I’m exhausted.
It’s been a long day.
It’s been an up and down and back up day. And I’m grateful that it’s ending on the back up. 🙏
It’s funny, yesterday, I talked about feeling like I was seeing a light at the end of the consecration tunnel, the light that illuminated the the reality both available and now ever more possible, that I might be able to give my entire heart to God.
I think I mentioned yesterday that one of the hardest things for me is to feel like my time is wasted. Time wasted, money wasted… Circumstances that seem to bring about such “wasteful” experiences are generally met with frustration and… worse. 😅
Seeing that light of possibility on the horizon, I was excited, but I also should have been prepared. 😆
There’s only one way to get to that point… That point where I am willing to put everything on the Lord’s altar and simply trust in him, giving my all, of course, but letting the chips fall where they may, and trusting that God can make everything beautiful, even beauty from ashes.
Whoops. Squirrel.
There’s only one way to get to that place of light that I see ever nearing on the horizon.
Practice.
😅
So I should have expected today to be what it was.
I did not.
It didn’t even cross my mind.
Good day started out with relative ease and comfort. I didn’t get a great night’s sleep, haven’t gotten to bed later than I had hoped, but I slept decently well, and when I woke up in the 6:00 hour whatever point it was, knowing that I want to get to bed early and get up early to have that quiet time in the morning before the world awakes (at least in my own little circle), I figured I would just wake up and stay up, which would help me get to bed earlier tonight.
Anyway, I had a nice, brief little text conversation with Cory.
And I did pretty decently with my morning dailies, including a more dedicated gospel study than I’ve had in a long time.
It was really good stuff.
Then I allowed myself to start slipping when I started trying to figure out what was going on with my brand new power station. Why when my other power station only had to expend an average of maybe 24 watts to run my star link, why does this new power station expend between 50 and 60 watts to run the same component?
I have twice the battery capacity, but more than twice the draw, which means that the battery that’s twice the size is going to be drained faster than my power station that had a battery half the size.
So I got focused on that, trying to get in touch with customer service and whatnot, and being told that it was going to be 3 to 5 minutes, and then waiting for 45 minutes, or whatever it was, and then trying again because no one ever came to help, and then waiting for another 15 or 20 minutes, or whatever it was, and finally giving up, finding a phone number, and calling that, only to realize that the people who man the phones don’t really know anything technical, and they have to escalate to tier 3 technical support.
Anyway, so I spent a whole lot of time trying to get that figured out, frustrated because this new power station that I paid twice as much as I did for the last one so far has been quite underwhelming. It’s a more annoying interface, everything taking longer to do, and it’s expending its energy at a far more rapid rate…
Unless my other power station was just giving incorrect data. The other one did seem to lose its power faster than I would expect.
But the water’s rating for the device, the starlink mini, is 20 to 40 watts. And I’m running between 50 and 60, generally. Sometimes it’ll drop down into the teens or low 20s for a little while, and then it bounces right back up.
Funny, I just checked it right now, and it’s running about the same as what the smaller one would be doing.
🤷
But all day, it was running between 50 and 60, and then if I unplugged my starlink from the new Power Station and plugged it into the old one, it would run it between 17 and 30ish.
Anyway, all that to say that I wasn’t doing very well at that point. I was frustrated with the power station. Frustrated with the absolutely atrocious customer service, when previously, I had had good experiences with customer service.
I also found out, Hans having re-measured our digging for the septic tank, and finding that somehow we completely screwed up and needed to go another couple of feet or so lower than we were. So I started trying to dig down again, but I hit rock pretty much immediately.
So I didn’t exploratory dig at the end of the now massive dig out area, and found that The Rock was sloping down, so I kept digging down and found that we could just dig the whole thing even further down the line, so I spent the next hour and 45 minutes, or so, digging out the septic and other dozen or so, or maybe 20 ft longer?
