The Dropkick Murphys-All Roads Lead to Boston

So in February the Paisley and I took a day off to go and see one of my favourite bands, The Dropkick Murphy's.

If you've never heard of them, shame on you and visit their website.

What can I say. As a child of the 1970's when music was mostly horrible (granola eaters making hippie music or disco, you're choice) and a child of the 1980's (thank you glam rock and alt-punk wave) the music choices were pretty grim at times. Thankfully there was punk.

The Murphy's fit this definition, but they also fall into many other categories. Irish/Celtic-Punk. No matter how you slice it, there is something in their music for everyone.

We caught them that the Showbox SoDo location. Not a bad venue for a show. You can get there early and sit in the restaurant area and have a full meal before hand. Plenty of beer on hand. Guinness my fav is on tap. Saw plenty of the younger crew getting it on with the PBR bomber cans. Ick. In my opinion, PBR is the new Milwaukees Best. I have always been a beer snob. Beer should not be transparent and should have a distinctive flavour. It should also have an alcohol content higher than 3% percent like the yank brewers here in the States like to make.

I've rambled. It happens. Bear with me. The Showbox SoDo. Great place for a venue. They have these garage doors that they open up between the restaurant and the concert floor when the show starts. Awesome. Reasonably priced food and beverages too. We paid (with tip) about $65 for dinner and 6 Guinness. Maybe a bit more. Not too bad though. I wish I'd had room for some of the Deep Fried Twinkies. Totally will have to get back there for some of those.

Here are some photos from the show. Enjoy.

This is Scruffy Wallace, the bagpiper for the DKM's. He's probably my favourite since I was a piper myself.

This was the only glimpse I got of him that nite from where we were.













This is Al Barr, the lead vocalist. He's got a really loud harsh voice. He reminds me of Henry Rollins of Black Flag.











During their song, Kiss Me I'm Shitfaced, the band has as many of the ladies as they can get on the stage.

If you don't know the song then you will have to get a copy and listen to it to understand.

I think damn near every lady on this stage was shitfaced or beyond.





This shot is Tim, Al and Ken. Ken is another lead vocalist and bass player. Tim is multi-functional as he plays guitar and banjo and citar and I think I even saw him playing the accordian. Well someone in the band play accordian and he was closest to us, but I could be wrong on which member it was.







Finally we have a very blurred shot of the crowd that nite. Everyone had a great time. There were no arrests that I saw and no one was hurt and hauled away. After all we were there to see one of the best punk bands in recent history.









Now for those Deep Fried Twinkies........................another one of my fav bands will be here in April as part of the Jagermeister Tour: Pennywise!!! Hmm.........I wonder if I'll be able to make that one?

The Power Source is Here!!!

So I must start by apologising for not posting anything for almost 3 weeks now. Been a little tied up with work and loads of activities on the weekends. Of course as someone who works on a computer all day the last thing I want to do is get on one when I get home.

I can promise that I have several things to post. Thought I would start with this one.

I have finally gotten a motour for the Paisley's Subie.

I used to think that I had been spending a lot of money on my BMW. After all the true meaning of those 3 lettres is actually Bring Money Willingly. Now after further thought, I'm into that little Kraut Kruiser for far less than the Subaru.

Right away there the purchase: $2k
Then upon getting it home, a wheelbearing: $95 and my own labour
Then there was the oil change: $19- first time shop customer coupon.
Brake pads and sensors for all 4 corners done at a shop: $400
Fan Clutch done at a shop: $180
Mass Flow Sensor done at a shop: $300 - it was a remanufactured unit. New would have been $500 before the labour was added in.
Head Gasket, VCG,Timing Belt,Valve Grind,Several cooling hoses,O2 Sensor,Oil Change, tune up and other miscellaneous work: $1753.
Two new tyres: $201

Not too shaby for a 22 year old car especially since I could have gotten a nicer looking E30 in a lesser model such as the 318 or the 325 e or 325 i. I chose the one I have since it's the 325 is. This was the model that BMW manufactured for country markets that did not receive the M3 model. This car has the high output 6 cylinder and tighter suspension and other sport goodies without going into much further detail. Essentially: this car is the shit.

Now onto said Subaru.

Purchase: $10,200 (or somewhere around there anyway)
For the first year there was the routing oil changes of course: $65 per change.
Air filtre: $10
PCV Valve: $20
Brakes on all 4 corners: $700
Head Gasket Service (including rebuild of oil pump, oil change, coolant change, new transaxle on one corner, woodruff key on the main crankshaft) $2700
Knocksensor: $110
5 new tyres: $465

So far not too bad. Lets consider that this car is now 10 years old. The cost of owning this car has far exceeded the cost of the other. What happened to quality? The Paisley really likes the all wheel drive feature and sitting a little higher up. I can go for that. I like those things as well.

