So, after a tumultuous start to the year, Dave found himself at a crossroads. His company (for whatever stupid reason or another) made the decision to let him go, which didn’t sit well, of course. Add-in some other factors, and the next thing I know, I’m on a plane to Phoenix to help Dave pack-up his home and move to San Angelo. After a whirlwind week of packing his things, visiting with his friends one last time driving, taking a nap in a parking lot while he’s conducting a telephonic job interview, we finally made it home. After getting settled in (since he’s going to stay with us until he gets situated after the relo), we started in on Jeep stuff.

Since I haven’t really driven Dookie (other than to the convenience store last September), and I’d gotten everything else pretty much ready to go, we decided to take a quick trip to a coin-op car wash to get him cleaned up. It seems like there are only 3 or 4 left in town, but we found one over by the university and proceeding to hose off 3.5 years of driveway grime. Thankfully, he still cleans up like a new penny, so at least that’s a plus.

Unfortunately, during that little romp over to the car wash, I learned that I really didn’t like driving Dookie… or least not in this configuration. Dave and I came up with the idea to modify the Corbeau seat brackets so that they don’t feel like they’re trying to dump me out to the front and lower the seat height yet even further. The brake pedal was painful for me to use because it bounced back too high for my right leg engage without putting pain to my hip flexor. So, he cut and re-welded the driver side seat bracket for a bit more ‘recline’ and dropped it another almost 2″ – to which, it feels just about right now. The brake pedal needed adjusting, and he was able to give me another 1.5-2″ of room so I can effectively do a ‘toe-and-heel’ transition between the gas and brake pedals – MUCH better!

Unfortunately, the summer’s looking to be another scorcher with more triple-digit days than not. What that means for me is Jeep projects basically come to a halt until the weather gets better.