Ugh! I’m so tired

April 14th, 2008 • chatter

Today was supposed to be a nice day, a leisurely day spent at the Palm Beach International Film Festival like the last two days have been. Unfortunately things didn’t go that way. Woke up later than I anticipated but today was the day to fix my Saturn’s broken power window motor. Word to the wise: never replace the motor, just replace the regulator itself.

That thing was just a bitch to replace. Neither my Chilton nor Haynes manual stated the motor was riveted — with solid core rivets — to the regulator arm. Nor did any of the other sites detailing how to do it. Sure, they’d mention they replaced the motor but they didn’t, they just replaced the whole regulator part and parcel. Luckily the only real problem I ran into were these rivets. Getting the rivets out that held the regulator in the door wasn’t tough, just a pain to rip apart. I had to send my poor girlfriend to the store for some 1/4″x1 1/2″ bolts because I thought the motor was bolted on and I wouldn’t need extra parts. After bolting the stupid motor back on, getting the regulator back on just right took longer than expected but wasn’t difficult. Everything else after that was cake. I hate working on my car but I know more than enough not to pay some schlub $300 to replace my regulator when all it’s going to cost me is 2 hours and $70 for parts.

I’ve been Internet absent for a few days but I managed to get some stuff done like the repairs today. I finally finished up Kitchen Confidential on Thursday night. Great, brisk read. Bourdain reminds me why I hated line cooking and why I liked cooking in a restaurant. I haven’t cooked in days though, been busy! We’ve been gong to the Palm Beach International Film Festival (except for today) and it’s been good. We saw Oud L’ward (I don’t remember the English translation) on Friday night, it’s a story about a Moroccan girl traded into slavery and exalted because of her lute-playing abilities. It was a good story, continuity issues aside. Last night we saw two documentaries. The first was Rock and A Hard Place: Another Night at the Agora about South Florida’s rock scene of the late 70s to mid 80s. Really, it was about Miami’s rock scene and how it produced some fine bands but little recognition. Except for Johnny Depp. Just about everyone in the documentary was at the showing since it was the Florida premiere, except Johnny of course. It was good, got great crowd reaction. Jess really enjoyed the soundtrack. Afterwards, we didn’t realize how many of these guys we’d actually talked to before!

The second one was Begging Naked. The sad story of a teen runaway who turned out to not only like stripping but was an accomplished artist. Unfortunately, now she’s just homeless in Central Park. It was a very sad story, my girlfriend spent much of the movie with tears in her eyes. The directory, Karen Gehres, was very nice and fielded many questions after it was over. We told her we were very thankful for presenting Elise’s wrenching story in an unabashed medium. I also met another filmmaker after this documentary who’s currently studying directing while writing his autobiography. He was a pretty nice guy as well, enjoys his Starbucks quite a bit.

Now, I need to go off and read another chapter in The Year of Living Biblically. Yes, I’m finally going to finish it, I’m about 130 pages from the end.