What I can't stomach is the fact that the dealership wanted $7k to do a new engine!!! No way was I going to let them rape me for that kind of cash when they are the reason we're in the engine buying market to begin with. That and I don't even get a kiss from anyone there after I've bent over and grabbed my ankles.

So the tech who services my car actually diagnosed the Subie this time. As good as he is, the best deal he could find was a low mileage engine for $2700 and another $2500 to install it. Better than the dealer, but still out of our budget at this moment. His opinion: park the little bugger in a bad neighbourhood and leave the key in the ignition. Not bad, but we still owe on our little Subie. We must fix it.

We my tech says that if I can find a better deal on an engine he will install it. That's one hell of a tech. Most shops won't do that for you. I let him know I'll keep him posted.

So for the last 3 weeks I've been engine hunting. Not much out there on Craigslist for what I was looking for. It seems that the 1998 model year and the 2000 and up model year of the Forester has a DOHC (dual over head cam) engine. For the model year 1999 (our model) it was a SOHC (single over head cam). Apparently the SOHC is pretty hard to find. There were plenty of the DOHC engines out there and most places wanted pretty hefty price for them. Most wrecking/recycling yards wanted $2500 and up for them. Most of the rebuilder shops that had them totally rebuilt were starting at $3800.

Why is the Subaru flat four waterboxer so expensive?! This just puzzles me. Volkswagen has been making a flat four engine for years. Ferdinand Porsche first put it in the Beetle prototype for Hitler in 1932. It's basic design hasn't changed much since then and it's evolution into a water cooled engine hasn't changed much either. Why can the Germans do it for so much less than the Japanese?

I joined an online forum for Forester owners to get some tips and pointers. They've been pretty helpful. I can say that I will be keeping the old engine. Apparently the SOHC engine is the best one to stick a turbo on. That will be fun.

NOTE TO SELF: do suspension mods to Forester before installing turbo engine.

So then I started thinking about one of my former employers of my youth. They may have what I'm looking for.

I haven't always been a travel agent. I worked for 9 years for two area dealerships in VW and SAAB parts and even a stint at the Subaru dealership in parts that I detest so much.

The VW dealer has a recycling yard and they have been handling Japanese parts as part of their line up for about 10 years now. So after a little search of their system on line, they have an EJ25 SOHC. No price and no mileage listed though. Email to follow my search. Waiting for an answer.

After about 2 days I get the reply. $1700 and it has 160k on it. Youch!! That's a lot of money for an engine with that many miles. Well at least it has been tested. They just pulled it out of the car. The compression in all four cylinders is at the high end of good. I call the boneyard and tell them to wrap it up and ship it to me. DOH!!! They can't ship it since I'm not sending it to a shop. Damn. I have to pick it up. It's 25 miles north of where I live. No worries. I have that avenue covered. For my troubles of having to pick it up, the yard has taken $100 off the price. That will be pretty helpful since it will cover most of the core charge. The core is $125. I'm keeping the old engine and rebuilding it for the trouble it's been to find one of these buggers.

Well here it is. Sitting in my friends garage on a cart waiting to be installed. Three weeks of headache:
It sure doesn't look like much right now. Hell it hardly weighs anything. I've got a friend that can pick this thing up like it was a cottonball. Of course when you're 6'7" and 290, you can pick up a lot of things without effort. I've witnessed him lifting the back end of cars for fun.

Well I'll have to make sure that I document the removal of the old engine and the installation of the new one. A blog for a later time.

Finding the power source

Well to keep folks up to speed in my little corner of the globe, the Paisley's Subie finally took a nose dive. The engine is totally gone and I'm on the search for a new one.

Let me tell those of you in this area, do not let Carter Subaru service your car. To give the really short version of the set of circumstances that lead up to needing a new engine:

Last April we took the car in for new brakes. That was $700. Way too much in my opinion. Then a week later we took the car back to them for a head gasket service. This includes head gaskets (as the service would suggest) but oil seals for the cam shafts in both heads, coolant service and a few hoses and oil pump and a few other things that I can't recall. They have to pull the engine for this service so there is plenty of opportunity to give it a thorough inspection for any other issues.

There were a few other things that needed to be done and the dealership did call us about them and we had them taken care of.

This is where it went bad. We got the car back and right away the Paisley thought that it was feeling a bit underpowered. I didn't totally agree with that. I did notice that we were consuming way too much oil and that the car was blowing it out it's arse every morning until it warmed up.

We took it back to the dealership two days later and brought these things to their attention. The answer we got was "we can look at it, but if it's not related to the service we did then it's going to cost you". That was shit. After explaining to the service advisor that this had to be related somehow to the service they just did we were told the same line over again. So we left and took our car with us.

Two days later we were back. This time we left the car and asked them to let is sit overnite so that when they started it up cold they could see how it smoked.

Next day the dealership called and told us to pick up the car. They didn't have same experience we had, but they did note the oil was low and topped it off.

