So I finally figured out what’s wrong with my car stereo.

Well, not exactly what’s wrong with it, but how to make it work again anyway.

See, my car is perhaps the finest piece of steel to ever roll out of 1975, but therein lies the major problem: it rolled out of 1975.

Regardless of that, my friend Mike and I managed to replace the old Philco AM radio (not even FM, just AM) with a CD player and 120 watt amplifier, which I figured would have blown the car’s original alternator long ago.

Well it hasn’t.

What has happened is I’ll be driving and the radio will take a spell where it’ll lose power every time I push down on the accelerator and begin playing again when I let off the accelerator.

It’ll do this for hours, days, maybe even months. It’s baffled us ever since we installed the thing.

Well today I had an epiphany.

I noticed that the radio came back on when I pushed in the cigarette lighter, and would stay on till the lighter heated up and popped out.

We installed the cigarette lighter when we put the radio in and we hooked them both to the same power line. If anything, this should mean the radio would lose power every time the cig lighter was pushed in, not the opposite.

It seems that the lighter itself is completing the circuit and all the times when it wasn’t working the lighter wasn’t pushed all the way in.

So that’s solved.

But my gas gauge isn’t. In fact, it’s getting worse. It actually ran out the other day and I had to push it about an 8th of a mile.

Doesn’t sound far, but I’m in bad shape physically and the car weighs like two freaking tons.

That’s it for now. Back to HALO 2.

Oh, one last thing. Tomorrow (Wed, Nov 17th) I have my physical to see if I can't get some government assistance in getting my surgery done.

Wish me luck. I typically need it.