The Agrinautica

   Driving home last Tuesday my car started alarmingly shuddering just a few hundred meters from home. Of course I looked in the engine immediately after getting home but to my utterly inexperienced eye nothing looked amiss. Maybe it was just a random thing. Driving to work Wednesday morning (21 miles), the shuddering was there from the outside, steadily got worse, after about halfway the car could hardly go over 80kph (50) (interesting fact, all these country roads have a speed limit of 100kph, which is 62mph, which I think is a bit ridiculous for country roads -- in the states I think non-highways are 45mph (70kph) tops), and the last few hundred meters into work even at the 20-30kph I went up the farm driveway at it was shuddering so badly I expected it not to make it.
   Long story short but talking it over with my more mechanic-inclined friends we quickly determined the head gasket is blown -- the professional mechanic had looked at it just two weeks ago over the oil guzzling situation and determined it wasn't anything outside the engine block, that the gaskets and such inside were probably leaking, and so I gather this is the critical natural progression of that problem. Additionally I confirmed there's bubbles in the radiator when the accelerator is applied (actually I learned there's a throttle in the engine area one can pull instead of magically pushing the foot pedal and trying to see the engine at the same time! So that's a thing I learned today), and this bubbling apparently is positive proof that the head gasket is blown. All my life I've heard of "the head gasket being blown" in hushed whispers as the certain death of a car, though my one friend says as long as I keep the oil and coolant up it could hobble through life for awhile yet. It's not worth an entire engine rebuild so my plan is to just keep driving it until its eventual catastrophic failure -- which would definitely happen the moment Ii really needed to get somewhere like to catch a plane but I definitely don't plan to put the car and I in that situation. As long as I only drive to and from work it should be no worse happening on the roads between here and there during business hours than if I just gave up at it at home hey? And in the mean time I'm heavily looking for another car (I think I'll look again at leasing because I don't have the kind of money sitting around to buy a car and/or the kind of car I could afford would definitely be another maintenance nightmare)


I was going to be done posting this guy's paintings but it seemed to me the imminent machine death of my car called for something mech related


Also I was about to go on to write about the state beekeeping conference that occupied the latter part of the week but after finishing the above paragraph I thought oh hey, there's a complete thought. Might as well post it as a standalone.