Yeah, pretty much want to rip my own face off.

I have crooked teeth. They’ve been slightly crooked for years—I never received orthodontia as a kid, and my teeth were straight enough then to avoid picket fencing and headgear and palate keys and all the other hellish shit my sister had to endure. She got the business while I sat in the waiting room for hours reading Archie comics as they jabbed hot pokers at her face behind the partition. I’d say I won that particular battle. Mom says they couldn’t follow up on me because they had other bills to pay, and I don’t fault them. Thirty years later, insurance still barely covers any of this shit, and it’s expensive.

As I’ve gotten older my teeth have gotten more summer—summer here, summer there—to the point where my lower incisors are pointed backwards and overlapping each other, like a fence about to fall down. My molars have all turned inward, and my top incisors have slowly followed the lower ones in alignment. My whole palate has shrunk, actually. I’ve always been self-conscious about my teeth, but having a teenage daughter who needed braces put any notion of self-care on the back burner until those bills got paid. Finn’s still got the braces, but the monthly payments are behind us so I figured I’d finally step up and get my shit fixed.

I talked to her orthodontist about Invisalign and he set up an appointment to have my mouth scanned, after which he showed me terrifying 3D models of my face and assured me we could straighten things out. That was three weeks ago. Today I went in and they attached small plastic nubs to my teeth with some stinky glue, and then popped a pair of clear plastic trays over top of it all. I left with a box of thirty new trays and the maddening urge to peel at the plastic off with my tongue.

All afternoon I’ve been trying to stop myself from futzing with them, and I’m losing. I can feel the pull of the trays pretty much across my whole palate, but the strongest right now is my right upper canine area, which feels like someone’s pushing on my face from the outside. Taking them out to eat is worse—I can feel all the nubs sticking out on my teeth, like barnacles on a tramp steamer.

Yeah, I signed up (and paid for) something like seventy weeks of this shit. If I don’t tear the skin off my own face by the Fourth of July, it’ll be a miracle.

Extremely satisfying. I’m still working on consistency from one weld to the next, but I was pretty proud of this one. Tomorrow night we start hands-on stick welding, which is supposed to be harder than TIG but much more flexible.

In the face of supremely bad news on Tuesday morning, I’m going to write a little bit about welding class so far to keep myself from screaming. So far, I love both oxy-acetylene and TIG with a new passion; both are excellent in their own way and both come with drawbacks. But it’s like my instructor told us: each one has its uses. Oxy-acetylene is slow and methodical: it’s heating metal with a flame. It’s also the coldest of all methods, so it takes longer and demands patience. But I enjoyed a kind of meditation while welding two sections of 1/8″ metal together. It’s soothing; “knitting with fire” is how my instructor described it. Not quite something I’d do on the couch in front of Netflix, but it would definitely go with some cool jazz or mellow electronica in the garage.

TIG is immediate and gratifying and makes short work of anything. It took half the time to weld the same length of steel together with TIG, and it’s easier to dial in the temperature and keep it steady. I see now why the pros on YouTube bust out the TIG torch when making metal stick together. But I spent half the night running to and from the sander to clean the electrode, even when I kept the tip away from the puddle. That’s a pain in the ass. With skill I bet there would be half the tungsten cleaning nonsense and a lot more productivity; I’d need to take the intermediate TIG course to learn more about how to dial the machine in for different thicknesses and situations. On Thursday we’re going to do another hour of TIG and then start learning about different chemical processes in the leadup to plasma cutting, and then I think we move to stick welding next.

Last night I joined about fifteen other guys in a cinderblock room and sat through my first welding class. The training facility is on the other side of town on Pulaski Highway, surrounded by commercial printers, auto shops, machinists, small factories, and cheap motels. I got there early and found I was one of three men over the age of 30; as we went around the room for the getting-to-know-you part, I learned I was taking the course with a farmhand, two young men who were learning a trade to get out of their houses, a father and his two sons, and another kid who was being put through the course by his company, among others.

My instructor is a year older than me and became a welder the same year I started college. He’s a bit gruff but approachable, has a sense of humor I haven’t cracked yet, and seems to really know his shit. Don’t judge a book: when a guy in frayed Dickies starts explaining the different molecular reactions behind different welding processes, I lean forward. We sat through the standard safety and basic background presentations, got some books, and did some light Q&A before calling it a night. Tomorrow night is nothing but theory, and we’re starting with oxy-acetylene for the first hands on practice. From there we do TIG, then stick, then MIG, and some quick demos of cutting with torch and plasma. I have a giant binder of reading material to go through and a test to take at the end of the course. I can’t wait.

Here’s all of the action from Monday, from morning to cleanup, minus the sections of no activity (namely, four trips to Ace Hardware).

The weather is getting warmer, which means it’s not quite as painful to stand outside and bang knuckles against cold steel, which is everyone’s favorite winter pasttime. I woke early on Sunday to drive over the bridge to Chestertown and pick up work on the schoolbus, something we haven’t done since early December when we put the seats in.

The first order of business was to get it started. It’s been sitting in the shed for months, so we put a trickle charger on the battery and futzed around with the windows inside. Testing out the theory that the windows are easily interchanged, we moved one of the emergency exit windows forward so that it sits directly between the passenger seats and is easy to get to.

