Hello, Lovine.com

I like the anonymity of night. I can work tirelessly, without concern and disruption of interludes that daylight brings. During the day you're preoccupied (or too busy pretending not to be preoccupied) keeping tabs on the clock as it ticks to lunch time. Then your senses fail after a heavy meal. Perhaps indulge in a caffeine pep, or energy drink to prop you up the rest of the afternoon. Wait in your windowless cube until the seconds turn to minutes turn to hours turn to another day on your hamster wheel.

The silence of past midnight is all encompassing. The world is quiet. Your mind is free. To create, or to vegetate. The reasons are all your own.

I can find all the reasons to stay up all night. The missing piece of the puzzle though, is finding all the right reasons to wake up earlier in the morning. :P

Gave the dog another shower this morning. I tried some Avon stuff that the forums swore by, to get mats and tangles out. I can see how it would work, but I didn't dilute the solution enough and left the boy a bit too greasy. Had to rinse him out again to get rid of the gunk. I miss his hair :'c

Leaving for SF in a few minutes to catch the SF Outside Lands Festival, then coming back Sunday morning in time to catch Radiohead (again) play at the Bowl. Should be fun times :)

Pretty darn productive this weekend. Laid down the foundations and revamped Paul and Kat.com. Installed WordPress, that stuff is pretty powerful and slick! I might convert to a WP setup in the future and junk all this Blogger madness. I still need to debug against older browsers (i.e. I hate you IE 6.0), and start broadcasting our offerings of custom buttons and our upcoming 'Make Your Own Fan Club' shenanigan.

I also replaced Vanessa's valve cover gasket, to remedy the small leak on the passenger side valve cover. It was pretty exciting since it's the first time I've really opened anything of importance in the bus, even though it's just a simple gasket replacement.

The mechanic used some yellow adhesive to afix the old gasket, which was an official PITA to remove. Took me some good elbow grease to get the mating surface clean and slathered on a thin coat of number 2 permatex gasket sealant to fix that puppy. While crawling under the bus my left shoulder started complaining, and I felt its weakness from last year's dislocation accident due to unwarranted hand-stand-walking in a parking lot. Ahh, the bragging rights you earn when you get old!

This made my day. Hehe. :)

Fascinating to point out, that the quantity and quality of my posts are directly proportional to my alcohol intake. Not that it's an excuse to drink more - I just find words easier when inebriated. Otherwise, it takes me forever to sit down, gather my thoughts, and pound it out to have no bearing of logical importance whatsoever. It's like spending the time to fix your hair to look like you just got out of bed.

Spent many hours on VW forums the past few nights, to read up about Vanessa's intermittent smoke problem. My mechanic said it was being caused by all the crud on the heat exchangers, which was being burned off since hot air was now going through c/o of the alternator fan. He said it would eventually burn out, but I wanted to take matters into my own hands. I doused the right heat exchanger with Simple Green before dinner, but it seemed useless, so I came back with a toothbrush and some 409 degreaser - that stuff works wonders! Just a little dab and a scrub from the brush took out years of accumulated oil and grime, and I was kinda surprised it went down to the bare metal surface in some areas. I might add that twilight surgery is not very efficient, so I might do another session on a sunny day. Had I left that junk as is, there would have be no way for all that crap to burn out by itself. I'm keeping my fingers crossed, since the burning smoke made its way into the cabin through the heat vents and almost killed Peter Pan. Sayang.

Paul and Vanessa, April 2008. Photo by Kat :)

Visited a vertical wind tunnel with Jaime, Nicole, and Dr. X last Saturday. All I can say is, WOW! If it weren't for my bum left shoulder, this might be a serious contender against the snowboarding sessions addiction...