2023-07-23 — Holy Crapoly!

Has it really been 10 days since I wrote a post?!?!?! 😶😶😶

😅

Sorry!!!

I’ve been making changes, and I guess I haven’t been telling you about them.

Whoops 🙃

Or maybe I have? I’m trying out a two-day work week. 😁

Basically, the plan is to massively overload myself on Mondays and Fridays. The goal is to put in at least 10 billable hours per day on those days, even if I have to put in 16 hour days to do it. I figure that a work day pretty much feels like a work day whether I work 8 hours or 16 hours, it all just feels like a work day. So why not just load myself up two days a week, go nuts, and have 5 days off? 😅😁

So I’ve been working towards that. Last week I worked 3 days, and I might end up having to work 3 days this week as well because I over committed myself a little bit and told some people I was available on Tuesday when I shouldn’t have said that. So I might have to work tomorrow, but I’m not going to work again till Friday for sure.

So far it’s working out really well. I’ve had really good days on the days that I have massively loaded myself up.

🥳

I guess I ought to tell you about it, eh?

Wow, 10 days of summary to go through. Good freaking gravy. Where has my head been?

So… I took an entire week off. I can’t even remember why at this point. So i guess i really did only work two days last week. 😊

I think I’m starting to remember now. I had job scheduled for the normal Monday last week and then one thing led to another, and I think they got postponed or something happened. I don’t remember for sure, but I ended up not doing any jobs on Monday even though I originally had some on the schedule.

After that, I wanted to be dedicated to my new schedule, so even though I didn’t work Monday, I didn’t want to work again until Friday, so I scheduled everything for Friday.

I suppose it doesn’t really matter, honestly. Doesn’t have to be Monday and Friday. That’s just days that seem like good days to have be the two days a week.

I might do 3 days a week… We’ll see. But if I can make enough money to survive on working just the two insane days a week, then that sounds pretty good to me, and if I can get the rest of my brain together, then I can get all my non-profit stuff going.

The goal right now is to reduce in large number the external things that weigh me down that are always calling for my attention. My own vehicles that need to be fixed and sold, my heavy equipment that needs to be fixed and sold, my crap all over the garage then needs to be organized and some of it disposed of, etc. I want to get everything down so that my day-to-day concerns are just the day-to-day concerns of things that come up, not the pile of stuff that has been weighing me down for a long time now.

So anyway, that’s priority right now.

I think mostly last week, though, I spent most of my time just veging. I wasn’t feeling too hot in the head, not awful, but not good at all.

So I don’t remember what all I told you last time, and I’m not going to go back and read everything to see, but I believe it was on the, oh yeah, probably the 13th and I probably did write about it. I did a whole lot of work out in the yard burning stuff and chopping a bunch of tree limbs down and up and what not.

That little escapade netted me probably the single worst day for bug bites I’ve had since I moved to Arkansas. I never would have guessed that the stuff I had done, which was a heck of a lot more tame than other bushwhacking tramping around the woods that I had done, but oh well. Bug bites galore, a long streak of poison ivy down one leg, but just a streak, and legs tend to be a heck of a lot less sensitive, at least the sides in front.

It’s been really hot and humid.

Sorry, my brain’s all over the place right now. I’m super distracted trying to take care of customers and put out fires.

I’ve been spending a heck of a lot of time going through and taking pictures of my late sister’s things that she was keeping stored at the house here. Sending pictures out to the family members and everything.

You wouldn’t think that would take so much time, but it does. 😅 I think I’ve spent dozens of hours on that, but we’re getting closer to being done with at least that part of the project.

My first day fixing cars again was the 21st. It was only five cars, but between the five, it was 10.1 billable hours. That was a good day and just barely met the goal of 10 billable hours per day on the days that I’m working.

The first vehicle was a 2018 Toyota tundra that the gentleman wanted to put towing mirrors on. What he didn’t tell me was that the towing mirrors required a whole bunch of wiring done because they had reverse lights on them, and you had to splice in new wires down the door, through the flexible rubber tube in the door to the body of the car, across the body of the car, and into an electrical panel. So I had to do that on both doors.

What normally would have taken 45 minutes, if that, to replace the mirrors on both doors, ended up taking more than 3 hours. 😅 Which was good for the daily total of labor hours, but certainly was not what I was expecting and was one heck of a challenge. It would have been a lot easier had I been willing to damage the rubber water shroud that envelops the bundle of wires that goes from the door into the car, but I wasn’t willing to do that.

