2020-03-30 — Of Transmissions and Raindrops

Hi y’all. 🙂

Happy Monday. 🙂

As I sit in my recliner in my bedroom writing this, I hear the patter of the rain on the roof above me.

I love Arkansas rain storms.

Anyway, last night I had one of those great dreams where I’ve found a fabulous woman, and things are going great. I don’t much ever remember dreams, let alone have good ones like that one, so it was nice. At least some of my living hours get to be spent with a significant other. 😀

My contract worker called about 8 o’clock this morning wondering where I was sending him today, so I gave him the info and got him headed on his way. I, too, got up and started heading out on my way, but on the steep climb up the hill to my first customer’s house, my trusty old beat up 97 Subaru Legacy Outback wagon stopped going forward, and I heard a loud clang clang clang clang clang!!!

I shut the car off and put it in park, only to realize that it was still rolling back down the steep hill while in park.

Nice.

Two transmissions in three weeks. Last time it was my 2007 Nissan Pathfinder that had already been on tranny life support before it finally gave up the ghost, and today it was the Outback, also on tranny life support. It’s funny. I have five other vehicles, and wouldn’t you know it but none of them are right for being a mobile mechanic. 

It did make me smile and laugh a bit, though. Which is nice. On other days, the decibel level of my voice might have increased… uh… substantially, and my vocabulary might have reverted to an average length of 4.5 letter per word.

I did better today, though. 🙂

So… the whole inside of the transmission just blew apart, I think. So much so that I couldn’t even drag it home without pulling the two front CV axles out. Got the first axle out in about 6 minutes, which is easily a record for me and a nice stroke of luck, given that my good friend left his shop and all the cars he had to fix in order to come help me get my car home.

The other axle didn’t behave as well. It was rusted into the wheel hub so badly we couldn’t get it out, so… I got my grinder and cut the thing out of the car–the end that was seized in flopping around and around and around on the way home. 😀 That side probably took 20-30 minutes, which was still would have been a record for me were it not for my 6-minute miracle (I tend to be a pretty slow mechanic).

Anyway, the car is home, and now I have three junkers that need to be sold off, two nice onces that need to be sold off, and a couple of shrug-your-shoulder pickup trucks that… exist somewhere in between.

And I still don’t have another work vehicle. 😀

Oh well.

Not being able to go out and work today, it was nice to have an employee earning at least some money for me. I’m grateful for that.

I spent the rest of the day on other work-related things. I picked up a part I needed, got repair info I needed, took care of my worker with things he needed while out working, etc. I also went to lunch with Thomas, got all the driveway gravel off the side hill next to the garage (hopefully, that will allow “grass” to grow there now).

Oh, the garage has been taken over by mice again. We have traps for them. I don’t like killing things. I feel like a little piece of my sensitivity dies each time I kill something. The traps are generally really good, I think, but somehow, this mouse managed to survive it. That’s the second time I’ve had to be the one to kill the mouse that was in the trap when the trap didn’t quite do it’s job properly–killing them quickly.

I really don’t like killing mice. One day, one of my posts will be about the value we place on life. I think it’s an extremely important conversation to have. People are making that choice now in some parts of the world with coronavirus. Which life do we value more? To whom do we give the ventilator? We have one, but three people need it. Off the top of my head, the best option instead of making a decision executively about whom it should go to would be to ask all three if any of them are willing to give up their chance at it to allow another to have it. Then, with whoever remains, the only way that I can see to deal with it safely is a lottery. Chance. Not value judgments. With chance, all remain equal.

Anyway, that’s an off-the-top-of-my-head thought. Probably lacking quite a bit somewhere, but it’s a thought. 🙂

I’ll have a whole official post one day dedicated to the value we place on life. And as will likely be true for many of my posts, it will probably be an exercise in working out my own feelings and beliefs in the process–a very organic process undertaken without an understanding of what the final perspective will be.

Well, there you go. Another day. Two days now. In the books on my journey back to daily journaling. Thanks for reading. I hope you get something out of it. 🙂

Sweet dreams or happy morning to you!

~ s