I set my alarm last night for 3:45 this morning, but then I woke up at like 3:25. I dozed a little bit, but in the end, I just got up before the 3:45 alarm went off. I spent a little while organizing the stuff in my Civic until Cory came out.
I’m leaving my car at his house, he being gracious enough to let me leave it there, and also gracious enough to ride with me to the airport and drive the car back to his house.
Thanks, Cory!
The flights were relatively uneventful, with one exception, which I’ll get to shortly. I was surprised by how long the line was at the salt lake airport to go through security at 4:30 in the morning. It was pretty much packed. 🤔
Fortunately, I’d saved sufficient time to be safe even with the long line. One uncomfortable challenge was that the food that I ate last night apparently decided to stay in my stomach pretty much all night, with nothing working properly but the gas pump. 🙃
That’s never fun when you’re in a crowded, enclosed space, and with faux leather seats that don’t absorb any… odor. 🙃
Sorry if that’s TMI. It’s just life… for me, at least.
First plane ride was only about an hour, and I dozed a little bit, making it quite the short little ride. Then I had a two and a half hour layover in Denver, where I did some work and watched part of one of the newer Die Hard movies.
The second plane ride was a tad longer, maybe an hour and a half, and it was pretty much uneventful except for one little thing. At some point in time, I decided to lift up the window shade to look out, and when I did I saw another airplane coming pretty much directly at us at the exact same altitude. I think we probably missed each other by less than a thousand feet, maybe even less than 500 ft. It was nutty! I think I was the only one on the plane who noticed, though. I exclaimed, “holy crap!” But no one even seemed to notice my exclamation.
It was so weird to see another plane 30,000 plus feet up in the air just barely miss us. I imagine it was all very well orchestrated, and everybody knew where everybody was, but holy freaking crap, it was so crazy close.
I wasn’t scared. It was more kind of fun than anything, but definitely crazy.
My Hill sister Liz picked me up, and we had a good chat for maybe an hour or so on the drive home and while waiting for her youngest daughter to get out of school. She’s a great one to chat with. We talked about life, what’s going on for both of us, challenges, ups, downs, etc.
You’re getting home, I ate some lunch, grabbed some tools from the garage, and went to AutoZone in Rogers to buy a whole bunch more tools. I spent almost $200 on tools today just to be able to do the work I had on the schedule since all my tools are still in transit.
But I wasn’t bothered, actually. It’s just money, and I’m getting better and better at dealing with not having made the best decisions, or with things going sideways, or with unforeseen things popping up and complicating or slowing things down. So that’s good.
First job was the one that the mechanic I had hoped was a solid mechanic had left incomplete. I went over there, tried to start it, and listened to the noise that it made when it tried to start. Just hearing that noise, I was a bit concerned, and unfortunately for the customer, my concerns turned out to be spot on. The reason the engine wasn’t starting was because it was locked up. 😕 Never like giving that news to someone. Crappy crappy day for them. But amazingly, most customers I’ve had to share that message with have taken it very well, so kudos to all of them.
Second job was another no crank no start, but this one, when the starter made its click noise, was much more the sound of a starter that was bad, unless the sound of a starter that was trying to push against a seized engine. Having done enough starters, I chose to just go ahead and pull it off instead of doing further diagnosis to be 100% sure it was the starter. After pulling it off, I bench tested it as always with my jump box, and yes, it was a bad starter. Took quite a while to get the starter off, though, not because it was a challenging starter by design to remove, but because whoever put the last starter on (it was a starter from O’Reilly’s that was bad) tighten the bolts so tight that it took every ounce of my strength using a very long cheater bar just to break the bolts free. Amazing that they didn’t strip them tightening them so tight.
That gave me pause when thinking about the woman who’s interested in training with me to be a mechanic. I’m not a bodybuilder, but I am pretty strong, and it took all of my effort to get that off. Don’t want to sound sexist, but biologically, women generally aren’t as strong physically, so it makes me wonder in a profession where often times strength is required in order to get the job done, what tricks she’ll have to come up with to get the job done properly. It’s even harder as a mobile mechanic because you don’t have as much space to work with to get leverage when things are tight and he-manned on there.
But we’ll see. The woman is going to meet me at my first job and will chat and see if it feels like a good fit to try and train her to be a competent mechanic.
One of the other applicants came out to chat with me while I worked on the second job, he turned out to be just a young 18-year-old kid, but he had a history of working on cars for his step dad who is a mobile mechanic in West Virginia.
He also will need a lot of training, but he seems like a pretty good candidate to learn quickly and do good work. He seemed like a pretty good kid, so we’ll see how that goes. He might also meet up with me at the first job tomorrow and ride along with me all day as a helper while I train him.
The third job postponed until tomorrow morning, so I just came home, ate pretty much half of a large watermelon, showered, and now I’m lying in bed writing this.
Oh, some other… Events of the day. I had sort of a running with a nasty bathroom stall in the Denver airport. Apparently, someone, or some people, it had far too much fun in that bathroom stall than it was designed for, and disgustingly, they left their leftovers on the bathroom wall.
Yuck.
That not so nice experience gave way to later better experiences when I got off the plane in Arkansas to find that it had been so hot and so dry for so long that the humidity didn’t feel much different than Utah, so it was hot, but it wasn’t sauna at all. It was pretty darn dry. In fact, I didn’t sweat much at all even while working on the cars because it was so dry. Totally out of the ordinary, but I’ll take it!!!
Another fun little thing, I had ordered something a long long time ago that was out of stock, but it was such a good price that I decided to go ahead and buy it anyway so that when it got back in stock I would have gotten a good deal, as it’s new price I want to say was almost double what I paid for it. Anyway, my Amazon shipping report said that it had been delivered, but I couldn’t find it anywhere on the property or in the house or in the driveway or anything. Then I noticed that it said that it was delivered inside the mailbox, which was impossible because our mailbox, though a large mailbox, was nowhere near big enough to handle the 4 ft x 3 ft box, or whatever size it was. Then I thought, I wonder if they stuck it in our package bin drop off. We hadn’t yet put a sign on it to let the delivery people know it was a package drop off box, but when I got home from the second job, I opened up the lid to the dropbox, and lo and behold, there were three packages inside–including my biggie.
🥳
So, even without the sign, the drivers know what to do with it, so that’s nice. That’ll save our driveway from having the big mail/package delivery trucks drive up and down it.
Well, I best be getting to bed, so that I can get up and do all that needs to be done tomorrow.
Oh, as promised, we made today a better day than yesterday. 😊
Love and hugs.
Lift the World
~ stephen
Lift the World 
What adventures – you are one of my heroes!