Gratefully, I had a coat hanger inside one of my siphon tubes that I use to keep the tube straight while I’m siphoning fuel out of fuel tanks. I was able to use the hanger and run the wire alongside the hanger, and tape it all together both to keep the wire secured to the hanger and to protect the internal wires and the rubber water boot from damage.

I found just the right curvature of the hanger to feed the wire through the bundle and shield and everything.

So I’m both grateful for the YouTube guy who suggested using a coat hanger, and I’m grateful that I actually had one with me in the vehicle. I used to carry one to help get into locked out cars until I got my break in kit.

Anyway, so that was car number one. 😅

Car number two was the 2013 Ford F-150 that the owner wanted me to replace the spark plugs and coils in. He said it wasn’t running very well, he wanted to replace everything. I asked him if he wanted me to diagnose it, as I didn’t think he needed to replace everything, but he just wanted me to go ahead and do it, so I went ahead and did it. No hiccups of any note, and the job went fine. Don’t know if it did anything to help us car or not, but I did what he asked me to do.

After I was done, he gave me a pressure washer that I guess needed some help. He said he figured I was the mechanic so I could probably take care of it better than he could. 🙃

So now I have another pressure washer hanging out in the back of my van that I need to take out and give to my neighbor up the street. 😆

The next job was going to a 2003 Buick Park avenue that the guy said was misfiring. I went out there and found that his motor was blown. Poor guy. He’s in kind of a halfway house type of deal, and he doesn’t have much money at all. So I cut my diagnostic fee in half for him and hopefully he’s able to get taken care of.

Car number four was a 2012 Hyundai sonata That wouldn’t start. Turned out to be a bad starter, and it was a bit of a pain to get out and reinstall, taking a lot longer than I would have hoped, but I got it done. I’m just grateful that I was able to find a way to do it without having to take off the exhaust manifold. That would have sucked. If not the taking off exhaust manifolds or difficult: It’s just rusty both and the risk of breaking one and turning the job into a massive one. May not happen seven times out of 10, but when it does… yeah. No bueno. No, thank you.

The last car of the day was a 2013 GMC Yukon that was having break issues. I went over and spent probably 40 minutes in diagnostics before I even started the work, which I didn’t charge him for, and then everything went super slowly, and I didn’t even finish doing the rear brakes until after 10:00.

Gratefully, he wasn’t in a huge hurry, so I was able to have him test it out the next day to see if the issues he was concerned about had been fixed because we couldn’t reproduce anything, so I just went ahead and replaced what was obviously necessary to replace. I left him with the instructions to test it and then we could reschedule to fix the front if needed if it was still having issues.

There was one job that I wasn’t able to get to because time simply ran out on me, so instead of taking my normal day off on Saturday, I had that leftover job.

That leftover job was way down in Fayetteville, so I had to drive all the way down to Fayetteville just for one job. Since I was already way out there, I figured I might as well do some additional work. So I ended up doing four cars for the day. The first was the leftover, a 2013 Ford Escape that had overheated. He was thinking he needed the thermostat, but I found that one of his coolant lines had been rubbing up against the transmission fluid access cap and had rubbed a hole through the line, causing it to leak fluid everywhere. I had to go to the dealer to get the part, but gratefully, the dealer had the part, and I was able to get him all fixed up in good to go.

Had good conversations with the young guy. He’s a 20 something in college, but his dad was in real estate rental properties, so he helped his son by two rental properties out of the gate. He’s got a 12 plex and a 14 Plex, I think. That was always my goal when I was a later teenager and early 20 something. I wanted to be in rental properties, but I guess… It never worked out that way.

I still toy with the idea of doing it.

The second car was a 2011 Honda Accord that was on my way home from that other job, so I stopped off at it planning on having it be the last job of the day. They just needed help taking a bolt off, but I realized after I took the bolts off that they wanted off, that what they were trying to do wasn’t even possible. They wanted to replace two broken wheel studs, but on that particular vehicle, you had to remove the whole bearing assembly in order to get the studs out of the hub.

😶

Come on, Honda, why did you do that to people?

I only charge them half my normal service call because it was such a quick trip over. They had the wrong tools, so they were rounding off the big bolts, so I just used the right size socket and my half inch ratchet, and was able to get them off within a couple minutes. I stayed to explain everything to them, but it was still super short trip, so I still gave him the discount.

