Howdy, folks. 🙂
Time keeps flying on by. July is quickly coming to an end, and life is as crazy as ever.
Slept in a bit today. Think I had weird dreams? I don’t remember. I’ve had some interesting ones lately, and I don’t usually remember my dreams.
After getting up, I went in to town to run a few errands. I needed to get my work van organized after all of my tools finally came in from having been shipped from Utah, so I spent a good while doing that in the parking lot of AutoZone. I also took some parts back, bought some other stuff, and… I guess that was about it there.
After that, I headed to Harbor Freight, where I bought more tools and stuff. I’m sort of… refreshing my tool arsenal, partly because I left some tools in Utah with my car. I feel naked without my tools, so I figured I’d leave some there for when I come back in a few days.
I’m spending money right and left–tools, plane tickets, etc.
“Spend cheerfully on things that matter, time as well as money.” ~ Jeffrey R. Holland
Went to Lowe’s to run a few more errands. Made some copies of our new house keys, bought some new chalk markers to hopefully help reduce the troubles like I had yesterday with the job that required moving the motor mount and having to get it back in exactly the same place. Hopefully, these chalk markers will do the trick. I also bought the hardware and stuff that I’ll need to fix the drawers and the flooring at my Liz’s place.
I’m starting to lean more and more toward trying to buy the 44 acres across the road. I’ve spent so much time trying to wait for things I thought were going to happen, and so much time worrying about making mistakes, that at this point, I’m kind of like, screw it, just do something. So… that’s on the docket right now. Perhaps the 44 acres across the road, perhaps a house back in Utah, perhaps somewhere else? perhaps all of the above? 🙃
As if I were made of money. 🙃 Right, Stephen. Good one.
Anyway, coming out of Lowe’s there was a guy with a nasty puddle of goo under his truck. Poor guy had just bought a 2002 Ford Explorer Sport Trac, and it had a whale of a blown head gasket. I stopped to help him, help diagnose it, etc. At first, I thought maybe it could be a blown seal in his radiator and that it might actually be tranny fluid in the coolant. That would have been better, but no such luck. Start it up, and the fluid just poured out of the radiator from the pressure the combustion gases were making pumping through the coolant.
Sad. He way overpaid for the truck $6k, and it was… in bad shape. 😕 Wish I could have given him some good news. It’s not so happy when your “help” consists of a really unhappy diagnosis and a really poor set of options for where to go from there. 😕
Not much else to do, though.
After that, I ran to Walmart and grabbed some things, forgot to get gas because someone was calling and asking for help on a car, and I… needed my “day off,” even though I didn’t really take it.
Once home, I cleaned out my work van a little bit. It was super warm again today–100 degrees. Fortunately, the humidity didn’t set in much until the sun started to settle behind the trees, then I was drippy drippy, but while it was still mostly up, I managed to move all the extra retaining wall stones (72 extras because the guy who my mom hired to put up the retaining wall didn’t listen to her, bought way too many, and didn’t do the job the way she asked him to). Got those moved, dug up one of the gates into the garden, and started trying to figure out how to get the fence up, as the deer have a fondness for some of the leaves in our garden boxes.
Punks.
Lots of leaves in the forest. Please go enjoy those.
What else… My programmer, after much complaining and pushing and demanding on my part (he’s about 8 months late on his promised delivery date), finally uploaded new code that supposedly will fix the errors in the transliteration engine. So, now I get to do a good bit of testing to see how it is. I was supposed to do my testing today, with him finishing the upload yesterday, but that didn’t happen, so it’s today. The problem with that is that now I’m back to working on cars all day and madly trying to get my new little tech trained so that he can do work for me while I’m out of town back in Utah again for who knows how long.
I miss my mountains back there. I sort of feel like I claimed Provo Canyon. There are the super popular places–Bridalveil Falls, Nunn’s Park, the canyon walking/riding path that follows the river for so many miles. There are the somewhat popular places, Upper Falls park, Upper Falls, the foot bridge people jump off into the frigid waters.
Then there are… my places (I know they’re not mine, but I see either no one, or so few people that they sort of feel like my places)–Slide Canyon, Lost Creek Canyon, the many falls above Upper Falls, the mini canyons between Upper Falls and Bridalveil.
Those are… my places. If only they weren’t right next to the highway. Would be so cool if they were off the beaten path, but being where they are, they’re easy to get to, and being what they are, few people bother with them, so in the midst of the crowd, they remain a place of solitude.
So nice. So so nice.
Even if my shower from over a decade ago is now dried up (along with half the United States including my little corner of Arkansas that hasn’t seen rain in over two months, I think it is now. It’s weird to have the grass crunch under my feet. It doesn’t even do that in the winter. But it’s dead dead dead and dry around here. It’s… bad. Crazy. Arkansas usually has tons of water, and we weren’t hurting for it in the Spring. We’re just having this “flash drought” that’s hammering us all of the sudden–no rain, crazy hot temperatures.
It’ll be 103 tomorrow.
We do have four days of 50ish% chance of thunderstorm this coming weekend, so… cross your fingers, do a rain dance, pray to the god/gods, and summon zeus, and perhaps we’ll have some rain.
But may it come down gently, such that it soaks in instead of washing the dust away so fast it doesn’t soak in. We need Seattle rain for about… a week straight. Replenish the groundwater. Get water in the creeks so the fish don’t dry up and die, etc.
Gosh, it’s almost 1:30.
So much to do on the to-do list. So much.
Gonna be a crazy-busy day tomorrow. Lots of cars on the schedule. My new contract worker just bought a work van today, one that I found for him on Facebook Marketplace. Hope it turns out to be a good one. It’s a V10 beast that he got for a fantastic price ($800), so… not really much risk, and apparently, it could be pretty decent. Probably gonna guzzle gas, but he’ll be able to haul everything he needs, and I believe it’s a 15-passenger with all the seats, so he can probably sell the seats and make some of that purchase price back.
I don’t know if I’ll have time to train him enough before I go for him to go out on his own, but we’ll see.
We’ll see.
Cross your fingers.
Well, folks, little boy me best be gettin’ to bed. I have a lot more stuff to buy still–so much… for so many things.
Love and hugs.
Lift the World
~ stephen
Lift the World 