Stuck in the Head

It's been a very frustrating day.

As you may recall, my current car project is replacing the head gaskets on my '98 Subaru Legacy Outback. For the most part, the project has been quite fun.  Challenging, but mostly fun.  That is to say, several difficulties have arisen, but none have been insurmountable, the type of crises for which it would be necessary for me to cry 'Uncle!' and call in a real mechanic to fix what I had messed up.

A few broken bolts here and there, mostly due to stubborn rust and worn-out edges, but nothing that would endanger the successful outcome of the project.

And then I got to the part where the passenger side valve covers were off, and the camshafts were removed, and it was time to loosen up the head bolts so I could take the head off and inspect the gasket.

Simple, right?

Well ... did you know that the head bolts for the EJ25 engine are 12-point instead of 6-point?  Do you know what that even means?

In layman's terms, it means "more opportunity to strip the bolt heads so that they cannot be removed".  And I'm proud to say that I totally realized that opportunity.

Four of the six head bolts came loose with only a ridiculous amount of leverage applied against the 3/8"-drive 14 millimeter socket (with a 24-inch breaker bar extension).

Passenger Side Cylinder Head showing 'Good' versus 'Bad' Bolts

The other two bolts absolutely refused to loosen up, no matter how much I threatened them with physical violence.  In fact, they were so tight that the bolt heads shredded.  Or stripped, depending on the way you want to describe it.  I was attempting to turn the heads, and the socket gave a loud screeeeek! and then it felt loose.  But the bolt was not turning.  Curious, I stopped applying leverage, pulled the socket off and looked at it.  The inside of the socket appeared to be stripped.  But wait!  I took the socket and tapped it on the workbench, and little teeny bits of metal came out.  I looked back into the socket, and it appeared undamaged.  And then I realized that the little bits of metal were not from the socket, but from the bolt head!

Rats.

Now what?

I spent the rest of the day trying to find something to loosen them.  Tried a 14 mm deep socket, but that didn't work.  Tried several auto parts stores, but most of them didn't have bolt removal kits.  Looked up "bolt removal" online.  Saw several sites where it was mentioned that the best method for stripped-bolt removal required the use of a welder.  Which I don't have.  Nor can I afford at this time.  So I kept looking.

{Apparently, there are two methods here: one involves heating up the bolt so that it expands inside the shaft and 'cracks' the rust which is holding it fast; the other involves welding a nut on top of the bolt and turning it with the socket, in the hopes that the weld is stronger than the rusted threads.  The risk with the first method, especially for head bolts, is that the aluminum head heats up before the bottom of the bolt which is stuck in the engine block; the risk with the second method is that the weld will not be strong enough.}

It turns out that Craftsman (Sears) has this "Bolt-Out" kit, which operates on the principle of tapping a socket down on top of the bolt head so that it becomes 'one' with the bolt, so I went round to Sears down at the mall and bought one.  Haven't had time to try it out yet.

Good Bolt Head

Bad Bolt Head

{For your edification, I have included a couple of pictures to demonstrate the difference between a 'good' (unstripped) bolt head and a 'bad' (stripped) bolt head.  Can you spot the difference?  It's kind of hard to tell at a glance, but it's easy if you have a 12-point 14 millimeter socket in your hand.  The good bolt head turns with just a little bit of effort, whereas the bad one refuses to budge, and laughs maliciously at your efforts.}

To add misery to misfortune, I've been battling this horrendous headache all day long.  Took three doses of migraine meds, but to no avail.  Had this headache that just wouldn't go away all day.

Visions of Nothingness

Pardon me for getting a bit metaphysical.  This is what happens when things aren't going quite the way I had hoped.

My brain wanders.

And this time, it wandered off into the Deep End of the Pool.

Thinking of Nothingness.

More specifically, Not Being.

It's kind of weird to imagine not being. Kind of scary.

It's not a novel concept; it's highly probable that you've thought of it, too.  It goes along with the opposite concept of Always-Being, which is the belief in eternal life, living forever and ever, never ending, never growing, never aging (and, depending on your particular brand of theology, never changing).

Those are both hard concepts to grasp.  Perhaps that is why most people don't spend a lot of time thinking about them.  If you think about them too long and too deep, it could seriously impair your ability to deal with the here and now.

