Wow, it’s been a week. 😬
Sorry about that, folks, the goings on in the attic (🧠) have been… interesting.
Monday was a good day that devolved into a really challenging day toward the end. I didn’t work that day. Monday and Tuesday were both rainy, so much of my time was spent at home.
I think I’ve told you that I’m working on trying to get outdoor furniture, and so I’ve been looking a lot on Facebook Marketplace for that and other things.
Well, Monday morning, I found a really beautiful looking wooden bench 🥳. It’s… so beautiful that I almost don’t want to leave it outside, but it’s made out of teak, so it should be great outdoors without any stain or sealant or anything at all.
I was able to get in touch with the gentleman who was selling it, and he accepted the offer that I gave (although he didn’t actually read the offer, so he was expecting full price when I got there 😅), so I drove way out to Gravette in my work van to pick up the little jewel.
Gratefully, he didn’t make me pay full price when he went back to read the conversation and realized that he had glossed over my offer. He went ahead and sold it to me for the offer that I had made, so that was lovely.
After that, I stopped off and hung out with my friend Miguel at his shop for a little while. Of course, as is generally the case, he’s working and taking care of people who are working for him, and whatnot, so he can’t really talk much, but that’s ok.
After a brief visit with him and his companion, I went home and just did the normal things during the day. To-do list stuff, lots and lots of time I think studying and learning and whatnot, and lots and lots of time on Facebook marketplace looking for things that are on my purchase list.
Aaaaand… That’s where things started to slide. As I think I’ve mentioned before, Facebook Marketplace just, no matter what you have your settings at, seems to just bombard you with women’s clothing ads, much of them lingerie and see-through stuff. Gratefully, I haven’t seen the full-on pornographic ads that have been there in the fairly recent past, but it’s still annoying to deal with these very provocative ads that show up as items to purchase in your list of things that you’re searching for. You could be searching for cars, furniture, whatever, and invariably, they decide to slide in women’s lingerie and whatnot.
I’ve gone through and changed my settings, I’ve blocked all those types of ads, and reported the pornographic ones and all that other stuff, and it seems like no matter what I do, to that point, I hadn’t been able to be free of those ads.
Funny enough, I was actually feeling really good because each time I saw an ad, I would just tap the little three dots, and choose to block the ad and report them as I don’t want to see. I just kept doing that over and over, and everything was great, but at some point in time, after I don’t know, maybe hours of being on Marketplace researching stuff and looking for things, I guess I got what my friend Cory would call decision fatigue?
I was doing so well. I wasn’t feeling any real pull from them in terms of addiction relapse stuff, just annoyance, and then blocking them. But at some point in time, I guess… Oh, I think I remember… Yeah, I think there was one that was completely see-through and not just the standard revealing stuff, and I think that was my trigger.
Yeah…
Instead of leaving Facebook Marketplace and running away, so to speak, I just kept right on looking for the things that I was buying, but I think each time I ran into another ad that I needed to block, I think it wore me down a little bit. At that point, I was triggered, and so those ads were having a more potent effect on me.
Anyway, I ended up sliding all the way into a full-blown relapse in the pornography/masturbation stuff, and having crumbled in those things, I crumbled in the other areas that I had been quite happily free of–sports, news, movies and whatnot. I ended up going on a multi-addiction, multi-hour binge starting around 5ish and not getting to bed until like 1:30 in the morning.
😕
Tuesday dawned with discouragement. It’s so hard to see progress after relapse–so hard–and I was struggling pretty good.
Gratefully, though, and I’m going to choose to say that it was by the grace of God, instead of slipping further and further, I started working on shaking it off, working on just trying to focus back in on the things that bring me peace and happiness.
And gratefully, it didn’t take all that long to be back on the horse. 🙏😊
Do I wish I hadn’t have slipped, certainly. Is it hard to get back up and to not get discouraged at yet another stumble, most definitely. But I was blessed to get up again.
Thank you, Lord.
I think it took a decent part of the day Tuesday, another somewhat rainy day that I chose not to work through, to start to get back on track. Having been up late, I ended up getting up late and missing all of my normal morning routines. But what really helped me get back on track, I think, was going and doing my morning routines in the afternoon, choosing to focus back in on the things that mean most to me.
