Be sure to check out my recent updates to my site. The coolest of them is the media pages with video of past races and photos sorted into the year that they were taken.

This last week… last Saturday to Thursday… was spent working on my little car, a Toyota Tercel. When I bought the car, I knew it had been neglected. My cousin did not take any care of it what-so-ever. It has blown smoke and pinged and knocked since I got it. I had planned on just keeping it maintained. Ya know, keep oil in it… That was until one day I was driving, saw a cop (which your first instict is to check your speed, right?) and noticed that my temp gauge was quite high. So I decided to slow it down and see if I could make it the rest of the way home. I got about 800 feet down the road and it went beyond the gauge. So I pulled over and turned my car off, called my folks to come get me. My father fills the radiator, which is practically empty, with water and I made it the rest of the way home. Since then, I had been just refilling the radiator and the reservoir until I finally decided to do something about it. A racing friend of mine, Jeremiah Fazzio, brought up his dad’s shops’ radiator pump. It lost pressure fairly quickly, but we were unable to find the leak. After pressuring it, we checked the oil and found out that it indeed was getting water in it which mean that I likely had a blown head gasket.

So that’s where the work began. Last Saturday we began tearing my engine apart. The thing is, while your in there on the engine, you might as well replace _________ (everything). New gaskets, new serpentine belt, new oil pan gasket (it leaked like a faucet), new valve gaskets (it burned oil on startup), and a heck of a lot of work. The bill ended up being about $300, but it would have been several grand to have someone else do it. So I saved a ton by getting my hands really greasy!

Now hopefully I’ll get to spend some time relaxing and enjoying my time away from school!

Yesterday we recieved our first day of snow in December. We had a fairly good storm back in October, but it did not do much. Fortunately for BMXers in Utah, this storm wasn’t to serious either.  It might snow this weekend but only a 30/40% chance in SJ.

To be honest with you, I really don’t care if it snows, as long as it only snows in the mountains. I live in a culldesac and when it does snow, the city never plows our street until late February to early March. Last year I actually got stuck at the end of our street while I was on my way to school. I was really lucky because a police officer happened to be driving by and he helped me out.

Right now, as I am writing this, I am studying for my finals tomorrow. The calculus exam shouldn’t be too difficult as long as I remember how to do all of the little algebra tricks to make some of the problems work. The calculus is actually very easy, it is the algebra that can get you. The other exam is for Russian. That test will be slightly more difficult because the way that you say a sentence; prepositional, genative, dative, etc; all have different endings on each of the words so you have to memorize them. However, I have done really well on the previous tests giving me some wiggle room if for some reason I bomb the final. Thursday brings the final for my Diversity Consciousness class where we only have to write an essay on a topic the professor has yet to tell us. I wouldn’t say I love to write essays, but I don’t really consider them to be that difficult.

I can’t wait for this week to be over so I can catch my breath before I take a dive into the classes I will be taking for my transfer into the Chemical Engineering major at the University next fall semester.