Gosh, it was quite the day yesterday!
First thing in the morning, I went over to the AutoZone in Pea Ridge to take back a mountain of parts that I ended up not needing. All the brake rotors and brake pads from that brake job that didn’t need to be done, and the fuel pump and fuel filter from that job that turned out to be a security issue.
I think I returned like five or $600, maybe $700 worth of stuff. 😅 Which is nice for the bank account, but I always dislike having to take back parts that they have to then reshelve.
After that, I headed to the only job that I was going to do yesterday. I had plenty of more people call, but after the cancellations, and not really wanting to work too much, I just did the one job that I had promised to do. It was going back to a long time customer with a Mercury Grand Marquis that wouldn’t start. Turned out he just had super super bad battery cables, so corroded, that one of the positive cables had actually broken itself loose and was completely free of the battery cable and itself.
So I cut off the old cable end, and I cut back the wire to the point where it was nice and clean, and then I restrict it and connected it to a new battery cable and, rerouting the positive cable since there wasn’t enough room anymore after giving the Cable itself a haircut.
The customer thanks me for my work, and he once again thanked me for my recommendation that he not sell his car. It was earlier this year but I first met him, so I guess not that long of a customer, but I’ve done several jobs for him. I met him while doing a pre-purchase inspection for him because some shop or someone had told him that his car wasn’t worth keeping and then he should get another one. Mercury Grand Marquis are fabulous vehicles, in my opinion. They just go and go and go. So after inspecting the vehicle that he wanted me to inspect, and finding that it wasn’t worth buying, then having him want me to look at other vehicles at the dealership parking lot, I asked him why he was buying a new car, and he told me that he’d been told his car was in bad shape and should be sold, and I asked him what all was wrong with it, and he told me, and I told him to keep the car. He’s been very happy with that decision and thanked me again for my recommendation because it’s been a great car for him, and all it needed was some basic maintenance with spark plugs and a few coil packs, for the most part.
Anyway, after that, I headed over to the northwest hospital in Bentonville to try and get all the financial stuff taken care of for the EGD but I had before I left on my trip. They had had me prepay the 2900, or whatever it was, and my health sharing ministry requires that I give them an itemized list of the expenses, but it was spread across four different departments, the hospital, the doctor, anesthesiology, and pathology. So I didn’t know exactly what to do, because when I called over the phone and asked for an itemized report, the only thing I got was the itemized report for the hospital itself.
So I went to the hospital and tried to get all the documentation I needed, but even they couldn’t give it all to me. But they assured me that the insurance company, health string ministry, I mean, would understand and wouldn’t give me any flack, so I guess we’ll see?
I spent a lot longer there than I was hoping, waiting for my own time in the waiting list at the front of the hospital, and then going from department to department trying to get the itemized list.
Any guesses what the original bill for the insurance company would have been had it been sent to the insurance company for my EGD?
Over $9,000. 😶
It was like a 15 minute procedure.
But I guess that perfectly illustrates the reason why I want to spend time and energy doing my best to help reduce costs in the health care system in the United States. I think we have fabulous resources, medically, and in theory, we’ve got the best medical in the world, but in practice… Maybe not so much? Between the absolutely massive expense, and how doctors, at least in my experience, don’t really listen to you and just make educated guesses after just a couple of minutes and charge ridiculous amounts of money to do that… yeah…
Anyway, by the time I got all that stuff taken care of, at least of the degree that I got it taken care of, I needed to head home to meet Jim in time to drive over to Bella Vista to pick up one of the items that’s part of my Christmas gift to the hill.
I was grateful for Jim’s help both in going to look at it originally, and in helping me go get it. We got it home, and I set about working on stuff down by the deck. After a while of trying to clear out the vines in the ground, and realizing that there were so many, and the roots went so deep that it was going to be an absolutely massive job, I thought better of my strategy and decided to get my skid steer and dig up the roots.
So I drove up the hill with my jump box, thinking that it was going to be as easy as jump starting the dead battery in the skid steer, but for whatever reason, I just couldn’t get a good connection, and it probably took me maybe an hour just to jump start the skid steer. I couldn’t get it to go the first time, and it acted like it either had a bad starter or wasn’t getting the amps that it needed because of bad connection or super bad battery. Eventually, I gave up, went home, ate a little bit well my battery charger charged the battery , and then I headed back up the hill with both my jump boxes and what I hoped was a charged up battery.
I still couldn’t get it to start.
