Well, I’m sitting on my trailer tongue about 7 minutes away from Gravette.
Why am I sitting on my trailer tongue on the side of the road? Well, because Stephen drives a general motors junk truck. His instrument cluster works when it wants to work. And even when his instrument cluster works, the gas gauge often doesn’t work. And even though Stephen saw how much gas he had earlier today while driving when the gas gauge was actually working, he forgot that he was low on gas and just kept on driving.
😅
Because he’s a genius. 😆
So… Many thanks in advance to my friend Miguel who is on his way with the gas can to rescue my little butt. 😆
…
In the meantime, I’m trying to make myself as productive as possible while sitting here, so I figured I might as well try and help myself stay on top of my journal.
I slept in until 8:00 something this morning. I think it was like maybe 8:20? I don’t remember. Maybe 8:30.
I decided I was going to go up to Oklahoma to get a big load of greenhouse materials, and then I had a customer call saying he was in an emergency and needed a belt put on, and it was on the way to Oklahoma, kind of at least, so I decided to help him out.
But then on the drive over, he canceled the emergency– After I told him that it was my day off and that I was going to help him out.
You didn’t answer my texts. He didn’t answer my phone call, so I called back again trying to get in touch with him because I didn’t want to show up and be stood up– which clearly would have happened had I not called because I was already on my way to help him after having ordered the belts and started driving into town.
Gratefully, I had taken a wrong turn and headed through Pea Ridge instead of going through Rogers, so it all worked out because I was on the better route to go to Oklahoma.
I do have parts I bought that are waiting for me at the Bentonville AutoZone, though, so hopefully I don’t forget that those are there.
Anyway, I drove out to Oklahoma and proceeded to bust my butt disassembling all of the rest of the greenhouse and loading it up.
I managed to get all the boards detached from the huge pieces of cover plastic. I got all the baseboards. I got the roller pipe. I got all the rest of the hardware and screws and everything.
When I go back on Tuesday, it’s just going to be loading up all the posts, the whole crap ton of cover plastic, and then whatever odds and ends are left over that I might want to take.
Almost done!!!
(This has been a much longer project than I ever expected 😅, But now I know what it takes to disassembly and haul off a 3000 ft² greenhouse.)
When Miguel gets here with a gas can and gas, I’ll take him to lunch and Gravette. I’ll be back on here when I’m closing the day.
…
I forgot to mention that loading the wood from the greenhouse into the dump trailer today resulted in splinters in my hand. That’s not out of the norm. I get splinters all the time with all the work that I do in the woods and whatnot, like the thorn under my nail the other day, but one of the splinters that I got went straight down and went in so far and so fast that there was no visual evidence of it other than the whole. Even opening up the hole, you couldn’t see the splinter down inside.
😅
Lovely.
Anyway, Miguel came with some gas and rescued me, and We went out to eat at a little restaurant in Gravette.
After getting some food, I came home and… I feel like I did something… But now I don’t remember. 🙃
Oh! I got a little scalpel/exacto knife blade thingy, and I performed surgery on my hand to get the splinter out.
Apparently, I’m a bit of a wuss. It took a long time of digging only making the smallest cuts necessary. Realistically, I was probably at it for an hour or two.
I tried using ice to numb it up a bit, but… that seemed ineffectual (hurt just as badly).
I had an idea, though. Often times, When splinters go down deep, the body creates a protective little bubble around the intruder, and that bubble can last a very very very long time. My mom had one for something like a decade, I think, before it basically absorbed back into the body.
I didn’t want that–especially not in my right hand. So I had this idea that if I could at least open up the hole that the splinter went in, and keep it open, that it was more likely to push the sliver out eventually instead of allowing it to close off and build a little protective bubble.
So I just kept taking down the hole, which was pretty much straight down into my hand and not sideways at all. I dug it open and kept digging, and then, eureka! I could see down in there the very end of the splinter.
It was still far too deep to grab with anything. It could only be excavated, but with that same idea of opening up the end, I thought that it might be more likely that if I opened up one end, and then progressively squoze from the tissue deeper down on up, like milking a cow, that maybe, just maybe, I could get that splinter to reverse course and come out.
So I got a pair of tweezers that was super super stiff, and I put it so it was squeezing the flesh below what I thought was probably the end of the splinter. And I just left it there periodically opening the splinter hole back up as it would close off, so has not to allow the bubble formation to happen and to prevent any attempts at healing.
Eventually, after enough opening and reopening and widening of the hole, and after enough squeezing, pretty significant squeezing, I saw what looks like the tip of the splinter protrude from the skin enough to grab some high-quality tweezers to it out.
It wasn’t a one-person job, and since I was home, and my mom was home, I went downstairs and asked her to squeeze firmly with the super heavy duty tweezers in order to force that little bit of splinter to protrude, and then I used the other tweezers in my left hand to pull out the thorn.
Success!!! 🥳
And, at the same time, I found myself disappointed at the size of the splinter. It was so much smaller than the pain made it feel. I thought there was this big old splinter buried way deep down inside, and it was just this little thing. 😅
Funny.
Love and hugs. 😊
Lift the world.
~ stephen
Lift the World 