eskatological volumes

8.04.2003

 
20:59

friday evening got off to a sucky start; julie and i were going to go to calypso cafe for supper. after i got off 24 and was going down thompson lane the subaru felt kinda...funny. like i gave it some gas but it didn't do anything. granted, it almost always feels like that in some respect, but this time there was more afoot then just my measley 82hp. we stopped at a red light and i hoped it would go when i gave it the gas. it did. but it got up to 3200 or 3500rpm and never got out of first gear. not cool. i let off the gas a bit and gave it another go; still no changing out to second gear. so i pull over in a gas station and check the trans fluid; seemed a bit low but nothing extrodinary. i bought some more in the gas station and put a qt in; we started off down a backroad to test it out and julie noticed the rather thick smokescreen behind us. but none was coming from under the hood. intriguing. so i re-park the car and check under the hood. nothing. look under the car and smoke is kinda coming from all around the exhaust, but nothing specific. it's all coming out the tail pipe. ..now why the fuck would tranny fluid be coming out the tailpipe. *sigh* to cut the details down a bit here trish came and picked us up; we went on to calypso cafe and i talked to pop on the cell phone a bit. i got the car towed back to the apt and that mostly ended our big friday night. sat i fiddled with the car some more; it was low on oil...so i put some in, put some water in the radiator for whatever it was worth, and added a bit more tranny fluid that i had around the house. still wouldn't shift out of first. (it's a stupid automatic by the way). the rest of saturday julie and i watched jumanji and ghostbusters on tv cause there wasn't much else to do but wait for the afternoon when her parents/grannies were coming up. we started to go to olive garden but they had a 75 min wait. ..no thanks. we went on to torinno's and had a pretty good time of it. afterwards julie and i went to media play and best buy to doddle around. i bought freeway on dvd at media play for $6.99. *yay* sunday we slept in late, read some harry potter, then cleaned up and went to p.f. chang's with ed and trish and misty and erin. i'd never been and it was pretty good and kinda interesting, but i don't think i'd go back very much. if i want chinese i'm usually wanting to pig the fuck out and eat some coconut macaroons or fried doughnuts. ...mmmm anyway, after that we came back here and finished up harry potter around 10.30 pm. so, today pop was coming to nashville that uh, technically mom had won a whole slab of ribeye from the kroger's on nolensville and old hickory; actually it was because julie and i have her kroger discount card and used it there several times recently. so anyway pop comes up to look the subaru over and he can't find much of anything that he can do; he calls some cat in sparta that's worked on some of our subarus before apparently and he says that there is some modulator on the engine that can go bad, and when it does it causes the engine to suck in tranny fluid. _why_ in the world this would be possible i have no fucking clue. motor oil and tranny fluid should never come together in a car as far as i know. but anyway he figured it had gone bad, sucked out too much/enough fluid to cause the bands (gears?) to burn out in the tranny, and the higher gears go first as the spin harder/faster. though oddly if i put the car directly into second gear it goes, but doesn't shift into third i reckon. so i guess that's what the bands do...anyway it's pretty much hosed as the guy said it'd prolly just take a new tranny at this point. so i'm kinda looking around at getting another junker car unless i can find some wrecked subaru to pull a decent transmission out of and transplant it. looking for cheap cars is fun though. got that from my pop i guess.