(written on the fourth)
I don’t really remember anything that happened in the morning for early afternoon.
😅
I haven’t been sleeping well at all, for some reason. I’ve been waking up absolutely exhausted despite having been in bed for maybe 8-10 hours?
Not sure what’s going on.
Spent a little while chatting with Jim today, talking about things on his want list. He’s always so busy putting out fires and getting everything done on the need list and other people’s want list that he doesn’t get much of the things on his own wants list.
He’d like to get the pig feeder fixed because he’d like to get a couple of pigs again. Forgot high up on his want list.
The hog feeder will need some rust removing, some metal repair, and painting.
It’s definitely a bit of a project.
One way I figured I could help immediately was with his truck and on the property. His truck had a check engine light, misfire on cylinder 3, which is a cylinder he’s already changed the coil on in the past. Might be a spark plug issue or something else…
It also has a blend door actuator issue, so I read codes and gave him some suggestions for what there might be to do.
One big thing that I thought that I could do to help was jump on the tractor and mow down the back fields. It’s been a very long time since those were mowed–for one of the fields, I think maybe it’s actually been years. 😅
So Jim grabbed some diesel for the tractor, and I rode around mowing the blackberries down while simultaneously trying to do some online mechanic work. I didn’t really get much mechanic work done because it’s a little too hard to be staring at your phone screen while also trying to stay in the mowing lines. 🙃
Chatted with one of my sisters for an hour and a half or so.
I’m just going to guess what I was on the mower for probably 3 hours before I jumped off to clean up all my junk that I had spread around from getting the excavator ready to sell. Big storm coming in tonight, so didn’t want to have my stuff everywhere getting soaked.
After getting all that cleaned up, I jumped back on the tractor, in the dark, turned on the headlights, and kept on mowing for probably another two and a half or three hours.
It’s hard to see even with the headlights because the front forks and grill guard block some of the headlight beams, so you don’t get all the light on the surroundings, and what doesn’t get on the surroundings actually reflect back in your eyes, causing it to be even harder to see.
So you have to focus pretty good, and a lot of the time, you can’t even see until you’re right up on what you’re mowing.
It was slow going, just because tractors are slow anyway, and also because there were places where the blackberry vines were taller than the tractor itself, and places where the saplings had grown up to be baby trees and not saplings anymore. Some of them probably 2 inches in diameter.
😅
So some areas I couldn’t mow much at all, in some areas I sort of picked and chose how big the trees could be and still be mowed over.
Anyway, I think it was some time between 10:00 and 11:00 p.m. that I finally called it a night, headed up to my little spot in between the shop barn and the Big Barn, so that I wasn’t in the lower field when the storm came. Episode or two of Bones…
And bed.
Gratitude:
- This might sound arrogant, but I’m grateful that while I have so many parts of me that I think are ugly and dark right now, my short temper, my addictions that I still can’t get a handle on, and whatever else, I’m grateful that deep down, I’m still a little boy who just wants to help people and for people to be happy and love.
- I’m grateful to have such a free schedule, working when I want. I do work quite a bit, but it’s sort of as a perpetual on call, working while I’m doing other things. So I always have work on and going, but relatively speaking, I don’t think I’m working that many hours? It’s nice.
- I’m grateful that I was able to get a massive chunk of the mowing done that hasn’t been done in so long.
- I’m grateful I was able to get all my stuff put away before the rain and that I had my sister to talk to while doing it, so it was less annoying. 🙃
- I’m grateful for tarps to keep rain off my stuff.
Success:
- Was about to do some service today for Jim and the Hill.
Improvement:
- Need to figure out my short fuse and bad language. Is weird… I don’t have a short fuse with people: It’s just with events.
Love and hugs.
Lift the world.
~ stephen
Lift the World 