Its a Van again.

There is always lots of things to do with the van, but I'm happy that I got it up and going again.  The replacement part went in very easily and it looks good too. (pictured below)

Sweet new bleeder valve/hose thing.

Its always nice to have some shiny silver stuff in the engine bay to contrast the black hoses and 25 year old dirt.  The small hose is what snapped off the old plastic piece.  I don't know exactly what it does, but I imagine it is some sort of system pressure balancing crossover.  Either way it's important that its attached so coolant doesn't leak out. 

I've been meaning to clean up the inside and outside of the van.  Although I didn't get to the outside yesterday, I managed to vacuum it out and clean up the dashboard and rear deck area over the engine bay.

I bought some long handled pruners and a trash can for yard waste yesterday, so today I spent some time on the oleanders in the front and it didn't take long to fill up the trash can.  The trash (and hopefully yard waste) gets picked up tomorrow, so tomorrow afternoon I will work on the fruit trees in the back.  The fruit trees have a bunch of white fly and aphids and such, so they need to be cleaned up and maybe sprayed with some Neem Oil. 

On friday I applied for a cable assembly position at a place in San Marcos. I might call them tomorrow and see if they will give me a chance.  I also have to drop of my application at Pizza Port, I have been hesitating because..I don't know why.  I will do that tomorrow too, I swear.

The beers are almost crashed, I had the freezer set at 65 F to finish out the primary fermentation of the rye beer, so it has taken it a little while to get 10 gallons of beer down to 35 F.  The beer acts as a big heat sink, and especially without any airflow it takes a long time for the convection heat transfer to take place.  I'd be willing to bet that the conduction heat transfer between the bottom of the freezer and the carboy provides a large portion of the cooling process.  I really need to install a small computer fan in the freezer to keep the air moving and it should really help even out the temperature inside.  Once they are settled out pretty good I am going to rack the N.G. Alt bier into the secondary carboy.  Prior to doing this I am going to prepare a couple yeast starters (starter = base beer for propagating yeast) in order to harvest some of the German Ale yeast off the bottom of the carboy.  I plan on trying out the WLP029 German Ale yeast in the Janet's Brown Ale that I'm going to brew this week.  This is an effort to save money on yeast as well as play around with different yeasts and try to find a few really versatile strains.  This particular strain is said to be very clean fermenting and suitable for quite a few styles, so why not try it out.

2 updates in one day, but only because I should have posted the first one a day or two ago.
Cheers.