⚽️🎮 Week Notes 043
🗓️ // Oct 19, 2025 - Oct 25, 2025
Somewhat hectic week all around. Mary's Expedition started having misfire issues on Cylinder 4 out of the blue last week. It was already running low on oil so I feared the worst when getting the oil topped off had no impact. Nothing like an unexpected and potentially very expensive car repair issuse to disrupt your peaceful three-day weekend.
⚽️ Prior to the car drama we had our last three games of the fall soccer season. All three went to their usual form with our younger two daughters' teams having excellent games and S's team getting dominated.
🏡 Monday was the Founder's Day holiday at work so I got the day off. I ended up spending the morning and early afternoon getting the backyard and shed cleaned up. Then I spent the rest of the day cleaning up and organizing Mary's half of the garage so that there's enough space for me to work on the Expedition and the kids to work on their very extensive Halloween costumes.
🚙 Dug into the engine after work on Tuesday and discovered that the sparkplug well on cylinder 4 was full of water and preventing the coil from working properly. Fired up my air compressor and blasted the heck out of the water-filled well while dabbing around it with paper towels. Cleaned up and dried our the coil pack as well, it was remarkably clean
🚙 The car ran fine again once I reassembled and tested it Wednesday night, but contemplating replacing all of the coil packs anyway since they're still originals and the boot for the coil pack on cylinder 4 didn't seal out the moisture. Still need to sort out the moisture problem with a bunch of rain coming this weekend or we're back to square one.
🛒 The new flagship North 40 store that they've been building near our house for a little over a year finally opened up on Wednesday. A couple of the younger girls and I stopped by after church so I could pick up some silicon to repair the engine compartment leak in Mary's car. It's a very cool mix of outdoor recreation, hunting, farming, and hardware in walking distance of our house and I will try there first most of the time if I need something.
Playing
⚽️🎮 The Football Manager 26 beta came out on Steam this week, and it's super fun. I've logged a ton of hours while learning the game with the Wrexham women's team, but I've only played about five total games. Unfortunately, my current save is stalled by a UI bug that isn't letting me switch out a couple of players that are away on international duty. I checked the season to date, though, and the team's performance and standout players were fairly similar to my own.
🧙♂ Played a little Magic Arena this, but mostly coasting and not caring about the weekly mastery pass at this point.
Watching
📺 Chad Powers S1E5 👍 Horribly cringe-inducing very bad episode for Russ Holiday. I guess this is the disaster portion of the season's dramatic arc and it sounds like maybe there's only one more episode in season 1? The show has a lot of goodwill built up with me, but I didn't enjoy this one quite as much.
📺 Lots of YouTube videos on FC26 to be honest. Most of the streamers seem to like it just fine despite all the complaints from longtime fans.
Projects
🏡 Yard, garage, and car mainly this past week as mentioned above.
📼 I have been recording my Wrexham videos with an eye towards documenting my Gladys Daystrom save and putting them up on YouTube. The main issue there is that I have to play the game with low quality graphics and my Mac is not a gaming machine but I find the season super fun and I'm intrigued to tell an ongoing storyline and put it up on YouTube.