Winter is dragging on, but the 818 poked its nose out of the garage to see its own shadow on Friday. Actually, I have not been working on the car at all- I was laid off late last year and with no salary no funny money.

The hiatus did allow me to focus on many of my lagging home projects (about 3 years worth ), so in truth I've been very busy between looking for a job, doing holiday things and laying a floor and painting the house.

Happily, I signed an offer letter for a new position last week, and I am getting excited about the new challenges the job will bring. The only downside is I'm going from a 0 minute commute to over an hour each way to/from Baltimore, going to be interesting to see how this works out.

One car related thing - actually the reason the 818 was out of the garage; I had to replace 2 failed air control valves on my daily driver (STI). It would have cost well over a thousand dollars to have the work done at my friendly neighborhood Subaru shop (never mind the stealership). But when I was talking to the shop owner about doing the job he smiled at me and said "You have this- you built a car already!" So he sold me a pair of take-off valves he had in his parts pile (for a LOT less than OEM new) and said it would be about an 8 hour job. I put the STI in the garage Friday morning and finished up Saturday at 3:00. What a chore - basically all the accessories had to come off the top of the engine and I had to loosen the intake manifold. It might have been easier if I pulled the IM completely off, but I managed to replace the parts without doing so - used a lot of extensions and swearing.

I would probably not have been able to complete this job if I hadn't built the 818 before hand. Having the comfort level of tearing down the accessories and knowing I'd be able to put it back together - absolutely priceless!

I will say that my 818C is not water-tight! It rained all day Saturday, and there was quite a bit of water in the drivers side footwell near the center tunnel. But free car wash!

With my new and much more limited schedule I am going to try to run a season of Auto-X (all Saturday events) and should be able to run 1 track day.

Best wishes for 2018 to everyone here!