(written on the 27th)
I started and ended the day today livid. 😕
I’ve worked my butt off down at the deck area to make the place look like a beautiful park, and when I went there this morning for my morning servicise, I noticed that someone had hacked chunks out of two of the three nice trees right next to the deck.
It was just random, thoughtless, selfish destruction.
And I was pissed. 😡
After a bit of inquiry, Liz found out that it was one of her son’s friends who did it.
It just boggles my mind.
How can people be so selfish?
…but then again, I’ve been guilty of stuff like that before myself, so as angry as I was… I can’t say that I haven’t done the same thing. 😞
Still… I was pissed.
After dealing with that this morning, I headed out for my normal car day. It was only four cars today, but it was more billable hours than the seven cars I did on Monday.
The first car was a 2011 Toyota Camry that… I can’t remember what I did on. 😅
Car number two was a 2017 Jeep Wrangler that the owner had the check engine light come on, and he was about to sell the Jeep to his parents, so he wanted to make sure the check engine light issue was fixed before they got the vehicle.
I went over and found that it had a code which 80% of the time turns out to be a particular part in the evap system, so I went ahead and replaced that part, letting him know that I didn’t know for sure, but that it was most likely that one.
I had to leave and drive up to the Bentonville store and back to get the part, so that added some time to the repair, but overall, it went really well, so that was nice!
The next car was a 2004 Ford escape that was having a cooling system issue and a misfire.
I found that they had a badly leaking radiator, and the misfire was on a particular cylinder, but when I swapped the coil to one cylinder and the spark plug to another, it didn’t misfire anymore, so I couldn’t prove the misfire at all. So I explained what they would need to do going forward on that, and then they went ahead and had me replace the radiator, which turned out to be quite the challenge.
It was basically a three and a half hour job to do everything that I did, so that was a pretty good addition to my billable hours for the day. 🙂
But it did kick my butt.
Well… actually, it went rather well… except for one stupid hose that even after getting the clamp off, took me probably 30 minutes of finagling and brute forcing and everything I could come up with to get the darn thing off.
It was insane. I’m pretty sure I’ve never had a hose be that hard to come off after the clamp has come off. I’ve had plenty of hoses that were a pain in the butt to get the clamp off, but I’ve never had a hose be stuck on like this.
Well… maybe I have? but not on one that I had to keep intact. When I’ve run into hoses that were a pain in the butt to get off in the past, I’ve just cut them off because I was replacing the hose anyway. But in this case, there was no cutting the hose unless I wanted to get another one.
Anyway, After lots of frustration with that particular hose, and lots of frustration with another hose that had a clamp that kicked my butt because of where it was placed and what kind of clamp it was, I finally got it all buttoned up.
The last car of the day was a 2011 GMC Yukon that she just wanted her old set of wheels and tires put on because she was going to get rid of the truck and wanted to keep the newer, really nice set.
That one went decently well. It was a bit hard on my struggling back, but I got it done without any real issues.
🥳
That was the day.
One note: I haven’t worked for JustAnswer in a long time, and that’s probably not very good. I probably need to keep working, so I don’t lose the job. 😅
Working on cars all day took my mind off of what happened with the trees down by the creek. But upon driving back onto the property, it all came flooding back, and the anger came flowing back…
Not so great. I found myself pissed again.
(sigh)
I’ll get over it.
Lift the world.
~ stephen
Lift the World 