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old man aches after replacing one of the brakes
Sunday, March 15 2026
Today I experienced a low-level malaise that might've been the result of ingesting an ambien last night and some gin in the wee hours of this morning. This had me planted firmly in the living room into the early afternoon as our neighbor A, her daughter, and her dog all came by for a social call. We talked some about the Pat Ryan yesterday and it was only then that it was revealed that Pat Ryan isn't even her congressman. (Then again, the United States isn't even her country, and she cannot actually vote here.)
When I did develop some ambition, I took the big Kobalt chainsaw a little ways south of the Chamomile on the Stick Trail and cut down the remains of a skeletonized red maple that could probably produce a couple backpack loads. I brought home one of these loads and the pieces proved unusually difficult to split, I so left most of them as bucked rounds, since they were small enough to fit in our stove and required no further drying.
Later in the afternoon, I overcame my pre-project dread and began working on the tasks needed to make the Subaru Forester once more street-legal. I jacked it up and removed the rear driver's side wheel, then went to unbolt the calipers. Initially I made the mistake of trying to do this with a 12-point socket, and all it did was round the six points on the one of the two nuts, as its bolt didn't want to budge. The key to removing it was to use a six-point socket, which grips a nut fully on all six faces and points.
But even with the calipers removed, I had troubles. The rotor didn't want to slip off over the emergency brake mechanism until I jiggled something inside the hub with a flathead screwdriver. And then I had the damnedest time trying to get the tabs in one of the brake pads to fit in the provided slots in the calipers. By the time I'd redone that one brake, it was after 6:00pm and I was done for the day. I noticed that all that time spent stooped over left my muscles in a bad state for standing upright when I needed to, one of the strongest signals in my body that I'm no longer a young man or anything close to it. It certainly didn't help that temperatures today hovered in the low 40s and the sky had the appearance of a concrete dome.
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