Been sliding pretty hard.
All of my commitments from the 13th have now been broken.
Every. Single. One.
My back has been awful. I imagine that has played a part in it.
I re-decided to go on the trip. I talked to my insurance company, and supposedly, they’re willing to let me do the MRIs without a referral /order from a doctor. I just have to call for pre-notification.
If that is indeed true, then that will be fabulous. I’ll order the MRIs, all three of them, for myself and get those done while I’m in Utah.
I might also make an appointment with a skin doctor to have my gazillions of moles checked out. Some of them look a little suspect, and My mom has had several skin cancers removed, and I think at least one, and possibly more of my siblings have already had skin cancers removed.
So, I had best stay on top of that, I guess.
Spent a fairly significant amount of time down at the Creek. Emotionally, I’m back down to nearly 0%.
Yesterday I was almost completely non-functional.
Of the things that are notable that happened, I think I spent a good chunk of the day on Tuesday removing the rear door on my dump trailer and trying to beat the snot out of everything to bend it back into place. Ended up doing more than I should with my back, lifting heavy things, specifically the big heavy door.
I don’t have the self-discipline to take care of myself right now. 😕
That’s one of the reasons why I re-decided to go on the trip. I need to get out of here, so I’m not tempted to do things that require lifting heavy loads.
I did manage to beat it back into shape at least enough to be able to close it relatively simply. One of the welds is cracking because of it, but at least it’s something. I need to put some grease on the crack so that it doesn’t begin to rust. Then I’ll see if Mike can weld it for me.
Anyway, it’s functional-ish.
On Wednesday, I spent some time removing the AC unit from Rover. I grabbed my skid steer from the upper pasture, drove it down to Rover, and raised the bucket so it was above the high top roof, unbolted the AC unit from the roof, went inside the van and unbolted all the under components, vents and controls and what not, went back up to the bucket, and slid the AC unit across the roof and into the bucket of the skid steer.
Then I went to Lowe’s and bought Sheet metal screws and heavy duty adhesive and a 1/4-in thick piece of plexiglass that the gentleman cut to size for me.
He struggled to cut it, and wasn’t able to get an even Edge on it, so he cut the price of the plexiglass in half for me, so it was $18 and change instead of $36 and change.
Works for me. 😊
At first, I figured I would just use a sheetrock knife or something to try and fix the edge, but then I decided to just leave it as it is, as it’s going to be on top of an 8 and 1/2 ft, or so, roof, and nobody is going to see it. 🙃
So I brought all that home, and I simply laid the plexiglass on the roof covering the hole, as it was after dark by the time I got home, and so there was no working on actually installing the “moonroof” last night.
Was kind of funny, having the clear plexiglass on the roof made the inside of the van a heck of a lot brighter As the sun started coming up, which meant that it woke me up in the 6:00ish range.
So I stuck a shirt over my eyes and went back to sleep. 🙃
So that brings us to today… Thursday.
I got up, and spent most of the day, if not all day, working on the moonroof project.
I grabbed the skid steer again, raised up the bucket, climbed up the bucket, and went to work cleaning the roof area where the moon roof is going to be fastened. I realized that the roof is actually not made out of sheet metal. Honeycomb is actually just a fiberglass honeycomb, so the sheet metal screws that I bought weren’t going to work.
So I went to the Ace hardware store in Pea Ridge and bought some rubber grommets to go on the bolts that I had. I double-checked the bolts, made sure they were long enough, and then loaded all the tools up and what not and the adhesive and some caulk that I grabbed from the barn that was left over from our own supply of stuff that got donated to the hill when we had to leave our house.
I pre-drilled the holes in the plexiglass, needing three different drill bit sizes to get to the right width. I didn’t want to go straight to the big drill bit because I was afraid it might crack the plexiglass. So I started with a really small drill bit, and then a bigger, and then a bigger. Drilling eight holes through the plexiglass, and eight holes into the fiberglass that makes up Rover’s roof.
With everything properly aligned, I grabbed the gorilla adhesive stuff, ran a bead all along the roof where the plexiglass was going to be pressed down onto, pulled the protective laminate stuff off the plexiglass, and stuck it down onto the roof in place.
Then I proceeded to put the bolts through the holes, complete with metal washers and rubber washers, and then I climbed down tighten them up with nuts and washers from underneath.
But there was a problem.
The bolts that I had made sure were long enough… weren’t.
😶
I’m still not sure how that was possible. I double-checked.
