Not looking forward to the Holiday Season.

I have always enjoyed the Holiday Season. I absolutely love Thanksgiving, and Christmas. With this holiday season, I'm getting older, I have no significant other to spend my Holiday season with. I'm trying to get another job on top of my current job, so my expectations for this Holiday Season, are to work, work, and do more work. I have had previous addictions in my life, I've had quite a few loves. Currently the only thing I'm addicted to is money, and the only love I have is to myself and my family. I look forward to spending time with my family, and seeing my pregnant sister, and brother in-law, and my older brother and his wife. I'm also looking forward to November. For those of you that know me my birthday is at the end of November. Along with that, its the day after Thanksgiving. I also enjoy to play video games on the occasion, here in the past 3 months I've steadily grew away from gaming, but Call of duty: Black Ops comes out in November. I enjoy playing games because its a way for my brother and I to communicate and enjoy ourselves while live over 200 miles away from each other.
      If there was something fun that I could do during the Holiday Season, then maybe I would be looking more forward to it. If anyone has interesting holiday plans then let me know

Vehicle Problems!

I recently purchased a 1999 Chevy S-10 Extreme. I plan on using it as my daily driver. I am hoping to get a job somewhere in the area outside of Sparta, which is why I purchased this type of vehicle, so I get good gas mileage. In the first week of owning the truck, it drove fine. There were a few problems I was aware of such as, the heat didn't work, the bed cover works but is a little messed up, the passenger tail light doesn't work but the blinker and brake lights work, and the driver door handle doesn't work properly, but it does work.
     About 2 weeks after purchasing the vehicle I noticed the check engine light came on, so I stopped by Auto Zone to have them check the problem. It appears that there is a cooling problem. Were more then likely sure that the heater core is bad, the thermostat needed replaced along with the ECT sensor. I replaced the cheaper stuff and took the truck to Tire Plaza to have them perform a Radiator flush and now found out that the previous owner dumped about $60 worth of stop leak in the truck prob due to the heater core being bad. So now I have to purchase a new Radiator, a new heater core, along with flushing the old radiator all the way out, so I can get the stop leak out of the block. This job looks like its gonna take about 6 hours, and it has to be done in the next 2 weeks before it starts getting to cold to be able to drive the truck or work on it. I also need to buy new suspension, New tires, and new brakes, along with getting the tail light fixed and finances right now are tight. If anyone has any pointers or know of any cheaper parts to buy, or any mechanics that don't over charge or specialize in this area, feel free to let me know.  

Camaro Work

So I've officially started the tear down of the Camaro. There is little to no rust on this car what so ever. I'm super pumped about this because that saves me on so much time and work. The only thing left to do is start removing the wiring. As soon as the wiring is removed I plan on pulling the motor, to do a tear down of it as well. It currently is a Lt1 with a few aftermarket parts. It has an Elderbrock throttle body, open headers, three inch exhaust, unsure of the transmission, (haven't got under it yet), brand new roller rockers. However it needs a new head gasket, new spark plugs, an egr, gonna replace the radiator, and some other odds and ends. I have a cam that I'm not sure if I'm gonna put it in or not. This project is meant to be a street car, that's gonna be fast, but I really want it to be sharp and look good, that's why most of my focus is going to the body work, and the interior. Im 95% sure I'm going to do a 98-02 conversion on the car, same body style, just looks better in my opinion. I plan on putting in 2 Sparco pro 2000 seats. These are $750 a piece, a visage body kit, considering making it into a wide body if I feel up to it. Also the back part of the car wont have anything in it, other then a sound system. I'm thinking about getting a veil side spoiler to put on, but not sure if I wanna spend that type of money just for a spoiler. I'm putting some 18" Helo 825 rims on the front, and 20"s on the back. The time frame I'm putting on this project is around a year and a half. If anyone has any suggestions, feel free to comment and let me know thanks!

