(written on the 29th from notes taken previously)
Spent a little while chatting with Jim this morning as he was getting ready to head out for work.
More rain. 😶
It’s just nutty how much rain there’s been, waking up to sweet my catch bins.. Waking up to empty them before they overflow.
I don’t think it would be an exaggeration to say there’s been somewhere between 8 and 12 inches of rain in just the last three to five days?
It’s just been… crazy.
Fortunately, the rain stopped long enough for me to head down to the lower field where the tractor has been waiting with one foot missing for several days now.
Thanks to Andres, we have a tire that holds air again. 🙏
I have been planning on heading back to Arkansas earlier rather than later, but getting the tractor back going again, I wanted to finish what I had started several days ago–getting all the rest of the lower field mowed.
So I hopped on the tractor and just started going round and round and round, mowing everything down.
I think I ended up mowing for probably 6 hours. 🙃
Sadly, I managed to run over an armadillo with the tractor and mower. 😞 I don’t know why it didn’t run away. I mean, they don’t scare easily, and they are slow moving little guys, but I never thought that it would just sort of sit there in the weeds while something very large and loud was coming right toward it. I didn’t even notice it until I’d already run over it and was coming back for another pass of that same area.
Seeing it already run over but still alive, I quickly made another turn so I could put it out of its misery.
Sad. 😞
I also spent a fair amount of time getting the things that I had removed for my vehicles into the shed, so nothing would need to be removed from the vehicles in order to sell them.
Then I spent a bunch of time with my truck, draining oil out to see if there was any metal in it, and then taking apart the filter to see if there was any metal in the filter.
There wasn’t any metal that I could see in the oil, and there were a handful of very small metal flakes in the filter itself–a finding that was both encouraging and discouraging.
It’s been a very rough last handful of days. I started out doing so well after the relapse, but have since devolved into being pretty much almost as bad as I’ve ever been. 😞
I parked my truck up by the barn, managed to get my van out, despite it having a flat tire and despite the mud. It was touch and go for a little while, but gratefully, and probably partially because of the flat tire, I was able to get out.
Jim let me borrow his portable battery operated air compressor, so I was able to fill the tire up at least enough to drive the van up and park it next to the truck.
Ate dinner with Jim and company and then said goodbye, and then I met up with my mom at Wendy’s and ate another dinner with her. Well, I just had a Frosty well she ate an actual dinner, as I was already stuffed from what I had eaten at Jim and Steph’s place.
Chatted with my mom for a bit. I wasn’t in a very good place, so I wasn’t very good company at all, unfortunately. Kind of sad, especially since I drove away from Arkansas today not to return for more than half a year at the absolute least. It’ll likely be somewhere around 8 months to a year before I’m back in Arkansas to visit next.
I got on the road late, I think starting about 9:30ish? And I drove and drove and drove. I ended up driving far longer than I expected, all the way until I was about 15 minutes north of Salina, Kansas, getting there a little after 4 a.m. 🙃
Gratitude to My Father:
- I’m grateful I was able to get the massive amount of mowing done that I got done. I got the entire back section of the property mode, even the areas that were pretty much nothing but blackberries and the areas where the weeds were probably 8-plus feet tall.
- I’m grateful I was able to get the wheel and tire back on the tractor okay in order to use it again.
- I’m grateful that Jim had an air compressor that I could use. Mine finally gave up the ghost, so I need to buy another one, but I’m probably not going to buy another one until I come back from New Zealand. Just going to risk the drive. 😅
- I’m grateful to have been able to spend time in Arkansas, although in some ways it feels like coming to Arkansas was the worst thing I could have done. It was like my brain reverted to where I was 7 months ago. 😕
- I’m grateful to have been able to be safe in my drive and to have made it so far before stopping for the night.
- I’m grateful to have found a rest stop that looks like it’s going to be fine for me to sleep at. 🙏
We. Celebrate. Successes!!! 🥳:
- Successes… 😅
Reflections on Where I Can Improve:
- Was terrible at not using my phone while driving. That’s pretty much all I did while I was driving. It’s super effective for having the drive go by quickly, and it’s quite effective for multitasking, but it’s just… Neither safe nor in harmony with my own values.
Lift the world.
Bring it on.
~ stephen
Lift the World 