Once we got it running and pulled out of the garage, we decided it would be much easier to work in Brian’s driveway where power and tools were easily accessible. We caravaned back to his house and then had to jockey trailers and tools and building materials around to make room in between the house and his new garage footer.

With that done, we got to work disconnecting the engine and storage batteries, pulling the wires, and disassembling the battery box. It took a while to get the box itself out, because they’d welded the back corner of it to the frame and spot-welded the edges to structural supports on the side. We wound up having to step on the edge to push it downward, shove a prybar between it and the frame, and whack it with a sledge to start separating the materials. Several sawblades, a trip to Ace Hardware, more pounding, and some specialized curse words later, we released it from the underside of the bus and dragged it away.

The plan was to replace it with a newer, bigger box where more batteries will fit and be be easily accessible. But now that the box was gone, we could also mount the passenger seat base permanently, which went relatively easily. Putting the new box in was more of a challenge; we realized early on that we were going to have to drop the other box we’d labored over in September. With that out of the way we got the mounting bolts in place and roughed in the battery box. By 7PM we were beat, the boxes were cattywampus, and the sun was down behind the trees. We called it a night and went in for a cold beer. I laid down on Brian’s spare bed at 9:30 and was fast asleep fifteen minutes later.

Monday morning I made sure my automatic replies were set correctly and we got back at it. Dropping the box, we found a couple of reasons why the box was hanging incorrectly and beat them into shape with a hammer. With that box hung, we put the longer box next to it in place and I set to work fastening both boxes to each other and to the stair wall.

Now that the box was in, we had to sort out how to put a set of industrial ball bearing rollers in and fabricate a shelf. The rollers were pretty easy to mock up, and I figured out a way to reuse the shelf from the original box with some new angle iron. Another trip to the Ace scored us the hardware we needed, and by about 5PM we had the shelf in place, the batteries mounted, the wires rerouted, and everything reconnected. Brian turned the key and the bus roared back to life.

We had a new power awning ready to be hung, but found quickly that the arms were too long, so we packed everything in and I hit the road for home.

Today most of my joints are sore, I’ve got gouges in three of my ten fingers, and I feel like I could fall asleep as I write this. But I’m happy with the results, and we’re that much closer to the interior work.

Frequent visitors here know that I’ve been hoarding a lot of truck parts for the last couple of years. This week a set of original Rallye rims popped up on CL down in Virginia, and through the course of the week, the seller dropped the price from $400 to $350. On Friday I contacted him, and he sent me pictures of each rim that were clearer than the listing. I did a quick freelance job last weekend through a friend—basically creating a vector outline illustration of his car—and the payment hit my Venmo account a day later, for roughly the same amount as the rims. Serendipity, right? I thought it over all day Saturday, and in the afternoon I decided to pass. I don’t need different rims, although Rallye rims are my favorites. Something in my brain told me to slow down.

I’m very aware that I’ve been filling the pandemic void with retail salvage therapy, basically hitting the parts listings daily to find good deals on stuff locally. I love the thrill of the hunt, planning for recovery trips, and the fun of going to discover and pick over old wrecks for good parts. I enjoy the planning and preparation almost as much as the picking itself: having all the right tools to do the job is a satisfying feeling. And knowing I’ve got spares of most everything is a comforting thought, as well as helpful when I want to refurbish what I’ve got. I learn by example—seeing how something is put together vs. squinting at a poorly-printed diagram or following shitty directions in a Chilton’s manual, so it’s been worth the money to have spares to refer to.

But how much is enough? Do I need more than one of a lot of these things? I tell myself I can refurbish some of this stuff and resell it, but I haven’t made a lot of effort to do that in the last couple of years. If I was serious about it I’d put the word out before Nationals to pre-sell, and bring it with me (I don’t want to piss off the vendors there by selling from the back of my truck). I have enough sheet metal, one or more of everything that unbolts from the tub. I have spares of almost all of the mechanicals save the chassis, some of which I want to learn how to refurbish myself. Do I need more stuff? Where do I put it?

Going by that Mayo Clinic article, I’m not to the point where sheet metal is piled up in the house, but the garage is pretty well stuffed with parts. I’ve got things organized as best I can in the space that I have (and I have plans for re-organizing it all in the spring). I have sold lots of parts in the past, in the Before Times, when we did more in-person meetups, so I’m always willing to wheel and deal.

The other problem is ongoing projects. I’ve got about six different projects on the bench right now waiting for parts or better weather to complete: the heater box, the steel gas tank, the windshield washer switch, the spare hub, the rear seat etc. When my focus shifts and I let things go for too long, I forget where I am in the process and I have to start over again. The gas tank needs warmer weather, as do the washer switch and seat. So I have to finish those first before I move on to other stuff, and sometimes it’s hard to be patient.

Jen and I were talking about this a little bit, and something she said resonates with me: I’m a results-oriented person. I like to see progress in some form for each day: What did I accomplish? How did I make a difference? A pile of rusty parts is one way to scratch that itch, especially when my career is less and less defined by tangible products and more and more by an Outlook calendar filled with Zoom calls. But there’s got to be a balance somewhere, and I’m struggling to find it.