2020-04-01 — Comfort Foods

You know, one of the things I like about being an adult (if I actually qualify as one 🙂 ) is that on the way home tonight after another rough day at work, I could go grocery shopping and come home with the following dinner.

• Strawberry ice cream.
• Vanilla bean ice cream.
• Salty caramel ice cream.
• Hot Tamales (1.8 lbs of spicy sweet goodness).
• Twizzlers bites
• Gummy worms (two bags), and
• Peach Rings.

Full stop.

Will my teeth like me?

No.

Will the rest of my body?

No.

But… after a long, hard, stressful, discouraging work day in which I actually lost money instead of making money, it’s nice to have something to look forward to. A few (hundred) sweet bites and a couple (maybe 20) episodes of Suits to watch. 😀

Yeah, another tough day. Same car. Spent a good chunk of the day trying to get the tranny fluid at the right level. It’s a CVT transmission. It can only be properly tested between 95 and 113 degrees, and you’re supposed to turn it on, get it to 104 degrees, spend 5 seconds in each gear before returning to park, and then you’re supposed to remove the fill plug, wait for the fluid coming out to go from a stream to a drip, drip, drip, and then you’re good to go. Well… So what actually happens, is that you get to 104, and you pull the plug, and before it stops pouring and turns into the lovely drip drip, it’s above the threshold (And CVT transmission fluid increases in volume significantly with temperature), so then you turn it off. So, you turn it back on again after it’s cooled down to test it again, and guess what? Nothing at all comes out! So… you put some more in because now you’re concerned it’s too low. You put in maybe three to five ounces. Then it starts pouring out again, and it won’t stop! It never just drips. It keeps pouring and pouring, more than what you added, and now it’s back to being too hot, and you’re starting all over again! It’s awful. I really despise how modern cars are becoming less and less user friendly–all so the companies can make another buck.

Anyway, frustrating day. Couple that with the fact that the other job that went badly last night turned out not to even fix the poor customer’s car, so I didn’t charge him, taking a pretty good bath on it, losing hundreds of dollars because I’m not going to charge the customer for all the parts and labor that didn’t fix the problem he was wanting to get fixed. Sure, what I replaced needed to be replaced anyway, but it didn’t solve the problem we were trying to solve and that I thought I’d accurately diagnosed. So… I took a bath. Probably will lose not only hours of my time but hundreds of dollars.

Oh well.

You know what was nice?

Even takin a bath and having strung together several rough days in a row, I didn’t freak out. I just went. Oh well. I’ll take the loss. Whatever. I didn’t charge him a dime, but he wanted to pay me something anyway, despite my saying no, so he gave me $25. I tried to refuse, but I could tell he would have felt awful not giving me something, so I relented.

So… it’s 9:32 p.m. right now, it was a beautiful day. I got all my tools moved over from my poor Subaru to my mom’s Durango, which she’s letting me borrow until I get another work vehicle.

And even though it’s late, I’m still gonna head back out there and try and get this Pathfinder tranny fluid thing done and taken care of.

It was another rough day, being quite vocabularically challenged. I think I’m getting dumber.

Anyway, yeah. Here we are. Another day. Inching closer to getting out of the life-wasting work I feel like I’m doing and closer to letting it go, so I can focus full time on inspiring peace, love, compassion, understanding, acceptance, cooperation, etc.

I’m getting there… ever closer.

Ever closer.

And…