(written on the 12th from notes taken previously)
Well, it looks like the tell-tale signs of a cold came through again. My mom has been dealing with allergies, so she was thinking at first that maybe it might be allergies, but nope.
Poor little lady down and out today, just wiped out from the cold overtook her.
My first order of business for the day was to pick up the keys that I had forgotten to grab last night. So I grabbed the keys, found my way back to the house where I parked the truck last night, dropped the keys in the bed, texted the new owner, and headed out.
My next stop was over to AutoZone to see about getting a push button start switch, but when I saw that the price was going to be $30 at AutoZone and only $6 on Amazon, I went ahead and ordered it off of Amazon, along with some UV-protective sunglasses for my apparently glaucoma sensitive blue eyes, blackout curtains for Rover, and the flexible metal spring cable and hardware to hang the curtains up with. (Thanks to my experience in New Zealand for teaching me how to set up the curtains, so I knew what to order 🙏).
Despite not having the ignition bypass switch, I decided to go to Haven Hill anyway. Since I hadn’t yet been able to catch up with neighbors Joe and Glenda, I pulled into their driveway and knocked on the door.
This time, Glenda did answer, and she and I ended up hanging out on her front porch talking for probably a little over an hour, about health and modern technology and all sorts of stuff.
Joe was asleep, so I didn’t get to talk to him, but she Said she would relay the message that I had stopped by him that I stopped by.
After bidding her farewell, I headed up to Haven Hill, moved my CNG van over in front of the entrance to the storage barn, grabbed the air compressor that Jim had left on his porch for me, 🙏 filled up the tire, and started working on it a little bit.
My CNG van seemed to be misfiring pretty good , which keeps happening on cylinder one, but I had an extra coil pack because Rover uses the same coil pack, even though he’s 10 years older. 🙏
So I swapped packs, and it seemed to run a bit better. 🙏
As I worked, and as per usual, I did a lot of multitasking. Camille, one of the stake Just Serve coordinators I’ve been communicating with about my concerns with the Just Serve app, sent me a link teaching me how to add new service projects. That was nice.
I also realized that Mom was still on my Amazon prime account, which is no longer allowed, since we don’t live together, so we got that resolved, now I think she’s got her own account.
While I was doing all of this, I was continuing to clean up the area around the tractors and the storage barn, burning rotten wood and branches and all sorts of stuff that was out there.
In the process of cleaning everything up, I managed to step on a nice little nail that went all the way through my footwear and probably a half inch or so into my foot.
In case any of you don’t know the rule, you never leave boards lying on the ground with mail sticking up out of them.
That was a bit frustrating. 😒
There was so much blood. 😅 I didn’t realize how much I was bleeding until a little bit afterward. Sure, there was blood all over The bottoms of my thick sandals, but it wasn’t until, while standing on rovers step board for a while and then looking down and seeing blood all over it that I realized just how much bloodless coming out. 😆
It wasn’t just a little. 🙃
My feet were absolutely covered in dirt because I’ve been walking around without socks on, and it took a little while to get my foot cleaned off enough to try and sterilize the hole and put some clean socks on.
At first, I just wanted to keep right on working, my foot sort of half slipping and half sticking to the blood on the top side of my water sandals, but my mom convinced me to stop working and to clean it all off, which wasn’t easy because none of the hydrants in the upper field work anymore, so I had to use the water in one of my drinking water jugs.
My biggest concern was having to go get another tetanus shot. I wasn’t sure when the last one that I had was. I remembered getting one in either 2016 or 2017, I think it was, when I stepped on a nail just outside of the garage at the 13801 house, but I didn’t remember if I had gotten one after sending the ax into my leg. 😅
I wasn’t looking forward to potentially yet another medical bill.
In addition to cleaning up and burning wood and branches, raking and burning leaves, and cleaning my bloody self, I spent a fair bit of time cleaning up my emails.
Google has been warning me for a good long time that I’m almost out of storage space, and I pay for 100 gigs of storage every month, but most of that got used up during the last Great Western road trip I took with my mom when I accidentally chose to back up my photos to Google Drive, and it used like 80 more gigs than I had on my plan, at a cost of $1 per gig.
I still haven’t removed those pictures from my account, partly because they act as a backup for some of my most prized pictures, but as it’s on my to-do list to clean up my files and back them up to external hard drives, I won’t be needing Google Drive to store those photos much longer.
I don’t like recurring payments for memberships, so as soon as I get the storage backup situation figured out, that monthly payment will be gone, and as soon as I get all my audible credits chosen, I’ll have a gazillion books to listen to, so I won’t need an audible membership for a good long time.
Speaking of audible credits, as I was going through my emails, deleting and organizing, I came across one that was from Audible that was from my oldest brother who had gotten me 12 audible credits for my birthday and Christmas back in 2024.
😲
I must have just thought it was one of my monthly audible credit notifications. So I clicked on the email to redeem the gift, and I went from having seven audible credits to 19.
