2024-06-29 (Saturday) — Chafingly, Blisteringly, Hot

It never cooled down last night. It was just hot and sticky all night. I think it was probably over 80°+ in the van all night.

Thank heaven I have that little fan to blow on me, 🙏and thank heaven it holds a charge long enough to last all night. 🙏

Jim came driving down to borrow the keys for my mini excavator before I’d even ventured out of the van for the day. I saw him coming, so I popped out. He also saw the huge tree that had finished splitting itself in half, the uphill side having fallen, the downhill side still holding on.

I’m guessing it’s two trees that kind of grew together. Otherwise, it’s probably been around since the civil war.

That’s another prediction I have. We’re going to have another one. Another civil war.

I really hope not, but we are priming ourselves so perfectly for it.

Anyway, just exiting the van at… what was it, maybe 8:45? was like walking into a sauna. Good gravy, it was a hot, sticky, miserable kind of weather.I showed Jim the twisted metal I’d asked him about yesterday, and now I know what he wants to do with it, so I know what to do going forward with that.

The trailer was loaded down with stuff from all the work I’ve been doing, so after Jim left, I drove around and unloaded the trailer, dropping things off at the different spots where they are going to live in the future–fence posts, garden stuff, and the piping that’s for scaffolding or canopy stuff, etc. I unloaded the rest temporarily down at my little Greenhouse staging area.

I loaded up some tires onto the trailer, and then I drove up to the house and loaded up the mattresses that were left there. Thomas wasn’t keeping his mattresses, and I think Jenna and Zach had a mattress they didn’t want, so I just loaded all three of them up and headed to the recycling center. Unfortunately for me, It was the fifth Saturday of the month, Not the 4th, so they weren’t available to take the stuff.

So much of this “move” unloading and reloading the same stuff over and over again as I try and find places for everything.

Ugh.

At least they take tires and mattresses without charge. 🙏

I also loaded up the Dogloo that was on the front porch. I will try and sell that for my mom. Haven’t had much luck selling other things, but I’ll cross my fingers. Pet stuff will probably sell pretty easily, I would guess. People love their pets and like buying things for them. 🤞

My mom is pretty sick, so that’s no fun. Super weak and fevery and whatnot. Hopefully, it passes soon. She and Thomas have also been pretty much without internet and cell service since going to the new place.

They are likely going to need to get Starlink internet, I think. Pretty pricey, but the world runs on the internet these days. Definitely a different world from when I was a kid. 🙃

And to think, in no time, assuming we don’t destroy ourselves first, kids are going to go up in a world where work and careers are largely optional, and artificial intelligence and robots run just about everything.

I believe it’s going to be quite the world. Hunger and poverty as we know it I think we’ll pretty much disappear. I think work will become optional, eventually. Medical Care will improve massively.

Fingers crossed the lack of poverty and for the increased medical Care.

I helped Rafe put the door panel back on for his little Ford Escape.

I spent the bulk of my day down at my greenhouse staging area. I started a fire in the burn barrel And had a fire going the entire day, periodically adding new stuff to it.

I was much more attentive to it this time. 😅

I unloaded just about everything from the bed of my pickup truck and put it on the trailer to start going through. I sorted stuff there, I did a little bit of overgrowth clearing, I started pulling out the book bins out of my van.

It’s hard to get rid of things that are worth so much but that take so much effort to get rid of. There’s little sense trying to get money from them because of the amount of time it takes just to get the money out of them.

Even at super cheap prices, people aren’t buying the furniture that my mom left at the house. So tomorrow I’m going to list it all for free–all except the safe.

I helped Landon a little bit putting up the fence around the upper pond. He ran out of time quickly, though, as dinner came.

As it was getting dark, and I was nowhere near close to reaching my goal of having sorted through everything, with everything strewn about on the trailer, I ran around gathering everything together, so I could cover it with a tarp because there was a pretty decent chance of a rainstorm.

Everything is taking so long because I can’t just leave stuff where it is.

I’m tired.

It was a brutally hot day today. My clothes soaking wet from sweat. Blister on my foot rubbed to the point that the blister is puffed out super far and is hard.

