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.