What that ended up causing was basically panic because I’d already gooped up the adhesive stuff, and now it was going to sit there setting while I scrambled to try and find bolts that were long enough.
Goody.
Gratefully, because I’ve been a mechanic for the last 7 plus years, I have my extensive bolt pile, and I was able to find four bolts that were long enough to start with.
Thinking about it now, I still don’t know why the other bolts didn’t work to start with. It just doesn’t make any sense at all. There’s enough leftover bolt underneath on the ones that I ended up using In the end to have made it possible for me to use the first ones.
But for whatever reason, they just wouldn’t go through far enough for me to be able to attach a washer and a nut on them, so I scrambled, found four that would work, and at least got those mostly tightened down, while I then went back to my pile of bolts to find the last four that I needed.
Again, gratefully, I was able to find four more of sufficient length, and I was able to get the plexiglass tightened down.
It turned out to be a little more complicated. Even though I thought the spot that I was attaching everything to was flat, and ended up being fairly curved. Which meant that when I went to tighten up the plexiglass, it ended up leaving gaps between the outer bolts and the inner bolts. So there was probably as much as a 2 mm Gap between the top of the van and the bottom of the plexiglass in the spots between the center bolts and the outer bolts.
Lovely.
Well, it was too late to do anything about it, reasonably, so I just went ahead and left it as it was. I tightened all the bolts as much as I dared, and gratefully, the plexiglass didn’t crack.
Then I went back with the adhesive and just filled in everything underneath that hadn’t been filled in.
I don’t know if the adhesive is really going to do anything. By the time I had found all the bolts that I needed, and by the time I’d gotten everything fastened (needing to put vice grips on the underside while I climbed back up onto the roof to tighten the bolts from the top side, having to go up and down and up and down and up and down for each of the eight bolts), the adhesive was already setting, so I don’t know if it actually even bonded to the plexiglass and the roof at all. 😕
But I squirted a whole bunch more in on all four sides, filling all the gaps that were still open even after tightening down the bolts.
I should have used bigger washers. I could hear the plexiglass starting to crunch on one of the bolts, and I didn’t have very big washers. Just barely bigger than the head of the bolts themselves.
🤷
But whatever.
Anyway, after filling the rest of the underside gaps with adhesive (between the plexiglass and the roof), I then grabbed the regular outdoor caulk and put a bead of caulk all the way around the plexiglass. So… It should be pretty darn watertight. And it never cracked with everything that I did, so, cross your fingers, I’m hoping I’ve got myself a good moonroof.
Certainly let in a whole crap ton more light. 🙃
Of course, the next project after getting that all done, was to build a frame to put my starlink mini in, which will completely block the moon roof, but it should allow me to have internet constantly while driving down the road, while parked–whatever.
I didn’t want to have too much weight up there, so I tried to use thin wood. With that in mind, I went up to the barn to look for scraps of wood that I might be able to use. I noticed that Jim was home, so I knocked on the door and asked about using some of the wood scraps and what not that he had around, and I also showed him what I was thinking I might want to do with the design of the frame.
Many thanks to him, he came and helped me build it. 😊
At least the first part of the frame. He built a little tray That my starlink mini could fit, so it could just rest inside the tray with the sloped underside hanging down. Basically a square donut slightly smaller on the bottom and then the starlink satellite dish, but The same size As the dish on the top side, So it could just sit in its little slot and not be able to move around.
Jim also started helping me make the little frame that that upper dealy would fit into, but it turning out how I wanted it to go. Jim’s design was more of a permanent design, and y’all know me, I don’t like anything permanent. I like to be able to change my mind and move things around fairly easily without having to disassemble, so I redesigned it how I had sort of initially imagined it.
I made a little box with really thin 1/4-in wood strips on the sides and 2x4s on the ends sitting vertically. I bent down all of the Staples that were sticking through that had been holding the previous pieces of wood in there. Then I put the 2x4s directly on top of the Staples and screwed them in with wood screws.
That built the frame in place such that it wasn’t going anywhere, and I could set the other Little cradle frame that was holding my starlink mini on top of the lower frame.
It took a lot more work than what is probably conveyed by these short little paragraphs. There was a whole lot of measuring and cutting and using the table saw and measuring more and fastening together, and then unfastening because I couldn’t fit what I needed to in place while it fully assembled, so I had to put part of it in place and then assemble it in place, at least the lower frame.
