(written on the 9th from notes taken previously)
Definitely nice to be able to wake up in the casino upper parking lot, no worrying about anyone bothering me during the night. Gratefully, I’ve been on this trip for a month, and had zero issues with anybody any night for the whole trip so far.
🥳
I spent some time in the morning putting things back together. I had taken apart my inverter so I put that back together. I also took apart my hair cutting clippers to see if I could figure out what was wrong with them, why they were making such an awfully loud racket, but no dice.
It’s funny, I have all these resources, and they all seem to be breaking quicker than I can get them taken care of. I had to means of running my starlink, and now I have zero. I’ve been limping along on my leftover charge with my Bluetti power station since Utah. Turning it on only long enough to get the information that I need from the internet when I’m out in the middle of nowhere.
I’ve tried, probably three or four different times to get replacement fuses for the charge cable for the power station, but without any success at all. Nobody carries the size that I need, and I tried to order it online once, but I haven’t been in one place long enough to get anything shipped to me.
With my inverter biting the dust now, I’m just… Hanging on for dear life. 🙃
Texted several different people that I’m hoping to visit today, two friends who I taught on my mission as a missionary, a niece, and a nephew.
I was able to get a hold of one of my friends, from the Dominican Republic, and we arranged to meet up at her place a little before noon. Apparently, since I last saw her, she has gotten married and done a fair bit of traveling around the world. 🥳
So I went over and visited her for a few hours, or so. She was getting ready to head to New York on vacation, and she was trying to get a watering system set up for a tree and a bunch of strawberry plants that she had planted that she didn’t want to die while she was gone on vacation, so I went with her to home depot, twice, helping her design and then build the watering system.
We talked while we shopped and talked while we built the watering system and talked at her picnic table behind her house after that until she had to get ready to leave.
Great to catch up with her. 😊
From there, I drove back to Davis to meet up with my niece who works at UC Davis. I decided I wanted to get her some flowers over to pick her up and take her to dinner, so I found a Safeway nearby where I was going to pick her up, hung out organizing things in the van for a little bit, and then went in and spent who knows how long trying to figure out which bouquet of flowers I was going to get her. 🙃
I had thought her favorite color was purple, so I eventually figured out the best bouquet with purple flowers in it that I could find (turns out her favorite color is actually red 🙃), but she does like purple, and a couple of the flowers in the assorted bouquet were her favorite kind of flower, so that’s ac win! 🥳
Anyway, I drove over to the parking lot where she Parks her car during the work day and waited for her to walk from her job to the parking lot, then I took her to a local dumplings restaurant that she likes, where we ordered a couple different kinds of dumplings and shared them.
We chatted and chatted and got all caught up with one another’s lives. It’s been a long time, I think since maybe 2020? since I’d seen her, and now she’s a grown woman, almost 30, and living her best life while enjoying her dream job.
🥳
After dropping her off back at her car and saying goodbye (and forgetting to take a selfie together. 🙄)
I called my sister Heather on the way to my next friend’s house to tell her about something exciting that happened on Saturday.
So you know how I’ve had brain fog for years and years and years, and how it’s just gotten worse and worse over the years?
So on saturday, I spent about two and a half hours taking an SAT practice test. 🙃 My nephew had just barely taken it for real, and we were talking about it, and I think I was musing about wondering what kind of a score I would get if I took it now, decades after my last standardized test.
And he asked me if I wanted to try taking a practice test. I was most curious about how I would do with the math section because even though I stopped paying attention to math in like 8th grade, except for geometry in 10th grade, I was always good at taking math tests because they were always multiple choice, and I could often reason my way to correct answers without knowing the math itself, but just using my reasoning skills.
So I was curious what I might be able to do decades later. 🙃
So I took a practice sat test, all two and a half hours of it, two reading sections and two math sections.
I don’t remember if I mentioned this in my other post, if I did, sorry for the repeat!
I did well on the reading portion, getting something like a 740 (which is a little surprising because I was having major major brain fog issues, and reading comprehension was never a strong point for me anyway), and I did atrociously on the math section, getting something like a 440 😅, for a grand total of 1180.
Amazingly, that’s actually above average, which I think speaks to the failings of our current education system. 😅
The average reading/writing score is apparently 519, and the average math score is apparently 505, for a combined score of 1024–at least those are the numbers for 2024.
Anyway, the entire point of that squirrel was that after taking the SAT, my brain fog has been either completely gone, or so much better that it feels like it’s gone!!!
