Seriously, does the wear and tear ever make you curious about the people who owned it before?

People act like redoing a deck every few years is some huge chore. It's a weekend project at most. My neighbor used water based five years ago and it still looks fine. The sun here is brutal too. Maybe if you're hosting pool parties every day it matters, but for normal use it's not worth the mess of oil.

Glad to hear you got your system sorted. Proper crimps are a good start, but in a moving vehicle, those connections can shake loose over time. I always add a bit of solder after crimping for extra hold. My last win was tracing a ground fault to a rusty bolt under the chassis. Cleaning that up made all my 12V accessories work like new.

HP's service manuals insist on straps, @ruby_lopez.

Read an article in the Atlantic a while back that basically said our brains use boredom and routine tasks, like daydreaming at work, to process bigger existential questions. It framed mundane mental drift as a kind of low-priority background processing for stuff we normally avoid. Makes your point about personal urgency hit different, like the mind sneaks the cosmic in through the back door when we're not looking.