I’ve missed two Temple Tuesdays in a row. 🥺 I was banking on being just a hop, skip, and a jump from the temple, but I guess it’s closed for yearly maintenance.
😶
And I drove past the Kansas City temple, one of my favorites ever, on a Monday.
I guess I could have driven all the way back to Kansas City, or stayed near Kansas City all the way through until the morning instead of going to Arkansas as soon as possible, but I didn’t want to lose time with people and to-do list items in my limited time here.
But I’m feeling it. I want the temple in my life every week. I’ve been sliding bit by bit by bit, and I almost slid all the way into relapse last night. I was on the razor’s edge, and it sort of feels like God held back the tide.
I wasn’t even really interested, but that’s when it can be at its most insidious–not feeling a drive, but then sort of going on automatic until boom.
Need to recenter.
Want to recenter.
So I tried today to get back to the things of greatest worth. I spent some time in morning dailies. I tried to spend some time in study. It wasn’t great, but it was definitely better than it’s been.
The vast majority of my day today was spent brush hogging the back field. Jim got me going this morning, putting the brush hard on the tractor for me and getting some fuel for me.
Round and round and round I drove mowing here and there and way over there.
So much mowing. 🙃
I think I mowed from probably around 9:00 a.m. until about 3ish when, as I was mowing, I smelled some sort of burning smell, and then all of a sudden all the electronics on the tractor went dead, but the engine was still going.
I turned the key off, but the engine just kept running..😶
It took me a little while to figure out a way to get the tractor to stall out, but once it did, I was able to start trying to figure out what on Earth was going on.
Trying to restart it yielded nothing, not even a sign that the key was turned.
So I started looking around and noticed that one of the cables coming off the battery was melted. Upon closer examination, I realized that the cable had touched the exhaust pipe somehow, melted the cable there, and the shorted out battery to exhaust melted the negative battery cable as well and actually even caused the negative battery post to straight up melt.
😶
So I grabbed a crescent wrench that was in the back tray behind the tractor seat, and I removed the negative battery cable from the battery and also from the frame, and then I removed the positive battery cable from the battery and then all the way to the starter.
Unfortunately, I didn’t have much choice but to walk all the way from the tractor through multiple different fields that I had just mowed, knowing there were likely ticks all over.
😅
Jim had just gotten home right about that time, so I came up with the melted cables, and he and I made some new ones out of leftover cables I had from disassembling Rover a couple of months ago, or so.
With new cables in hand, I went back down to the tractor, this time driving Rover, and I spent the next probably 30 minutes, or so, installing the new battery cables, removing the battery from Rover, and using it to start the tractor.
Gratefully, it fired right up, so it didn’t melt the starter, which was a concern, and it didn’t blow any fuses or mess anything else up that was electrical.
🙏
Jim gave me some money to go buy another battery, but not wanting to waste a trip into town when I needed to take a trip into town tomorrow, I just kept right on mowing with the battery from Rover.
I think I mowed until probably about 6:15 or 6:30, having mostly run out of fuel by that point and not wanting to risk the lines going dry, which would require the whole system to be bled in order to start again.
After that, I stopped off and said hi to neighbor dan, who was outside as I was driving by, and then I headed over to Wendy’s to take care of some errands that I wanted to get done on my computer.
Had a little bit of a scare when I couldn’t find my credit card. I bought myself dinner and then realized that I got a notification saying that I had made a purchase on my credit card, and that’s when I realized I used a different card today than I did yesterday, which didn’t make sense, so I went and looked in my wallet, and my usual personal credit card was missing. 😬
Gratefully, I didn’t panic. I just jumped online and found that no one had used it, so I felt like I had a little bit of time, since the last time I had seen it it was the night before.
After doing a little bit of searching here and there, I ended up finding the credit card on my bed inside of Rover, which reminded me that I had used it either late last night or early this morning as a scraper to clean up some stuff that spilled. 🙃
After finding my credit card, I spent the next probably 45 minutes to an hour putting my driver’s door back together, as we’re mostly past the bug season in South Dakota, so I’m not going to worry about trying to get screens installed for this year. If I’m still living in my van when I come back from New Zealand, then maybe I’ll do it next year.
From there, I headed over to Walmart to use the bathroom, buy some food, and empty the little bit of trash that I had. Ran into my step nephew-in-law while there, and we chatted a little bit, arranging to grab some lunch later this week.
Then it was on to my mom’s house for the night, as I was planning on doing an oil change for her in the morning and to get some laundry done, but I found out that she’s going to be subbing for someone at the family history library, so anything that I do will need to be done quickly and early.
Just finished up some online errands and some catch up on my journal. Posting this one tonight means I am completely caught up.
🥳
Gratitude to My Father:
- I’m grateful I was able to help out today by doing the brush hogging that I did. I probably spent nearly 10 hours brush hogging today which is probably more than Jim would be able to get done in 2 weeks, so hopefully it’s a meaningful help.
- I’m grateful my car battery was able to work at least temporarily to keep the tractor going.
- I’m grateful that I kept those really long battery cable wires, as it would have been even more expensive of a repair to fix what happened today had it not been for those. I often don’t like carrying so much stuff, but it’s amazing how often random things I keep turn out to make issues easier to deal with.
- I’m grateful that it appears as if maybe I managed to get away with only one tick today I found one little teeny teeny tiny tick on my ankle under my sock after taking my socks off. That said, it’s possible that I have others. I was in long pants and long sleeves without any tape around my ankles, so it’s possible I ended up with ticks in other places. Hopefully none in my hair.
- I’m grateful I was able to get some stuff done for my calling today. Just working at getting organized right now.
We. Celebrate. Successes!!! 🥳:
- I made positive steps toward the things that are of greatest worth for me. 🎉
Reflections on Where I Can Improve:
- Still much more I can do to eliminate distractions.
Thought of the Day:
Adversity, if handled correctly, can be a blessing in our lives. We can learn to love it.
~ Joseph B. Wirthlin
Must. Recenter. Now.
Lift the world.
Bring it on.
~ stephen
Lift the World 