Let’s call it, Project CELICA – Level 2. I’ve invested somewhere in the neighborhood of 5 thousand dollars into Project CELICA between parts and associated labor, but the car is night and day different from when I purchased it. The most major upgrades came from the clutch, flywheel, wheels and tires. Don’t get me wrong, the most important repairs were the timing chain cover gasket and chain tensioner because oil leaks of any kind are especially bad given that the oil is typically protecting the more sensitive bits of the motor. But from a driving experience perspective, the clutch, flywheel, wheels and tires made the car feel brand new.
The next updates I am looking at are window tint and paint correction. The car really is looking and feeling wonderful and I’d like to continue breaking in the new clutch and flywheel by daily driving it. Like I’ve told my colleagues, you really don’t see any cars like mine on the road these days.
So this post is going to go all around the place because a lot has been going on in my life in the past couple of weeks. It has been busy. I want to preface any potential readers by stating that this post is long and covers a multitude of topics, including a venting opportunity.
As previously mentioned, in addition to clutch and flywheel I have replaced the wheels and tires all around with tire balance and an alignment. Given the recent clutch and flywheel replacement, I’ve encountered a new problem of stalling out. I get the impression the reason for stalling out is a combination of the new lightweight flywheel with the brand new clutch assembly. With the new clutch assembly I’ve found the clutch engagement point is now higher than it was before. I’m guessing that this change is due to the new pressure plate being more powerful than the old failing one as well as the new clutch disk being fresh and new versus the old destroyed one that was removed. This adjustment is especially noticeable. I want to also discuss how this is not my first experience with a brand new flywheel as I’ve bought three brand new cars in recent years (with near zero mileage on the odometer) yet never had any issues like this with stalling out.
Initially I was planning to adjust the free play in the clutch pedal so it could feel more “normal” but instead I think I can wear in the clutch assembly which should accomplish a similar result more naturally. I’m also beginning to adjust to the lightweight flywheel by adjusting my throttle strategy while driving. My hope is that this experience simply makes me more well rounded in driving manual cars. I’ve thought many times about my future with manual transmission and I really hope that I always own a manual transmission vehicle for the rest of my life. I understand that electric cars are in our future and I fully expect to own one of them also, but I also want a manual-driven car if not just for weekend romps.
Given a new daily driver I have also thought about selling my Honda Type R. I still claim this car as my favorite car that I have ever owned, but the payments are not fun, and I really do want consolidate and eliminate my loans. I also understand that it is impractical driving a project car as a daily driver because it is inherently unreliable, so I would either need to replace the Type R with a used pickup truck or at minimum, a new reliable economy car like a Corolla or a Civic SI. The goal would be minimal or better yet, no loan. Buying used could prove difficult given the rising used car prices, so I imagine it would make more sense buying new.
I’m going to switch gears now to discussing speeding tickets, since within the past several weeks I was pulled over and cited for speeding on a low-traffic roadway. The officer caught me with LIDAR technology, which I may have been caught with in the past, but the difference this time is that I was caught from up ahead where I could actually see the police car coming. I was clocked by the time I even saw the cop so I was not given any opportunity to slow down, which was likely the officer’s goal. Usually I am pretty aware of my surroundings so this particular ticket caught me off guard.
In the state of Florida, you can only take the BDI (basic driver improvement) course so many times before you are cut off. I haven’t gotten a ticket in probably a decade or two, but I have to be aware of how many more times I have left before I need to start getting lawyers involved. This lead me to researching radar detectors, but after more conversations with colleagues, I’m uncertain if radar detectors can protect you from LIDAR. I still have some more research to go. The only result of this ticket is that I am no longer taking the path utilizing the roadway I was pulled over on anymore. Given the lower traffic levels and prevalence of police staking the road out, it is a honeypot for collecting speeding tickets. Believe it or not, higher traffic roadways make it less likely for you to get a speeding ticket since it is hard (or impossible) to speed in high traffic. I also like areas where there are less (or no) spots for officers to hide.