I think by evening I was much much better. 🥳
Wednesday was actually a work day, Just two cars. Things have been slower lately, but That’s pretty normal for this time of year, and I also don’t want a lot of work right now. I just want to get enough to replenish what I spent on the recent trip and cover my current expenses. I mean, it would be nice to also have money that I’m socking away, but I’m not so worried about that right now. I’m focusing on my transition out of mechanics and into the stuff that’s going to feed my soul. 😊
Anyway, the first car was replacing the radiator on that Nissan Murano.
Nissan.
😅
I swear I have the shortest memory. Why do I keep saying yes to these jobs? 🙃 I did basically the same job just a few months ago, and it took like 6 hours, I think. I started pulling it apart and went, oh yeah… 😬.
Gratefully, it didn’t take 6 hours, but it certainly took a lot longer than the 3 hours that I billed for it.
Part of the reason why it takes longer is that as a mobile mechanic, I choose not to do the AC stuff because I don’t want to deal with the headache, so I have to find ways of getting parts out without having to evacuate all the refrigerant, vacuum down the system, and then refill the system.
It would be one thing if I were in a shop that had one of those several-thousand dollar machines that does the whole thing for you, basically, But I’m just little me.
Gratefully, it went reasonably well, and he should be good to go.
The only other car I did was also a Nissan. 🙃
It was the 2019 Pathfinder, I believe, that had an oil leak which turned out to just be the dipstick tube having had the dipstick left slightly pulled out. It was leaking just a little bits of oil down the alternator and onto the AC compressor and all over the bottom of the engine. Not a lot of oil in volume, but definitely all over lots of engine parts.
So I put the dipstick down all the way, and I spent some time cleaning up the oil that I could reasonably get to. It should probably have degreaser sprayed all over it, but that would have gotten oil and degreaser all over his driveway. And it’s not really a big deal, just doesn’t look so great if you’re going to go sell the vehicle and it looks like it has an oil leak when it actually doesn’t.
When I got finished with work, I think I went down to the lower pasture by the deck and started working on cleaning out the vines and the overgrowth and whatnot until dinner.
Thanksgiving morning was the same thing– going out and working on all the land clearing, that is. I spent pretty much the whole morning after my morning routine, and all of the afternoon until Thanksgiving dinner at Jim and Steph’s place working on clearing out overgrowth.
It was nice to do Thanksgiving with Jim and Steph. I’m grateful for their efforts to help in my quite challenging diet. Aside from My choice to be vegan, I am avoiding spicy things and any foods that aren’t the greatest for reflux issues.
So a big thank you to Jim and Steph for including dishes that fit into this crazy little boy’s diet.
Friday was a repeat of Thursday, spending a lot of the day after my morning routine trying to get all of the stuff down in the lower field taken care of as a Christmas present for my hill family here. Lots of fun plans that require lots of work, but it’ll be cool when it’s done. 😊
I spent a good while, I think it was Friday Anyway, talking to Jim about all the things that I want to do for the hill family down there by the deck. Hopefully I can get it done by the time I want to get it done. 🤞
Christmas is coming!!!
I did one job on Friday night, going to a Hyundai Veloster in Bella Vista that had the check engine light start flashing on his daughter while she was driving on the freeway heading for Thanksgiving dinner. Usually that means there’s a dead misfire, but in this particular case, there were no misfire codes. There was just a weird code for a glow plug issue, but this wasn’t a diesel car, so it didn’t have glow plugs. So I looked up to see what on earth that code was supposed to be for in that particular car, and it turned out that the most likely cause was either a bad knock sensor or a blown engine.
Blown engines in those Hyundai’s and Kia’s with the 1.6 motor are pretty common. They had bearing issues that ruined the engines prematurely for a pretty good handful of years. I believe they even extended the factory warranty for the motor to either 130,000 or 140,000 mi, something like that, because of how prevalent the issue was.