But every once in a while, my brain goes into this really intense what-if mode, and suddenly I'm confronted with the reality of The End. We all know it could happen at any time; we see examples of that all the time.  For some, it ends suddenly, without warning; for others, it announces itself well in advance.

For many of us raised in Christian homes, we take for granted that we will transported instantaneously from one existence to another: from earthly toil into heavenly rest; from pain and misery into continual joy.  For some reason, although it should be a comforting thought, it has always terrified me, this concept of being forever, time without end.

Notwithstanding the Biblical promises of love, joy, peace, and everlasting happiness in the presence of God, my primitive brain can't handle the thought of going on and on, forever and ever, amen.  Because there really isn't a going "on" if there is no "time".  There is just the "being".  But what is it like to "be" when there is no "time", which implies there is no moment-by-moment progression of activities, no clock ticking, no physical manifestation of interaction with a physical universe?

My imagination is too limited to consider it.  My sole experience has been with the sequential passage of time, one moment transitioning to the next with accompanying changes to either myself of the environment around me.  What would it mean to exist on a plane where there was no such thing as the transition from one physical state to another?  What would it mean from the aspect of thought?  How does the 'mind' experience a new thought or a change in intention when there is no such thing as 'before' or 'after'?

It would mean that your existence here on Earth was neither in the past nor in the future, nor even in the present, because this short episode of Time and Creation and Existence did not 'happen' nor will it 'happen' but it is.  Or is it?

My brain is hurting now, just attempting to think about these things.

As a person who enjoys the subject of history, and is constantly rewriting it (both in the general sense and in the personal sense), my greatest comfort comes from the (admittedly feeble) thought of enduring eternity by being granted the ability to go back through my own life and re-do any and every moment, only this time, making subtle changes here and there to see what different paths my life may have taken.  To correct old mistakes.  To try to make it turn out better.  To avoid the events or decisions which have had negative effects.

But the only way that would be of any use to me, was if I could also remember my previous experience so as to have something to compare it to.  But that would only go so far, because once I wander off the path in which my 'original' life was lived, my parallel lives would diverge so much that comparisons would be rather pointless.

So say that I live a second lifetime, and then a third and a fourth, and so on and so on.  Even were I to have enough lives to redo every second of my original life, that would not even begin to touch the edge of the concept of Eternity.

Perhaps then I would be granted the ability to experience someone else's life, and all the combinations and permutations thereof, for every singe person who has ever lived - or will ever live - throughout all of history.  Imagine!  Knowing what it would be like to actually be Abraham or Moses or Elijah - or some nameless soldier who died in the unremembered battle between some obscure tribe of people who lived in some long-forgotten village three or four millenia ago.

Even though I lived through the eyes of all the people who had ever existed, and then gone back and re-lived their lives in order to experience all the possible outcomes of every decision of every second of their lives, at the end of all that, I would not even begin to experience Eternity.

Because, by definition, Eternity never ends.

So after experiencing all those lives multiple times, all the joys and pains and triumphs and tragedies, perhaps I would be allowed to experience the unrealized future, the dreams which were unfulfilled in our own lifetimes, the imagined peoples who moved out into the vastness of space to explore the galaxy and the universe.

Even after all that, Eternity would not have begun.

Because Eternity has no beginning, and no end.  It merely is.

And I would be.

But what would that mean?  What is it like, to be?  Or not to be?

That is the question.

A Little Cranky, A Little Pulley

It's going to take forever to get this engine done.  There are so many preliminaries! I spent Sunday afternoon preparing some workbenches so there would be a place to put all the parts on, and didn't get around to the crankshaft pulley until today.  And even then, there were preliminaries.

Do those count as preliminary preliminaries?

My main worry with regard to the crankshaft pulley was making sure I was trying to turn it in the correct direction.  Most of the bolts and screws are "lefty-loosey, righty-tighty", but I'm never sure with crankshaft or camshaft bolts.  Just my luck they'd be the other way around due to the way the shaft rotates.  Is it clockwise, or counter-clockwise?  I didn't pay much attention when the car was still running.

The Hayne's manual didn't say.  Or, if it did, I missed it.  So I got on the Internet (the source of all knowledge, with lots of caveats) and looked around, searching for "Subaru engine crankshaft rotation" and things like that.  They all indicated that the crankshaft rotates clockwise, which means that the bolt is loosened by turning it counter-clockwise.

Well, that's all well and good; but then the question arises: How do I hold the pulley still while turning the bolt?

