering the sidewalk and the feet of snow blocking our access to the parking area will prevent us from moving our stuff so we need to get that taken care of ASAP.

I also dug out my un-planted flower bulbs and got those babies in the soil yesterday. I am a bulb addict and I had a number of daffodils that I hadn’t planted yet and I would really love to enjoy their beauty this spring so I got them in the soil and let the chilling/ rooting process begin. I also spent $50 of a fresh batch of bulbs from Van Bourgondien and I am so excited to receive them!

In other news, our car battery is fine so that means we do need to replace the alternator on the car now. We are planning on doing it together this weekend ( I can build computers so why can’t I fix a car?) and I’ll let you know how successful that is, maybe I’ll have photos!

Oh, last thing is that we seem to have another white baby zebra finch. Our first batch of babies matured and went off to good homes and now mommy and daddy finch are nursing round 2 of babies! We started with 5 eggs, one was tossed by the parents and several days later another egg vanished. We suspect mommy and daddy ate it or tossed it so that left us with 3 eggs.

The three eggs hatched and were doing okay but yesterday I found one baby dead in the nest. I removed the dead baby and got to see the feathers on the remaining two babies. One is cream/ brownish and the other is gray/ white. Now the color mutation in these zebra finches is supposed to be very rare so I am surprised that it appears we have hatched another rare zebra finch.

So how is your Valentines Day going? Since it is valentines day you should share the love by heading over to vote on our chicken cooking videos. Give us 5 stars to help us win!

• http://www.wherestheflamegrill.com/video/watch/61
• http://www.wherestheflamegrill.com/video/watch/89 

I gathered from reading my favorite blogs that many people are experiencing storms, power outages and all kinds of craziness.. How is the weather and day for you?

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