The days are all a bit of a jumble, but here’s Monday.
(written on Thursday)
Back and forth multiple times at different houses to get generators going and what not. I force fed fuel into Liz’s whole house generator with Windex squirt bottles full of gas In order To get power to the well pump so that she could wash her dishes and so that Mike could take a shower.
I spent some time trying to help neighbor Joe wire up his gas generator so that it could run his well pump. It needed to be spliced indirectly. Unfortunately, his generator didn’t have the power to jump start the pump, blowing the circuit breaker each time he tried.
I also learned that in doing what we were trying to do, we were backfeeding power into the grid, which, according to what Dan was saying, would actually electrocute workers if they were working on the power outages in our area. 😅
While I was off gathering that information for Joe, I took some time to start the old dead tree on fire that we were taking down for Joe. He was worried it was going to take out the new fence he’s having installed, so I set about getting it removed.
It was a huge ok, and it was completely covered in poison ivy.
Amazingly, power came back on about 5:45 p.m. 🥳
Again, we were among the lucky ones.
After lighting the tree (and a crap ton of Poison ivy) on fire and trying to help Joe with the well stuff, I went home for a bit before coming back a little bit later to work on getting the tree down.
I had hoped to pull off all the large, rotten, upper limbs. I still had my mega sling shot from the tree service days, so I went to town launching the beanbag over limbs, pulling ropes over, and yanking down rotten limbs.
It kicked my butt.
I spent i think 6 hours fighting with stuck beanbags and ropes that acted more like grappling hooks than ropes when trying to pull them over the rotten tree limbs, and with the tree being rotten, there were so many places for the rope and beanbag and all that.
It was… frustrating. I was out there until midnight trying desperately to get the tallest limb busted off because the rotten base was burning a lot faster than I had expected, And I was worried that it might come down In the, but to no avail. During my last attempt, the rope broke, so I called it a night, crossed My fingers that it wouldn’t come crashing down and damage his other trees, and went to bed.
The tornado And all the things that need to be done give me things to focus on to do, but like I mentioned before, not even doing things to help other people is able to bring happiness, so I’m struggling.
A lot.
And the old adage that no good deed goes unpunished seems to rule in my life as well.
Running out of steam.
I’m trying to make it through this crazy stressful time right now without making any really big decisions out of desperation just to lighten my load but that I might regret.
So I’m just trying to make the smaller decisions. I’ve got a list of decisions I need to make, and I’m going through that.
It’s all very hard right now.
~ stephen
Lift the World 