ET's Info-Stew

Broken things add all kinds of stress. It's nice when they it turns out they aren't broken, they just need to be adjusted.

The explorer was making nasty noises whenever it was idling between 18 and 60 mph. You could feel a rhythmic thumping that didn't seem to vary with changes in speed. It started a few months ago a week after when we got new tires. Not knowing what was going on, we assumed the worst: a problem with the drive train. Usually something that big and important takes thousands of dollars to fix.

Yesterday on the way back from Plymouth, it just seemed like it was slightly worse, so we decided to stop by America's Tire Company and get the tires rotated. It's a free way to get an expert to look at the car to see if there is something obvious wrong with it. They didn't find anything. But on the way home, we put the truck through the normal rigors and, to our surprise, it wasn't thumping. We'll see over the next week if it returns, but I feel good that it hasn't returned yet.

Today I was going to take pictures of some stuff I was going to put on Craigslist.org. But the camera didn't turn on! This is our $300 camera that we saved for for a long time and I put some serious research into. It turned on if you were viewing the photos, but if you tried to extend the lens, it wasn't happening. There looked to be a little bit of damage as if the camera was dropped.

So Jenny and I spent an hour taking it apart. Nothing inside seemed to be wrong, but there was a ribbon connector for the top buttons that only seemed 90% attached. I reattached it a little better and, to our surprise, it worked again. Now it seems to be working just fine, but I think we'll have to take better care of it. Hopefully things breaking doesn't happen in threes.