Up at 5 something… I just… woke up. 🙃
Headed out to Lowe’s early to try and get wood picked up for my mom’s garden box, since they open really early.
Unfortunately, either I’m the worst person in the world to pick wood boards, or the boards were pretty crappy because I spent probably 45 minutes combing through boards trying to find boards that looked like they were in good condition. It’s easier with 2x4s, but we were looking for 2x12x10s.
With near zero resilience these days/years to obstacles in my path, I just… got mad. 😞
I gave up I’m trying to get wood from Lowe’s, and My mom is going to look at Another place that might have better quality wood. 🤞
From there, I went to pay my huge property tax bills.
Gulp.
I hate property taxes. Hate hate hate. Fall on hard times, and you can’t even afford to keep your own stuff. Which means it’s not really yours. Some things governments do are just flat wrong, in my opinion. Property tax is perhaps the worst tax. Get rid of it, or make it a one time fee, or increase some other tax to cover the budget shortfall, but don’t charge people for owning stuff.
What else… I got all the Haven Hill tools and whatnot transferred to personal property. Still paying for that huge business mistake.
From there, I went to the Rogers City office and renewed my business license. I’m actually a few weeks late, so I had to pay a late fee.
Whatever.
Then I stopped off at the Rogers yard waste place and got Another load of wood chips for the creek ramp area.
What else… I was finally able to finish a JustAnswer question that’s been hanging over my head for over a week now. A lady in California was trying to find a shop that was willing to change the EV battery in her old 2014 RAV4 EV. After calling the Carlsbad, California Toyota dealership three times over three days, the only one in Southern California that was willing to work on the old 2014 RAV4 EV, I was finally able to get a quote of something like $23,000 to change out the battery, with no estimated time of delivery because new batteries are drop shipped as needed and listed as out of stock and back ordered or something like that.
But at least I was able to complete that pesky question that’s been lingering for so long.
I spent a good little while working on the ramp area, recon touring with the metal rake. Lots of hard work, but also great progress. It looks really good right now. Just have a bunch of weeds to pull that crew because I didn’t get everything covered in time before spring.
Once all of the weeds are pulled, then what chips can go down.
Hunter came and mowed by the deck area, which looked really good with all the long grass growing in the hay fields surrounding.
I helped Hunter with a truck bed he’s trying to modify and put on his truck To turn it into a welding bed. We used my little skid steer to move the heavy parts and whatnot, and then he borrowed my grinder to cut up the bed.
That was all over by the shop area, and since that was already there, I decided to start dragging down some larger pieces of concrete that have been stashed in the woods from a leftover demolition many years ago. There were some sections of sidewalk probably 8 ft long each, so I dragged one of them down to the creek area. I pulled another out of the woods, but when I went to get the third, the skid steer died. According to the fuel gauge, it had plenty of fuel, but I had fuel with me, And when I went to check the fuel system, there was air in it, so I figured I would just put some more fuel in and prime it.
That seemed to work. The skid steer fired back up, and I started working again, but maybe a minute later, it died again.
This time, there was no bleeding of the system. No fuel at all was coming through the fuel line from the tank. So I tried to suck fuel from the tank, but all I got was a few little brief mouthfuls of diesel fuel but just air after that.
Hmmm…
Basically, as best as I could guess, that meant one of two things. Either the fuel line was between the engine and the tank was damaged, or the fuel line inside the tank was not touching the fuel.
I did a quick YouTube search, and I found one guy talking about how a super common issue with those is having the fuel line in the tank slowly disintegrate over time and break off.
So I learned how to raise the cab on the skid steer, pried The fuel line out of the tank, and found that the line indeed was busted inside the tank.
Gratefully, the parts I needed were only like 25 bucks from the local Bobcat dealer, so I ordered the parts for pick up the next day, as they were about to close.
Grateful that it appears to be a fairly simple fix. 🤞 It’s been really frustrating having so many things breaking lately. Frustrating and discouraging. I’m already overwhelmed with so many things. And the pile just… Get steeper.
I am feeling really good about the progress at the deck, though. There is light at the end of the tunnel, so to speak. You can actually kind of see that we’re almost to the point where it’s going to actually start looking like a park instead of a long-term landscaping project.
Still, there’s a ton of work to go, and looking at it, it honestly doesn’t look like much. It’s more the contrast from what it used to look like to what it is now than it is that it actually looks really good. It doesn’t actually look all that great. But it does in comparison. 🙂 So I’ll take it.
My new Milwaukee sawzall came during the day while I was working on other things, so I grabbed it out of the package bin, figured out how to put the saw blade on, was absolutely blown away by the sheer size and weight of the darn thing. Holy freaking crap. I never realized this thing was going to be a big old beefy honkin’ tool. 😆
It’s pretty cool. 😁
I used it to cut the damaged boards off the shed, so I made a little bit of progress there. Little bits of progress here and there. I haven’t been working on any one project until it’s finished. I’ve just been bouncing from project to project making little bits of progress here and little bits of progress there.
Psychologically, I think it helps a little bit to have some novelty mixed in with the ongoing? At least with projects that are multi-staged and take a good long time. Sometimes it’s nice just to see progress in a new place instead of seeing the same project still not finished. Of course, working on another project slows down the ability to finish the ones already in process, but sometimes… I think the psyche just needs something new and fresh.
Ate some dinner after that and then headed over to neighbor Dan’s place because his big tractor yet again had the AC go out on it. It happens to him pretty much literally every single year, And here we were again. This time, gratefully, when I went over there, I found that the whole front of his cooling and AC system was all choked up with dust and field debris. There was refrigerant in the system, and though the readings weren’t what I might have expected from a car, It seemed more likely to me that it was working like it should and that the only real issue was that the air wasn’t able to pass across the condenser and radiator like it was supposed to, which was keeping it from being properly cooled which was keeping it from being able to cool the inside of the cabin.
He felt a little foolish because he had noticed that before but they hadn’t blown out the debris yet, but we all do stuff like that. Nothing to feel foolish about.
And, well, that was the day. Some good progress. Crossing my fingers on this skid steer. Hopefully it’ll be a quick fix tomorrow.
Love and hugs!
Lift the world.
~ stephen
Lift the World 