Anyway, I didn’t see any metal in the oil, which is what I usually see when those engines have issues, and I couldn’t get the issue to reproduce, so I told him that the next step for me to do in the diagnostic process would be to actually drain a little bit of oil out of the bottom of the oil pan to see if there was metal in it that I wasn’t able to see on the dipstick. Usually, it’s quite obvious that there’s metal in it because I can see the metal in the oil on the dipstick. But that was the next step that I could do in the diagnostic process to make sure the bases were covered. So I jacked up the car and let a little bit of oil out, and sadly for him, I could see the glittery metal dust running down the bottom of the oil pan, the reflection of my headlamp showing me the many many little metal dust particles.
😕
Crappy.
So I explained to him everything that was going on and what all of his options were. He had literally just purchased the vehicle 2 days prior from a used car dealership nearby that he had purchased I think two other cars from in the past. I’m crossing my fingers and hoping that they will take the car back. Pretty rough, though. The repair would cost more than they paid for the car itself. 😕
Anyway, even though I was there for nearly 2 hours, I just billed him for my first hour and for the materials and whatnot that I used well I was there. It’s hard to Bill someone for the time that it actually took when the bad news is so awful.
Saturday my goal was to finish clearing out all the overgrowth from the deck to the front gate, which is like 150 yards, with probably 80 or 90 of those yards still to clear, but that was an absolutely massively unrealistic goal. 🙃 I was all pumped to go down there and just bust it all out, but so much of what I’m clearing out is blackberry vines. They grow here like weeds–everywhere. And they’re not the thornless type. 😅
Cutting out vines, thorny vines, takes a long time. In addition to that, trying to burn all those vines takes even longer. Because of the volume of space that the vines take up, they don’t burn well. The flames can’t reach from one branch to the next, so you end up with only a little bit burning, and then having the fire go out. If you want to keep the fire going, you’ve got to chop the vines up into pieces that can be laid down on top of each other instead of dragging the whole mess of vines over to the fire and letting it consume the brambles as a whole.
So after 3 days or so of working on this project, gazillions of scratches and punctures and thorns embedded in my hands and legs and maybe even my head? I lasted for probably about 5 hours or so and cleared probably 15 ish yards before I was exhausted and hungry and realizing the hugely overly optimistic goal that I had put in front of myself.
Not that I’m ever overly optimistic. 🙃
After that, I went out with Jim and Jordan to look at a house that for sale in southeast Rogers. It had foundation issues, and I knew before going out there that I almost certainly wasn’t going to be interested in it, but it was an opportunity today spend some time with Jim and Jordan, Jordan being a real estate investor himself.
The house was a mess of foundation problems. One side of the house had sunk like 7 in down, and the corner of the other side had sunk down a good ways as well. Apparently, the neighborhood has that issue. Whoever the builder was didn’t properly compact the ground before building the houses, but it’s been 20 years or so, so nobody can do anything about it because it’s out of warranty.
Brutal. 😕
I don’t remember what I did last night. I pretty much just do a continuation of my morning studies in the evenings. 🙃 And I look for the things that I need to buy on Facebook marketplace.
Trying to be as careful as I can to avoid those ads that have been an issue for me. In fact, this morning (Sunday), I gave in and allowed Facebook to start sending me targeted ads like a lot of other websites do. I’m thinking that letting them send me targeted ads will actually be much more likely to keep the triggering ads away because it’ll actually be focusing on the stuff that I am searching for and not just sending the generic stuff that it sends to everyone over the age of 18 or everyone over the age of 21 or whatever the specifics are when I look up why I’m getting particular ads.
So 🤞. So far, since making the changes, I haven’t had any ads at all that have been in the triggering category. So I guess that’s one bonus of allowing people to send me the targeted ads based on what I search for instead of the generic stuff that they send to everybody.
🤞🤞🤞
So now here I am, Sunday afternoon, having come home from church, put some food together to shove down my throat, and finally catching up on this journal entry for the last week.
Since the relapse challenges on Monday night and the aftermath Tuesday morning, I’ve actually been doing really really well. I’m nearly back to where I was just a couple of weeks ago or so when I was on fire, so to speak.