At this point, we might as well seal the walls fill it with water and call it a pool. 😅
Anyway, I made a pretty significant mistake in my digging, not realizing that I was digging deeper and deeper and deeper. For my vantage point, I couldn’t see that I had actually dug down way too far. I could tell that I was digging deeper, but I didn’t realize I was that much deeper.
That lovely little mistake ended up costing me many many hours of backbreaking labor, not to mention it’s going to cost at least a few if not several hundred dollars worth of road base to rectify.
At first, we are just going to fill it back in and use a compactor to compact the dirt, but I knew that there would always be a little bit of niggling concern that the dirt would settle over time, and the weight would shift and ruin the septic tank that we just spent a couple of thousand dollars on, not to mention the nightmare of digging it up and replacing it or fixing it.
As we were heading down that road, I started filling in the portion that I had overdug (by like four or five feet 😬) , basically putting back in enough to level it off.
Which ended up being too much, so then I grabbed the backhoe and dug out what I just put back in, at least a fair bit of it.
We borrowed the compactor from our neighbor, and Hans started compacting it, but even compacting it, there was going to be hanging over our heads the concern that it was possible that it might not stay that way and might end up settling and breaking the tank or something. It’s a clamshell tank, so it’s got a seam in the middle. That, just by itself, makes me nervous, as I’d much rather have one solid piece that was molded as one piece and not something that was put together, but that’s what was available, and so that’s what we’ve got, and it would seem that if that’s a design people are making, then it’s likely functional and fine.
🤞
Anyway, so I grabbed the backhoe and started digging out dirt that I put in, getting it down to a layer where Hans decided to go ahead and compact it from there, but his nervousness, even though he said after compacting it that he thought it was going to be good enough, combined with my nervousness was enough for me to just say, no, I’m just going to dig it out all the way back down to where I had dug it before, pre refill.
So I spent the next I don’t even know how long, in 100° weather, digging it all back out by hand so I could feel the bottom, as the bucket was so powerful that I couldn’t tell if it was getting what I had put back in there that was compacted down, or if it was actually digging it even deeper.
I don’t know how many hours I spent at it, but I will allowed myself to get really frustrated at myself, at the situation, and pretty angry. I would say I was well over halfway on my meltdown scale, and quite possibly up in the 70%- to 80% range of meltdown.
Anyway, somewhere around 6:00, I finally scraped the last of the soft dirt out, leaving the chasm that I had so carelessly dug.
We’re going to fill the chasm with road base, which is $350 a load. It’ll probably take at least one load, maybe two, maybe even more, but probably one to one and a half loads to fill in my mistake.
So I got some practice at the consecration effort today.
Not only did I contend with wasting time, which I absolutely despise, but I had to contend with wasting money as well. A double whammy.
😶
Practice. 🙃
I knew while I was melting down, that I just needed to turn it over to God I’d be okay with having given a worthy effort, but I just couldn’t get myself to do it.
Hans tried to get me to take a break, and to go into town and cool off a little bit, both physically and emotionally, but I just… Wasn’t in a space to do that. My brain was like “you’re not stopping until all this loose dirt is out of the hole, and it’s ready to have the road based dumped in to level it out.”
Having failed in his effort to get me to take a break, Hans found a wonderful general conference talk from Elder Gong about all things being for our good.
When he sent it over, I didn’t want anything to do with it. I was frustrated and angry, really angry with myself.
At first, I didn’t want to play the talk, but then I was like, “You’ve been talking a lot of talk. Are you going to walk the walk?”
Gratefully, I softened just enough to press the play button on the audio, and I started listening to the talk while I was hand digging.
I started calming down pretty much immediately, and after that talk was over, I let the next one play and then the next one.
It was really good for me.
I still had all the hard shoveling to do, which I worked and worked and worked at, having to take frequent breaks because I was absolutely exhausted, but eventually, I got it all done, all while listening to uplifting and inspiring stuff, which helped to pull me out of my deep funk and regain my perspective.
