Howdy, folks. 😊
Happy Monday. 😊
Clearly, I’ve not been as good about writing every day. Life is crazy.
Yesterday, let’s see… It was a working Sunday for me. I didn’t plan it that way, but I had a lady call me in the morning who had a mechanic come out to help her at 1:30 a.m. He diagnosed a bad alternator and said he’d be by later in the morning to get her going, so she could leave by noon to go back to Texas.
Well… she wasn’t able to get a hold of him in the morning. He’d already started taking stuff apart, but with him not answering, she was panicking a bit because she needed to get the car fixed in order to get back to Texas.
Not wanting to work on my day off, but not wanting to leave her stranded, I texted the mechanic who was supposed to be fixing her car (I know him [acquaintance], having helped him fix some cars he couldn’t figure out and having had to clean up after some mistakes he’s made in the past, etc.). I told her that if he didn’t get back to me quickly, I’d go over and help her.
Well, he didn’t get back to me, so I went to Rogers and got an alternator and put it in for her and got her going by her noon departure time. She was super grateful and gave me a $50 tip, which was nice.
But I wasn’t done with my working Sunday. For, you see, before I’d even left to go to the first job, I had another person call who was stranded and was trying to get back home–this one in Fayetteville trying to get back to Kansas City, MO.
They’d had their car towed to the Firestone down there because Firestone’s website said they were open on Sundays (and some of them are), but they weren’t open today for whatever reason. So I drove down to Fayetteville to rescue him and his wife as well. It turned out their little Corolla needed a starter, so I swapped swapped it out and sent them on their way.
So I was done.
Nope.
While I was working on that car, I had the mother of a college student ask if I could go rescue her son’s Land Rover that wouldn’t start. She was calling from Texas, and he was a student at the U of A, and since I was close, and I figured it’d just be a quick battery job, I agreed to help them as well.
Gratefully, it was just a battery job, so I was able to slap the battery in and be on my way.
I got more calls, but by that time, it was almost 3 p.m., and I was supposed to help Stevie practice downrigging branches. So I turned down the rest of the people who called, which isn’t easy, but I can’t save the whole world, as much as i might like to.
After getting back home, I helped Stevie practice downrigging, which actually was more like me watching him for about three hours, followed by 2 minutes of participation on my part. 🙃 That said, it was pretty cool to see how fabulously one of the expensive tools I’d bought worked. The tool is a PortWrap friction lowering device; and when utilized in a setup to downrig heavy branches from way up in trees, I was able to, with pretty much zero effort at all, gently bring probably a 100 lb+ log to the ground.
It was pretty sweet.
After that, I helped Jim load the new goat I’d found for him into the pen with the other goat and all the chickens, and then I headed home.
That was my Sunday (it was well after dark by that time).
Oh… as y’all know, my mental health has been… awful lately. It’s gotten bad enough that I’m pretty desperate. I decided to do a little experiment Sunday night, in my desperation: I decided to ask my hill brother for a blessing (mormon speak for a supposedly inspired prayer where the giver of the blessing is inspired to speak what god would have him speak).
I’ve had some pretty profound experiences being the giver of blessings in my days.
But I’ve struggled to trust or believe any of that for a while now. Though the honest truth is that some of the experiences I’ve had are just straight up too profound to throw away or explain away rationally or reasonably. But neither have I had the courage to fully trust or believe again.
Either way, though, something has to change, and soon.
Anyway, so I asked my brother for a blessing, with the overt declaration that I didn’t really have any faith, just a desperate hope.
So I was given a blessing, and… I guess we’ll see. It was a typical blessing for me as a receiver. My experiences with them have easily been more profound as the giver than as the receiver. But… it was an experiment. I’m trying to feel my way.
…
Monday was a bit crazy as well. I mean, all my days are crazy right now. I don’t really have any restful days at this point in my life. It’s all go go go stress stress stress. But I think I might be making some strides.
I hope.
Anyway, we did 7 cars today but only got paid for 5 of them. One of the seven was a warranty return because Malaki hadn’t tightened the battery tightly enough, so it was back to being a no start after needing a battery. The other was a Toyota Camry that had a grinding sound that turned out to be a wheel bearing, but it was the press-on kind of bearing, and we don’t carry the tools to do press-on bearings.
So… I told Malaki not to charge him (he was already suspecting wheel bearing) unless he felt we could give him good money’s worth, which he didn’t feel we could, so I paid Malaki for the visit but didn’t charge the customer anything.
Malaki did three other paying jobs, a diagnosis that I thought was just a valve cover oil leak that was actually blown motor (I think they threw a rod through their engine block 😬). There were metal chunks all over. 😕
Then he went to another one that was not starting very well, but it was totally fine, and he couldn’t find anything wrong because the issue wouldn’t reproduce. The third job he did that we got paid for was a no start that turned out to be an alternator.
