A Good Day in a Crappy Truck

Once again, I've been remiss in my blogging responsibilities. I've decided that I can generate X number of keystrokes a day, and if I waste too many of them on the nutbuckets of WWET, I don't have as many to blog with.

So here's where we're at these days:

The crappy pickup is coming along swimmingly, as shown in the delightful before and after pictures to the left. Unfortunately, it's been raining too hard to work on it the last few days. But I have faith...the rain will stop, the clouds will break, the humidity will shoot up to 150%, and all will be well with our Southern Illinois life.

Yesterday was Lori's and my day off, and we spent it driving to St. Louis, ostensibly to burn more of the crappy gas out of the crappy pickup, but really because we like to take long drives and see the countryside and talk. So first we wandered over to Cobden to pick the brain of my favorite mechanic.

I have a problem that's been vexing me on the crappy pickup...the gas tank appears to only hold six gallons of gas. After 6 gallons, it acts like it's out of gas, and I can only put another six gallons in it. So I went to Larry for some free advice, and after scratching his head, squinting his eyes and smiling winsomely at us in case we might be distracted, he finally postulated that it might be that the sending unit on the fuel pump in the gas tank is bent upwards, which would cause it to think it's out of gas prematurely.

Works for me. He recommends dropping the tank and checking out the fuel pump.

So then Lori, me, and our six gallons of gas tooled up through Pinckneyville (named, undoubtedly, because the natives are famously known for their pink knees) and wandered around an antique store where we drooled over an antique Hoosier cabinet and eventually bought a wicker rocker that's comfortable for shorties like us. Now we can sit on the porch, rock, and churn butter or some such elderly rural hobby. Maybe whittlin' or spittin' or somethin'.

From there, we headed vaguely west to search for a town called Rice, mostly because it's a place we'd never seen before. And no wonder, since it turned out to be about ten houses in a wide spot on an unmarked, unlined blacktop. But at least now we know.

Outside of Rice, we spotted a sign for Mascoutah. Hey!, we said. We know someone who lives in Mascoutah! We should do a drive-by! Maybe we'll even stop and talk! I hope he doesn't construe it as a TERRORIST THREAT.

Mascoutah, come to find out, is a lovely little town about the size of our lovely little town, and we see why our friend chose to live there. But we couldn't find his house, so the chance to TERRORIZE him fell through. Next time we're out wandering that way, we'll get directions, and maybe drive by and TERRORIZE him with beer and a pie.

Eventually, we stopped for another six gallons of gas and headed home. Pretty Midwestern prairie sunset, fun talk, holdin' hands with my girl in a pickup truck...what else does a person need?