It happens every semester. The first few weeks are amazing; everything is new and exciting. I’m on fire to reach my goals, and put forth every effort to do so. But as the semester continues, like the thickening of bacon grease, things tend to roll more and more slowly.

I knew that the suspension was going bad because the car bounced more than one time when I pushed down on the bumper and any car should only bounce once. It also bottomed out a lot during normal driving.

The total cost of parts was around $150 and since I put them in myself, labor was free. I can imagine that most shops would  charge over $400 for the job.

Since I have never installed new struts before, the first one took about three hours from start to finish. The second strut only took about one and a half hours. Replacing the struts involves removing the sway bar, tie-rod end and ball joint from the steering knuckle and control arm, then unbolting the strut (coil-over) from the car. A spring compressor tool is used to squish the spring down enough to safely get the strut out from inside the coil. The new strut is inserted in the coil, and the process is reversed for installation.

The rear shocks were much easier, and I replaced both of them in about an hour. There is one bolt on the top and one on the bottom. The hardest part of that was pulling back the carpet inside the car to get access to the upper mount bolts.

A lot of people have asked me how I learned to work on cars, and my answer is always simple. I learned to work on cars by working on cars (and trucks). One of the first things I do is look in the Haynes manual. This is a $20 book that can be purchased at most auto parts stores.

Another great resource is of course the Internet. My homepage is chevytalk.org. Another forum that I used was ls1lt1.com. For the last project, I actually found some good info on youtube.com.

A quick Google search can turn up lots of information on whatever vehicle you own. Most jobs don't require special tools beyond wrenches and sockets, but if they do most parts stores rent tools for free (with deposit).

Good luck!

Your neighbors probably aren’t doing anything illegal, and their activities probably don’t harm you in any way. But they’re annoying, right? The easiest way to take care of this problem is to have police with guns threaten to kidnap and imprison your neighbors if they don’t stop. But how can you get the police to make violent threats against people who aren’t doing anything wrong?

All you need is small amount of authority and a big red herring. Parking space is usually a good one.

This is what the city council of Duncanville, Texas did. Council members of Duncanville couldn’t stand the fact that a Duncanville resident was hosting swinger parties in her home. They couldn’t reveal their prejudice against the activity by outlawing the parties without an outside reason, so they chose to reference parking concerns.

According to a Nov. 7 Dallas Morning News article by Holly Yan, the Duncanville City Council approved an ordinance preventing the operation of “sex clubs” in private residences.

The article quoted Councilmember Johnette Jameson saying, “We are not addressing what activities are going on. We’re addressing the traffic. We have to be good neighbors to each other.”

If they were truly addressing parking issues, you would think the ordinance would have addressed parking issues. Instead, it defined “sex club” as “any premises, person or organization that is presented, advertised, held out or styled as, or which provides notification to the public that it is a swinger’s club; an adult encounter group or center; a sexual encounter group or center; party house or home; wife, spouse or partner-swapping club; or that it provides permission, an opportunity or an invitation to engage in or to view sexual activity, stimulation or gratification, whether for consideration or not.”

According to the city’s definition of “sex club,” which actually (and I assume, accidentally,) includes an instance in which a married person invites his or her spouse home for a “romantic encounter,” using a house for a party that involves sex makes it a sex club.

If city officials were really concerned about parking, they would make laws addressing parking. But they aren’t as concerned about where people are parking their cars as much as they’re concerned about where people are “parking their cars.”

A city commissioner in Big Rapids used the same excuse to strip landlords of their private property rights in a move that was intended to get rid of students living in a particular zone. After one of the city commission meetings, I was told that there was a concern about parking, but there was no legitimate explanation of how forcing students out, and magically bringing families in, would solve any parking problems.

Though our nation was founded on the idea that we have a right to liberty, even when that right annoys other people, we have never been promised the right to park on the side of the street. Citing the parking issue, city officials will take away other liberties, but they’ll probably never take away your ability to park on the side of the street. If they did, what excuse would they have to take away your other rights? 

We’ve grown up surrounded by the idea that true love is perfect and peaceful, and it has affected how our relationships pan out. How many people have broken up with someone that they really cared about because they didn’t match that idealistic perception of “the one?”

I listened to Savage Garden when I was about six years old, listening and admiring the music with lyrics like, “I want to lay like this forever until the sky falls down on me,” and “I knew I loved you before I met you, I think I dreamed you into life.”

The fact is, however, that my ideas of love and the search for perfection were defined even before Savage Garden came on the radio.

Most of us watched all of those classic Disney movies when we were younger. Some of us still do because they are awesome, but they promote all of the same unreachable ideas and ridiculous standards and expectations as all of the other movies and television shows.

