Good Friday
Well, I guess it was a good day. While changing the winter wheels on my car
to my summer rims, I noticed that the passenger-side ball joint was very
loose. Finally, the culprit that was going "clunk-clunk."
As luck would have it, a friend who goes through parts at at-cost prices got me a pair of new ones for about 35 bucks apiece (the driver-side is loose, but not noisy yet). That's an amazing deal, seeing as I paid 200 dollars for the last one.
It was a difficult job. Of course, a bolt snapped along the way. Still, a good learning experience.
Change of subject: I got a surprising amount of feedback about the gas graph. I was told a lot of interesting theories, but they all pointed to what I alluded to: normalization to prices elsewhere in the world, with a growing population and growing demand. So, I'm not complaining about gas prices anymore, and neither should you. But feel free to complain about the uncompetitive "up-and-down" methods of gas stations.