Van maintenance

The dealer said the van needed three things - new brakes up front, new front sway bar bushings, and a coolant flush.

This morning I drained about 2.5 gallons out of 4 that it supposedly holds. It really didn't look that bad; dark green but not horrible. Given that a full flush requires removing the thermostat, which is almost inaccessible and requires buying a gasket set to replace, plus a lot more dinking around and getting antifreeze all over the place, I decided that changing half of it was good enough. Maybe I'll do the same again every couple of years.

The bushings - yeah, they're a bit loose but not horribly degraded. As far as I can tell, they're not really bothering anything, just making some noise on bumps. Meh, I can live with it. They're not hard to change on this car though, they're right there. Maybe I'll do them sometime next year.

Brakes - yeah, they were bad, not quite metal but really close, and lots of rust. These were factory pads with 110,000 miles so it's about time. The inner side of both rotors were a little bit grooved but not too bad, the outer surfaces both dead flat. Given that they're held on by screws that I'd have to drill out (which isn't really a big deal, I've been told that mechanics almost always drill them out and they don't need to be replaced, they're just there to make manufacturing easier) I opted to just let them and the new pads duke it out. I bought a basic $27 semimetallic pad set; I've never found that the "premium" pads which are $40 are worth it. Certainly not the $50 or $60 ceramic pads. I guess if I were driving like some of the morons on the expressway I might benefit from ceramic pads.

Anyway, all that's done. Just as well, as I'm driving to work these days.

Book finished

Local Custom by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller

Acceptable writing (*), and a fairly romantic story, but my opinion of the Liaden culture is that it's pretty wretched. It's not as utterly shallow as Pern books by a long shot, but there's a bit of the feel of two-dimensionality to it.

There are two more books in the anthology that I won a few weeks back. I suppose I should finish them but I'm not really all that enthused about the universe. I may go read something else instead, and if I do, I doubt I'll get back to this series. The book did have enough internal pull to make me want to finish it, but not enough to really make me anxious to pick up the next book, or even to keep reading past page 300 in the anthology.

(*) Except for the preface, "Here there be dragons" - I find it hard to believe that it was written by the same people who wrote the books themselves, unless they've got a damned hard working editor that just didn't get a shot at the anthology preface. It reads like a junior high school book report. I very nearly threw the book out before I finished the preface, thinking it was indicative of the writing in general.