That’s really exciting. 😊
I would say that right now I’m on tentative fire. 🙃
My morning routine has been a godsend. I don’t think I’ve done it perfectly a single time, but that doesn’t matter. It’s been supremely helpful, and I think I’m getting more and more zeroed in on how to make this iteration be super effective and meaningful.
I have no doubt there will be changes in updates and new things I learned that will bring adjustments in the future, but for now, this is working really well, and I’m really grateful. It’s exciting to be able to be making the progress that I feel like I’m making. 🙏
I’ll give that glory to God. I think it’s been pretty clear where I’ve been without Him the last couple of years. 😅
So all of that’s been really good. I’m back to being hungry, and that’s really… just… wonderful.
I’m starting to get more and more excited about the non-profit stuff again. I’ve been working on it little bits here and there, and just in the last day or so, I think I’ve had some breakthroughs in my motivation and with direction on where I want to go with What I’m doing.
I’m not going to lay it all out there just yet, as my experience tells me that there’s a lot likely still to come before I feel like I’m solidly going a direction I am both excited and feel good about.
But it’s fun to be making progress and to start seeing the things I dream about taking shape in my mind’s eye.
If you’re interested in health updates, I’ve been doing physical therapy exercise is at home for both my tennis elbow and spine issues. I think my tennis elbow is improving little bits here and there it’s not great at all, or even good, but I do feel like I’m seeing improvement. I’ve got specific stretches and exercises that I’m doing each day. I’m less well versed in my spine care, but I feel like I’m making progress there as well. Learning things that I’m applying to my physical therapy routine that I think might be making a difference. Certainly, sitting down on a road trip in a car for as long as I did was not the greatest for my back with all the issues that it has. So it’s been good being home and moving around in whatnot instead of sitting in a car for so long.
I’m more and more convinced that my hip knee and ankle issues are all related to my spine problems, and I’m still suspecting that my heartburn and reflux issues might also be related to my spine issues. I think I’ve mentioned all that before, but that hasn’t changed and has only increased, I think.
I’m working a lot harder at taking care of my body than I ever have. I took so much for granted, beating my body up by lifting things that were way too big for me to lift safely, and putting lots of repeated stress on my joints in ways that I shouldn’t have. But I’m trying hard now. I’m more careful about how I lift things. I’m more careful about how heavy the things are that I try and lift. I bought a sun hat to protect my body from the sun, my face specifically, of course. I’ve been buying things to help with my tennis elbow and my back issues. I got some exercise bands to do exercises for my arm, and I bought one of those pad thingies that people use to sleep with when they’ve had surgery on their leg or legs. Keeps the legs up, and reduces the pressure on the spine by putting it in a much more neutral position.
Hopefully the efforts will pay dividends, and if not, I guess I’ve at least learned the lesson to not take my health for granted.
Speaking of which, after what, 3 weeks, I think today is my first day where I have actually finally gotten enough calories to maintain my weight. It’s been a slow process of figuring out how to pack in the calories with a vegan diet that has also gotten rid of refined foods and highly processed foods.
But Thanks to a decent little bit of effort, and my wonderful mother, we are eating healthier than at least I’ve ever eaten before, and I’m discovering healthy ways to increase the caloric intake to make sure that I can properly take care of my body.
Lots of progress there.
🥳
What else… It’s been really nice lately to feel hungry to talk to God. I’ve missed that relationship a lot, and Even being back hungry and thirsty for the things of God, so to speak, I still find myself longing for an even closer relationship, more communication, more contact with the Divine.
🙏
I think that about wraps it up. I do have a friend of mine that has gone MIA that I’m concerned about and who has been on my mind a lot. Hopefully everything is good.
I’ve got a very long day of work scheduled tomorrow, and it’s going to be very cold, so that’ll be… interesting. 🙃
I’ve got a lot I want to get taken care of here on the home front before I head back out of town for a little Christmas vacation.
It’s not quite 4:30, but I’m going to go ahead and wrap this up as though it were the end of the day. I’m planning on spending the rest of the day chatting with family members and preparing myself for tomorrow in the coming week, and hopefully getting to bed a little early, as I’ve not been getting enough sleep.
My love to you all! 🥰
Lift the world.
~ stephen
Lift the World 