I rolled out of bed a bit earlier today than usual for this trip. It was 8 something, early ate something, I think.
I rolled out of bed because, unlike usual, I had to go to the bathroom first thing in the morning instead of after eating breakfast.
And, no, not the kind of bathroom that just requires the pee bottle. And boy did I have to go!!!
There was just one problem: there’s no plumbing here, so there’s a composting ish toilet, and it was full, so I had to wait for Hans to empty its contents. 😅
So I danced around the freshly recovered parking turn around that I had dumped all the road base on and tried to smooth out, doing my own little toddler potty dance trying to hold in everything that wanted to come out.
Sometimes being a vegan is great. But if there’s not a bathroom around, as a vegan, sometimes when you gotta go, you gotta go. 😶
Gratefully, I was able to hold out long enough… Maybe I should say hold in long enough? 😅
Aaaaaah… relief. Except…
Today was indeed the next stage of development in the poison cashew progression. Today it was IBPPH.
Itchy, bloody, painful, poo hole.
Ouch. 🤕
And lots of blood.
All those poison cashew blisters popped and bleeding. Would be easier at home with my bidet, but no bidet here. So… ouch. Super painful.
So, have you now experienced what you expected to experience when reading This blog post? 😆
After that little saga, I finished my last catch-up post, downed some corn checks with unsweetened almond milk, and then I headed out to help Hans with the house building project.
He needed to go to a medical appointment, so he gave me some instructions for what to do, but those got complicated when we couldn’t do what we needed to the way It had been done to that point.
So while he was gone, I cut lengths of rebar to the length they needed to be, and then I said about trying to come up with a way to bend the rebar the way it needed to be bent but having to find some other way to do it then Hans had been doing it because we couldn’t do that way anymore because it was causing damage.
after gathering up all of the rebar from up where Hans had been bending it prior, I said about trying to come up with another way of bending the rebar.
I had a handful of different ideas, but they all failed. I tried using the tractor bucket and the regular rebar bender, and I was somewhat successful, but it still wasn’t really good. Eventually, my sister came out and asked how things were going, and I was catching her up, and then she asked about one of the pieces that I had bent, saying that it looked perfect. I mentioned that I had done that the other day when we were trying to bend the rebar using the corner of the shipping container. We had decided not to use the shipping container for some reason, I think because we thought maybe the bend was too sharp, and we didn’t want to weaken the rebar.
But my sister got out the information for how sharp the bend was supposed to be, and then when she opened up the tape drawer, the idea flashed into my brain to use a roll of tape to measure the bend. The bend was supposed to be equal to the circumference arc of a 3 and 3/4 inch diameter circle.
Well guess what?
There was a a roll of tape in the tape drawer that had had enough tape removed from it such that it was three and three quarter inches!
🥳
So I grabbed the roll of tape, pressed it up against the l bend on the piece of rebar, and it was pretty much perfect. 🥳🥳🥳
Wahoo!
So I bent another one using the corner of the shipping container, and it worked great. I didn’t have the measurements exactly perfect, so I had to shave off a little bit of the l-shaped part on the end so that it wasn’t a quarter inch too long, but it worked!
Then I said about creating a sort of jig, putting a sawhorse near the shipping container and placing one of the legs such that When the large pipe that we were using to bend the number five rebar tapped the leg on the sawhorse, we knew that that piece of rebar had been bent sufficiently.
Hans got home from his appointment about that time. I hadn’t accomplished much by way of completed items, but I had created a way of bending all of the remaining pieces of rebar rather quickly, in one smooth stroke, and so that they were pretty much identical.
🥳
After bending two or three in the new way, my back wasn’t happy, so Hans ended up bending all of the rest of them.
I’m feeling less and less useful. 🙃
But I guess that’s part of getting older. You just sort of have to accept that you can’t do a lot of the things that used to do anymore.
I’m not very good at accepting that. 🙃
Anyway, in the middle of the rebar adventure, Hans left again to visit a neighbor while they were having their concrete poured. I took the opportunity to start getting my oil changed on the van, as it hadn’t had an oil change in quite a while.
Nasty oil. Bad mechanic. Bad bad mechanic. 😆
After getting all of the pieces of rebar bent, with Hans doing the bending, and me putting the rods in their slot for him to bend, we headed off to bomgaars to buy a few tools.
We worked on putting some plumbing in where the footings will go, and then we called it a night.
Dinner was basically the same thing as yesterday, but it did not sit well with me at all today. I don’t know if it’s just because I had a mango pineapple smoothie fairly shortly before having a pretty big dinner, or if it was just too much food at once, or what it was, but it was certainly not great. Even four and a half hours later, I’m still dealing with it wanting to push back up into my esophagus. So I’ve crunched down three Tums, and it’s a good bit better now than it was. It’s almost 10:00, so I’m hoping that it’ll be calmed down enough to fall asleep and to not cause me further issues tonight.
🤞
I’m sitting in my extendo Twinkie van right now on the parking pad that I redid, listening to the wind howl. South Dakota wind is no joke. 🙃
Where should I live? I haven’t figured that out yet. I need wide open spaces. My heart longs for wide open spaces and nothing but God’s creations in my vistas. I don’t want roads. I don’t want buildings. I don’t want vehicles. I want towering craggy mountains, flanked by rolling hills filled with trees, with beautiful rocky rivers.
(makes me smile just thinking of my little paradise 🙂)
Maybe I should go back to New Zealand. 🙃 I think the only way that they would take me is if I told them I was going to be a mechanic. Mechanics, electricians, those kinds of people are shoe-ins, from what I’ve been told, if someone wants to emigrate and have New Zealand as their destination.
Questions for another day.
In the meantime, I just settled for some decent quality flossing tools. I can’t remember where I bought the ones that I bought a long time ago that lasted me forever. Those things were fantastic. Absolutely fantastic. This last trip to Walmart, ponied up for the expense of ones because the ones I had bought prior were crappy. Well, the expensive ones I bought have been even crappier. 😆
(But hey come on the bright side of churning through three of them just to floss my teeth once, I noticed that it looks like I’ve got a filling cracked on the lower right side of my mouth, and something is totally messed up with my teeth alignment on the left side of my mouth, because all of my molars have been ground down to nothing, there are a whole bunch of super deep pits. I always knew there were one or two, but now there’s a bunch.
So, I’ll focus on the positive. Thanks to really crappy flossing dealies, I now know that I’ve got some significant issues with my teeth. 😆
Guess I’ll be heading to the dentist shortly after getting home to get stuff figured out and fixed. I have yet to need a root canal, so let’s hope I can keep those at Bay still.
🤞
Back to the flossing dealies… Maybe I bought the ones that were so awesome from Amazon? I’m going to go look again.
… {Jeopardy music playing}
Yes!!! It was Amazon! Yay yay yay yay yay yay yay!!!
I’ve been dealing with crappy flossing dealies for… months! Thank you, DenTek!!!
Never would have thought I’d be excited for flossing dealies. 🙃
Let’s see, what else… Chatted with the family here about what’s going on with Israel and Gaza and all of that. Looks like there’s the potential of world war 3 erupting, this time as a Middle Eastern conflict.
Crazy times.
Well, I guess that’s all for today. I’ve got some non-Journal posts I’m going to be writing soon, as I try to work through some things.
Lots to think about.
In other news, happy two thirds birthday to one of my Utah peeps! 🥳
Love and hugs to all y’all.
Lift the world.
~ stephen
Lift the World 