2022-10-19 — Start Over

I guess I haven’t written in a few days.

Right now, I’m… really dejected. I made the mistake of thinking that I was going to be buying the piece of property across the road. It’s been for sale for most of the last 20 years, I think. And with the economic downturn, I… didn’t figure anyone would be buying it.

I didn’t see it listed when I looked up property in the area. I…

It’s sold.

😞

I’d emotionally pretty much already considered myself owner of the property, I think. I basically thought about it as though it were just about already mine. I’d made my plans for what I wanted to do with it. And then…

It’s… sold.

And I’m… pretty devastated.

In all of my struggles with life right now and just trying to figure out what I’m doing and where I’m going, I finally made a decision, and… the door is closed before I even got to it.

Super dejected right now.

In a way, it throws so many things back into the blender. What now? Where to? What am I doing?

I got an offer for my business that was a lot less than what I was hoping. I declined the offer, as I could make the money that was offered in not much time, and without a steady income I can count on, I would just burn through the cash in no time.

So… I’m pretty down right now. That news just completely sucked all the life out of me.

Oh well.

Guess I try to figure out where I’m going from here. Where to now?

(sigh)

In other news, Malaki did 6 cars today. Nice job, Malaki! I did two, an ’83 El Camino that was overheating (it was about 2 1/2 gallons low on coolant and had a leak at the heater core/heater hose connection). Got that one figured out and buttoned up.

Then I had a 2013 Chrysler Town & Country that had an extremely strange set of symptoms. It was a crank no start, but it had fuel pressure. It had spark. It had injector pulse.

The only think I could think of was that the fuel pressure wasn’t enough or that it was out of time. All the voltages were good. The pump was screaming, so…

🤷‍♂️

There were a couple of times that it tried to start, and when it did, a bunch of smoke came out the back, and that got me thinking. I wondered if maybe it had a stuck open injector that was dumping so much fuel that the engine was flooding and couldn’t start.

So I tested my theory.

I removed the fuel pump fuse, and started trying to start the van (to burn off as much of the fuel as I could). Once I burned off the fuel as best I could without adding any new to the cylinders, I tried to start it, and boom, it started–smoke billowing out the tailpipe, which confirmed that there had been a ton of gas in the cylinders.

It idled terribly, clearly a misfire, but the darn computer wouldn’t register any misfire codes, and the live data wouldn’t show me any misfire info either. 😶

It would run great at higher RPMs and crappy at idle–telltale sign of a stuck open injector (when accompanied by lots of smoke out the back, etc).

But then… it stopped running crappily at idle as well.

By the time I left, it’d basically fixed itself. 🙃

Kind of like my spider lift from the other night. Did I write about that? If I didn’t, let me know, and I’ll write the story.

So… that was the day today. I’m proud of Malaki, as he did six cars today, and that was after the first one, which should have been relatively simple, turned into a pain in the butt, partly because he was given the wrong belt in the right package. Gotta love that. But he still got 6 cars done today. Gratefully, most were battery jobs (which was thoroughly expected given that it was 22 degrees last night).

(sigh)

I’m really disappointed. Don’t quite know what to do with myself.

And Google suspended my Haven Hill Tree Service business listing immediately after I created it. I don’t know what to do. Google is… the best way to get business. If you’re not listed in Google… I mean… it’s a massive obstacle to being competitive. And you can’t actually talk to a person. It’s all algorithmic, so… you’re pretty much screwed. At least, I was last time I had a similar issue. Google just shut me out, and there was nothing I could do about it.

So… once again, here I am… lost as to what I’m doing.

Stay tuned?

~ stephen