A New Family Tradition

I'm sitting here pretending I'm sick.  Actually I'm not pretending, I'm in the; "I'm not sick except for the cough." stage.  This week I started the week talking in a whisper at work (for which I got a lot of grief for) and towards the middle of the week I was starting to feel better and was thinking about when I could start exercising again.  Then yesterday I started coughing again so today I'm starting to act sick again so that I can maybe get better.  This is the time when in the past I would start thinking; "I can just work through this."  Maybe if I just keep acting sick I can get over it.  Right now I'm at three weeks, well on Tuesday it will be three weeks, and if I can get over it in three weeks I'm still going to count it at as a win but it's not very much fun right now.

What is the new family tradition?  Last week Brian said that he was going to fix Goosy's car brakes.  Sometime during this week Goosy must have told Brian that Aaron had showed me how to fix the brakes on our car (as in Karen's car when we got married).  So Brian texted me that I should teach him how to fix the brakes on Goosy's car. 

Brian came over today for us to fix Goosy's car, after I went into Albuquerque to pick up my new spectacles and visit with my Mom.  We got the tires off the car and had the car up on blocks.  On the first side we were trying to pull the rotor off and it wouldn't come off.  I remember one time when I was working on the back brakes on our Van.  The rotor would not come off and I spent hours trying to get it off, and finally had to go get a slide hammer from Auto Zone to get it off. Anyway I couldn't figure out why this rotor won't come off and was starting to wonder what we might have to do.  Remember I'd never fixed Goosy's car before so everything was new about this.  We went in and googled how to fix the brakes and found a video about it and in the video the guy just reached up and grabbed the rotor and pulled it off.  Brian and I just looked at each other in disbelief.  We just laughed and went out and hit the rotor with a rubber hammer and it came off, and then the other side came off pretty easy because by then we knew how to do it.

Brian had gone to Auto Zone and gotten a set of brakes before we started.  After we got the rotors off we took the rotors into Auto Zone to see if they could turn the rotors, but they couldn't.  O'Rielly's, the other auto store in Bernalillo could turn them so we took the rotors there.  (It seems weird to me that Benalillo has two auto part stores right next to each other in such a small town, but there it is.)  The O'Rielly guy said that if we buy the pads there as well they would give us a break on the cost of turning the rotors and that they'd be ready in an hour.  We went back on hour later and Brian returned the brake pads that he'd gotten from Auto Zone and then he was able to but new pads and have the rotors turned for the same price.  I thought that was a pretty good result.

That's the new family tradition.  If Brian and Goosy have a daughter Brian's going to have to teach the husband how to change the brakes on her car.