As I was driving up the road, I realized that only three houses down was a job that I had scheduled for Monday. I figured there was no sense in driving all the way down from where I live to Springdale to do that job on Monday with it only three houses away, so I stopped in, and she was available, so I spent the next 3 hours at that job.

She didn’t tell me, however, that the people who were helping her pay for it had a cap of $200. So I spent over 3 hours working on it, replaced an expensive sensor, had to drain out nearly 14 quarts of engine oil because someone had massively overfilled the engine, put in new oil, new filter, etc, the total bill coming out to over $600, of which I thought I was really kind by knocking it down to $538, and change. That’s when I found out about the $200 cap.

😶

I called the people to take payment, and they said they had only authorized $200.

Uh…

So that sucked. Supposedly, the lady is going to pay me the rest, and I knocked it down another 38 to 500 even, but I’m not banking on anything. The number of people who actually pay me what they owe me is very few.

That’s something I don’t understand. Debt to me is like my tippy tippy top priority. If I owe anybody anything anywhere, I want to pay it immediately. I don’t do anything nice for myself. I don’t buy anything I don’t absolutely need. The tippy tippy top priority is paying off the debt. I don’t understand people who go around buying things for themselves and living their normal life and not paying off their debts. I just don’t get it. It’s like, hey, you borrowed money for me, and now you’re just going to go on living your life as normal and not pay me back?

I just don’t get it.

In my mind, it’s a huge obligation. It’s the tippy top financial priority. How could it not be? I mean of course if you’ve got a major health emergency or something like that, fine, but if you’re just living your normal life, buying your normal things, spending money on yourself for non-essentials, really?!?!?!

Sorry, no strong opinions there. 😅

After finishing up there and having pretty much work to full day, I figured I might as well help the last person who was in from out of town and had their vehicle die and had toweded over to the Ford dealership only to find out the Ford dealership couldn’t get them in until the following week, Even though it was most likely just a battery that needed to be replaced.

So I drove over there, buying a battery before I showed up, and went to change the battery, only to find that the battery recommended by AutoZone as the original equipment replacement was incorrect. They had said it needed an AGM battery, but it was just a regular lead acid battery. So I ended up going all the way back to the parts supplier, getting another battery, this time a lead acid battery, and drove back to the little bronco, put the battery in, and called it a day.

I’m crossing my fingers at the lady actually pays me the other $300 she owes me. I already knocked off more than 100 from the original price it could have been, thinking I was doing her a favor. 😅

My Sunday, the 23rd, was spent much of the time in working on the distribution of all of my late sister’s stuff. I spent several hours doing that. Much of the work was going back through the books that I had taken pictures of previously. I thought I might have gotten mixed up and put books that I hadn’t taken pictures of with books that I had, so what originally was just taking pictures, turned into a one by one comparison of all the pictures and finding all of the books. 😅

I wanted to make sure that I had sent pictures of every single book, so I spent hours going back through everything. 😶

In the end, I found that I hadn’t made any mistakes at all. 😆

But at least I know that and can rest easy now. 😊

Oh, at some point during the week I also mowed the lawn. I don’t remember when that was. It had gotten super long.

Anyway, I don’t remember much else.

Oh! Actually, I spent a whole crap ton of time trying to fix my aerial lift. I paid to have the relays on the board repaired, but the board isn’t working still. Or something’s not working. The board will power on, flashing, and then just turn right back off.

😕

It’s worse than before I took it apart. 😕

That’s a stressor for me. It’s stuck with its legs in the down position, so I can’t even tow it to a place to have it checked out. Big mess. Should never have taken it apart. But I took pictures, and I didn’t do anything that would have caused issues that I can think of. There was one little thing that looks like maybe it held a fuse that I don’t see anywhere? I don’t remember that part at all. Two extra screws holding that little thing there, but I can’t find any place where it might have gone. Maybe that’s the issue? I don’t know. I’m pretty discouraged with that thing. I got screwed over by the people who sold it to me. It broke while I was in New Zealand, and now it just sits there is a very very expensive lawn ornament. Sound familiar?

Bulldozer, and now this. Many many many thousands of dollars wasted. Almost 20k lost.

Ouch.

I had a dream that the area left miraculously just fixed itself and started working just fine.

Boy, wouldn’t that be great?! 😅

I’m still making very slow progress personally. So that’s something.

Love and hugs. 😊

Lift the World

~ stephen