(written on December 6th from notes taken previously.)
I slept through my first trading alarm. I suppose that’s not much of a surprise, since I’ve been significantly sleep deprived since I started trading.
I think I got maybe a couple hours last night?
I started out with a couple of weak sauce trades, and then I took a real trade.
I honestly don’t remember if I accidentally pressed the wrong button or if it was one of those lightning quick reversals on the opening Bell, or what it was, but I was immediately significantly down on the day.
But my brain was broken.
Internally, I was panicking, but I was so sleep deprived that I couldn’t get my brain to recognize what it needed to do to resolve the issue.
I just sort of sat there in panicked, stunned incoherence.
Eventually, the adrenaline brought on by the panic was able to get my brain working enough to know what to do, but by that point, I was already significantly down.
Between my broken brain, the slow app giving me fits, the app crashing at times, I found myself down $700+.
But something was different today. After the initial panic, I took a breath, reframed the circumstance in my own mind, managed to contain my inner sailor, disciplined myself to not size up in order to try and get the money back faster, and slowly chipped away at the loss until, after a long day of trading, I’d reversed the loss and finished up $29 on the day.
I did it! I started poorly, for sure, but I did it! I disciplined myself. I didn’t panic. I had confidence in my ability, and I succeeded!
Maybe I can do this!
I even called it at +29, walked away, gave a shout out to the Big Guy, and was off to the other activities of the day!
🥳
Well I was in my van, a young lady who worked for the department of conservation in the area pulled up to inspect the possum traps, and I charted with her briefly about the work that she does and how she goes about it period how the traps work, etc.
I had wondered if they might consider doing bounties in order to solve the invasive species issues. They do that in Arkansas and Texas because of the massive numbers of wild hogs.
Anyway, after having solved the storage issues yesterday, I turned my attention today to dealing with the window issue on the passenger sliding door period with the heat coming on, it would be really nice to be able to have two open windows in the back for cross ventilation.
I looked all over online trying to find anything that would be helpful for figuring out the wiring and electrical circuits, but it was mostly a lost cause.
I looked and looked and looked, but there just aren’t the resources available for these New Zealand models that were imported directly from Japan.
(I don’t think I mentioned it, but that’s how it was trying to figure out how to take that darn door panel off. It’s so easy to miss fasteners and end up breaking stuff, so I probably spent a couple of hours just trying to figure out how to get the door panel off without causing damage.)
So I set to work trying to figure out the wiring, the powers and the grounds and whatnot.
I did find that there was power getting to the window switch. I also found that there was power getting to the motor from the switch going One direction comma but also power going to the switch at the same time in the other direction, as if there was some sort of short or ground issue or something?
I ended up making a couple of long jumper wires from the wire that I had brought with me from the United States, and I was able to use that wire, eventually, to confirm that there was nothing wrong with the motor itself. I jumped the mean heart power wire to the down wire for the window and grounded the up wire to the seat track that I had just messed with (forcing power to the window motor but giving it a separate external ground), in the window went down!
Reversing the procedure, gratefully, the window went back up!
That was good news in some respects, as it meant that I didn’t have to take the entire door apart to remove and replace the window motor and regulators assembly.
It also meant that the most likely issue was that the window switch itself was bad.
I had a little nagging feeling like there was still something that wasn’t figured out. I certainly wasn’t confident that the switch itself was the issue, but anything else would have been one of those rare issues that is much less likely.
So… next step, get a replacement switch from the junkyard if I can find one.
Was not an easy task to get to this point, lacking lots of the tools that make doing already-challenging work more reasonable, but… definitely made some progress today on that front.
There were definitely a fair number of frustrations as well with how unnecessarily challenging the work felt because of the lack of tools and whatnot, but overall, I’m feeling better in general, I think. I’ve had some successful trading days in a row. I’ve made some progress on the van, though it required a sizeable effort to get to this point.
Gratefully, when the possum lady came back, I remember to ask her about the garbage issue at that falls that I don’t remember the name of that I called garbage falls. 😅
She gave me the organization to contact about the issue, so I jumped online and wrote an email, including pictures, of what I had found and what I had done.
Several days after the fact, but at least it’s taken care of on my end now.
With everything apart, I also realized that there was some issue with the latching mechanism on the sliding door period there’s a spring that holds back a little knob so that the door can click into place and stay open even if the front of the vehicle is pointed a little downhill.
Well, that little knob is perpetually sticking out, I think because this used to have power doors maybe, and something was removed so they no longer work?
🤷
It started to rain, and I got everything all packed up.
Instead of heading to those places that gentleman had recommended the other day, I headed back to town, over to Bunnings, as everything I could find said that that was going to be the cheapest place to buy velcro stripping to attach the bug screen to my vehicle with.
Doodle drive from where I was to Bunnings comma but an eventful. As I was walking into the store, a lady who looked like she’d been maybe battling meth addiction stopped me and asked me if I would buy her Bunnings store credit voucher. I wasn’t sure if it was legitimate or not, but I went ahead and bought it from her, as she said she needed money for the bus.
Gratefully, the voucher did turn out to be legitimate.
Spent a good long while inside the store trying to figure out what I wanted to use as my medium for attaching the bug screen to the van. I had wanted to do the velcro strips, but the cost of the stripping was astronomical, to my sensibilities at least.
In the end, I gave up on the velcro idea and decided to just use the American style duct tape as my method of adhesion. I’d put the black tape over the top of it to help with the aesthetics. 🙃
I did buy a bungee cord to hold up the food storage compartment lid, and I did find and purchase the sticky stuff that the rain Shields are fastened to the door with. So that’s good.
Hopefully, after installing the bug screen, there will be enough space to put the double-sided sticky stripping on to be able to put the rain shield back on.
🤞
From there, I swung by Pak ‘N Save, text it a little bit with my brother Richard and then chatted a little bit with my sister Heather.
My default Whangarei Falls freedom camping spot was all blocked off, so no one was allowed to park in the parking lot, so I headed back over to the rugby place, guessing that they wouldn’t have another event scheduled, and they didn’t. 🙏
After parking for the night, I remembered that I wanted to get gas tonight, tomorrow being Sunday, and preferring to avoid spending the money on Sunday if reasonable.
Lift the world.
Bring it on.
~ stephen
Lift the World 