Just watch this and imagine yourself pulling in… if you dare

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I dropped the Landy in today for a service. The old girl is up to 380 000km from her birthday in 1981 and needing a bit of loving care.

For a mere $135.00 she is running nicely now, but not without her problems. The mechanic who worked on her suggested all I needed was 4 litres of petrol – to set fire to her…

Steady Eddie…

Ok… So she is full of rust, the shockies are shot, the front tyres need replacing, the rear axel seals are gone, it leaks everything it is possible to leak, the handbrake doesn’t work… and there are over 20 other items needing attention… BUT the fact is she still goes!

So I’m tossing up – sell her for $2K and buy another $8K beast, or run her into the ground. The problem is I’m not sure how far she has to go.

I reckon I might be able to get another year out of her. Then again she could cark it tomorrow.

My policy has always been to buy older cheaper cars and take a gamble on the maintenance costs. For the most part it has paid off with few really big bills hitting us over the years. I reckon this baby could roll along nicely for another 12 months if I spent $500.00, but then that’s about 1/4 of her total value…

Occasionally I dream of owning a car that was made in the same decade we are living in a dream that is currently well beyond us. Right now we have a 1989 Telstar that has been a great car and the 1981 Landy. I reckon the total value of our cars (and boat )would be less than $10K !

The great thing about the Landy is that when I am dropping the boat into the water I don’t worry about how deep we go. When smashing around the bush I don’t worry about the scratches – I’m told they will polish out but I am unlikely to ever make that discovery. I washed it once, but haven’t made a second attempt – couldn’t see the point.

If you want to buy a great old piece of Australian history then drop me a line and you can come and have a look. We can give her hiding up along the dunes and you can see what a great 4wD the old Landy is. And the best part is she’s on LPG so its actually cheaper to run than the Telstar. She’s done a heap of south west trips and been no drama (except for the time the harmonic balancer fell off in Mandurah…)

Come on… you know you want to…

One of the real benefits of my ‘job’ is that I get to hang out with some wonderful people.

I had an email last week from Darryl Gardiner

telling me he was coming to perth and expected to be having a coffee with me. No problem there. Even though he’s a kiwi, (:)) Darryl’s a bloke I love to hang out with – a man’s man, a no frills fella and a genuine godly bloke.

I picked him and we had that coffee at 10.00… and then another at 11.00… and then it was time for lunch… We got home some time after 1.00 after three hours of sharing hearts and laughs, encouragement and inspiration.

I love that kind of uncluttered male friendship where you can pick up after 12 months, laugh at fart jokes, share (true) mission stories and go deep deep into the guts of life, then pick up and leave knowing that in 12 months time we’ll do it all again and enjoy it just as much.

Kindred spirits.

Thanks God for Daz and the others like him in my life who I share the journey with.

Some people laugh at my preference for old cars – but there is method in the madness

Yesterday while backing my boat into its parking bay, I inadvertently left the drivers door open and it caught on a tree branch, bending it out a little.

It meant that every time I opened it there was a loud crack as the door and front quarter panel clicked together.

Of course a panel beater is out of the question.

How then do you fix it?

I am grateful for a neighbour who is a farmer and who is familiar with ‘agricultural’ solutions to these problems. The general all purpose solution is usually ‘a bigger hammer’, but today it was a bigger screwdriver to wedge the damaged front panel back into shape.

Yes paint chips hit the ground. Yes door is still 5 ml out. Yes it does look a little rough. But this is a $4000.00 car so I don’t really give a toss!

Its also a 4WD and meant to look like its been given a hiding (which I can assure you it has) Just try that soultion on a new $70000.00 landcruiser…

Today I took Sam for a train ride into town.

He’s starting to get to the age where we can go out and have fun together, so we will be doing more and more blokey things as we go along.

As we were sitting and knocking back some coffee and cake in Forest Place a group of people broke into song behind us. Sam started jigging and twisting while everyone in the cafe looked mildy unimpressed at having their Sat urday morning disturbed.

What followed was something I haven’t seen for a while – full scale fire and brimstone preaching – ‘if you think there’s no God you’re a fool – if you think there’s no heaven you’re a fool… yada yada yada’. About 7 or 8 young guys and girls had a go at preaching in between songs.

