2020-05-04 — Testing My Mettle

Well… happy… what day is it?

Monday!

Sorry… been a day. 🙃

Let’s see… I jumped on the lawnmower relatively early this morning because the grass was getting tall, and I wanted to try to get the lawn mowed before the storm rolled in.

Unfortunately, both the mower and the storm had other plans. 😬

First, it was the mower. As I was racing around at full speed and full throttle, the mower grabbed a ratchet strap that a buddy of mine had left, and I’d forgotten to throw away. It sucked it in, and in the process shut down the engine and threw the deck belt off. 😣

It took a little while, but I got the strap unwrapped from the center blade and the deck belt re-routed. Then it was back to work. Around around, racing the storm. Then all of the sudden, I felt resistance trying to go forward.

I looked behind me, and there was probably 20 feet or so of torn up grass, as if I were dragging something. I lifted up the mower a few times, expecting to see a rock or something that I’d been dragging… but nothing.

Finally, I realized that the issue was actually that the front deck guide rod had snapped in half, and the leftover part had been wedged under the deck, and was chewing up the ground like an 1800s plow 🙁 (I still don’t know where the other half of the rod is… somewhere on the lawn I guess). I spent probably 45 minutes running around trying to find the duplicate part from the parts mower I’d disassembled a few months ago. I even scoured my metal pile–twice.

No cigar.

Then I remembered that I’d put a bunch of the extra parts in a storage bin in the root cellar, so I went to the storage bin, and viola! The duplicate rod. 😁

I’m super glad I kept that part, especially since it’s one that you’d never think would go bad, but… it did, and because I had a backup part, I didn’t have to wait a week before I could finish mowing the lawn.

Aaaaaaaaanyway… so I got that new part put on and went racing around the yard, but by this time, the storm had other plans. At first it was drops here and there, but as is the norm here, it was only a matter of time before the clouds cracked open, and the buckets came pouring down.

Even with it raining hard, I kept trying. I pushed it as far as I could, but once I was starting to get pretty well soaked, I threw in the towel, and raced back to the garage.

Fortunately, after about an hour, the sun came out, and the wind kicked up, and between the two, the yard was still wet, but just dry enough for me to go around and finish the mowing without too many issues sliding on the wed grass.

After mowing, fixing the mower, and mowing again, I submitted the info to the county for the vehicles I’d just sold, so I could get them off my property tax assessment. I did some laundry, and I organized some of my papers that have been getting a little unruly.

I didn’t even go out to work until well into the afternoon. Part of the reason was that I wasn’t feeling well today–my faux diabetes issue giving me fits pretty much the whole day today, and I still haven’t caught up. I’m about to eat and drink more in the hopes of getting straightened out for tomorrow… Right after I shower. I’m chigger bitten from being in the wet grass tonight while writing on the last car, and I probably better shower before more little critters take the opportunity to make me their evening meal.

Anyway, I only got one car done myself. My tech David did 3, so that was good. The car I was working on was a crank no start that at first appeared to be a spark issue (the cap and rotor and distributor were in awful condition, and I spent probably three hours checking and rechecking, first the wiring, then with a new cap and rotor, and finally with a whole distributor assembly, but it still wouldn’t start, and I’d felt like something was just off the whole time, something wasn’t right. So I decided to pull the spark plugs and to do a compression test, and guess what I found?

Blown motor. 😬

Looks like the timing belt probably had a bunch of ground down teeth or something. The compression readings were all over the place, super low to decent, but they kept changing, which means the belt had to have been continually slipping as it was cranking.

Poor peeps. It was a repeat customer, and he’d just gotten the car as a first car for his teenager. Unfortunately… it isn’t going to be his first car. It’s gonna be at the junk yard very shortly. 🙁

But guess what? I had that bag of probably 30-40 DVDs in my work vehicle, and I had the thought to give him all the DVDs to help soften the blow of finding out that the car he’d just gotten was junk.

I think he was happy to get the DVDs. 🙂

Anyway… the last car was an overheat/coolant leak diagnosis–another repeat customer. I never did get to see the exact place where it’s leaking out, but it’s definitely the radiator. It’s just gushing out. The engine bay is so tight, though, that I can’t tell where exactly it’s coming from without taking a while bunch more apart, and my new phone was giving me fits, not wanting to turn the flashlight on with the video recorder on, so that base it 20 times harder, and I actually couldn’t do what I needed.

I finally got it to turn on (after I got home for the evening), but I still don’t know what I did to make it work. This new phone is functional, but it’s so much less convenient for the things that I need to do. I tend to use my phones quite differently than normal consumers. I’m sure the phone is great for the majority of people, but there are particular functions that I bank on being able to use for my business that this new phone doesn’t have. I think I’m gonna have to find 3rd party apps to get what I need.

Anyway, I got home, parked our most valuable vehicles under trees (forecast called for a tornado watch and possible large hail). Hopefully, they survive the storms unharmed.

Well… I’m pretty beat. It’s been hard today to not turn on a TV show or a movie or something to wind down for the day, but I’ve abstained. One more day.

No chickens.

It’s amazing how routines and behaviors and habits can have such control over me. I want to master all those things and not have any one of them have mastery, even a tiny bit, over me.

#1. I’m grateful that though my body has been flirting with a crash all day, I haven’t completely crashed yet. I’m badly over the edge, but I haven’t crashed. Bonus.

#2. I’m grateful the parts store let me return the parts I bought and installed. I let them know I’d installed them and tried to start the car, but that it never started, and they were cool with it. That was nice because it was $200+ worth of parts, and I didn’t really want to take that hit. But they were clean and nice and still basically new, so they’ll go back on the shelf and will make someone else happy.

#3. I’m grateful that my ulnar nerve issues have lessened today. I’ve tried to pay a little more attention to what I’m doing today, trying to give the nerves a bit more of a rest.

#4. I’m grateful that I was able to finally figure out that car. One car in a day isn’t so great, but again, for the second time in two working days, David saved my butt. He put in something like six or seven billable hours, so that’ll be good for me, thank heaven.

#5. I’m grateful to have made it through another day. 29, 37, 28, 2.

Progress.

Knock on wood, I’ve managed to hold steady in each area since starting each one with y’all. I need to add a couple more… exercise and language. Those two might well be the toughest in the short run. I really need to get going on them, but I don’t want to change too many things at once and overwhelm myself so much that I drop the ball on all of them and come crashing down. It’s gonna take time to work back to where I was a few years ago before I fell apart. Can’t expect myself to do it all at once. Step by step should be enough for me.

#6. I’m grateful to have had that extra mower part.

#7. I’m grateful that I remembered to call the parts supplier just in time tonight to have the part coming in early tomorrow morning instead of later.

Well, my peeps, I hope y’all have a wonderful night! Thanks, for supporting me on this journey.

Lift the World.

~ stephen