HEY! I slept in until 8:15 this morning. Well, it was 7:15, but with the time change I got an extra hour of sleep ---- OH! That is not how the extra hour works? Anyway, I hope you set your clocks ahead and are not an hour late for anything today.

It is another beautiful sunny day here. Beautiful weather to stay inside and work to catch up on our down time. HOWEVER, we are headed out the stores this morning for some stuff. Since we will be right there, we are going to the all you can eat breakfast buffet at Home Town Buffet. We love the all you can eat buffets. I guess that is why we love pot luck dinners at the rallies so much. Always a real variety of delicious food.

A 34 foot motorhome is a lot of surface to wash, especially with black streak. In the future I need to wash the beast more often. I still am not done. The battery powered scrubber keeps running out of juice. Based on the power available in the scrubber, it looks like this is going to be a three day job.

Yesterday I replaced the starter solenoid in the Bounder. Hopefully the starting problem is solved with the replacement of that relay. The relay was on top of the engine and easy to get to. BUT, what a hassle. EASY job made complicated. One pair of bolts would only come out with a #10 metric socket --- on an old Chevy chassis. I tried and double tried every socket I had until I got the metric tool box out.

Then the store gave me a "bad" solenoid which I took back and they replaced with the "good" one, for twice the price BUT let me have as a direct exchange with no extra $$$. Nice of them.

Well it turns out it wasn't a bad relay. The old one used the two top terminals for ground and hot. The new one used the mounting plate as ground and I only used one of the top terminals -- the terminal going to the starter switch. I was going to return that one also, but it was too much hassle so I put it in anyway. An easy fix.

The problem was that they gave me the wrong relay for this vehicle, TWICE. This is part of the joy of doing your own maintenance and working with the parts department an a modern chain parts store. The people are pretty good behind the counter, but are no match for the old time parts store with the guy who knew everything about every engine around. Now the computer tells the clerk what the part is and you hope the computer has the right information.