Maintenance is key
I just spent 4 hours reorganizing the spare equipment and storage boxes of my parents. I threw out another pair of sacks full of junk. You see, my grandmother is a bit of a packrat and my mom seems to have imbibed this trait. My dad, after having spent decades with her, probably got infected. He has a few hundred thousand pesos worth of optical equipment sitting at the hall gathering dust. Worse was that the most expensive chair (the one he wouldn't even let us sit on when we were kids) was in the dirty area outside with the shovel and a bunch of stuff leaning on it. I had to clean up the place because i cant stand seeing it.
The point of this entry is that i realized how important it is to know how to maintain your equipment so as to keep them in good working order. It will also save you money in buying new stuff. Sometimes it is as simple as just wiping away grime and putting grease on the area. Please note that i said grease and not WD40. Grease lubricates, WD40 actually removes grease even though it does provide a certain amount of lubrication that lasts for a short time. An example is that you put grease or machine oil in hinges (house or car doors) but you put WD40 on nuts and bolts that you dont want to rust away. I put WD40 on my battery terminals, too. I realized that it keeps the terminals from having those white residue. Perhaps the proof that what im saying works is the fact that my Lia (my lancer) still runs well at 14 years. While the other cars being used by my siblings have been handling really poorly. My sister had to spend thousands to have the pickup that she is using repaired because the one who used to drive it really didnt know anything about cars (or simply anything for that matter).
When i visited my uncle, i got pretty bored so i started to clean his backyard while they worked. Autumn sucks because i hated raking all those leaves. While at it, i stumbled onto his outdoor grill. It looked ok, just dirty. Inside, again, it was dirty. He left it that way because he said that there was something wrong with it. Since i couldn't resist the challenge, i grabbed his tools and surgically disassembled the thing. When he got home, i told him that i can fix his grill by just replacing the burner and by buying new lava rocks (normally you would use charcoal but this thing runs on propane fed into a burner and it would suck to roast stuff directly so you need these newfangled lava rocks to store the heat from the flame and gradually cook your food). He didn't believe me since when he was with us, i was still in the anything-i-open-will-get-put-back-but-not-necessarily-working stage of my Do-it-yourself training. He figured that it was worth a try since buying a new grill would cost hundreds of dollars. He bought the new burner for 17 dollars and a less than 10 dollar bag of cooking rocks. I installed it and when he saw it work (plus the fact that i cleaned the backyard), we had a cookout that weekend.
Yes, i like fixing things but i do know that some things are beyond my skills and will gladly step aside for experts. I believe that this is a good trait for a doctor, too.
The point of this entry is that i realized how important it is to know how to maintain your equipment so as to keep them in good working order. It will also save you money in buying new stuff. Sometimes it is as simple as just wiping away grime and putting grease on the area. Please note that i said grease and not WD40. Grease lubricates, WD40 actually removes grease even though it does provide a certain amount of lubrication that lasts for a short time. An example is that you put grease or machine oil in hinges (house or car doors) but you put WD40 on nuts and bolts that you dont want to rust away. I put WD40 on my battery terminals, too. I realized that it keeps the terminals from having those white residue. Perhaps the proof that what im saying works is the fact that my Lia (my lancer) still runs well at 14 years. While the other cars being used by my siblings have been handling really poorly. My sister had to spend thousands to have the pickup that she is using repaired because the one who used to drive it really didnt know anything about cars (or simply anything for that matter).
When i visited my uncle, i got pretty bored so i started to clean his backyard while they worked. Autumn sucks because i hated raking all those leaves. While at it, i stumbled onto his outdoor grill. It looked ok, just dirty. Inside, again, it was dirty. He left it that way because he said that there was something wrong with it. Since i couldn't resist the challenge, i grabbed his tools and surgically disassembled the thing. When he got home, i told him that i can fix his grill by just replacing the burner and by buying new lava rocks (normally you would use charcoal but this thing runs on propane fed into a burner and it would suck to roast stuff directly so you need these newfangled lava rocks to store the heat from the flame and gradually cook your food). He didn't believe me since when he was with us, i was still in the anything-i-open-will-get-put-back-but-not-necessarily-working stage of my Do-it-yourself training. He figured that it was worth a try since buying a new grill would cost hundreds of dollars. He bought the new burner for 17 dollars and a less than 10 dollar bag of cooking rocks. I installed it and when he saw it work (plus the fact that i cleaned the backyard), we had a cookout that weekend.
Yes, i like fixing things but i do know that some things are beyond my skills and will gladly step aside for experts. I believe that this is a good trait for a doctor, too.
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