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I wish I would have started working on cars earlier in life – it would have saved me a bunch of money. Here are some things I’ve learned over the last few years of working on my own cars.

• When replacing suspension components that involve removing sway bar links, plan ahead and get new sway bar links. This tip does not apply to places where cars don’t get rusty. But around here, sway bar links are considered single-use. They are designed to be able to be removed and re-installed, but that’s only in a perfect world. They’re cheap enough that it’s not worth my time to try to save them. I’ll give it one attempt to undo them, but if they don’t cooperate I just get out the angle grinder and off they go.
• Speaking of sway bar links (and other stubborn rusty connectors), a good tool to have is an impact wrench. It doesn’t loosen everything, but it has helped. And it helps tighten those sway bar links. I got a cheap electric one from Harbor Freight. I went with corded electric because I don’t have shop air and I don’t use it enough to make it worth managing batteries.
• The steering wheel on the van was wobbling. Slowly at low speeds and faster at higher speeds. That seemed like an easy diagnosis – one of the front tires broke a belt and is now out of round. So I swapped out the front tires (normal to winter or vice-versa) but the problem continued. I took it to the shop and told them what happened. It didn’t take them long looking at it to find it was a rear tire with the broken belt. Moral of the story: just because the symptom is in the steering wheel doesn’t mean the problem is in the front end.

It is time once again to update Some Blog Site readers on the results of my Some Fun Site project to create a more accurate football prediction method.
The 2021 NFL season is over, and here are the most accurate methods for predicting regular-season game results (wins-losses):

• MPWLS: 63%
• ITPLS: 63%
• MYW: 60%

I thought the Home Field Advantage factor would come back into play this year, after being diminished last year due to lack of crowds, but oddly enough it did not, and the biggest factor was how the teams did last year.

If you think you have a formula that can predict the winner of an NFL game better than 62.8% of the time, let me know and I’ll add it to the list.
(For the ideas behind the methods, please visit the Some Fun Site page.)

Okay, okay, it is 2022 at this point, but the results are headlines as 2021 because they match with the 2021 predictions made in 2021 for the 2021 season. Also, the results are not all-haiku, just the predictions were. A more accurate title would be “Results for the All-Haiku Predictions made in 2021”.

Before the bowl games commenced for this past college football season, I made some predictions and some more predictions. Here, for your reading enjoyment, is the tally of those predictions. Note that the results are not in haiku form, in contrast to the predictions.
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Since we’re in the dead of winter with snow covering everything, it’s a good time to think about flowers. I’ve already started receiving seed catalogs, but I’m not sure how much ordering I’m going to do this year. I seem to be on track with my seed saving, so we’ll see.

I wanted to see when all the perennials we have here start blooming. Mainly to see what needs some help from annuals, but also maybe moving something around or adding something.

Blooms by Month (when the flowers first appear):

March
First to bloom every year are the snowdrops.

Next is something I’ve been calling Siberian iris but I think that’s wrong.

And the yellow crocus arrives before …

… the purple crocus.

And then come the species tulips.
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This is a quiz to test your knowledge of both the Bible and the maternity ward.

What do those two things have in common? A lot of Greek/Latin/Roman names.

It’s been a while since I’ve been in the maternity ward section of a hospital, but having been there a few times I picked up on some common terms.

This quiz is in a simple multiple choice format. I’ll present 4 choices – A through D – and you pick the term that is not from the Bible but rather is from the maternity ward.

On your marks.

Get set.

Go.

Set 1:
A. Galatians
B. Ephesians
C. Philippians
D. Colustrum

Set 2:
A. Macedonia
B. Pergamum
C. Lycaonia
D. Meconium

Set 3:
A. plains of Shinar
B. isle of Patmos
C. medium of Endor
D. score of Apgar

Set 4:
A. 1st and 2nd Corinthians
B. 1st and 2nd Thessalonians
C. 1st and 2nd Chronicles
D. 1st and 2nd Episiotomies

And… pencils down. That’s it for the quiz. Please exchange papers with the classmate next to you and we’ll grade them now.

The answers are: 1 D, 2 D, 3 D, and 4 D.

I hope you all did well. A passing score of at least 60% can qualify for Continuing Education Credits, please grab a form for that on the way out if you need it.

I’m calling these things albums, but Amazon calls them playlists. Close enough. Amazon also has things they call stations, which are just playlists but you can’t see the list of songs in it.

First up: Christmas Hymns

Good stuff. The songs were sung in a manner that was faithful to the way they were written, and the way everyone expects them to be. It was also a good length for an album, just over an hour.

Second up: Christian Christmas Favorites

Some good stuff, some not-so-good stuff. I suppose it depends on what you’re looking for, but the title of this album was not quite representative. It starts off with a mix of classic Christmas carols and newer songs about Christmas. I wouldn’t classify some of those newer songs as “favorites”, but they were about Christmas and they were from a Christian perspective, so I did appreciate them.

What I didn’t appreciate was some of the songs mixed in: Winter Wonderland, All I Want for Christmas is You, and some others that I think were included because they were performed by Christian artists. But that doesn’t make them Christian Favorites. Plus, this album clocked in at 3 hours and 14 minutes, so they certainly could have done without those songs. And I didn’t need 3 different versions of Breath of Heaven. The curators could have picked their favorite version, or maybe they couldn’t agree on the best version and so they each put their favorite version in and hoped no one would notice the redundancy.

I had to mark this one down also due to Jordan Smith’s song “O Come (Let Us Adore)” because it took a standard Christmas carol and added a new section.

Last up: Caroling at Christmas

This one was okay. It had Christmas carols, plus some other popular Christmas songs such as Feliz Navidad that I wouldn’t classify as carols. Can you picture a group of people walking up to a house and serenading them with “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas”? No. Therefore, it is not a Christmas carol, and it should not be in this collection.

Anyway, this album has most of the staples, and they’re the type you’d catch on a radio station this time of year – Frank Sinatra, Andy Williams, etc.

Fine background music.

And that’s about it for Christmas albums that interested me. I then switched to Handel’s Messiah and listened to that while I finished our Christmas card layout.

Based on the popularity existence of last year’s article predicting bowl games in haiku form, I present to you this year’s all-haiku bowl game predictions. Still America’s only all-haiku college football bowl game predictions.

These are listed in order of date (earliest first). Some picks are whom I think will win, and some picks are whom I want to win. I’ll leave it to you, the reader, to decide which is which.
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