But finally after however much longer of fighting with it, I was able to get it to move just a little bit, so that let me know that the issue wasn’t the starter.
And then, finally, I got it started. 🥳
Once I’d gotten it started, I loaded it up into my dump trailer, and drove it down to the deck area.
At that point, I thought I was home free, but when I went to try and take it off the dump trailer, the hydraulics stopped working halfway down the ramp. And unlike other vehicles, I couldn’t just put it in neutral and roll it the rest of the way. When the hydraulics stopped working, it basically locks up, so I couldn’t go up, and I couldn’t go down.
I was just stuck.
That, and then the skid steer died, and I had to hook up the jump box again, with the skid steer in a precarious position and me having to be behind it while I hooked up the jump box.
After several failed attempts, I had the idea to put the skid steer in the lowest possible setting and just creep it along as slowly as I could. In doing so, I was able to creep it all the way back down the ramps and onto the ground. 🎉
From there, I used the skid steer to dig up all the awful roots, which turned out really really well, I think. Obviously, since the skid steer is large, I can’t get it into the tight places, so there’s only so much I can do, but it was at least nice to be able to make a significant difference, cutting down below the root level and then lifting up, so all the roots would come out and I could just comb through the dirt pile and pull out the roots.
So that was super great, and I’m grateful. I feel like I’m making better progress now on what was an absolute nightmare part of this whole venture.
There are so so many vines, and so many of them are poison ivy, I think.
What I really need to do is grab a poison ivy vine from the tree itself and pull it back to the ground to look at what the roots look like to verify that what I think is poison ivy actually is.
Anyway, after spending time doing that, by that point, it was dark outside, but I had the headlights on on the skid steer and managed to smooth out some of the places that were piled up with dirt and debris, and I also use the skid steer to basically bulldoze through the vast majority of what was left to clear on the bridge side of the deck. They’re still a massive amount of work that needs to be done, but going in there and just running over everything means that it will be a heck of a lot less work, especially dealing with thorn bushes. I should have gotten the skid steer a long time ago to do a lot of the work that I was doing, but… I didn’t. 🙃
Anyway, so I’m making good progress on all of that, and I’m grateful. I’m spending so much time working on that, and as I drove away this morning, with all the leaves off the trees, I realized just how bad our own woods are still on the acreage that I actually live on. But, this is a gift for Jim and Liz and the hill, so priority doesn’t really come into play here because it’s not just One of my many to-do list items.
Let’s see… Oh yeah, no forgetting this one: after spending a good little while dealing with all the brush on the bridge side of the deck, I decided to go down into the creek with my skid steer to try and move some of the large boulders over to help reinforce the bank by the deck.
I tried to get some of the boulders for a little while, but they just were super super hard to get with my skid steer, so after trying for a while, I gave up and tried to leave the creek. Unfortunately, what I found, was that the bank was too steep for me to get back out.
😅
So I spent the next probably 2 or 3 hours trying to dig my way out, first digging down the bank to make it less sharp and less muddy, but that didn’t work because I was in a skid steer not a bulldozer or excavator, so I couldn’t get the leverage to dig the hill away.
So then I tried building up a ramp of river rock, but even after I built up the ramp, the skid steer would just dig ruts in the gravel instead of actually climbing it.
I tried and tried and tried, but to no avail.
Finally, I hooked up a a super long tow rope to my truck, put my truck in drive to have constant tension on the skid steer thinking that at least the weight of the truck and the tension of at least a small effort of the truck going forward would help pull me out, but time and time again, the skid steer would just dig deeper ruts, and the truck didn’t have the ability with just being in drive to get me out.
I finally gave up trying to find a way to do it by myself and reached out to family members all over the hill, but everyone was busy doing whatever they were doing and didn’t respond.
Finally, after about 45 minutes or so, or whatever it was, my nephew Hunter responded, and came over with his diesel pickup truck and pulled me out. It took two goes, because the first go the tow rope snapped and came flying back probably 40 or 50 ft and smacked me in the face. Gratefully, it was just a tow rope and not a chain.
😅
Finally out, I was relieved in grateful, especially since Hunter was basically lying down to go to bed because he had to get up early to go to Tulsa for welding school in the morning, but he actually liked coming to pull me out, so that was nice.
After that, I cleaned everything up that I needed to clean up for the night, and I headed back up the hill to our house, where I ate some dinner, relaxed a little bit, and then crashed for the night.
What a day!
Love to all.
Lift the world.
~ stephen
Lift the World 