Nineteen. 😶
Holy…
I’m going to be set for years, I think. 😆
Thx, Jared!!! 🙏🥰
And that wasn’t the only lovely surprise. As I continued going through my emails, I found one from this last December from my dad and stepmom who had given me gift certificates to Amazon, one for my birthday, and one for Christmas. 😆
Happy very late birthday and very late Christmas to me! 🙃
😆
Thx, Dad and Cindy!!! 🙏🥰
I texted a little bit with my sister Heather about Mother’s Day as well. Eventually, it got late, and I wanted to wrap everything up, but my little fire was so weak that it just wouldn’t burn very well because the leaves and pieces of wood were too damp. It just continued smoldering and smoldering and smoldering.
I did everything that I could to get the stupid thing to burn faster and hotter, so it would dry out the other wood and finally just consume itself, but no matter what I did, it the layers of stuff were so small and tightly packed together, that they acted is insulation against the surrounding heat and wouldn’t dry out.
Ugh. 😒
I resorted to pouring a quart of transmission fluid on the fire in the hopes of having it finally catch and really get going, but… It was no use.
And since the hydrants don’t work, I couldn’t just put the fire out.
I fought with it and fought with it and fought with it until finally I had the idea to drag the burn barrel over (oh, I guess now would be a good time to explain that I had multiple fires going. Two little ones on the ground, and one in the burn barrel.
So I put on some gloves and dragged the super hot burn barrel, very carefully, about 100 ft or so over to this pile of combustibles that I just couldn’t get to combust.
I grabbed a flat shovel, and just started filling every last coal I could get off the ground, putting it in the burn barrel.
Eventually, I had the burn barrel not only full, but mounded over the top, but no more poles were on the ground.
I couldn’t just leave the burn barrel that way, though, with hot coals out above the top that could be blown over. I mean, realistically, the fact that it was that hard to keep the fire going meant that it was almost certainly not a fire risk, but still, you don’t leave Kohl’s if you can help it.
So I decided to climb into the burn barrel and pack down the coals as best I could. 🙃
Gratefully, I was able to pack the Kohl’s from a point of being mounded up several inches above the top of the burn barrel to being probably 7 or so in below the lip. 🙏
With the coals and unburned combustibles All packed down, I felt much better about leaving the burn barrel as it was.
Now my problem was that my van, with the exhaust having fallen off, is super loud, and it was late enough that everybody in Jim’s house was in bed, lights out.
😬
Ugh.
Should I just stay there for the night? I wondered…
No, I wanted to get back to my mom’s place. So I tried pushing my van backwards. At first, I thought about pushing it toward Liz’s house, but I didn’t fancy backing down the driveway all the way, and I didn’t have much of a place to turn around until I backed all the way down to the lower field.
So I decided to push the van the other way, which turned out to be clueless because I lost my gravity assist. Had I gone toward Liz’s, I could have used gravity to go over the little nub that keeps the water from washing out in front of Jim’s place. Since I went the other way, the only thing that was going to get the van up and over that little mound was my strength.
And that wasn’t happening.
And not just because I have a bad back and shouldn’t be trying to push a multi-ton vehicle, but also, it was absolutely hopeless anyway because I was having to push uphill up.
I gave it as much effort as I dared, not wanting to hurt my back, before giving up.
While I was struggling with everything, my mom texted to see if I was all right, having seen on Google Maps that I’ve been basically in the same place until late. I let her know the situation that I was in, and she suggested that I just go ahead and start the van. I didn’t want to, but now, since I’d moved the van, it was directly in everybody’s way. 😕
Reluctantly, I decided that I was just going to need to bite the bullet and fire the van up and risk waking people up and annoying people (I don’t know if they would actually be annoyed, but I was worried that I was annoying.
So I turned the key to start it, and nothing.
Dead. 😠
Between the nail in my foot from the improperly discarded board, the struggles getting the fire to burn down, and now this, I was… not happy.
Yes, I’ve been doing a heck of a lot better over the last three plus weeks, but I have a long way to go still, So unfortunately, I was pretty mad.
Gratefully, I have a jump pack, so I was able to get it jump started, starting it just long enough to get the van over the hump and then shutting it off and coasting pretty much all the way down to the front gate.
Really hope I didn’t wake anybody up, and if I did, I really hope nobody’s frustrated with me. 😕
Need to get this stupid exhaust fixed.
Once home, I brought my cooler inside to leave for Roseanne. I guess I forgot to mention that. I had messaged Roseanne earlier in the day, and we texted back and forth a little bit. She had been so generous in giving me the cooler back in the summer of ’24 when we had to leave the house we’ve been living in on the hill, and I had moved into Rover.
Since I graduated to BEC (Big Electric Cooler 😁), the cooler she gave me has just been sitting around gathering dirt and dust. So I messaged her to see if she might want it back, since she had been so generous in giving it to me in the first place, and as luck would have it, she had just left her cooler with her daughter, so it was perfect timing.
🎉
I chatted only briefly with my mom before heading back out to Rover to crash for the night.
What a day. 😅
Many thanks to my mom for her encouragement. 🙏 And many thanks to my friend Corey, who felt like he was prompted to reach out to me tonight. Definitely good timing because these are the kinds of days that are off in the catalyst to relapse.
And as of the moment, I’m still clean, and it looks like I might manage to make it to eyes closed without using.
🤞
Lift the world.
Bring it on.
~ stephen
Lift the World 