(written on the 1st and 3rd from notes)
It’s going to be hard to get used to writing in my journal every night. 😅
But I did it for years, so I can do it again. Let’s do this.💪
Pep talk complete. 🙃
Let’s hope it works. 😆
Sometime during the wee hours of the morning, I heard a distinct double knock on the side of my van. 😬 I believe I was already awake when I heard the rapping, and I didn’t want to pull back my privacy curtain (a small blanket strategically placed to block the view to everything behind the front seats) to see who was knocking, but… You kind of have to, don’t you? 😅
I demured for probably 15-20 seconds? before finally moving the curtain out of my way.
No one at my driver’s window…
So I crawled forward a little bit to see if I could get a decent look out my rear view mirror, but there was no one that I could see in the rear view mirror either. No lights… nothing.
🤔
🤷
🙏¹
So I curled back up under the covers, cold because I had gone to bed with my pants and jacket on, which meant that my blankets never got to heat up.
I know it’s probably seemingly counterintuitive, but I’ve got to remember peel off the layers in the cold if I want my blankets to be warm. 🙃
I think I ended up sleeping until somewhere around 7:00 in the morning before finally getting up for good. I put on some uplifting music while I got myself going a little bit, and then I kneeled down for my first decent conversation with the Big Guy in a very long time.
As I prayed, I had the thought come in that of my two deepest desires, though my deeper desire is to spend my entire life serving others and sharing both my love and God’s love with them, I take that deeper desire for granted. Why? I think because it’s the one I already have: It’s always available to me. It’s so easy to focus on what I don’t have that I want.
And that’s where that other deepest desire comes in (to be one with a companion who wants to walk with me hand in hand as we give our everything, together, to lift the world in every way we can). Because continually return to and focus on the fact that I don’t have a companion, let alone that kind of relationship, I let the longing and the loss and the fear overshadow my ever-present tippy.
I think this is an understanding that I’ve had multiple times before, but I think it just… hit me differently this time?
I’m grateful to have had that pointed out to me in the way that it was today. 🙏²
I have complete control right now over my deepestestest desire, my tippy, and I’m going to strive to take advantage of the time that I have to go out and serve and lift and love, and to carry the message of God’s pure and perfect love to everyone.
🤍
My other deepest desire? I’m doing the best that I can to follow that path. It’s a path I don’t fully understand the way I’d like to, but Lord willing, one day, I’ll both understand the journey and enjoy the opportunity I long for.
In the meantime, I thank God that I can spend my life lifting, serving, loving, etc. 🙏🤍🙏³
It’s such an incredible gift. 🙏
And if my companionship hopes don’t come to pass as I hope, well… then I have another hope: I hope I never again let the pain of that loss overwhelm me to the point that I lose sight of what matters most to me. 🤞
And if I do lose sight of it, I hope I regain my perspective soon.
And if I don’t regain my perspective quickly… remind me? 🙏
🙃
A bit of a non sequitur… One of the biggest struggles that I have each time I circle back and try and live a life in accordance with my own values, is not using my phone while I’m driving. 😅
Good golly. 😆
I want to use my time as efficiently as possible, and so I’m nearly always multitasking, and driving is so… mind-numbing that I want to be actively learning or accomplishing something.
It takes more patience than I have right now to have the only thing that I’m doing while driving be paying attention to the road. 😆
It’s so clearly what I should to be doing, but it’s so blasted hard! It feels like such a waste of time.
Of course, if I were a better planner, I would always be prepared with podcasts or scriptures or whatever else to listen to, so I don’t have the “need” to interact with my phone.
But I’m terrible at remembering to get everything queued up and ready to go, so all I need to do is press play and drive away.
And it wouldn’t be much of a problem if I could get my brain to focus and ponder while driving, but I just can’t. I would love to just sit their, mentally working through struggles or challenges or thought experiments or whatever.
But for whatever reason, when I’m driving down the road, I just can’t focus that way. My brain flies off in a billion different directions.
I don’t think driving is the cause: I think I’m that way, in general. I need something engaging to be able to focus my attention.
Oh well. 🙃
I’ll figure it out. At some point.
I got to Devil’s Tower relatively early in the morning, which was nice. I don’t know when crowds show up, or if they even do this time of year.
Fun to be there. Hadn’t been there since my impromptu eastern road trip back in 2010.
