Christmas in July!

Well the eBay sellers came through in fine fashion with two (count ‘em – two!) packages arriving at the humble abode today. Woo hoo!
But let me digress for a moment. There was one small surprise. One of the sellers shipped UPS instead of USPS (my bad - I forgot to specify) and as a consequence I got hit with an extra charge of $55 for brokerage fees and taxes (this on a $100 order). So, note to anyone Stateside: If you ever want to ship anything to a Canadian relative or a friend you want to keep, DO NOT ship UPS. They will charge a brokerage fee on pretty much anything crossing the border, which is just a huge rip-off because they do nothing different than what USPS does for free. Rant over – don’t use UPS.
So it’s up to the garage with the parcels and, just like Christmas, in 37.5 seconds I had everything unpacked and this pile of chrome parts on a bench. Being used, of course there were no installation instructions. No surprise there, but it does make it a bit more difficult for the spousal unit to offer “suggestions” when she doesn’t have a roadmap to point to. And besides it gives me an excuse to make several trips to the dealer to ask whether tab A really fits into slot B, and where the hell is slot B anyway? Or why do I have two of these, and what are they? And while the parts guys are chasing down the answers I’ll get to sit on all the new 2010’s on the showroom floor and fend off the sales reps touting their key exchange program. It’s all good.
But for now I’m just trying to make sure I have everything I need to finish the job once I start the tear-down. So I’ve been trying to dry-fit all the bits and pieces and producing huge lists of special bolts, acorn nuts, washers, spacers, and anything else I just “might” need in the process, which is, after all, half the fun.
The other half of the fun is putting it all back to stock when you are 95% complete and find you are still missing that one critical piece which is on backorder and won’t be available until the real Christmas arrives in about 6 months. But that would never happen to me. No.
Anyway we’re supposed to get a few (more!) days of rain coming up, so it’ll be a good time to do some wrenching and see if we can’t change her character just a wee bit. Stay tuned.