Another week has gone by and I haven’t written a post. Things didn’t always go as planned this last week. I mentioned in my last post that I had to take our Nissan Frontier back to Sullivan Motors for a repair to the airbag system. I got up at 6am on Friday for coffee and breakfast before heading out at 7:15am.

They were going to change the clockspring for the airbag and said it would take all day. I didn’t understand this – I’ve never done this job on a Nissan, but I changed out six clocksprings in a day on Volkswagens. We had a quality engineer that wanted airbag clocksprings with various time/mileage for study. He sent me six new parts. I went to an auction yard in Avondale, Arizona where I found used Volkswagens and removed and replaced the clocksprings which I tagged with VIN and mileage and shipped them to the engineer. But, I digress.

I saw them take the truck into the shop right at 8am. Donna came about half an hour later to pick me up in Midget-San. We came home and I hit the pickleball courts. I took a phone call at 10am – it was Sullivan Motors. They guy told me he had bad news. The clockspring didn’t fix the problem so they ordered a control module. It’s an expensive part, but it’s on them as the airbag repair was part of the sales agreement. I’ll have to bring the truck to the Nissan dealer when they get the part – it requires programming by the dealer.

I told Donna I was a little worried about having the truck diagnosed by a parts replacer. Donna asked me what I meant by that. A parts replacer is a mechanic that lacks diagnostic skills – they read a fault code and jump to a conclusion without going through proper test procedures and just order the part they think will fix the problem. In my years with Volkswagen Technical Service, I ran into many examples of this. We’ll see if replacing the airbag control module was the right call.

Another plan that went awry was the title transfer for our new-to-us park model home. The seller wanted us to meet him at a third-party vehicle licensing place at 1pm on Monday. Donna and I arrived at the place right at 1pm. We saw a sign on the door that said service was by appointment only. Then we were told they used to do mobile home title transfers, but no longer do. They gave us the address and phone number of a place that does. I called the other outfit and the next appointment available was Wednesday morning at 10:30am. I made an appointment.

Then I called the Arizona Department of Transportation to see if they would be able to get us in. Their number went to a voice mail system that said call volumes are high, call back later – click! Typical service from a government agency.

Speaking of government agencies, I received the license plates from South Dakota for the Nissan Frontier. I looked at the registration reciept and saw they charged $460 excise tax. This was not right, because I paid Arizona sales tax when I bought the truck. South Dakota credits the sales tax for out-of-state vehicle purchases and only charges excise tax if the South Dakota tax is higher than the out-of-state tax – they charge the difference. I paid more than the South Dakota excise tax already, so the tax should have cancelled out.

I called the county treasurer office in Sioux Falls and they told me they had to get the documentation from the department of motor vehicles. This made no sense to me, I sent the documentation to the county treasurer as instructed, they should have records. They said they would call me back. The next afternoon I called them since no one called me back. I was told that the DMV records are being transferred to a new system and it would be weeks before they could retrieve them! I still had the documentation, so I sent it to the county again via email. I’m still waiting for a response.

Yesterday, we went to the third-party licensing place for our 10:30am appointment. What a disorganized zoo that was. It was 10:50am before we started the process and it took much longer than I expected. It was after 11:30am by the time we had everything signed and we were good to go. The park model home is officially ours.

Donna’s been sorting things out at the house – the sale included most of the stuff inside including furniture, appliances even kitchen utensils and linens. Donna will figure out what has to go before she starts moving our stuff in and getting it all organized. She also wants to paint before we move ourselves into the new house. That could take a few weeks.

Yesterday, while Donna was over at the house in the afternoon, I was puttering around in the trailer. It was breezy outside and wind gusts were picking up. Suddenly, great gusts of wind started rocking the trailer. I went out to check the canopy on the ham shack and it was whipping madly in the wind. I started removing the canvas but before I could take it all down the wind delivered a fatal blow. The ham shack canopy was destroyed.

Luckily I wasn’t sitting at the table with my ham gear at the time! The wind carried dirt and desert sand. To the north I could see a haboob – a dust/sand storm that obscured Usery Mountain.

I’ll be setting up a new ham shack in the small shop area of our new home.

I’ll close this post with a shot of a dinner Donna made last week. It’s a Greek pork stew made with pork tenderloin, potatoes, kalamata olives, baby kale and white beans.

The weather has been great, other than the wind storm. Sunday was cool – in the mid-60s. Monday was warmer and by Wednesday we had mid-80s! Today is a little cooler but the forecast calls for low 80s through the weekend.

*Just so you know, if you use this link to shop on Amazon and decide to purchase anything, you pay the same price as usual and  I’ll earn a few pennies for the referral. It’ll go into the beer fund. Thanks!