🤯
I hope to heaven that it lasts, but I’m just shocked! I was so absolutely mired in brain fog during the reading portion of the test, but it’s like a switch that’s been turned off got turned back on by the math portion of the test.
Or something?!?!?!
Since saturday, I haven’t had brain fog to any noticeable degree. How?!?!?! Why?!?!?!
The only other thing that’s different at all is that I had milk for the first time and I don’t know how many years. Actual milk. Not just ice cream or cheese or sour cream or cream cheese… Actual milk.
The fact that I’ve had plenty of dairy over the years would seem to indicate that the milk is not likely the cause of the brain fog going away.
So now it’s got me thinking that I want to make sure I get myself mentally active on the mathematics front.
Maybe if I just stay focused and give my brain math and other brain teaser activities, maybe I can get back to where I was as a teenager and early 20 something?!?!
Gosh, I hope this can last!!!
Anyway, so I chatted with my sister Heather really quickly to share the happy news, hoping that maybe she could do a little bit of math and have a similar brain wake up!
I didn’t talk to her for very long because I had arrived at my other mission friend’s house and didn’t have a lot of time to spend with her before she needed to go to bed, or at least so I thought. 🙃
Anyway, I ended up chatting with my friend María for a good long time. As an added bonus, she called another friend from the mission I’d lost contact with but with whom she’s great friends 20+ years later, and even though it was late at night, she came by as well, and we all chatted for a good while.
My chatting with Gemini I think really helped my ability to speak Spanish. 🥳
Anyway, after catching up with them, freecampsites.net told me there was a Denny’s about 25 minutes away, or so, that allowed overnight parking.
So I headed over to the Denny’s parking lot, only to find that even though the update about being able to park there was recent, apparently, they’ve decided they are no longer going to allow it. Not knowing what else to do, I headed over to a nearby LDS church, thinking that maybe I could stay in their parking lot, but no, they also had overnight parking prohibition signs, so I ended up just parking across the street from the church on the road next to a house that had a big fence along the side of their yard.
I had thought that I would go ahead and go to sleep at that point, but then I remembered something about freelancer.com owing me money, so I went to check on the status and found that they’ve been deducting money from what they owe me, every single month, until they drained what they owed me down to zero.
Apparently, they have a fee called a dormant account fee.
😶
Let’s just say I wasn’t happy.
I ended up being online with them from like midnight ish until I want to say maybe close to 3:00 in the morning. Gratefully, they were quick to refund the ridiculous fees, but unfortunately, in order to actually get my money back out of their site and into my account, I had to jump through some pretty ridiculous identity verification hoops.
It’s crazy. They took my money no questions asked, and even though they gave the option to give the money back via my PayPal account, they weren’t satisfied with my PayPal verification. I had to go through a ridiculous rigmarole.
I had to send photos of both sides of my driver’s license; and then I had to get a code from the website, write it on a piece of paper, right words next to the code explaining that I was sending the code for verification purposes, hold my identification up next to everything, and take a picture of all of that along with my face.
No, just no.
Felt like something a scam company would ask for, and so I wasn’t about to do it. I tried for hours to find some other way of getting my money before finally giving up, quite angry.
One more good reason not to ever use Freelancer.com.
😒
Gratitude 😅:
- I’m grateful that even though my hair clippers are freaking out and sound like they’re going to shake themselves apart, I was able to trim my beard with them.
- I’m grateful I was able to spend some time with three different people that I taught on my mission. I’m sad that none of them are still active members of the church, but I guess it is what it is. We all have our own journeys. I think something like 30 people that I taught on my mission got baptized, and I am only in contact with three out of the 30, many of them having been migrant workers, I think. I have no idea how many, if any, are still active members of the church. At least I got to see the few that I am still in contact with.
- I’m grateful that I was able to have such a good visit with my niece. It was great to see her and to catch up and to see how things are going for her.
- I’m grateful that I was able to reschedule with my nephew and his partner. I didn’t get finished visiting the last of my friends until after 10:00, and he needed to go to bed so we could get up and work.
- It’s starting to get hot, and I’m grateful that my van both has ac, and that I’m heading north next. 🙃
Success:
- I overcame my innate awkwardness and shyness and visited people I love despite it having been so long since I’ve seen them. 🎉
Improvement:
- Ummm… there’s got to be something. But… 🤷
Loves!
Lift the world.
Bring it on.
~ stephen
Lift the World 