The manual suggests one of those chaink-link pliers wrapped around the pulley with a breaker bar on the socket wrench.  The Subaru forums on-line strongly suggest wrapping the pulley first in something to protect it from the chain.  I took an old rubber tire and cut it up to provide a protective material.  With the chain pliers around the pulley and the socket wrench on the bolt head, it was ready to go.

All I needed now, was 130 foot-pounds of torque and an engine that wouldn't fall off its stand when that torque is applied.

As Jack Sparrow would say, "It's all a matter of leverage."  (Pronounced LEAVE-a-ridge.)   So I took a long bar clamp and jammed it between the top of the engine and a coolant pipe, then rotated the chain pliers until they stopped against it, then put the breaker bar on the socket wrench and PULLED.  And the pulley bolt went POP!  And it was loose!  Yay!

By then, I was too tired to do any more work, other than taking the timing belt covers off, so called it a day and went off to do other things.

At this rate, the engine should be rebuilt by Christmas.

The Rains Came Down and the Garden Came Up

I am an embarrassment to all of my grandparents, who were farmers. They could grown entire fields full of vegetables, while I struggle to keep a simple house plant from dying of malnutrition.

All winter long, I nursed three poor little tomato plants.  They almost made it.  But I was fooled by an early spring, and put the poor things outside right before a major frost.

In consequence, two of the tomato vines "bought the farm".  None of my pathetic attempts to revive them were sufficient.  The sole remaining vine still retained a hint of green, but it was a sickly green, the kind one gets after lying about in a boat in a storm after having eaten too much of the all-you-can-eat buffet.

We had two broccoli plants which were also sequestered during the long winter months, but I did not put them out during that illusory spring; yet, again, only one of them survived.

I suspect it was the heat that did it in.

In the early spring, Cheryl and I had received two lettuce plants as gifts for attending a gardening seminar down at the local botanical park: one green and one red.  These were doing quite well until the heat wave we recently survived; then they, too, started to show signs of damage.

I was sad and discouraged, thinking that all of my gardening efforts were wasted, and it was time to wash my hands of it and turn it over to someone more qualified (if I could only find someone in the immediate family who had the same level of emotional investment in these poor plants).  Alas, no one was to be found. They all had other things to do.  And the sun was beating down.  And the skies were clear and blue and cloudless.  And it was hot.

Then, all of a sudden, the rains came.  Incidentally enough, they started the afternoon we drove down to Indiana for the family reunion.  And they started a week of storms and rain and water.  And the plants, instead of dying off as I was expecting them to do, grew.

Broccoli

The broccoli is a rather curious type of flora.  I hadn't realized - until we started raising it - that the part we eat is actually the blossoms.  The plant itself is ordinary looking until the little blossoms start appearing on the stem, and it takes a few days for them to really look like the broccoli that shows up on the table.  We only got a few of the blossoms off last year before they got too far in their blossoming and actually turned into cute little flowers (which, I hasten to admit, we did not consume).

Green Lettuce

The lettuce, both the green and red varieties, looked exactly like what I was expecting, back when we received the plants: short and busy and full of fat little leaves.  But after they were planted in our garden, the green one shot up and got really, really skinny; and the red one started turning bizarre colors, a mix of red and brown, which didn't look healthy.  And when the sun hit, the green one all but shriveled up.

Red Lettuce

Oddly enough, the red one didn't seem to be affected, other than the fact that it didn't grow very much.  I finally took the planter box with the lettuce in it and moved it over to the other side of the yard where it has more shade.  They were getting far too much sun.

Cherry Tomato

I had almost given up on the tomato vines, especially after two of them died off; but the third one, although challenged mightily by the heat and sun, pulled through til the rains came in.  And then, in a matter of only a couple days, it turned all green and threw out all kinds of vines and leaves and buds and flowers; and, soon enough, actual cherry tomatoes started showing up!

The most "cheery" (although ironic) item in the garden is the crop of watermelon plants that suddenly appeared.  Back when I was discouraged and thinking it was all going to die on me - and we just happened to be eating a watermelon for dinner that night - I took a bowl full of seeds and dumped it in the garden, thinking there was nothing to be lost by such a pointless gesture.  If they grew, it would be a bonus; and if they never sprouted at all, I wouldn't have lost anything.

