Car 54, Where Are You?

I've not been blogging much over the past couple of months. A big reason, at least lately, has been a pinched nerve that made my left arm go numb every time I sat down at the computer, among other places. It's been slowly getting better, although I still go numb if I sit on the commode for more than a couple of minutes. Most of my online activity has been via my iPad, but it's hard to type more than a few paragraphs at a time using that interface, even with a bluetooth keyboard.

I recently got a comment on an unrelated entry asking about how things have gone with my wife's RAV4 after we shipped the vehicle's ECM unit off to Brooklyn for "the Serbs" to replace the cheap capacitors and prevent the "hard shifting" problem that has become a major issue for this generation of RAVs. I'm happy to say that the fix worked - there has been no hard shift issues, or actually any transmission-related issues with the vehicle since we had the work done. My only regret was that we can't seem to find the paperwork that would allow us to get a refund from Toyota, but at around $300 it's something I can live with. Had we spent more than $1000 getting the ECM replaced (or considerably more getting the tranny replaced) I would have dismantled my house trying to find the correct receipt. All in all, I was extremely happy with the solution we chose, although I have to admit it required a bit of a leap of faith.

I've not discussed my Totaler Krieg game either, and part of the reason for that was because of the same things that kept me from posting on the blog. We've had about a month hiatus and I'm looking forward to getting started again once I feel I can sit for an hour at the computer (what I figure it will take for me to make my move - probably the last big Axis push of the game, although there will be smaller ones in the form of Citadel/Wacht am Rhein), but fortunately my opponents have been patient with me. We're also moving into a part of the game where support unit placement becomes really critical and it's hard to do quickly with an asynchronous VASSAL game. We'll get there.

Finally, over the last couple of months I turned 49. That's not a terribly exciting birthday, and to be honest I have avoided celebrating my birthday during my 40's in general. I've decided that I will start observing my birthdays again once I turn 50, and in fact I've decided that as part of hitting the half century mark I'm going to try something a little crazy, like audition for a reality television show. I will have a little more on this in the near future, and I will actually be asking for your assistance at that time.

My arm is getting numb again, so time to stop typing. I know that several people who follow my blog were a little concerned that I'd dropped off of the planet, and I just wanted to mention a few things that had been requested or that I left hanging a bit.