Let me take a moment to start this post out with a little shout out to my wee wonderful mama! Happy birthday, lassie! 🥳🎉🪅🎊🥳(…At least on this continent. It’s already past your birthday where you are). I hope you had a wonderful day. 😊 Thanks, for being such a wonderful person with an absolutely beautiful heart. 🥰
Given my mother’s age, one would think that our living in the same house would be because I was taking care of her, and that’s what I thought I was doing when I came here (a visit which was supposed to be temporary). I thought I was there to try to make life easier and better for her.
And then my temporary visit turned into my being here longer than I’ve ever lived in the same house in one continuous stretch in my entire life. I…. didn’t leave… 😶, and she… arguably does a better job taking care of me than I do taking care of her. 🙃
Thanks, for being you, mama. Love you!
Been a little while again since I’ve posted. Still not back into the swing of things with my journal. And home life seems so much less… memorable than travel life. It just sort of runs together.
That said, I’m definitely better in the head than I was before I left. I’m not going to say I’m a completely changed man, no, not by any means; but I’m slower to stress about situations that aren’t going “my way,” and my transition to the nonprofit/humanitarian life path feels imminent–like both my mind and heart have already begun the transition, and it’s just inevitable that the rest follows suit.
It’s… nice. 🙂
I’m not as stressed out as I was before I left, even though in a lot of ways things aren’t going very well on the outside (my tree business all but dead, and my auto mechanic business struggling… leaving my bank account dropping rather quickly for the first time in many years. I guess that’s a testament to how lucky I’ve been the last several years. The last time I worried about my bank accounts was probably 5, or so, years ago. For nearly all of my adult life, I haven’t really spent any money on myself. I just saved for the future, putting away every spare dollar in preparation for what was to come. I never kept a budget. I never had to balance any accounts or whatever. It was a given. I earned money. I didn’t spend it, so my accounts always went up.
That’s… not true at the moment. My accounts are massively down, and it has me… a little… nervous.
But even with the significant drop in my accounts, I’m… good. 🙂 I want to make sure I get the auto business back humming along again, and even expanding. I’ve appreciated the work that Malaki has put into it and what kind of a person he is, and with him potentially sticking around longer, I’d love to build it up even more so that both he and I can get closer to financial independence.
🤞
I still haven’t fully thrown out the tree business. In fact, someone called my nephew about a job. He had knocked her door because she had a dead limb hanging dangerously out over stuff, but she didn’t want to pay for it to be removed.
Well… sad for her, this recent storm that brought heavy snow and ice to the area knocked that limb down, and… it hit a car. 😕 So now we’re doing the job that needed to be done, and now she’s got that mess to deal with as well, as apparently, the tree limb fell on someone else’s car. 😬
I believe there’s another ice storm in the coming forecast.
Anyway, while my nephew and I work on other ideas to bring in income for him/us, we’re going to keep the tree stuff going, as that’s the immediate source of income that’s possible for him.
I’ve not been feeling so hot the last couple of days–migraining and whatnot. I went to bed with the beginnings of it, and I woke up with it much worse. It’s my own fault… not eating well. It’s been hard for me to get back into the swing of things.
As for the last several days… I… can’t really remember. I’ve been fighting a mouse infestation in the garage. They’ve been having a field day eating trash for some time now, even before I left, so I’ve been dealing with that since I got home. They’ve been pulling insulation out of the garage walls and building a nest in the corner where all the garden tools are.
Don’t like killing things.
😕
I’ve got really good traps that kill instantly, but…
(sigh)
I feel crappy for killing the mice.
Really crappy. 😞
ugh
I think I’m going to order some humane “relocation” traps. And I’m gonna get a trash can to discourage the mice from even coming into the garage in the first place. We usually just put the trash bag on the garage floor. But… they can smell it super easily that way, i’d guess.
Relocation traps aren’t that great either, though. I’d probably need to get an aquarium first because… you’ve got whole mouse families. Catching and releasing one would just… separate families. 😕
Better than killing them.
My heart is totally convicted right now. I’ve killed probably five of them. Certainly the mother and father, and three of the little ones. 😕
I suck.