But they sprouted.  And I felt my heart leap with joy!  Not because I had my heart set on raising watermelons, though; but just because I was delighted that something green was actually coming up out of the barren dirt where once had been two tomato plants (R.I.P.).

Perhaps there is still hope after all.

Watermelons!

Too Busy to Get Anything Done

All day long I've been daydreaming of working on cars. Not only the one that needs the new head gaskets, but also the one that needs another transmission. It's awfully hard to focus on work when there are much more fun things to think about.

I was hoping to start working on it the moment I got home, but that didn't happen due to various other little things that needed attention.  In fact, it wasn't until after dinner that I found a few moments to run out to the garage and drink in the sight of that lovely EJ25 4-cylinder fuel-injected engine sitting on it's pretty little perch, just waiting for the removal of the intake manifold and the heads.

But first ... a few little safety precautions.  I drilled some holes in the mini-rafters above and threaded some 3/8" eye bolts through the holes and tightened washers and nuts on 'em, then looped some chain through the eye bolts and bolted those to the engine.  So, just in case the engine decides to take a dive off the little table saw platform, it ain't going nowhere.

I had just barely enough time to take a few little things off the intake manifold in preparation for removing it from the engine block, and then I remembered that there was this pesky little bike adjustment to make before work tomorrow.

I was having a great deal of difficulty getting into top gear on the way to work (and back) today.  Which means that the cable needs adjusting.  Again.

So I put the bike up on the hooks (which hang from the rafters, like everything else in the garage) and adjusted the cable until it finally started shifting more easily into top gear.  I hope it still works tomorrow when I take it down from the hooks and put on my bike-riding outfit and head down the road.

Meanwhile, it was time to head in because a bit of a windstorm had begun blowing things around, and there were precious plants which had gone without water for several days or weeks or months or something; not that they were going to get any water from the windstorm, but we were afraid that perhaps the windstorm was going to obviate all of our efforts to save them long enough to make it to the next rainstorm.  So we took the delicate ones back inside to protect them from the wind, and left the rest outside to rot in the wind.  Especially the ones which had such deep roots that it would've been impossible to move them.  (Actually, I don't think they'll rot in the wind; more likely, they'll just get whipped.)

Looks like I'll be back to dreaming about engines again tomorrow.  Can't think of a thing that will otherwise be occupying my time.  At the office, I mean.  There's plenty of other things to occupy my mind at home.

Exhausted

I fell off a ladder last night.  Or, I should say, the ladder fell out from under me.

The fact that it collapsed underneath me was not completely surprising, given the fact that it was sitting on concrete, and that the bottom was worn nearly smooth after months and months of scraping along the floor.  I should've known it was going to happen.  Affixing it permanently to the floor was on my To Do list. But it's just another one of those things that get forgotten over time, taking things for granted, assuming things that worked in the past will always work the same way in the future.

It's the kind of assumption that makes people dead.

Luckily for me - lucky! - it didn't turn out that way this time.  I just ended up with some bumps and bruises and cuts from landing on things that were not designed to be landed upon, like engine lifts and exhaust pipes and other detritus of car repairs.  And some bruises to my ego.  Which don't count for much anyway.

The really stupid thing was that I was only up on the ladder because I needed to put a big cardboard box up in the loft.  I'd been cutting up all the other cardboard for recycle but this one particular box, the one that the big television came in, was a keeper.  And it wasn't going to take but a minute to haul it up to the loft, and then I'd have the rest of the evening to start pulling the engine apart.

But I never got that far, owing to the fact that the ladder slid across the floor and became disconnected from the loft that was holding it up, and then gravity took hold and we both - ladder and I - were overwhelmed by our common attraction to the concrete floor and rushed toward it.  The ladder beat me to it, but I made up for it by beating the ladder senseless with the back of my head.  Or was it the other way around?  Either way, I found myself lying on the floor with blood dripping out of my head - both front and back - intensely angry that my inattention had nearly resulted in my demise.

Never did figure out how I managed to gash the front of my head.

Cheryl and James attended to my immediate needs, with ice packs and damp cloths and medicines.  And that was the end of any plans for accomplishing anything in the garage that night.  I was too sore, both physically and mentally.

Oh, well.  The family time made up for it.  I sat on a comfy chair in the living room with an ice pack on my head and watched Charade with the family.  Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn and Walter Matthau and James Coburn and George Kennedy.  Such a great movie.  Almost enough to make me forget about the pain in my head.

