2021-04-30 — No, I Didn’t Miss Today

No, I didn’t miss today. It may be 5:55 a.m., but I haven’t gone to bed yet. In fact, I only just now walked in the door.

It’s been a long, very frustrating night. I’ve just been… livid. The day went decently well up until about 7:30 or so (warranty battery job, battery job, no start diagnosis, and a second no start diagnosis. Then I drove to pick look at the trailer I was interested in buying (which I bought). But just as I was getting on the interstate with the new trailer (in Muldrow, Oklahoma, the trailer started to fish tail badly, and I realized that my hitch was too low to the ground. That meant the trailer weight wasn’t balanced at all, so any bump or shift in the road above 50 mph, and it started to fish tail badly, threatening to jack knife the truck and trailer.

No bueno.

So… I put the hazards on and readied for the much longer drive home. The hour and a half it took to get there turning into a 2 1/2 hour drive back.

Or so I thought.

On the way back, I got a call from my friend Allison (commercial manager at the Bentonville AutoZone). She, her husband, and a couple others were broken down on an off ramp on their way to a funeral 5 hours away, and it just so happened that because I’d gone to pick up the trailer, I was relatively near them.

So I stopped off at the nearby AutoZone and grabbed parts for their truck and headed over to them. Unfortunately, they got mixed up on where they were and told me the wrong place, so I drove 25 minutes the wrong direction, and had to come all the way back to where I’d been before and then go further toward Little Rock in order to get to them.

When I finally got to them, I spent the next… 5 hours? Trying to help them fix their truck. It had overheated. They had replaced the thermostat, but it overheated again and again. I got there, upper hose was really hot, and the lower hose was really cold. So…. that was thermostat symptoms (plus some other possibilities). I pulled the thermostat out altogether to verify for certain that it wasn’t the issue, even with the new thermostat.

It wasn’t.

It over heated again, so I did a block test, and the head gasket checked out okay. The auxiliary fan wasn’t coming on, but it wouldn’t make sense that the aux fan would be the problem because they were overheating driving down the freeway, and fan issues don’t show up until you’re idling (you don’t overheat with a bad electric fan until there’s no more wind across the radiator because you’re at a standstill). So that sort of narrowed it down to the radiator or water pump, though I was still concerned about the fan.

I voted for the radiator over the water pump for two reasons: #1. When I disconnected the lower radiator hose, not much coolant came out, at least it certainly didn’t seem like much.. To me, that indicated it was partially clogged. That, and the water pump impeller on the replacement pump was metal, so I was guessing the original one was metal, and the bearing was fine, so it didn’t seem like a likely candidate.

Anyway, spent probably an hour trying to get the fan clutch off before giving up and trying desperately to find another way to get the radiator our without taking the fan clutch off. After finally finding a way, we replaced the radiator, I topped off the oil (it was nearly 4 quarts low), and it was still running hotter than I’d like, but it was doing much much better, so they went ahead and continued on their journey, and I began the 3-hour? or so drive home.

I stopped off at the Taco Bell on MLK in Fayetteville and waited for like 20 minutes or more in the drivethrough, even though there were only a couple cars ahead of me. Then I drove the last hour+ home.

But the adventure didn’t end there. I couldn’t get the trailer up our driveway, so i tried to park it in the lower field, but that was still saturated from the floods, and I ended up getting the truck and trailer stuck, and it took me about 2 hours or so more to dig the truck out.

Hence it being almost 6:45

#1. Grateful the jobs went decently well today with the exception of one.

#2. Grateful I could help a friend, even if it killed me for the rest of the day and probably Saturday as well.

#3. I’m grateful that my truck’s trailer hookup was working, so I could get the lighting working for the trailer.

#4. I’m grateful that I got a discount on the magnetic lights thingy. The packaging was damaged, so they gave me like 30% off or something.

#5. I’m grateful I made it home safely.

Please send prayers and/or happy universe thoughts to my friends Brittani and Allison. Brittani is just getting hammered by the Basement Dweller, and Allison and company are still driving to the funeral.

Tough times for many.

Loves and hugs.

Lift the World

~ stephen