Desert Airs

Tommy Life

All-American

by Paul

Tommy has finished his first year at college!!! Pima won regionals against teams from 4 states. He placed 6th overall. Then they went to nationals in Odessa, Texas where he played all four days and helped the team to a 15th place finish. He finished the year as a first-team academic all-american by maintaining a 4.0 gpa in mechanical engineering. So proud of him!

My BMW Problems

by Paul

Recently I was scolded by my son about how I was treating my car, and rightfully so. 

For explanation, I’ve had an intermittent issue with my BMW going into limp mode and throwing a check engine light when I would floor it. And It’s not like the car has a lot of miles, the issue started at 20K miles and the car is now at 40K miles. The issue hasn’t been too worrisome since the CE light would go away and the car would operate as normal after a restart. Over Christmas, though, it got worse. 

So being Christmas with my son home for break, he was kind enough to look into it. And after talking with him, it turned out that I’ve been acting like a total noob in respect to the BMW. See, most of my adult life, I’ve driven Audi cars. And I’ll admit, I mildly abused them and they didn’t seem to mind. How did I abuse them? Well, the cars ask for 91 octane (which I usually dutifully supplied), however, occasionally I would run low and was only near a gas station that charged extortionate pricing and reasoned, I’ll just give it a ¼ tank or maybe ½ tank of 85. And my Audis never protested. The BMW however is apparently much more finicky in its taste for premium petrol and those little dalliances with 85 were completely frowned upon by this finely tuned beast of a machine. Luckily damage appears to be contained to the spark plugs and were promptly changed. 

When I told my son about my gas filling habits, he laughed and proceeded to scold me about how BMWs have to get 91 and blah blah blah, well, I got the message – mostly. Consider these wrists slapped.