(written on the 24th as though the 23rd)
I was in such a bad space yesterday that I didn’t mention several things about the day itself. I replaced the damaged zerks in my excavator and regreased the zerk fittings.
I spent I don’t even know how Long, possibly hours, just trying to find the year of my New Holland mini excavator so I could properly list it for sale.
With how I am mentally and emotionally, that was… really frustrating. Bless the gentleman at the equipment sales place in Yakima, Washington for taking his time to look it up for me. It was after hours for any local place to call, so I figured I’d call an equipment place that dealt with New Holland equipment in an earlier time zone.
Bless him forever. 🙏
I made the decision, that I’m finally selling my equipment. Well, I’m selling my two excavators and my skid steer. I’m going to keep the equipment holler and my dump trailer for now.
I just… need all of the big stressors out of my life right now, and all that equipment has been a weight for quite a long time, and thinking about using all that equipment to make money right now…
I just don’t have the emotional energy. It would require hiring people and starting another business and all that, and I’m just… spent.
It’s time the equipment go, so there’s nothing to worry about there.
At some point, I’m going to need to be able to function again and be able to handle things going sideways, but right now… I need fewer possible issues when it comes to things possibly going wrong and taking up my meager mental space.
So I’m going to get the New Holland listed first.
I need to get the bucket fixed on the skid steer before I try and list it, as I want it to be fully functional and not with a glaring issue that people will be concerned about right off the bat.
I found a charge on my credit card history from WordPress that I don’t recognize. It doesn’t align with any of my renewal dates that I’m aware of, so $115 bucks… would be nice to have that back.
I sent a message to WordPress to figure out what’s going on. Hopefully I’ll hear back soon. They say 24 hours, so it’ll probably be tomorrow.
I spent some time doing a somewhat dangerous cut on a tree. There’s a tree that had fallen across the creek a long time ago, before I started living at the creek, because the bank had eroded so far that the roots were exposed and couldn’t hold the tree up anymore, so it had fallen over. It was still half alive. Well… Maybe less than half alive. Maybe a quarter alive, And very large birds that leave poop stains the size of a grapefruit apparently like to perch on it, and that happens to be right where I bathe. 🙃
In addition to being mostly dead, when it fell, it fell into a tree that was across the creek, so it never came all the way down. So the cut was bringing down a tree that’s mostly horizontal, and then curves up toward the tree it’s been leaning against for who knows how long.
So I made the normal cut that I make on trees in similar situations, cutting from the bottom so that the weight of the top part of the tree in the bottom part of the tree finish splitting it apart and it comes down, in the top part of the tree that’s up in the trees come sliding down a little bit more and either dislodges and falls the rest of the way to the ground, or you repeat the process and cut it until it breaks again and slides a little bit more toward the ground.
This one, was freaky, though, because I was really concerned that it was going to shoot back at me when the cut finally went far enough for it to give way.
So I cut as far as I dared, until I heard the weight of the tree start cracking, and then I figured that it would go on its own or with just a little bit of help from me.
It ended up being a lot of help from me. 😅
I didn’t dare do any more cuts underneath it, because I didn’t know whether it was going to come straight down and be fine, or shoot sideways a little bit when it came down because of the awkwardness of the angle of the tree and how it was resting, or what it was going to do.
I ended up crawling into the creek Aunt crawling onto the part of the tree that was going over the creek, sort of half jumping up and down on the thicker trunk part to get it to split.
I was still nervous, because I didn’t know how the top portion was going to come down, whether it was going to do like all the other ones I’ve ever done, or whether it was going to shoot back because the tree was bowed and almost completely horizontal at the point where I had to make the cut in order to make it comfortably.
Gratefully, after lots and lots of rocking the tree up and down with all of my strength, it finally gave way, and somehow I managed to stay on the trunk of the tree as it splashed down into the deeper part of the creek.
And gratefully, the longer section of the tree that was lodged in the adjoining tree across the Creek simply came down to the ground without shooting sideways or toward me.
I ended up having to do a couple more cuts to get the leftovers of the longer portion of the tree to finish coming out of the tree it had been leaning against, but I eventually got it all on the ground, safely, without damage to life or limb.
🙏
I made some progress toward things, but I was in a really bad way yesterday. A really bad way. As you can see from my post.
I also got most of the top of the Walnut tree that had fallen down where my van normally was parked dragged over to the burn pile that’s next to the spring house pond.
Really really rough day.
As for today, I spent just about the entire day working on the reasonable compensation concept. I wanted someone to gut-check me because my goal is to make sure I’m 100% square with the government. I don’t want to pay them more than they should, but I’d rather pay more than not pay enough, and so I wanted somebody to be there to gut check me.
So I headed over to my mom’s place, and she was kind enough to sit with me and help me even though I got impatient at times.
Over the course of the day, as I worked through a lot of things, I realized that a lot of this is just how you decide you want to run the numbers.
As I dove deeper and deeper into the data from 2023, I found that I had worked less than I thought I had. I also got some real-world data from my friend Miguel, asking him how much he would pay an employee who had my skill set. After chatting about it, and hearing what he paid his other employees, it was determined that with my skills, he would pay me $20/hr (flat hour, not billable). So… $160/8-hour day.
So that was useful.
That’s also why I wouldn’t be getting a job with anybody else fixing cars. 😆
I found my niche. I was good at it. And I got paid well for it, but only because I was the owner and running absolutely everything on my own.
Anyway, so with those numbers, things start to look a lot different, a lot less worrisome about what my compensation has been, especially since I haven’t been working anywhere near as much in 2023 and 2024 as I did in previous years. I think I only worked 164 days during 2023, having spent The first two weeks still in New Zealand, and 6 weeks with my mom on a road trip, and then another 10 days over the Christmas holidays…, etc. So a lower number shouldn’t be as shocking as it is when I see it.
Anyway, so I worked on that pretty much all day. Lots and lots and lots of time spent on this and more to spend still.
I’m less worried about it right now than I was yesterday, with the new data, but there always seems to be new data that sends it wildly off in a different direction.
I also realized that I had another vehicle that I had bought and sold that I didn’t have listed on my income, so I’ve got to get that over to my accountant as well, as I think I made somewhere around $3,000 on that one, so that’s a pretty good chunk of taxes that I’ll owe on that.
Anyway… I forgot to pick up the wheel and tire from the tire place on the way home. They closed for the weekend, but being a small town, even though I hadn’t paid for it, they put it in the bed of one of the trucks so that I could use it over the weekend if I needed to.
Nice to be in a small town.
My starlink mini came, And Landon and Jim had picked it up because they had just set it on the ground by the gate, so it could have easily been hit by somebody or stolen. So, thanks to them for picking it up and bringing it to their house.
I went over to their house and picked it up, stayed to chat for a little bit, and then headed down to Rover for the night.
And that was the day.
…and the rest of yesterday
Oh! And I heard back from WordPress. Good crap, I’ve been paying for the domain hosting, $115 a year, for 4 years now for the business that I was starting back in 2021 to help Thomas try and do computer repair as his own thing.
Good crap. $460 over those 4 years, and never even used. Completely forgotten about. Ugh.
~ stephen
Lift the World 