After waking up at the truck stop and realizing that I was pretty out of water, I drove around hot springs trying to find one of the grocery stores that we had been to the other night.
I think I found one of the ones that we went to, and I went to buy water, but it was $1.99 a gallon.
😶
Food is so expensive here. It’s nutty.
I weighed that against driving around trying to find a cheaper price, but that would be a waste, so I sucked it up and just spent two bucks for a gallon of water.
After that, I drove over to Cascade Falls, a little picnic area and swimming hole near where my sister and brother-in-law live.
At first, I mostly just walked around, pondering. I spent some time studying gospel-related stuff, listening to old recordings that I had made of myself reading spiritual stuff that was significant to me.
I had data reception on and off while there, so I worked on the Arkansas sales tax stuff that was due today. I only worked something like five or six days in September, and I haven’t worked since, but I still had income to report and taxes to pay.
Gratefully, since I only worked a handful of days, there wasn’t a whole lot to go back through and figure out in order to submit everything.
In my walking around, I wandered down to the beautiful little Springs. I think the temperature of the water is something like 67° year around because it’s a “warm” spring?
Something like that, I think.
It was definitely a fun little place. I love little places like that.
Eventually, I grabbed my biodegradable soap, and took a bath in the springs. 🙃 I actually love taking baths in springs and mountain rivers/creeks. It’s so refreshing. 🙃
I don’t remember if I mentioned it before or not, but I think my new floss dealies dislodged one of my fillings in the back. Last night, when I went to bed, I remember feeling like the lower rear most muller on my right side was sticking up further than it usually does. I could feel it touching my upper teeth sooner than it was supposed to. So I sort of bit down, pressing against that spot, and it felt like it popped back into place. Looking in a mirror, I can see the outline and discoloration where the filling ends and the tooth begins now. Have no idea how long it’s been that way, or whether or not it really was the floss that did it, but I think it might have been.
Every time I tried to floss between the rear two molars on that side, the floss tape would get stuck. Twice I had to get a pair of needle nose pliers in order to get the floss out from between those teeth because the flossing tool dealies would break and leave the floss stuck in my teeth.
Gotta love it.
But it’s a good opportunity to practice being grateful for everything, even the challenging things. I want to make an appointment with the dentist soon after I get back. I was hoping to do it today, but it’s a Friday, so dentists generally aren’t open on Fridays. I’m a little nervous, though that it’s going to hurt a crap ton, especially if sugar or other things get down past the filling to the nerve.
One more reason to get home sooner rather than later.
One more aid to help me in my oft-failing efforts to stop eating sugar again. 😅 I was doing so well until the road trip (darn fruit snacks). 🙃
After my bath, after listening to several of my little spiritual recording thingies, after doing most of the work I needed to submit my tax stuff, and after enjoying a nice swim in the springs, I headed over to my sister and brother-in-law’s place, picked up my mom, said goodbye, pointed the nose of the van south, and we were on the road again.
While going east through Nebraska, I learned two significant geographical features about the state that I had never known before. The first was that there was an absolutely massive aquifer that is so near the surface, that there were lakes everywhere. We learned about it because as we were driving, we saw lakes all over the place, and that didn’t make any sense to us given the climate of Nebraska. But the water of this massive aquifer is so close to the surface, that it creates these lakes everywhere.
Cool. 🙂
The other thing that we learned was that, apparently, the largest sand dunes in the western hemisphere are in Nebraska.
😶
Nebraska?!?!?!
Yep! Y’all might have already been aware of these things, but it was certainly a surprise for me.
The Sand Hills in Nebraska is an absolutely massive stretch of land that just looks like hilly grassland. But if you look closely, anywhere on the hills where the terrain is steep enough for grass not to grow, what you see underneath is actually sand.
I don’t know what kinds of grasses grow there that managed to survive in the sand, but that was super interesting. If you were to strip away all the grass in the Sand Hills in Nebraska, It would look like a sand dune desert.
Did I mention it’s big?
If you didn’t already know, it’s 20,000 square miles big.
😶
Anyway, so those were cool things. Nebraska is also very very long to drive through when you’re going west to east or east to west. 🙃
We got to sergeant Nebraska around 9:00, got gas, and then headed over to my mom’s friend’s house where we were temporarily reunited with Mindy, our old mini Aussie that my mom rehomed because she was just more than what she could take care of and still have a balanced life.
Mindy was super confused, it seemed. She always seemed to have the pack mentality when she lived with us, I think as the runt of the pack, so she was always deferring to the alpha. I think she was super confused because now she had two alphas. My mom who used to be her alpha, and her new owner who is her current alpha.
Despite being confused, I think she was still happy to see us, and she let us pet her quite a bit. She still just as scared as ever, jumping and jerking and running away at the slightest little noises and things. Very scared dog. But It’s good to see her. Hopefully it won’t mess with her psyche too much to see us and then have us leave again.
I wish we could communicate with animals more effectively. I’d love to know how they feel and to be able to talk to them.
Anyway, I’ve been getting sick today. I could feel it starting in last night, that little itch in the back of my throat, and being tired. The sneezes and the headache and all that stuff coming on.
Welcome back, cold! Haven’t seen you in a long time! 🙃
I also noticed that our 5-hour drive from Hot Springs to Sergeant did a number on my back and hips and knees and ankles. As I was going to bed last night, my joints were super bad, lots of pain.
I’m thinking this might be a good thing, though? It’s still just correlative evidence, but it’s happened a couple times now that I have felt mostly fine from the waist down, no pain of any consequence, really, in my hips, knees, and ankles, but then I get in a car and drive for hours, and I am miserable afterward.
This seems to be lending more and more credence to the possibility that all that pain that I feel in my hips and knees and ankles is actually caused by my back.
🤞
I’m really hoping it’s all from one issue, and not from actual joint damage to each of those joints.
Oh, do I hope so! 🤞🤞🤞
We will be back in Arkansas probably Sunday or Monday, and then I can go back through my medical records, and take a look at those MRIs from 15ish years ago.
It’s going to be weird to be home. Not that I really feel like I have a home anyway, but I’ve lived in that house in Arkansas longer than I’ve ever been at any one place without leaving. It’s been six and a 1/2 years without moving, but I think it might be time to go.
I just don’t know where… yet.
I stretched a little bit before bed, and struggling emotionally as I have for the last day and a half, I allowed myself to slip back into wasting time online with news and sports and other stuff–hungry for an escape. I tried fighting, but I just didn’t have anything left.
My biggest consolation is that when confronted with the temptations to relapse in my pornography addiction, I didn’t. I was at least firm on that one, so I’m grateful for that.
Lift the world.
~ stephen
Lift the World 