If you think about it, those movies were all about princes and princesses, true love, magical kisses and every other crazy thing you can think of. Now of course we don’t actually believe that our true love’s first kiss will actually wake us from a deep sleep, but who’s to say that we don’t expect a similar result metaphorically?

I believe that relationships suffer mostly because of these high standards shown by every romantic movie you’ve probably ever seen.

The truth is that while some moments of love can feel like that, not every second can be filled with magical moonbeams, sweet-smelling roses, and the purity of heart and everlasting stability that sometimes we expect.

People make mistakes and no one is perfect, no one will meet our every desire. But if you find someone whose mistakes you are able to deal with, that’s about as close to perfect as you’re going to get.

Valerie Kirn-Duensing of the Northern Express Weekly newspaper revealed some of the most common relationship “misconceptions” that a specific psychologist had discovered.

The couples she studied found themselves struggling with things such as not spending enough time together, fighting too much, not as much romance as there used to be, and they were troubled because their relationship wasn’t "perfect."

She admitted that she herself had been guilty of these ideas that may have been “gleaned from the popular media,” and from “those tender first years of our lives.”

She said, “As human beings, we live what we learn, like it or not.”

While we all have some aspect of misconceptions about true love, there are ways to break down these previous misconceptions and build a new definition of love for yourself and develop a “healthy, mutually- rewarding” relationship with someone that can really be your prince (or princess) charming.

According to the Associated Press, “a top intelligence official says it is time that people in the United States changed their definition of privacy.”

The recently confirmed Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence, Donald Kerr, says that people should no longer hope to remain anonymous. Instead, they should renounce their anonymity in the hopes that the government can protect them from terrorists and cyber-criminals.

I understand that most people’s personal information is online via social networking websites and what our nation’s president refers to as “the Google.” I wouldn’t find much of a problem with this except for the fact that when you give the government an inch, they take a mile. It’s already being seen with the erosion of our rights in Congress.

“Lawmakers hastily changed the 1978 law last summer to allow the government to eavesdrop inside the United States without court permission, so long as one end of the conversation was reasonably believed to be located outside the U.S.,” the A.P. article said.

“Mark Klein, a retired AT&T technician, helped connect a device in 2003 that he says diverted and copied onto a government supercomputer every call, e-mail, and Internet site access on AT&T lines,” the article also said. Legislation is currently in the works that will shield telecommunications companies in issues such as these.

The war on terror has opened the flood gates for abuses. Government officials can now be more blatant when telling you to surrender your rights. Kyle Opsahl of the online free speech defending Electronic Frontier Foundation said it nicely in the article.

“Anonymity has been important since the Federalist Papers were written under pseudonyms,” Opsahl said. “The government has tremendous power: the police power, the ability to arrest, to detain, to take away rights. Tying together that someone has spoken out on an issue with their identity is a far more dangerous thing if it is the government that is trying to tie it together.”

The terrorist boogeyman does pose a threat against us. But the Bush Administration’s war on terror is completely separate from this threat. The war on Iraq is making more terrorists than it is eliminating. Innocent Iraqis are in a war zone with no rights with an occupying force that, as seen with Abu Ghraib and the recent CIA waterboarding and Blackwater catastrophes, believes that the ends justify the means. Our real enemy is this administration and the never-ending war that is in place.

 Also, this is not the first time the Bush administration has assaulted the dictionary. George W. Bush, in 2002, said, “I just want you to know that, when we talk about war, we’re really talking about peace.” If I had ever read ‘1984’ by George Orwell, this is probably where I would make some clichéd comparison.

So when you’re thinking of issues that are important to you while you're in the voting booth next year, think of this. As John Edwards said, the war on terror is little more than something to slap on a bumper sticker. This administration’s war on our civil liberties and our Constitution are more much important than being “tough” on terror.

An examination of some sleeping habits that may work for you.
By Paul Jarema, Production Manager

I’ve always been a guy that enjoys his sleep. My parents will tell you about the days of my infancy when I would celebrate the fact that I had to go to bed for the evening. That hasn’t changed too much now that I’m older but now I realize the full value of good sleep habits.

As with all my articles dealing remotely with health, I will tell you that I am in no way a medical professional nor claim to have any scientifically proved facts. These tips are just things that I believe work for me.

Stick to a Regiment

Many artist are commercial rappers. There are others that actually live what they rap about.  With all the negative stereotypes surrounding the hip-hop industry it might be best if the critics paid attention so they would learn that a discussion has already begun about how hip-hop is trying to improve the culture. Many other things have made an impact on how people perceive certain cultures. Overall we need to realize that we cannot bash one genre of music. Music is a representation of the culture that it comes from. Making assumption about music or a culture is not beneficial; therefore, research first.