1995 Chevy Camaro Z28

A Work in progress

Any of you who know me, know that I appreciate cars. I'm typically more fond of American made cars then imports, but theres always the occasion. My first car I ever, was a 1996 Chevy Lumina LS. It had 99,000 miles on it, with the 3.1 V6. This car is a Grandma's Car for sure. In the year that I had this car I put over $3000 into it. The usual oil change, transmission flush, new brakes, new tires, rattle can painted the interior. It was practically a car that I could use as a daily driver to get me from point a to point b. When I purchased my 95 Z28 I planned on redoing the interior and was just gonna drive it. To find out when I went to replace the window motors in the door panels, there was a wiring problem. Not only that but the car originally was a automatic that a previous owner converted to a 6 speed. There is participially one problem with this, when you do a conversion like that theres a sensor, for automatics, that tells the engine which gear its in, (park, reverse, neutral,etc..) and when that sensor is in reverse, the reverse lights kick on. This sensor was never removed therefor I had no reverse lights. In addition to that, there was no heat or ac. I began a tear down of the entire interior, so I could get the car rewired. After weeks of sitting on the project planning what to do, I came to the conclusion that were going to take this ride back to square one. I'm talking total restoration. Due to the lack of finances, school, and work, and no place to work on the car, I'm currently sitting on the project tell tax season. However I do have some pictures and info on the car.

Boxing: The good, the bad, and the Painful!

     My brother is currently 25 years old, standing at 6' 3, 245 lbs. A few years back he was involved in mixed martial arts, kick boxing, karate, ju-jitsu, and boxing. There was an experienced that changed his fighting career. He was up for his first major amateur kick boxing, which was being held in St.Louis. He was nervous of course, the guy that he was to fight was a little smaller then he was, but he also was a  amateur boxer for a few years. My brother was watching the fight before his, and one of the fighters was struck to the side of the head with a kick, it not only knocked the guy out, but caused severe internal bleeding that led to his death about 8 hours later. This scared the hell out of my brother, especially before his fight. He ended up losing the fight due to a broken nose, that wouldn't stop bleeding. The moral of this story is any type of fighting is dangerous, and can be fatal. Its best advised that if your practicing any physical sport that makes contact to the body, take safety precautions.
     I however did not follow this piece of advice until recently. Four to five weeks ago, I was boxing with a few friends from work. We use 12oz boxing gloves, mouth pieces, and on the most part, headgear. The only thing that we left out, was of course, our hands. Out of the 6 people that go boxing with me, I'm the only one to ever sustain injury. I received a mild impact fracture to the inside part of my index finger (2nd metatarsal head) and several minor hair line fractures through the knuckle. Though I would love to put the gloves back on and go a few rounds, the thought of re-injuring my hand is just something I just couldn't cope with right now.
     I have a few videos posted on youtube of my boxing experiences. The links are First Boxing Video, and Second boxing Video. Please don't judge the videos based on their content, their not meant to show hard knock out hits, their meant for learning purpose to watch our techniques, and to work on our form. I also don't usually make videos with the exception of boxing videos. Please comment and enjoy!

Just a Little information about me.

     As you all should know now my name is Morgan Cavalier. This is my first semester at SWIC. I'm 19 years old, and I work at Showtime Cinemas in Sparta IL. I drive (or will when its done) a 1995 Z-28 Camaro. I currently hold the title as Assistant Manager, and will have worked there for two years come October. The job is pretty fun, most the people there are nice, and its always an enjoyment seeing people come to the show. One of the perks about working at a theater is having the availability to watch movies free of charge, and sometimes even before they're released.

    If you can't find me at work, you can usually find me sitting in front of my thirty-two inch LCD SANYO playing X-box 360, or the Playstation 3. The usual games I enjoy playing range from Call of Duty, to Forza 3, to Castlevania. For anyone who enjoys gaming and looks for a pretty decent competition, my gamer tag for Xbox is bobbymax2 and my gamer tag for playstation is bobby_max2.

     While in high school, I joined the Journalism class hoping to not do much and just sit around, cause that's what most teenagers want to do while in school, is nothing. It actually turned out that I enjoyed doing the writing, and developed a skill for photography as well. I most commonly wrote about video game reviews, and mixed in some of my artistic skills as well drawing up graphics. Since the work was being published, I couldn't pull pictures off of google or anything like that, and I would have to have permission to publish other peoples art work. I eventually became photographer of the Journalism class, developing skills with editing, angles, and positioning. There are some pictures to the right that I have taken for the zoo, and a field trip that I took in high school. Photography is defiantly a hobby I want to pursue later on in life.

Check in for next blog, will be discussing about my boxing experience, along with my car development of my Camaro.