2022-08-24 — So Many Words

Hey, folks. Happy… Wednesday, I believe.

I had a really rough day today. For some reason, business has been really slow. Before today, I was getting lots of calls but a greater number of people not wanting the work done. I guess the price was too high? Funny, I hear about what other shops are charging and am shocked with how high their prices are; so it makes me wonder, when they don’t choose me, where do they go?

Then today, the phones were nearly dead. Not sure what the deal is there. I’m pretty dead for tomorrow as well. Not sure what’s going on. I’m used to a slow down in November, but August? That’s… really strange.

Anyway, so I was going to have Malaki come to the house here and help me get the Sentra fixed for Jim and then have him help with the BMW AC and then have him do a couple of jobs, one in Pea Ridge and one in Bentonville, but he didn’t want to drive all the way here (it’s an hour and 15 minutes from his house because he lives way outside of town). So… with the slow day, I told him to just stay home.

That done, I went to work on the Sentra myself, and gosh, it turned into a nightmare. Emotionally, I’ve been going downhill still, bit by bit, like that sliding stock market. Today, I hit a pretty bad low–nearly a full nervous breakdown.

Been rough.

I just… can’t handle everything life is throwing at me right now. I don’t have the capacity. I’m trying to simplify, trying to downsize, trying to make decisions that will get me to a better place, but I’m cracking and crumbling more and more every day. The things I’m getting done aren’t… getting done nearly quick enough for my mental health to recover. I’m a mess right now.

It’s bad enough that it’s spilling over in ways that others, like customers, have seen a little bit of it. I’m no longer able to control myself like I used to.

Malaki says I’m not getting enough sleep, and that’s why.

That’s probably part of it. I am not getting enough sleep, but honestly, well… I won’t rehash it. Y’all have read about it over and over and over.

So the Sentra absolutely kicked my trash today. So many things going wrong on it, stupid things that made a two-hour finish-up job take like… 5 hours or something. I don’t know how long, but it was a long freaking time.

In the end, after getting the struts and sway bar links finally back on, it still had one of the problems that Jim was concerned about. We knew that was a possibility, but he wanted me to replace the struts anyway, so I did, and I replaced the sway bar links as well because one was snapped off, and the other was completely worn out.

But the awful sound was still there, a metal rubbing on metal sound.

So I brought it back to the garage and started to jack it up. That’s when I noticed the problem. As I placed the jack on the subframe and started to lift the car, I noticed that the subframe itself actually moved.

😶😶😶

I messed around with it for a while, and then I started to do some searching for Sentras and subframe issues, and low and behold, there it was. So Jim came over, and Jim had the idea of shimming the subframe up (Nissan made built-in bushings into the subframe, and one of the bushings was completely shot. This is another example of planned obsolescence, I think. I want to make a YouTube channel or something that calls out all the products that companies make that have crap like that. It’s disgusting. They waste people’s money. They create more waste. They accelerate the damage done to the earth. It’s… awful. So awful.

Anyway, I had some shims that I’d bought for my mini excavator, and luckily, they were just the right size to shim up the bushing, so… it’s no longer loose, and the sound is gone. Wahoo!

First time I’ve ever run into that issue in 6 years of mechanicking. Good gravy. Bushings built into the sub frame. Ridiculous.

I took a break from finishing the rest of the job with the Sentra. There’s a torque strut to replace, two rear shocks to replace, and a blower motor to replace still. So… it’s a few hours of work yet to be done with this one.

What else? Uh… I mowed the lawn. With all the rain, it’d come back in most places with a vengeance, so it was tall and took multiple passes in a number of places, but it’s done now. I moved one and a half fence panels to make access to the backyard easier. I repositioned the garden fence panels against the wood piles, so I could mow the tall grass that’d grown up between the panels. I got my beat up trailer hooked up to my pickup truck. I’m going to take it in tomorrow to have a new jack welded on it.

That was good to get that out of the middle of the field it’s been in for probably a year now.

