Aaron Landry

After some GT4, we took our cars and did some real racing in Eagan. After I got owned by his SRT-4 with a Mopar Stage 1, Adjustable Waste Gate and Boost Controller. My stock Mini Cooper S (minus my tires) was in the lead on 2nd gear, he shifted to 3rd and clearly blew me away.

Enough of that, time to get a beer and pizza. Snakebites for me.

Co-worker Nick is part of the Polish American Club, and after a chat at work about beers, including Zywiec from Poland, he said he’d take me down there for a beer. I met a few people, including Dan, who said I looked very familiar. I had never met him before. Ends up that he found my photos at my homepage a while back looking for photos and continued to look through them now and then. Much of the time at the bar was me, fleshing out the details behind the portions of my life he already knew about. Interesting to talk with someone that already knows a bunch about you.

Got ripped off on some Elixir strings and a new capo.

T-Mobile has something seriously jacked up with the GPRS service in and around Duluth, MN. After going back and forth with customer care, I finally found a level 2 guy that knew what he was talking about, and we figured out that T-Mobile was, well… jacked up, obviouslly. That was last night.

This morning, after a bit of research, I found a working tower about 20 miles away. I obeyed the "No Tresspasing" sign and didn’t walk up to the tower itself. Here was close enough. =)

They found that they needed to replace a strut and ordered the part on Wednesday. When they got it in the next day, they found that they also needed to get a new spring plate and some other things. Of course, they don’t have that in stock either. Brings us to today, where they have it almost all fixed up.

They went to align it again after they thought they were done to find there is a little shimmy being caused by one of the rims. Remember I got those replaced already?

So my insurance agent shows up at the same time I do. He doesn’t seem very happy that two wheels were purchased already and now we need a third.

I find it strange, myself.

Either way, my service manager at Motorworks had a fun story to tell me about this insurance agent she called an "asshole" and a "total prick." Apparently the conversation went like this:

"What’s the labor rate?" "$110." "No, what’s our labor rate?" "$110." "No, what is Progressive’s rate?" "$110." "No, you don’t understand…"

That was fun to hear.

So now I am driving it to Duluth for the weekend, and the steering wheel is rattling a bit. Grrr…. At least I get this other wheel replaced next week.

Maybe I will be get to be done with my car woes then.