We had another overnight rainstorm last night, definitely not as violent as the one night before last, but a bit of rain.
Given the rain, and not wanting to muddy the field by driving through it to get down to the greenhouse area, I decided to head into Rogers to renew Rover’s registration since I was pretty sure that I was going to have my registration expire while on the trip.
So I stopped off at the recycling center really quickly to toss in some stuff, chatted with my mom on the phone for a little bit, and then headed to the county offices.
First, I removed my mini excavator from my property tax assessment, then paid over $1200 in property taxes.
Evil taxes. I hate property tax. Renting what’s mine. So ridiculous.
Anyway, I had pulled my ticket to wait in line for the vehicle registration renewal stuff before I even started with the assessment stuff, and even still, when I went in to sit down to wait my turn, there was something like 150 people ahead of me, the lady next to me having already waited 3 hours.
😶
Government is so… inefficient.
Gratefully, there was a guy sitting behind me who was unable to wait as long as it was going to take to get his stuff taken care of, so he gave me his ticket, which bumped me up in line 90 something slots.
🥳
While doing all those things, I got in touch with my insurance company because I noticed that my insurance premiums were ridiculously expensive for my Z3. My monthly premium was like $85 just for that car. 😶
My 6 month premium over $500.
I checked the insurance on rover, and it was over $200 for 6 months, while the insurance on my pickup truck was only a little over $100 for 6 months.
So I was over $800 between the three vehicles, which seemed absolutely nuts to me, so I decided to do a little car insurance shopping. The only reason I had been using State Farm was that my last insurance company Progressive, I think it was, wasn’t willing to ensure my business vehicles. Maybe it was geico. I don’t remember. One of the two.
Anyway, my nephew Landon had just barely switched from State Farm to Progressive, and he was able to save a fair bit of money when he added his second vehicle, so I started plugging in a quote to see what Progressive might charge me for insurance, and was happily surprised to see that insuring all three of my vehicles with Progressive was going to be less than half the cost of insuring my vehicles with state farm.
🥳
So I’ll probably get that switched out tomorrow. I gave my State Farm people a heads up that I was going to be canceling if they couldn’t match the offer, they couldn’t come anywhere near close to it, so so long, state farm!
I haven’t been very happy with State Farm anyway, honestly. They are great for the fact that they have real people I can talk to when I need to talk to people, and they are local, so that’s nice, but I’ve never had to deal with talking to insurance people except for when I needed to actually make a claim, so having to interact with my insurance people again and again and again because their system is archaic, it’s been… quite annoying over the years.
But that should all be taken care of tomorrow. 🤞
After going to the dmv, I headed over to the gym for the first time in… over a month?
Didn’t think it had been that long, but that’s what my exercise calendar showed. 😅
Today was bicep and back day, per the schedule, and I did kind of a 70% workout today. I did three out of the four exercises, only skipping the last one because someone else was using the machine and I didn’t want to stay around and wait for them to be finished.
I’ve definitely lost strength in the month I’ve been absent. My first exercise went totally fine, I even went up and weight as I had planned to do previously, but the endurance wasn’t there. I got through my seated cable row decently well, but when it came time for the light pull down chin up style, I just didn’t have the strength to do all 10 reps for any of the three sets. I think maybe I did seven or eight reps for each set, or something like that.
Oh well, at least I was back in the gym. 🎉
From there, I headed back to the recycling center because I had another thing to recycle, and then I headed back to Haven hill.
For the next several hours, I worked on getting everything in the lower field ready for my departure. I spent who knows how long cutting up the leftover pieces of plastic to cover the ground in the greenhouse area, so I could put down the greenhouse parts on the ground in a place where the weeds wouldn’t just grow up through them.
That took quite a long time because I didn’t have big pieces. My biggest piece was probably 10 ft by 15 ft, and they weren’t square or rectangular either. 😅
So I arrange the pieces that I had for maximum coverage, cutting up leftover pieces to fit in where their work bare spots, and putting down rocks and boards and whatever else to hold the plastic in place with the wind blowing.
Eventually, I got enough down to have it covered, and I started moving my stuff in. I parked my CNG van in there. Then I pulled in my truck and flatbed trailer. Then my skid steer. Then I started moving all the greenhouse stuff out of the grass and into the area that I had just put together.
Then I went around and gathered up branches out of areas where they would cause issues when the grass grew, throwing them back into the edges of the woods out of the mowing path.
Gathered up all my tools and chains and whatnot that have been hanging around the creek area, putting the chains on top of my flatbed trailer, and putting the tools inside the shed.
I didn’t get the wood that’s been sitting out for pretty much a year and a half now cleaned up. It’s just still sitting there, but… whatever.
Spent a good chunk of the day listening to sports YouTube videos and technology YouTube videos and LDS videos.
Didn’t do any work online at all. 😅
Said goodbye to Liz and Steph, Jim was working in the temple, so I didn’t say goodbye to him, though he did call me as I was heading toward Fort Smith.
Been almost a decade since I last did this drive. 🚐
Craziness.
In other news, I managed to get poison ivy all over my face. 🙄
Joy.
I’m probably going to drive for 4 to 8 hours tonight before crashing. We’ll see. I always like starting road trips at night. Been a long time since I’ve done one by myself, though. At least, that’s what it feels like, anyway.
Gratitude:
- I’m grateful that I was able to get most of the things done that I was hoping to get done before leaving.
- I’m grateful that I remember to go to the DMV, though it’s sticking in my mind that there’s something that I did forget. 😅
- I’m grateful I was able to find much much cheaper insurance that will save me over $800 a year. 🥳
- I’m grateful to poison ivy on my face is not really all that itchy. It’s mostly just uncomfortable.
- I’m grateful for the guy at the DMV who gave me his ticket that jumped me almost 100 spots in line. 🙏
- I’m grateful that I didn’t even end up needing his ticket because they made a special line for those of us who were only there to renew tags. 🙏
- I’m grateful that my forest fire lungs seem to have gotten a lot better than they were immediately post fires and the days thereafter.
- I’m grateful that I realized my form doing seated cable rows is part of what is making my lower back hurt during exercise. I realized I’m leaning back far too much, which puts a significant amount of direct pressure on my spine instead of having it be perpendicular to me.
Success:
- I think I managed to hold my tongue maybe even twice today when I would have otherwise let some four bangers fly.
- I went to the gym even though I didn’t want to
Improvement:
- I should have worked today. I just… didn’t want to.
Love and hugs! Cross the fingers and hope I make it safely to a good stopping destination tonight.
Lift the world.
~ stephen
Lift the World 