And I’ve been spending a good amount of time working on the phonetic dictionary. It’s… quite the challenge to go through. There are over 100,000 words in my dictionary right now, but I’m doing extensive revisions. The questions, though, include a number of challenging ones. For example, no matter what I do, as long as it’s phonetic, it’s gonna be a piece of cake to read. But what about spelling/writing? I want people to be able to hear a word and know how to spell it simply by hearing it.

Of course, there are a number of challenges to this. There are many different accents in the United States. You can’t choose them all. Words will sound different depending on the accent, so it can’t be totally perfect. That said, you can do a lot to work around those problems. The accent that I’ve chosen is the western/broadcast accent–the one that’s neutral, where people hear you and can’t really tell where you’re from. Some call it General American, Broadcast English, etc. I think that one will have the greatest number of benefits and will be the easiest for people, as even if a person is from an area with a different accent, the non-accent English (obviously a misnomer but gives the idea) is going to be familiar to nearly all because it’s what they hear and see in movies/television so regularly.

Anyway, so… I’m going off of the Western English/Broadcast English with a heavy dose of lazy English because that’s where we seem to be headed as a nation in general for how we pronounce things, but… how far do I go? For example, the glottal stop. The glottal stop is super common. The letters k, p, and especially t are very common examples of letters that often become glottal stops.

And what about situationally colored vowels? We often pronounce words one way when they start a sentence or end a sentence but pronounce them differently when the come in the flow of a sentence between words. What do I do there? And though most of us speak lazily (leading to the schwa being the most common sound in the English language) those lazy schwa vowel sounds generally disappear with the word is broken down syllable by syllable (such as when someone says a word slowly to emphasize it. In such cases, the schwa (or other sound) becomes a different sound.

And what about the near ubiquity of turning t’s into d’s? The thing you climb up rung by rung is a ladder, but the most common pronunciation of latter is as though they were d’s not t’s And what about the R and the ER? Dictionaries seem to have so much overlap. It feels pretty haphazard, honestly. 🙃 Like someone just sat down and made a dictionary with the pronunciations they wanted (sort of like what I’m doing now 🙃). I guess that makes sense, though. The US has no official English. Schools pretend there are rules, but nothing is official, so we teach what we want to, honestly. We are mostly in agreement, but nothing is official, so technically, nothing is correct and nothing is incorrect except as each locale decides it wants it.

But I digress…

Anyway, lots of stuff to try to figure out with the dictionary. It’s certainly interesting!

Best be gettin’ to bed. It’s almost 1:30.

On the bright side of a very rough day…

1. I’m grateful that I had shims that were the perfect size for Jim’s Sentra. Pretty amazing, honestly.
2. I’m grateful that I had enough gas in the gas can to get the lawn mowed.
3. I’m grateful that the mower, despite seemingly being on it’s last legs, is still cutting the yard with few issues.
4. I’m grateful that I was able to get the trailer off it’s concrete stands and hooked up to my truck.
5. I’m grateful to have a traveling companion for at least 3 weeks of my two months abroad. Chase will be buying his tickets tomorrow after I see about changing one of my flights to add more time to the New Zealand part of the trip and to change the flight from Christchurch to Melbourne instead of to Sydney. That’ll make it easier, I think, for Chase to see more in Australia. Then we can just start south and move north, instead of having to go back over the same territory. Assuming changing my flight isn’t gonna cost an arm and a leg, I’m gonna recommend that Chase fly into Melbourne with me and then have him fly out of Brisbane. Then we could do Tasmania, and just head up the eastern seaboard to the Great Barrier Reef (seeing the sites along the way), and he could fly out of Brisbane while I… poke my head around the rest of Australia for another month+. 🙃 Fun fun fun.
6. I’m grateful that Jim takes an interest in my life. We talked about my massive struggles lately, and he suggested we get together and talk on Sunday night to help me process through some things that will hopefully make it more likely to get the ball rolling in certain things, such as where on earth I will be moving to. My goal is to have that figured out before I leave for the Lands Down Under.

Love and hugs.

Lift the World

~ stephen