Later, at bedtime, I had to sleep sideways with an ice pack on my hip - it was swollen up pretty bad - but managed to make it through the night.  Thought I might have to head over to the doctor's office in the morning if the swelling didn't go down; but by morning, I was feeling quite chipper and ready to go, none the worse for wear, and went right off to work.

Kind of disappointing that no one asked me how my evening had gone.  I had the story all ready to tell.  But everyone was distracted by important matters such as meetings with customers and schedules and budgets and spreadsheets and other things like that which bore me silly.

All day long at work, all I could think about was getting back into the garage and finishing up the work I had been planning on doing.  And what work was that, you ask?  Why, taking the exhaust system apart, of course!

See that long snaky thing?  That's the exhaust system.  It's very rusty.  The bolts are practically welded to the nuts.  Near impossible to separate 'em.  Comes from the high heat inherent in the system, and the copious amounts of salt that get spread all over the roads up here come winter time.  Salt has a nasty reaction with metal.  Accelerates the oxidation process. Causes bad rust.  Which explains why you don't see a lot of old cars up here in Michigan.  Most of 'em rust away to nothing by the time they're twenty years old.

My plan is to de-rust what I can on the exhaust system, replace the bolts as best I can, and get it ready to put back on so by the time the engine is fixed, the exhaust system is ready to go, too.

Might take a bit longer than I thought, though.  Either the ladder or my thick skull whacked part of the pipe pretty hard and busted it right where it goes into one of the catalytic converters.  Guess that means I'll be needing to borrow someone's arc welder so I can make some repairs.

Oh, well.  There's a few other spots on the body that need some welding, too, so now's a good a time as any to take care of 'em.

Meanwhile, I got me a pretty pile of exhaust system parts next to my workbench, and maybe when we get back from our little reunion trip, I'll make short work of the rest of the engine repairs and get this thing back on the road quicker than you can say "Subaru".

I sure do hope so.  Because as soon as the one gets fixed up, I'm going to need to park the other one for a spell so I can swap out the bad transmission for a good used one, so these boys of mine have a reliable car to get 'em to work and back.  Especially in the coming winter.

Here it is July, and I'm feeling the chill of winter coming on.  Isn't that just like a Michigander?

Living the Stress-Free Life

There's something therapeutic about going out to the garage and playing with the toys.  When the day has been stressful and nothing has been accomplished (and very little is actually accomplished in the day-to-day work that goes on in an engineering office), it is soothing to go out into the garage and take a tool and do something useful with it.

Even more satisfying is accomplishing something more substantial, like taking an engine out of a car and putting it on a stand.

Well, I have an engine that's been pulled out of a car, and it's still hanging from the lift because I haven't figured out what to put it on.  Hmm... What shall I use?

I thought about building a wooden platform matched to the shape of the bottom of the engine, and spent some time up in the loft looking around at the various scraps of wood that were lying around up there.  But, frankly, I didn't feel quite up to doing another project that would take several hours to complete.

Then my glance happened to fall upon the old table saw that Dad gave me so many years ago (which has been in near-constant use with all the projects around the house).  And the stand on which it ... stands.  It was the perfect shape and size, with just the right opening for the oil pan to sit.

So I pulled off the table saw and put it on the floor, then rolled the stand over to the engine lift and put it directly under the engine, adding a few 2x4 boards here and there to support the cylinder heads.  Then eased it off the lift onto the stand and voila! it was ready to work on.

Almost.

All I need now is a whole lot of time to sit around the garage, pulling off the intake manifold and the valve covers and the valve springs and the heads and the gaskets, then put on the new gaskets.  And then put everything back together again, like Humpty-Dumpty.

And hope it all works.

But in the meantime, every chance I get to spend a few moments in the garage, just looking around and thinking of all the fun I'm going to have working on the engine - and about a million other projects - I take it.  And I feel the stress leaking out of my brain like a river.

Funny.  I used to get that feeling when I sat in front of a computer, writing code.  Now the computers get me all tensed up.

Swapping Stories, Swapping Brakes

I've been working hard lately, but not on the blog, as you can tell. Comes down to it, there's really nothing tangible on the blog that gives me any sense of satisfaction other than reader comments, and those are few and far between.  And that's kind of the way it should be; after all, the only time you should be reading this blog, is when you have some spare time from doing all the things you're supposed to be doing to live your life, take care of your family, work your job, fix that leaky sink, keep the house relatively clean, have some people over for some down-home, face-to-face fellowship, and get enough rest.  And don't waste any of it in front of the computer, searching through the Internet for cute kitty pictures.

