Ingenious Contraption

On Saturday, we figured out that we had probably put too much oil in our car... like 3 quarts too much oil... but we weren't quite sure. Our new Mazda's dipstick is absurdly hard to read. It's a long story with lots of details that no one really cares about, so we'll just say that we're pretty sure we thought it was empty so we added 3 quarts, and now we're thinking it was probably full to begin with.

So, being the self-reliant (not to mention "poor") students that we are, we had the great idea to rig up a homemade device to suck some of the oil out. The device would involve some rubber tubing from Lowe's and a baby nose-sucker from WalMart.

We drove all the way to Lowe's and were walking in when we realized that neither of us had our wallets (aka no $). We decided to check to see if they even had what we were looking for. They did. It cost 9 cents per foot. Dilemma: do we drive all the way home to get a quarter or do we search the floors of Lowe's until we've found all the loose change people have dropped? We searched the floors for about 5 minutes as we walked from the back of the store to the front doors, then drove home. We considered asking random people if they had any spare change. It's too bad we didn't have a spare Santa suit, a bell, and a Salvation Army bucket in our trunk.

We eventually did acquire the needed materials and produced the world's most inefficient oil-sucker. It took us about 45 minutes to suck out about a quarter of a quart.

We finally decided to take it to Jiffy Lube on Monday and have them drain all the oil and put in the right amount, just so we can be sure.