Then I measured the upper frame/cradle and trimmed and checked, and trimmed and checked again, and trimmed and checked again, and managed to Get it so that I could have the mainframe in there permanently but have the cradle that sits on top of the mainframe fairly simply removable, which means that if I need to take the starlink mini dish out for whatever reason, it’ll take all of 30 seconds to get it out, no disassembly required.
🥳
Then I ran the power wire through space between the ceiling and the top of the van, running the cable on the inside of the trim and interior paneling all the way across the top of the van, down the a-pillar, around the front of the dashboard in a little groove that you can’t even really see now contains the power cable, then just a couple of pieces of masking tape, holding the wire in place on the right side of the driver’s side dashboard, and then down to the dog house, through the hole where the old generator controls used to be and into The little compartment in the dog house where I also placed my inverter.
Amazingly, I was able to get the super fat cigarette lighter inverter connection to fit through the hole that was drilled in the dog House by the previous owner. So now I don’t even have annoying cables running over the top where the cup holders are.
It’s actually a pretty clean looking setup. 🙂
After I got that all in place, I headed over to my mom’s house, somewhere around 9:00 p.m., because I told her I would go over and help with some things with Thomas’s car.
So I looked at Thomas’s car, the coolant level, the tires again, etc. I showed my mom everything that I had been doing with the moon roof and the starlink mini setup, I grabbed the big cooler and threw it in the van, along with the porta potty.
I brought my amplifier and electric guitar and case and put it in my mom’s house, as we are likely going to leave on our trip before I get them sold.
Might be a better time to sell them when I get back anyway, as it’s going to be closer to Christmas time, and people will probably be buying gifts for others and might be willing to buy a guitar and amplifier and what not.
🤞
Anyway, my mom fed me dinner, as she hadn’t eaten yet either. I think we ate at like 10:00. 🙃
Well we ate, I spent the time trying to find a youth mattress that would fit my mom and also go side to side in the very back of the van. We have 65 in of space from side to side, and twin beds are 75 in.
My mom is a little teeny tiny thing, so 65 in is more than plenty, but I need a mattress that size.
Ikea sells one that’s 63 in, so maybe we can pick one up in Utah when we’re there and just improvise until then.
I’m also looking into getting one of the twin size beds that are pure memory foam and then just cutting off the last 10 in. That would probably work, too, I think. I think that would actually be my preference, if I can swing it. 🤞
I also fixed my mom’s dehumidifier. She had thought there was an issue with the drain hose, but it turned out that there was just a clog, the drain part of the assembly itself clogged up with dirt and debris and nastiness right before it entered the hose.
So I emptied the container into the drain in the basement, and then I spent a good little while cleaning out the clog and blowing out the hose before putting it all back together.
Once back together, it fired up just fine and started working again, so hopefully, it will be good to go the entire time we’re gone. Cross the fingers, at least.
I came home, parked the van, moved some stuff around because the huge cooler was on my bed, repositioned the cable to my starlink mini, As they give you like 25 or 50 ft of cable, so I coiled it up and put it out of sight between one of my cupboard trays and the side of the topper extension. Can’t even see the cables. Not in the way of anything. Perfect.
What else…
Oh, my battery is starting to go bad. My mom had to give me a jump. Probably because I had starlink parked underneath a tree, so it spent the entire time I was there pumping out probably 50 or 60 w as it tried to find a signal over and over and over and over again.
Also forgot to mention that I decided to test my starlink on the drive home, and my cell phone was getting about 18 megabits per second as I was driving home using my starlink.
Eighteen isn’t much, but it’s about three times faster than what we were getting at home, And that connection did me just fine, other than hosing me over when I was doing my stock trading back in the day, and other than making it hard to get questions seen and reserved for myself on justanswer.com. Eighteen megabits per second is going to work just fine. I imagine sometimes it’ll be more than that and sometimes it’ll be less. I could probably make it even more if I put some shims between my starlink mini and the lower frame. Right now my starlink mini sits probably about 3/4 of an inch below the plexiglass, meaning that it’s not getting its full range. I didn’t want it flush up against the plexiglass, at least not to start, because I don’t want it to overheat with the Sun beating down on it. Of course, it might not overheat anyway… But at least for starters, I wanted there to be a little bit of a gap to allow some air circulation.
I hope that’s good thinking. 🤞🤷
After getting home, I also cleaned up my tools that I had still in the bucket of the skid steer, and I spent some time removing the awning from Rover’s passenger side.