And then there’s the chafing. Don’t know why I didn’t have it the big big moving day. 30,000+ steps. But I don’t think I had any chafing at all that day.

Today, 22,000 steps, and chafing so badly that I had to walk like I had to stick up my butt, or walk pulling one butt cheek away from the other. 😅

Quite raw down there.😬

But hey, all this work is helping to get rid of the extra little poundage I added around my midsection. 🙃

I went around all my bins and made sure they all had lids, and then I loaded the massive pile of extra bin lids into my truck. I’ll take those over to my mom’s house because I know she’s got at least some bins that don’t have lids because I helped load some of the ones that don’t have lids, and I think I have some loads for the bins that she has. Still, I think most of the lids we have no longer have bins, so they will likely end up being trashed.

So much trash in our world today.

I hate that.

It’s ironic that living my current homeless lifestyle (by choice), I produce more trash.

Anyway, I got all the stuff covered in tarps a little before dark, and then they headed down to the creek to take a nice long cool bath in the creek with the crayfish and minnows. 🙂

The water felt super good.

I also needed to rinse off all the sores that I have all over my body. So many bug bites, so many poison ivy rashes opened and oozing because they’re just constantly soggy from all the sweat, As well as some of them being covered up by duct tape to keep the ticks from going higher than my ankles.

It’s been a chafingly, blisteringly hot day. But the cool bath felt really good, and I finally put some hand sanitizer on the bulk of my sores, put on some clean clothes, and drove to the store to buy some more food–walking awkwardly up and down the aisles, either wide-legged or holding one butt cheek.

I remember chafing so badly during a trip to have a supai that I couldn’t even make the walk out because it hurt so badly. That was the first helicopter ride of my life. I gladly paid the $80 or $100 or whatever it was for the 5-minute ride from the little village up to the parking lot like 11 miles away.

No way I was going to try and walk that holding my butt cheeks apart for 11 mi. 😆

Same thing happened In the Netherlands before going Egypt and Israel and Jordan. I started walking around Amsterdam with my sister and friend and had already started chafing after like an hour. I ended up buying European underwear and baby powder, and I survived just fine with that.

But today was pretty miserable. 😅

On the way to the grocery store, I noticed a bunch of little weird looking bites or stings or something on my right bicep. I realized that maybe the Red ants that had gotten on me and were poking or biting me or whatever might have left stingers? I did a little research, and apparently the red ants in Arkansas, at least some of them, have stingers and can sting you. Looking at the five or six itchy little raised spots on my bicep, each, or most of them looked like they had little teeny black barbs in them, so That’s why I’m guessing they were lamb stingers. I scratched off the barbs and went on my way. So many bug bites and stings and rashes and what not… gosh, what’s another one? 😅

Still, hats off to the native Americans and the early settlers. What a miserable time it is in the summer, covered in bug bites. They had to have had it so much worse, or they must have had something that kept the bugs away.

I really hope chafing is better tomorrow. 🙏🤞

I ended up lathering my chafed spots with aloe vera gel, which stings pretty good on open sores, and sitting there naked in my van as the fan slowly dried out the aloe.

Would have been quite the sight.

Reminds me of the time I went to see the pudendal nerve doctor in San Francisco who had the assistant who was just about the spitting image of Michelle Pfeiffer. I think it was her? Or maybe it was one of his other female assistants, who walked in while I was naked in my lower half with my feet up in stirrups like a pregnant woman giving birth.

😆

Ah… fun times.

Now that I think about it, I think that lady was actually front office lady/helper, not the Michelle Pfeiffer look alike lady who I think had something to do with physical therapy. Still, I had to drop my drawers in front of her, though I think just down to my underwear.

Nothing like dropping your drawers in front of a dropped edge gorgeous woman. 😅

🐿️

I sat in a nice AC for a while eating some comfort food and wasting some of my life on YouTube before braving the transfer from one vehicle to the other and the potential onslaught of bugs.

Gratefully, no bugs managed to come in with me this time, which was both gratitude inducing and a little shocking.

What a day

I didn’t really mention it, but I was unraveling by the end of the day and broke down completely there at the end.

I’m not well. But I struggle on.

~ stephen