I didn’t stay long. I stopped off in a few different places to take pictures both at different distances and different angles, but that was pretty much it.
Fun to see again. 😊
On my drive from there toward Rapid City, I got a little distracted on Facebook Marketplace. There were a couple of trucks that were for sale for what appeared to be good prices, at least one (the other one was only going to be a good price if the owner had an incorrect diagnosis).
So I sent some messages out to those guys, texting them back a bit when they replied. Don’t think I’m really going to go for either, though one of them is a really cheap price (even knowing that it needs a transmission).
I also started looking for a toilet seat. One of the few places where I can sit and not have fairly significant nerve pain and discomfort is on a toilet seat. I don’t last very long on those either because they’re hard, butt at least it’s somewhat of a relief for a short period of time.
I’ve tried using those donut cushions, but for some reason, they just don’t help.
So a toilet seat it is. Going to put it on my driver’s seat. 🙃
One thing I’ve been working on… I remember an LDS General Conference talk from Elder David A. Bednar where he addresses fear and talks about the People of Alma who “hushed their fears,” and I’ve found that helpful lately–just deliberately shutting the fear down. Not gonna go there.
Again, I think this is only really possible because of whatever switch got flipped in me that last Sunday in New Zealand.
To me, it makes most sense that it was God, as I made a deliberate choice to try faith again, and boom, but whatever the cause, I’m grateful, and I’m still reaping the benefits of that shift. 🙏⁴
I had reached out to the dentist office earlier in the day to see if they had any cancellations, as that would be good for both of us. I could get in earlier, and they could fill up a slot that was unexpectedly empty, but they didn’t, and maybe it was just as well.
I arrived early, and as I was pulling into the parking lot, I saw the back corner of the parking lot a young lady sitting on the curb who looked like she was crying.
So I parked my van, got a few things situated, and then wandered over to her to see if there was anything that I could do.
She mentioned that she had just gotten in a fight with her “baby daddy.” I’m guessing she was early twenties
I don’t remember what all I said or what all questions I asked, but I do remember asking her if she was safe and if there was any concern with how he was treating her. She said she was safe and there wasn’t anything to worry about in that regard. I let her know that I was going to be hanging out in my van for the next hour or two waiting for my dentist appointment, and that she was welcome to come by anytime if she wanted to talk further.
I worked on my journal catch-up efforts while waiting, and the young lady went on her way.
Hope she is able to find peace through the challenges. 🤍
The dentist appointment went decently well. They took an x-ray and couldn’t see a crack, and what the other dentist said was a crack and what AI said was a crack apparently wasn’t but was just the border of filling and regular tooth.
He definitely said the symptoms sounded like a cracked tooth, but he couldn’t reproduce any of the symptoms with the tests that he did.
He said there’s also a possibility that what was going on was basically a tendonitis of the tooth. He gave it another name, but when I described it that way, he basically said yeah, that’s pretty much what’s going on in those situations, and it’s a possibility that that’s all that might have been going on with me.
I’m going to be really hopeful that that’s the case. 🤞
It certainly seemed like more than that, but I had no clue there were even ligaments attached to teeth. 🙃
He said to go ahead and start chewing on that side again, starting with soft foods, and we’ll see how it goes. If I continue to have issues, then I’ll likely need to get a crown, which was priced at $1,850. 😅
The more expensive than the one in Salt Lake, the bonus is that they make the crowns right there on site, so everything can be done all in the same day without having to go through the whole process twice.
Still, somebody mentioned in a comment on one of my other posts that they had a crown done in Springdale, AR for something like $400. That would be an absolutely incredible price, so I might be looking into that if the symptoms come back.
Hopefully, they don’t come back. I’m going to probably rest my tooth a little while longer, just to give it a little bit more time to come down if the issue indeed was inflammation from an unhappy ligament and not any actual damage to the tooth.
Unfortunately, in all of my concern about having a cracked tooth and thinking that it was simply a question of whether or not the crack was a shallow crack that could be drilled and refilled or whether it was going to need a crown, I forgot to mention that ever since I had my fillings done last time, my bite has been a little bit off on that side, my upper left touching first.