Totally suck.
I guess that’s one form of motivation. 😞
Anyway, so… that’s that. I’m gonna order some humane mouse traps for… next time. If there is a next time.
…
Okay, they’re ordered.
If we get another infestation, I’ll try and capture the whole family, then I’ll release them together. I just worry that there are little babies somewhere that I won’t know about that’ll starve to death because they’re not big enough to forage on their own.
That’d happen either way, though.
Life… it’s so interesting how we value (or don’t value it) as humans. We value some life more than other life, even though it’s all life. Is that reasonable? I… don’t have an answer right now. We even have it codified in our legal system. You can’t just go and kill your dog for no reason, but you can kill a spider without a second thought… or a fly… or a mouse.
What is the value of a life?
I still haven’t written my post about that.
I don’t think. Or maybe I have? Hmmm… don’t remember.
Anyway, it’s after midnight. I’d probably better cut this thought off for now.
Let’s see… the snow day I spent mostly outside. We were snowed in, not because it was too much snow, but because we live on a hill with a very steep dirt/gravel driveway. And if you drive down the hill in the snow, there’s no guarantee you’ll get back up (we’re all 2wd vehicles over here), and when you flatten the snow, it’s less likely to melt off (especially since our very steep and very long [400+ foot] driveway is largely in the shade). So you pack it down, the cold freezes the packed snow to ice, and then you’re stuck longer.
Anyway, so I spent a good chunk of that day (three days ago?) cutting the vines in the forest. There’s a section of the woods by the mailboxes that’s just… awful looking. The vines have totally choked out a massive section of the woods, and I’ve decided that this is the last time I’m going to let that section of the forest go uncleared. Before spring hits, every. single. vine. is going to be cut, and all the dead trees are going to be felled, clearing way for the trees to breathe and hopefully get healthier.
Not to mention having the forest look better.
What else… gosh. I just… my brain. I helped my brother in law with a burn pile he was working on yesterday? Day before? Don’t remember.
Today, after waking up earlier and taking a mountain of pills to hopefully combat the migraine, I woke up to my other nephew knocking on my door because people were worried about me because they’d been trying to get a hold of me, and I wasn’t answering. (I’d turned my phone to “do not disturb” because of the migraine). That was when I found out about the tree job. The trailer was full of mulch, so I went up to empty the trailer and get the truck tires filled up because they were really low in the rear.
I ran into a pretty hefty problem with the trailer, though. When I went to dump it, the trailer popped off the ball on my truck. 😬😬😬
No good.
Not only that, but because the mulch was so fine and a little moist, it wouldn’t come out of my trailer.
Long story short, since it’s late, I figured out that the ball I was using was the wrong size. Not sure how that happened. I put the correct size on their, but the trailer tongue was way up in the air from all the weight being on the end of the trailer from being in the dump position. I had to get creative and carefully lower everything without it coming crashing down.
That was an adventure.
Then I had to hand rake out nearly the entire 14ish cubic yards of mulch, which, was no small effort in and of itself.
Eventually, I got everything out of the trailer, one of my nephews helping me at the end, got the trailer safely back to the ground in the front and safely hooked up to the correct-sized ball.
From there, I set about to fix the rear doors, which, was no small feat. The mechanism was bent, which had pinched the cotter pin inside the shaft, so I couldn’t get the cotter pin out, and there wasn’t really room to cut it out, and all my chisels are in crappy shape, so… it took a long time, but eventually, I managed to get the cotter pin out. Then I managed to sledge hammer the main shaft straight again, ream out the cotter pin hole, find a better cotter pin, and get it all put back together.
Only thing I didn’t do is get the air in the tires filled up. I’ll do that tomorrow.
I filled the skidsteer tank to full, put more fuel in one of my excavators, and that was that.
I just removed the deadly mouse trap from it’s place, and the humane ones should come in the mail soon.
Gosh, time flies. It’s almost one and not my mom’s birthday anymore. 😬
G’night all!
Love and hugs. 😊
Lift the World
~ stephen
Lift the World 