There are two ways to look at this:

– they are doing something in regard to evangelism. They are doing more than many are doing. That is a positive thing.

– they probably turned a whole bunch of people off by their methods and further added to the stereotype of christians as nutters.

Maybe it just takes all sorts…

I’ve spent a fair bit of this holiday messing around with the crankshaft on my old landcruiser, trying to get away with a cheap fix rather than the real McCoy.

Its still not fixed right and I am now on plan C. The first timing cover gasket didn’t hold so I had to pull the balancer off to fix it and in doing so discovered that the devcon repair hadn’t worked. (Glad I discovered it then).

The second time round the gasket worked but the devcon failed again. I just pulled it all apart again… It took me 15 minutes rather than the hour it took the first time!

Plan C is to weld the key in place and make it a permanent fixture. Next weekend we’ll have a crack at that. I am tempted to just weld the balancer onto the crankshaft for ever and a day… but that wouldn’t be nice to the poor person who gets it after me and had an oil seal leak…

The danger in all this is that I end up spending more money doing it badly several times than doing it right once.

However that said I have spent $300.00 and am a long way shy of the $1500/2000 price it would cost to do properly.

I hover between being totally frustrated by it and wanting to sell it at any price and becoming more determined to kick its arse. I need to remember not to do anything rash in my frustrated moments!

It’ll be good to take my eyes off it this week as I return to work. It has impacted on the holiday in the sense that it has caused stress and some financial anxiety, but at the same time I have been enjoying learning and the challenge of fixing it. We recieved a very generous gift a few days back which will really help with the cost of all the repairs that we have had to do in the last few weeks.

So… today I am up for another round with this beast. I reckon it can be beaten… Ask me what I think this time next week after we’ve tried welding it up. That will be a do or die effort and if we botch up the crankshaft the only option then will be to do it properly…

Yesterday Stuart and I went out for a bash in the 4WD’s up north of where we live and then today Mark and I did the same.

Its all of 400m to bush tracks so it makes for easy access and a lot of fun.

It struck me again just what a blokey activity 4WDing is! Climbing dunes, bouncing over tracks, racing down the beach, attempting the same hill climb 4 times just because you so badly want to do it…

Funnily enough there were no girls out there bashing around – but lots of blokes – just one person per car but each with a mate, all enjoying the day and using up a fair slab of testosterone while they are at it.

On Dec 16 we head off for a week to Margaret River with Stu and family and one of the things I’d love to do is make the trip to Black Point – a 4WD only surf spot about 50kms from there. Its a legendary spot and I have surfed near it once, but never had the right wheels to get back there.

Loving being a bloke!

That’s all…

The Greenman is doing a great series this week on what it means to be a ‘man’.

If that sort of thing turns your key then you’ll find some healthy discussion over there.

I was reading his post here and it took me back to a youth camp experience.

It was a weekend with teenagers talking about relationships – with each other, God, opposite sex – pretty normal church stuff.

At one point we separated guys and girls to discuss what it meant to relate to the same sex – to have some open frank discussion. I was leading the guys and Danelle the girls. As we spoke about these relationships that we blokes have with each other, especially with fathers, it started to get pretty close to the bone. Bottom lip tremors and averted gazes said this was a raw nerve.

As the one leading it I felt uncomfortable – it wasn’t an area I felt confident in – it wasn’t a topic I was very comfortable with – especially when I was the pastor who was supposed to havestuff together. As the discussion progressed it became obvious we were in territory than none of us knew how to deal with.

There was a long silence… then someone chirped up “I spy…” and that was the end of it. We played I spy for the next 20 minutes totally oblivious to the frviolity of it all.

Now, I knew (I’m pretty smart!) that playing ‘I spy’ wasn’t what this group needed at that precise moment, but I didn’t have a clue how to approach the situation.

When we finally came out of the room grunting, laughing and making blokey noises, the girls were huddled around one other girl who was in tears. They were praying for her and consoling her (abuse stuff) and giving us the vibe now wasn’t the time to mess around.

We got the message and went outside to kick the footy.

But what a contrast. It was a reminder that we had failed pretty badly in there today. Hurting blokes playing ‘I spy’ because they couldn’t express feelings. Thankfully I feel I have moved on from there and could probably do ok with that situation now – but even now I’m still not at ease with those kinds of conversations.

Its hard being a bloke.