Next, I am going to switch gears to work-life balance. I may or may not have discussed the concept of work-life balance in the past, but in the past several months work-life balance has been problematic for me. I have personal goals that I am working, whether its building the project car, decompressing with video games, cinema, or television, or simply enjoying nature. Part of enjoying any of these aforementioned tasks includes not being interrupted with work-related obligations. I understand that the business is the business and it requires 24 by 7 hour management, but isn’t that why I am part of a team? I’m not the CEO. Doesn’t that mean that I should be able to take time and get away?
Work-life balance essentially means that I can engage in work while also disengaging from work. When work-life balance is not in place, it is usually resulting in working too much as opposed to not enough. When you feel as though you are working beyond your work threshold, the result is a condition called burnout. Being a self-proclaimed workaholic, I am no stranger to burnout. My work threshold is naturally higher than the average employee’s due to my extreme work ethic. This work ethic in combination with my goal-oriented personality has lead me to a life of both academic and professional success. Unfortunately, these traits also leave me vulnerable to both burnout and being taken advantage of. It is usually necessary for my manager to prevent me from working too much. I have a track record of carrying teams, but I do have a limit.
Lately, I’ve found that my vacation days and otherwise scheduled paid time off does not provide me time to decompress. Sometimes I end up taking time off to perform non work-related tasks and while unfortunate, I cannot blame my job for that. In most cases, performing tasks like mowing the lawn, working on the project car, or performing other projects around the house still provides me a level of relief simply due to the fact that I am not interrupted by coworkers. The real problem comes from actually performing work-related activities during my vacation time or otherwise scheduled time off (like company holidays).
I was called on my day off to work an incident call (similar as if I was on-call) which ended up lasting the entire day. While I fortunately was able to work with my manager to compensate elsewhere, the mere circumstances of the event affected me pretty sharply. This past weekend I scheduled two more off days and ended up finding myself looking at emails on my phone. The longer I stay with any company, the more that my employees rely on me, generally leading to more interactions during scheduled time off. While it is a good problem to have to be needed, it is a problem as it pertains to work-life balance since it does not effectively allow me to disengage and decompress. Even the mere act of looking at email is a problem, and if I am scheduling vacation days and using them to review and respond to office emails, then I am wasting my vacation time while increasing my risk of burnout.
At this point, I believe I need to turn my work phone off in order to appropriately disengage, primarily during scheduled time off. The new Microsoft Teams and Outlook applications on my phone in combination with the new work-from-home options are leading to more and more employees engaging in electronic communications during scheduled rest time. This recently has become especially problematic. For this reason (among others), I have decided I want to continue to commute into the office although the vast majority of my coworkers opted to fully work from home. The problem for me is that I need to delineate work and home very aggressively. Having been with my current employer for coming up on 10 years and given my predilection for working, I am of the opinion that I am being taken advantage of. Working from the office gives me a distinct separation between work and home in addition to the perk of driving in for a morning commute. I also like the fact that it gives me a routine that forces me to go outside, get some fresh air, and interact with other human beings. I understand that some of my colleagues have nice porches, patios, and home environments that give them sufficient interaction to their liking at home but I simply do not at this time.
I really needed to vent about work-life balance. The longer I stay with my current employer, the more important that work-life balance becomes as I continue to learn and become a workplace fixture. Some of my coworkers have spent decades with the company, some have moved on, and some have even passed away in these 10 years. At some point the line blurs between being coworkers and family. I am hopeful that I can navigate this environment for the long haul.
Finally, I want to talk about my latest indulgence: Final Fantasy 7. While attempting to navigate the aforementioned burnout issues, I’m hoping to get “bang for my buck” decompressing with Final Fantasy 7. This game is distinguished from the Final Fantasy 7 Remake–I’m talking about the original game from 1997. I’m somewhere in the neighborhood of 60 hours of gameplay in and I am loving all of it. What I found especially strange while playing is that I don’t remember a lot of the story–it was as if I had never played the game before. Don’t get me wrong, I do remember bits and pieces which indicate that I did beat the game way back when, but a lot of the story was simply new to me. I suppose we are talking about 24 years ago–more than half my lifetime to this date. The story is spectacular–I really am loving the experience. All of the fond nostalgia I had for the game was 100% warranted. The bar is set high for Square-Enix while I continue playing all of these legacy Final Fantasy games. I’d like to continue reliving further Square-Enix games either on PC or PS4.