Friday

So, the kids and I ended going off to Ming 10 and had an excellent lunch. The place was packed! We've been there many times and at all hours and never have I seen such a crowd. We were placed in the furthest section away form the food. Because there was so much traffic the food was constantly being replenished and never had a chance to sit for long so everything was wonderfully fresh.

After a thoroughly delicious repast eating stoutly like trenchermen, we headed out. We stopped at the Meijer that is adjacent to the complex that Ming 10 inhabits as my good friend Brian told me that his wife Carrie had found Dreamfield pasta there. This was good news because after the local grocer by my house stopped carrying it (they replaced it with disgusting gritty stone ground whole wheat pasta) I had been reduced to mail order to keep it on hand. Dreamfield uses a unique method to encapsulate most of the carbohydrates in the pasta so out of a normal serving which contains 40 grams of carbs, only five are digested. And it looks and tastes like regular pasta. Being a diabetic, Dreamfield pasta is something that lets me enjoy pasta without my blood sugar being affected!

They did indeed have it, so I picked up a few boxes, a roll of electrical tape, some cat treats, and a pair of wire cutters. Thursday after I got home from work Scott seeing the portion of the dash from the Mustang that contains the cigarette lighter was spurred into action and wanted to install the radio I bought for his car last September! I could not find my wire cutters so a new pair was needed.

We had gotten as far as we could Thursday having removed the old radio and gotten together everything we needed for the installation of the new.

Returning home I began working on the wiring harness that would mate the new radio into the existing wiring. I had bought the radio from Crutchfield and they sell a kit that makes the radio, which was a totally different size, fit like it was custom made int he dash of the car. They also give you a wiring harness that mates with the existing one in the car and that is wired to the new hardness. This requires some time as you have to solder and then tape each connection which I did. here's a picture of my work area:

So, after about two hours work all total I had the harness made, we got everything plugged in and the adapter faceplate would not mate with the holes in the dash of his car! A quick inspection showed I had put the new radio in upside down so I turned the bracket 180 degrees, and got everything connected. We turned it on and nothing came out of the radio except static, the same symptom of the broken radio! Scott was distressed because the person we got the car from said it was a bad radio. I checked the connections int he trunk to the antenna and they were fine, so, I pulled the radio out to find the antenna connection had slipped out! We got that firmly in place and Scott, with the radio playing, carefully put all the screws back in the pieces of his dashboard he had removed.

He headed out with his friends, and Danielle and I watched TV while snacking on some popcorn samples that had been delivered. Scott and Steve showed up a bit later and played Left 4 Dead here awhile before heading out to meet up with more friends. I dropped her off at her Mom's house around 6 PM and then Tails and I spent a very quiet evening watching TV and puttering on the computer. I retired around 1 AM.