Today was a to-do list day, and on most accounts, a rather productive one.
I closed the sales tax account with the state of Arkansas for my defunct tree service business. Funny that The agencies don’t talk to each other. When you shut down a business with the state, not all the agencies get the memo. You have to tell them individually.
Welcome to 2023, Arkansas. We’ve got about a week of it left. 🙃
I finished buttoning up the last little bits of Thomas’s truck, getting the plastic molding put in place around the front bumper and radiator.
I got the metal part left overs from my recent jobs taken down and put in the bed of my pickup truck.
I went to Pea Ridge and took back all of the parts that I’ve bought over the last however long that I hadn’t yet returned. Trying to get everything buttoned up before the end of the year.
I bought two five gallon diesel fuel cans because we only have one, and I keep putting diesel in gas cans because I need more diesel than just the 5 gallons, but then that gets confusing to figure out which fuels and which can. So I bought two more diesel fuel cans, so we’ve got a total of three now… and about 87,000 gas cans.
I took the house trash up to the dumpster.
I took the coolant leftovers from various jobs to the Benton County recycling center in Rogers, along with a tire that I found while cleaning up the banks of the creek.
I picked up a load of wood chips, and that’s where the day started to get a little… crazy. The wood chips load was so heavy, with so much of the weight forward, that it smashed the rear end of my pickup truck almost down the ground. Going over the slightest bump, or starting to go up a hill, and my receiver hitch would drag on the ground.
😶
I ended up having to drive all the way home at like 15 to 30 mph, probably. Depending on the road. Sometimes I was going like 4 miles an hour if there were a change in elevation. Gratefully, it was a two-lane road, and I put my hazards on and everything, but it was super touch and go.
Hopefully didn’t completely ruin my truck, but… It is what it is.
What should have been a 12 minute drive home took me probably 45 minutes to an hour?
If that weren’t enough, my trailer brakes went out on the way home, which meant that when I tried to go down the hill, the trailer was pushing me, even with my brakes pressed down to the floor.
Gratefully, I was able to get it to stop because I had started taking the hill at only a few miles an hour. Gratefully again, I was able to reverse up the hill, having just barely come over the crest of the hill to the first sloping downward portion of it.
Grateful for a third time, I was able to do a u-turn in the driveway of the abandoned house that’s next to our property.
Gratefully a fourth time, I was able to make it all the way around on the less steep portion of the drive and come in our property at the other entrance.
I pulled up into the field where I was going to dump the load, and I dumped it, but it was so wet and so sticky, and so decomposed, that it was super crazy heavy and wouldn’t come out, and my truck got stuck in the field, tires just spinning instead of being able to pull forward and let it all come out of the trailer like I usually do.
I think I spent the next two plus hours trying to get all the wood shavings out of the trailer so I could drive away.
What normally is a 30 minute trip there and back with wood chips ended up taking I think maybe 4 hours?
That seriously put a damper on the things I was hoping to accomplish for my to-do list. I was supposed to have picked up five loads, which should have taken about 4 hours, but I ended up with only one load, potentially significantly damaging my truck, and on and on. 😅
Still, I was able to get more stuff done. I went and got the three diesel cans filled with off-road diesel for my mini x and skid steer. I cleaned out my van, so it would be 100% ready to just go right back to work when I got home, without having to do any cleaning up or organizing or anything like that.
I cleaned up the mess on the driveway from all my car and other stuff.
I started checking the brake fluid on the van to see was causing the right front and left rear brakes to lock up and overheat, but as I was checking that out, I realized that the van underneath was crazy rusty. I could just reach up, grab chunks of metal, and pull them right off. 😅
Seeing that, I decided I wasn’t going to spend any time trying to fix the van. I’m just going to sell it as is, or we can use it as a trash runner or something here on the property. I don’t know. Probably just going to sell it as is, so I don’t have to insure it and register it and pay property taxes on it and all that jazz.
I spent some time helping Steve with his Honda again. He had gone and got a new battery, but the Honda place had given him the wrong battery for his vehicle. So when Andreas was trying to install it for him, and they were having issues, I went over to help, and realized that the battery hold down bracket was not going to work because the battery was too tall, so I looked up the battery who was supposed to have, it was an h6. For some reason, the dealer had given him 133 or something like that.
Anyway, after that… Dinner because I’m still not eating like I should during the day 😅…
I’m still not getting my morning routine back going… And I’m leaving for Utah on Saturday, so that’s going to make it even harder to keep the routine. 😅
I’ve got to figure out what I’m doing while I’m in Utah. Generally, I just sleep in my car, but it’s been a while since I’ve slept in my car during a Utah winter. 😅
I don’t want to pay for a carry-on or a checked bag, so I’ll just pack everything that I can pack, and then with the money that I save from not buying a carry-on or checked bag, I’ll just buy some more clothes and blankets for the Civic. 😆
Lift the world.
~ stephen
Lift the World 