Unfortunately, that turned out to not be the greatest idea, as the awning turned out to be super duper heavy, which wasn’t the greatest for my back. 😕
I never expected the awning to be that heavy. Holy freaking crap. I unscrewed it, and then lifted it, And was like… 😬
It’s down now, removing a lot of weight from the vehicle. And every little bit helps as I try and figure out ways to improve fuel economy. I’m guessing that we’re going to get somewhere between 10 and 12 mi to the gallon. If it’s less than that, that’s going to totally bite. If it’s more than that, I’m going to be thrilled.
ET averaged somewhere around 15ish miles to the gallon on our last trip. And it would probably do about the same this time around, but… I just can’t get myself to spend $700 for a computer. And Rover is going to be much more comfortable, assuming that he can survive the trip without any significant issues.
🤞
I’ll be buying a whole crap ton of parts to be ready for breakdowns, alternator, belt, starter, etc. I’ll have them stored in a bin ready to be used if needed, and if not, I’ll take them back when we get back.
I’m also going to go ahead and buy roadside for my insurance for that one, that way if anything happens, we can at least get roadside assistance and not be stuck somewhere.
🤞
Well, that’s the day.
Other things of note, I removed most of the nail on my smashed finger. The inside was already hardening and crusty because of the holes that I had drilled in it to relieve the pressure and drain the nasty fluid. So each time I would take a bath, the underside of the nail would fill with water, drying out quickly of course, but fill with water. And all the skin underneath the nail has been drying out and getting hard. So… With the huge gap between the nail that’s already detached and the nail bed that’s already hardening, I figured there wasn’t much purpose in waiting for the rest of the nail to come off. The new nail is coming in, and it’s been pushing the old nail closer and closer to coming out, so I figured it was about time to just help it along.
So now I have an exposed nail bed, with just a tiny bit of the old nail left on the passenger side front, so to speak. That part is totally still stuck to the nail bed with nice tender skin underneath, so… I am not in any mood to try and remove that right now. I’ll remove that if and when it seems necessary to get it out of the way of the incoming nail.
The new nail that’s growing looks really funky and weird, but it’s only grown out to the point of where it would normally be the base of my nail where the skin touches. But because of everything that’s happened, the skin is pulled way back further down my finger, so it’s exposed as it grows.
Hopefully it grows in relatively decently and doesn’t turn into something funky like my other thumb that has a perpetual break in it from having the the nail root, or whatever you call it sliced in half by that drill bit years ago.
What else… my spine is…messed up, But I’m taking active steps to figure out as much as I can about what’s wrong with it, and I’m taking active steps to try and get me away from projects that would require me to lift things that I shouldn’t lift right now.
I’m grateful…
- That the plexiglass didn’t break. A bit nerve-wracking drilling through, especially when the drill bit could catch and The torque could easily crack the plexiglass.
- I’m grateful that I figured out a way to mount the starlink mini satellite dish such that it can be removed quickly and easily– No tools needed–and yet it’s still completely stable. 😊
- I’m grateful for the cooler weather. It’s been high ’70s to low ’80s the last few days, I think. I haven’t needed to use my fan to stay comfortable, just using the rain sounds app on my phone for white noise.
- I’m grateful that I’ve been able to head off my migraines. Several days in a row now, I think, I’ve been on the edge and slipping into migraines, but I’ve managed to stop them from happening. 🥳 That’s kind of a big deal.
- I’m grateful that I’ve been able to make the decision to just leave everything as it is on the hill, undone, and to just go. Decision fatigue has overwhelmed me, as has fear of making mistakes and getting things wrong, because that’s… what seems to be what happens most frequently these days. Even all the effort I’ve put into the moonroof in Rover… It’s taking an entire day… Multiple days, actually. How much time spent and money not earned. Again and again and again and again I do these projects, thinking they’re going to take less time than they do, and then they end up taking a heck of a lot more time, and I could have paid someone to do it… but I just keep trying to do it myself to save money… And I end up taking massive amounts of time. Anyway, that’s a bit of a tangent. Not quite gratitude. 😅 Decision made. I’m going on the trip. I’m grateful to have been able to make that decision. I hope it’s a good one. 😅
Well, it’s just after 2:30 in the morning over here, so I’m going to call it a night.
After several days in a row of really really struggling, I’m doing a bit better today. Hopefully, I can continue in the right direction.
Love and hugs.
Lift the world.
~ stephen
Lift the World 