Audiobook finished

Thief of Time by Pratchett

Death series. The Auditors take on human form and commission a genius clockmaker to recreate an infamous "glass clock" from history - one that takes its beat from the fabric of the universe. When the first one was built, it ripped history apart, and the time monks spent hundreds of years rebuilding history.

A trainee monk, along with "sweeper", who isn't a monk but is actually more skilled than any of them, go to try to stop it. The trainee is incredibly gifted and seems to understand manipulation of time by instinct. In the end, the genius clockmaker and the trainee turn out to be the same person; they're the son of Time and the founder of the order of time monks; at his birth, Time was terrified and the moment of birth was repeated, causing him to split into two beings.

Long day

I got out relatively early and started leveling the new flower garden. While I was working on that, the neighbor called me over. He had picked up a 2.5 gallon jug of concentrated weed stop, and had borrowed a friend's tow-behind powered liquid sprayer. The jug was enough to do both of our lawns twice over so he said he'd do my lawn too. I'd been meaning to do this anyway; I don't mind dandelions in moderation, but they don't understand moderation.

He was towing it with his big quad bike, and had trouble; the hitch was way too high and it wouldn't go slow enough, so I brought my mower over for him to use.

Eventually we got talking about generators, and he's been trying to sell me his 3500 watt unit. He pulled it out to show me and the stupid thing seized up while he was trying to crank it. We wound up tearing it partially down and guessing that he had a stuck ring (it stopped at TDC). So I went and got some of the "chain lube" that I had in a oil can - it's 1/3 30-weight oil and 2/3 mineral spirits. I squirted in about 10 pumps of that and after some coaxing it started spinning again with only a minor hitch at the top which went away later.

We put it back together and it started up, but even after a couple of minutes it was still blowing blue smoke. I figured the oil ring was stuck too so we decided to put some tranny fluid in the crankcase and run it for a few minutes to break the ring loose. I couldn't find the tranny fluid, but I'd been meaning to clean the garage anyway, so he went back to spraying our lawns while I cleaned the garage.

In the end I pretty much emptied the garage onto the driveway (looked like the world's messiest yard sale). I found the tranny fluid, we ran it 10 minutes, then changed the oil and it was running great after that.

Then I spent the next 6 hours moving the shelves that were nailed to the wall and trying to find proper homes for everything. Finally at about 8:30 or so I just started tossing everything back in the garage so the place wouldn't look like a junkyard (also it looked like it might rain). And I had to be able to get the blue car out, I'm supposed to take it in for service tomorrow.

The garage is still a mess but I think I've identified a large quantity of stuff that can be thrown out or given away, and we now have 1/2 of the attic of the garage available for storage that wasn't there before, so there's hope of getting to the end of this with both stuff put away and still able to move around and do work out there.