This cycle repeated it self once more before we were told by the dealership that "according to Subaru an acceptable loss of oil in your car is 1 qt every 1000 miles to which my reply was that after having this major (and expensive service) any oil loss was not acceptable by my terms. We were then told that we could bring the car in every 200 miles to see how much oil we were losing by having them do a leak down test. So we agreed to do this.

We took the car in twice for this test and both times were down 1 qt for about 350 miles of driving. Again we were told to just make sure it's full and don't let it run out of oil and we could drive it indefinitely like this.

Every visit I reiterated to the dealership that this was not acceptable and that they were the cause of the problem. I was told that it could be piston rings or problems with the valve stems/seals.

My thinking is that if they pull the engine out and have the heads off then they should be inspecting the sh** out of the heads and the block and not charge me $2700 for a service that is going to be useless in under a year when the engine totally blows out. Thieving dealership wankers!!!

After not getting anywhere with the dealership I had almost accepted that this was the way it would be with the car. ......... almost. So two months ago now I contacted Subaru of America. They have been about as useful as tits on a man. Two months of emails have gotten me the answer of, "they will look at it but if it's not related to the service you had done then it will cost you".

Since English is my first language and having worked in car dealerships, I understand their mystery speak. What they don't seem to get is that our car had NONE of these issues the day I took it in for it's major service. My secondary point to them was that if they had inspected everything like they should have done during this service, this would have saved me $2700 then and I could have directed that money towards a new engine and not wasted on service that would prove to be useless.

So now I wait to speak to Subaru of America again. In the mean time the car is parked and dead. The same tech that services my BMW did the diagnose on it last week and in his opinion we would be better off parking it in a bad neighbourhood and leaving the keys in it. Unfortunately we still owe on it so that isn't an option.

It seems that Subaru makes one expensive engine. A standard non turbo EJ25 engine for a 1999 Forester is a few thousand bucks. Matter of fact the cheapest low milage motour in the area from a reputable yard is $2700 bucks. So I'm hitting Craigslist and E-Bay Motours in hopes of finding one more in line with my budget and also trying to avoid getting a Japanese crate motour since there could be differences in connections for various sensors.

I'll have to keep an update log on this and document the swap process as it happens once the donor motour is found.

How Starbucks saved one man's life and his story may change others

We have all had some particularly hard times in our lives. Some harder than others.

There are days where I'm sure that we have all felt that it just couldn't get any worse than it already is.

The Paisley and I just happen to be having one of those weeks. We just got word yesterday that the engine in the Paisley's Subie is done. So done that a burial is not even worth the time done.

The really hard part to swallow is that we still owe the bank on this gem of a car.

The up side to this is that for whatever reason or whatever we have done to change things in our lives, this really doesn't seem to be bothering us for the moment.

We are still able to carpool for another 11-12 months before her office moves. We still have my Bronze Bitch to get around in. We do have some kind of tax return coming back to us.

The point is that we have taken the higher road in this personal crisis and are not dwelling on it. Maybe that is what I should have been doing in my life all along. It hasn't been easy getting to this point in life either, but I'm glad I'm on my way there.

I don't want to make this a sob story about me. This is about a story that I just read on CNN's site about a gentleman in New York that hit the lowest point of his life and made it work. He recently wrote a book "How Starbucks Saved My Life" and it really said a lot to me about how we all have the power to change how we look at life and what it throws at us.

This man, Michael Gates Gill, lost it all: his wife, his health, his high paying executive job, his expensive home and probably his dignity in there somewhere. It just didn't get any worse than this.

Now I haven't read the book, but I read the CNN article as I mentioned before. On the day this man lost his job he happened into a Starbucks for his regular coffee and the manager asked him, by happenstance, if he'd like to apply since they were having a job fair. He figured why not. He didn't have anything to lose.

He does a bit of everything there it sounds like from making drinks to cleaning the loo. Not the kind of job you'd expect a six figure exec to be doing or enjoying and all for $10 per hour.

Of course along with writing a book about his experience he is also on a lecture circuit as well to speak about his last few years and how it changed his life for the better.

It's strange to think that things like this can happen to someone of his stature in life. The wealthy. The one living the extremely good life. I know people personally that are facing tough times and they either break apart or they work through it.

I think I'd rather be the latter.

I'm glad I read the article. I don't watch tv news because it's the same depressing crap every nite. At least when I read the news on line I can pick and choose what I read and avoid the depressing and disturbing.

This man's story made me feel better about the fact that losing the engine in the Subie was truly not the worst thing that can go wrong in my life. I'm not upset by losing that engine or by the fact that I'm not even sure where I will come up with the rest of the money for the work that needs to be done.

I do know that after reading the article and how Mr. Gill made his worst experience work for him instead of becoming a slave to it, I realised that I have been doing the same.............for the last year I have done some clearing of clutter out of my physical and mental life and it's working. It took this article to see that there is a difference from just over a year ago.

It feels great to be able to see the good side of life even if it does smack you in the back of the head like an older sibling when mom's back is turned from time to time.