Everything I have, God gave me. My money is his, so if some of it gets wasted in my efforts to try and do good, and he’s okay with it, which he is, it wasn’t my money to lose. It was his money to lose. And if he needed it, then things would have been different today.
But they weren’t different, and he didn’t need it, and everything will be fine, even if something happens that makes it look like it doesn’t look on the outside like it’s ok.
Anyway, chatted with Hans for a little bit after I finally got all that dirt moved. I had probably spent the last hour and a half of the effort in mind-over-body mode, just forcing my body to do the work because I was exhausted.
So we chatted for a bit, and Heather came home, and we all chatted for a bit, and Heather and Hans were super encouraging about everything, which is really nice because it felt pretty crappy to have made such a crappy mistake.
After a long hot exhausting work day, Hans and I headed back to Cascade Springs with our snorkels, and enjoyed a lovely little swim with the underwater creatures.
We didn’t bring our fins today, and so the swimming was a lot more exhausting, having already worn through the energy reserves that I had, but it was still really good. In fact, it was the most successful snorkeling trip I think I’ve ever had, in that Not only was there a lot of wildlife to look at, but for I think maybe the first time in my life? I was able to keep my goggles from fogging up. 🥳
That might actually be because I was so dehydrated that there was no perspiration coming off my face to fog the mask up. 🙃
😆
There were definitely some dehydration cramps as I was swimming around, my muscles tensing up at times, but I made it out without drowning. 🙃
And I had an absolutely wonderful time. 😊
With the unfogged up mask, I was able to see wildlife, fish, everywhere, several species, from Little minnows all the way up to maybe an 18 in bath, two turtles, both rather large, one the size of a dinner plate, and a snapping turtle that looked like old Mr grandfather massive snapping turtle. Big body. Huge head.
Definitely not one you want to mess with, but we certainly admired him from at least a handful of feet away as he crawled around the bottom.
After that, we came home, I bringing in tow a sample of the devil weed that made me break out so badly yesterday and allergic reaction hives. Every place on my body where a little pollen needle thingy touched, I got a nice little itchy welt/hive.
Fun fun fun. So today, I did a little looking and found the plant. Do I still haven’t been able to identify the actual species. Took a picture, asked Google about it, but I haven’t found an answer I’m satisfied with yet.
Anyway, Heather and Hans and I hung out, eating dinner and listening to the general conference talk that’s going to be the basis of the priesthood/release society lessons come Sunday.
And now here I am. It’s coming up on 11:00, so I’m definitely later than I want to be, but I’m somewhere around an hour ahead of last night, so that’s a plus. And it’s a plus that I got out of the trailer before 10:00, so there is progress being made.
Rover is definitely cooked inside, much of the day baking in 100° weather, and me having to close the doors at some point because the wind was so strong that it was filling my van full of Red dirt from everything that I was digging. I’ve got a nice little layer of Red dirt all over inside the van. 😅
Anyway so that was the day.
Gratitude:
- I’m grateful that I was able to have a better morning study this morning.
- I’m grateful that all my work effort yesterday appears to be pretty nicely financially lucrative, as I was really surprised at how much my earnings went up from yesterday to today. That’ll help offset the cost of having to use road base to fill up the hole that I dug far too deep. 🙏
- I’m grateful to have been able to go snorkeling without my mask fogging up. That’s… Never happened, I don’t think. I don’t remember how things went in egypt, if things fogged up, but I certainly remember that it was a bust in Costa Rica and fun, but pretty foggy while in New Zealand.
- I’m grateful for Hans for sending me that talk that helped make it possible for me to transition from frustrated and angry to calm, and eventually, to being back in a good space.
- I’m grateful to be going to bed in a good space.
Success:
- I think that’s a big thing, going to bed in a good space after having a pretty frustrating day in some pretty significant respects.
Improvement:
- Well, I guess this one’s pretty obvious. 😆 ‘Nough said. 🙃
Good night, Neverland. 🤍
Lift the world.
Bring it on.
~ stephen
Lift the World 