I've been suffering from a general malaise lately, mainly due to a feeling that my brain is rotting every time I to go work and that perhaps all those years of studying to be a computer engineer were completely wasted, since the most interesting thing I've had to do lately is with a spreadsheet; and the only thing that seems to make me feel any better about myself is getting off the computer and heading out to the garage and doing something useful with my hands. Thank the Lord he gave us cars (and houses) that are constantly falling apart, because there's more than enough work to do just to keep them in one piece.

The old green Subaru, as you probably know, has come down sick with head gasket-itis; it's a well-documented illness which strikes most Subaru EJ25 engines around the 130k-mile mark due to inferior gasket construction materials.  And, wouldn't you know it, mine just passed 131k-miles and started to overheating.

Took it to the Subaru shop to get an 'expert opinion', and they opined about $3,000 worth of repairs.  That was too rich for my blood (which contributes somewhat to that 'malaise' I was talking about earlier), so I decided it would be more fun and therapeutic to take on the job myself.  Looked up the cost of the parts and found it was less than $500.  Net result was that I parked the car in the garage and am currently waiting to get some time to build a frame and pull the engine so's I can fix her up.

Naturally, I'm grateful as all get-out that this incident occurred at a time when there's good weather outdoors and a working bicycle to get me down the road to work.  But it does have some negative side-effects in regards to getting everyone in the family to all the places they need to be at the time they need to be there.  I sure don't like to be in a position where there's too many places to be at and not enough vehicles to get us there.

So I was looking around at craigslist and want ads and other places for another car, hopefully a cheap wreck of a car that could be put in relatively working order with just a bit of elbow grease.  Wasn't really finding anything that jumped out at me.  Then one day, I happened to be over at the other work building (we have two) and noticed an advertisement on the bulletin board for a cheap affordable '98 Subaru Outback.  Took a look at the picture.  It was similar to this:

Bingo!  That was the one I wanted.  The exact same year as my green one. Except this one is an automatic.  Which means it would be perfect for the boys to drive because they still haven't had a chance to get used to the stick shift.

Of course, there were a few "issues" with the car.  Are you surprised?

- high mileage (like 345k-miles, but mostly highway)
- bad brakes
- transmission slip
- rust spots

But the fact that it had mostly the same parts as my other one convinced me that this was the car for me.  Us.  Reminded me of all those Volkswagens we had when I was a kid growing up in Virginia. Except instead of Volkswagens, I've got Subarus!

Cheryl and I picked up the car on Wednesday after work, taking the opportunity to go out on a date.  Then I got to drive it to work on Thursday and Friday.  Because it was hot, and the car has air-conditioning.  And I had to show it off.  And I needed to help take food and stuff to our department picnic.  And I had to show it off.  And I needed to drive up to the Allergy clinic to get my shots.  And I had to show it off.

Then, on Saturday, James and I checked out the brakes.  Turns out the right rear rotors were bad, so we swapped 'em with the ones from the green car.  James seemed to have a good time learning all about disk brakes (and the emergency drum brakes).  And when we were all done, he took the car out for a spin, declaring the brakes to be "good enough".  And then he washed the car to make it nice and sparkly clean.

So now we have a second second car (that is, a backup for our second car) which gives me the breathing room to take my time on the other Subaru.  Which is a good thing.  Because as we were pulling the pads and rotors off the green car, we noticed a lot of rust. And if I'm going to go to all the trouble of pulling the motor to fix the head gaskets - which I'm hoping to do later this week as part of my July 4th vacation time - I'm going to be doing some de-rusting as well. And buying new pads and rotors.

By the time the end of August rolls around, I'm hoping to have the green Subaru running with new long-life gaskets (built of serious metal gasket material, not that cheap garbage they put in originally) and the red Subaru running with a new/used transmission, just in time for Adam to start college.  Because he'll need to be driving something.  Unless somehow we figure out how to afford him living in the dorms, in which case he won't be needing wheels.

But I'm hoping at least one of them - Adam or James - will be needing a car to get to work.  Because work means money, and money means paying for college and gas and insurance and all those other things that go along with growing up and getting educated and starting Life.