I hadn’t really mentioned it because my bite changes throughout the day, as I think it does for pretty much everybody, and I didn’t want to be an annoying patient, and then I went to New Zealand for 6 months. 🙃
So I paid for the visit without ever getting that part of my concerns checked out. No fault to the dentist. His bedside is absolutely phenomenal. He doesn’t leave you until you’re absolutely finished exhausting all your questions, and he’s not impatient, nor does he give off an air of being in a hurry.
I simply forgot to ask him that rather important question. 😅
Oh well.
I had a couple people on Marketplace that were selling toilet seats for super cheap, but both of them were out of town, so no dice there. Might be just as well, because when I measured my driver seat, it looks like a round toilet seat is going to be the better shape, and the two online were elongated.
One of the people messaged me later while I was still in Rapid saying that they might be able to get a neighbor to put the toilet seat on the front porch, but by that point I was of the opinion a round seat would likely be better.
I headed over to Walmart to stock up a little bit on groceries, as the grocery stores in Hot Springs are pretty expensive, and they got back to my van to find my right rear tire was rather low.
When I looked at the tire, I saw what at first I thought was just a rock wedged into the spaces between the tire tread, but then when I looked closer, it turned out to be the ground down head of a bolt.
😶
I’d I had my tire plugging tools with me, of course, so I figured I’d I’d plugged hole really quickly and then lent my way back to Hot Springs just fill up the tire the rest of the way with Hans’s compressor.
But I didn’t expect the hole was going to be that big. 😅
Usually, you pull the nail or screw out or whatever, and then you can quickly put the reamer in its position, and the reamer plugs up the hole, so no extra air comes out.
Weeelll… 😅
When I pulled the bolt out, the amount of air coming out was significant. I quickly shot the reamer inside, but the hole was so big that quite a bit of air was escaping around the shaft of the reamer. 😲
I wasn’t prepared for that. 🙃
Realizing how big the hole was, I realized it was going to require at least two plugs, so I quickly threaded two plugs through the little eye of the installation tool, took out the reamer tool, and shoved the installation tool in.
It took a fair amount of pressure, a good bit more than usual, I think, but eventually, I was able to get both plugs inside the tire and the reamer tool pulled back out.
But not before the tire was super low on the air. 😬
I ended up googling local places that had free air. I toyed with the idea of going back into the super Walmart and buying a tire pump, but the last one that I bought from Walmart only lasted like a year and a half, I think, and I didn’t want to rush into buying another one that was going to be equivalent quality.
According to Google, a Maverick less than a mile down the road had free air, but when I got there, it was $2. That’s a lot for air, especially since it couldn’t even go up to 80 PSI, which is what I needed. But it got me to 70 PSI, so I’ll call that good enough. I can fill it up more later.
Once in Hot Springs, I popped over to Heather’s work to surprise her. I got there about 15 minutes before she was done for the day, so I gave her a hug and then went outside to let her finish up her work duties.
While I waited for her to finish, I went over and filled up at the gas station across the road, as it was tied for the cheapest in the area at $4.09 a gallon.
I also checked my oil which was almost a quart low after about 1,200 mi of driving.
That’s better than being two quarts low after driving only 100 miles or so, which means I must have filled the van improperly last time?
Weird.
I’ll be keeping a better eye on the oil levels going forward. 😅
After Heather finished work, we chatted for a little bit in the parking lot. As one of her co-workers fired up her SUV, I heard the familiar timing chain rattle, saw what it was, and knew exactly what was going on and what the vehicle needed.
I tried to flag her down, but it was a little too late. She’s got one of those General motors compact SUVs with the 2.4 engine in it. She’s going to need the timing chain, the balance chain, all the components in the timing system, and I would also recommend the water pump being replaced.
Heather said that her dad is kind of a home mechanic, so that’s good for her, because that’s not a cheap fix at all.
Heather went to pick up dinner for all of us, and I drove straight back to the homestead, hanging out with Hans a little bit as he showed me around what’s new since I was last here.
At this point, New Zealand feels almost like it was all just a dream.
Crazy.
Oh! I forgot! Zora was there to greet me as soon as I got back to the ranch, and I think she was pretty happy to see me. 😊
Dogs are the best. 😊
Anyway, we ate dinner and talked and laughed and enjoyed the evening, and then, almost as if I’d never left, after a family prayer, I headed out to Rover for the night, where I tried to write the entire entry for that but clearly… didn’t. 🙃
Lift the world.
Bring it on.
~ stephen
Lift the World 