As for me, I did a prepurchase inspection on a 2020 BMW 3 series, and I also did a diagnosis on a 2015 Lexus that supposedly had a metal grinding sound, but what I think she was hearing was the stick that was lodged in her suspension and that was rubbing on the ground. 🙃
I couldn’t reproduce the issue, and the rain (oh yeah, gratefully, it rained pretty much all day today. We’ve been in pretty severe drought for much of the year, and today the heavens opened), and the rain, coming down in buckets where I was, made it pretty much impossible to hear any sounds, but I couldn’t find any issues other than the wedged stick, and with it being a 2015, and a Lexus to boot, I was pretty confident there was nothing wrong. Lexus is pretty much the best of the best of the best, in my opinion.
So I got cold and soaking wet, which probably isn’t the greatest given that my current roommate (nephew Austin) has been battling a cold for like a week right now, and he’s not… winning the battle. I started feeling a couple nights ago like I was starting to get hit by a bug, so I did my patented artificial fever the last two nights, and I’ve managed to knock it back before it took hold, but being cold and wet for a bit today might have been a bit of a step back in the virus-fighting efforts.
We’ll see.
I swear by those artificial fevers. I have to catch the sickness right at first symptom, and I really have to go all out (raise the temperature of the room, wear several layers of clothing and many blankets, to the point that you’re just… dripping sweat and your clothes are damp around you. It’s certainly not comfortable the times you wake up during the night, but you’re not awake for that long, so you just deal, go back to bed, and voila. You don’t get sick! A handful of uncomfortable moments through the night is a small price to pay in order to be free of the congested head and phlegmy lungs.
That’s my take, anyway.
Hopefully, I didn’t set myself back.
In other news, I feel a bit cheated by ZenBusiness. I spent $300 to have them get my business legal and all taken care of. What I didn’t realize was that they… don’t really do what I expected. They took a week or so to get me my EIN number, which I could have gotten in no time directly online with the feds. They registered my business with the state of Arkansas, which I could have done in no time on my own. The reason I paid for everything was the nightmare it was to get my s-corp approved last time. I didn’t want to deal with it myself. I figured I’d pay the company to submit it all for me.
What did I find? Really deceptive product explanation. Do they submit everything for me? Nope. They simply fill out the 2553 form. Something that takes… 5 minutes for me to do? Then they send it to me, all proud that they’ve done what I paid them to do, and what do I do? I have to print it out, sign it, and mail it in myself.
So I paid for pretty much… nothing. And I had to wait and wait and wait for them to do it. I even paid a rush service–an extra $99–to have it done quicker. When in reality, I could have done it all in one day. I was just leery of doing it again myself after the last fiasco.
$300. Wasted.
I mean, it’s not completely wasted, but the S-Corp part of it pretty much is. It was nice to not have to do the EIN and LLC stuff myself, but was it $300 nice?
…
Anyway, then today I came home to a letter from the state of Arkansas saying they were putting a lien on me for nonpayment of tax.
😶
Excuse me?
So I get to deal with that mess tomorrow. I’ll try and figure that out on the way to Tulsa, Oklahoma where I need to go to get my Haven Hill Tree Service bank and credit card accounts created.
I leave in three weeks. Pretty crazy.
For two months. 😶
Oh, if anybody suggests you download the Tagged singles dating app, I’d… highly recommend against it. In our research and preparation to creating the new app that we’re creating, we’re joining all the dating apps out there. Tagged is by far the worst of the worst. Within minutes of joining, I was spammed by a gazillion fake accounts with “women” all asking me if they could send me pictures of their private parts.
I probably had 26 likes within no time, pretty much all from fake accounts, I think. Not to mention it’s an ad-funded app, so there are intrusive ads everywhere.
Nope. No. Never.
So… that was… interesting.
What else… uh… I guess I’ll call that good for now. Just need to decide if I’m going to artificial fever myself again tonight or hope what I’ve done that seems to have knocked out what was trying to get me a couple days ago succeeds without further assistance.
Oh! I forgot to go up and see how the boer goats are getting along. Oh well.
Oh! In other other news. We have our first official tree job on Wednesday. The neighbor of ours just across the way. He’s got two trees we’ll be taking out. And then the neighbor of ours just down the road a skosh. That’ll probably get done this week as well, so between those two jobs, that’ll hopefully pay Stevie for two weeks of salary that I’ll owe him. Might even make a couple of dollars toward paying back the… not small amount I’ve invested into the business so far. 🙃 But I’m not gonna hold my breath too much on that part. We got an order for $500 worth of firewood as well. So that’ll help, too. I’ll consider the venture successful if it at least pays Stevie’s salary and pays for my investment into the business. Anything on top of that will be gravy.
I like gravy. 🙃
It’s certainly a mad dash to the finish line with getting things settled for the business. Gonna be pretty nutty. Just three weeks away. Three weeks from tomorrow, I think.
I really hope my layover in Tahiti is long enough to leave the airport, touch the ocean, and make it back to my plane. 🙃
Love and hugs.
Lift the World
~ stephen
Lift the World 