(written on the 24th and 27th from notes)
Today was a day of emotional swings as different events unfolded. 😅
I was up really early this morning, which was probably a good thing, since I had an early morning doctor’s appointment in Bentonville. Gratefully, traffic was surprisingly nearly non-existent between the hill and Bentonville. Usually, you’ve got a fair amount, but not today. 🙏¹
The visit to Ozark Orthopedics went pretty much exactly as I expected it to go: after everything, he ordered more MRIs of my spine and suggested a spinal injection.
Sometimes I wish I could just be my own doctor and not have to waste a couple hundred dollars to hear what I already know they’re going to say. 😅
The physician’s assistant was really good, though… took his time, so that was nice.
Not common these days… But definitely a lot more common among physicians assistants and nurse practitioners than doctors– at least in my experience.
My mom wanted to join me for the visit, and it was nice to have her there.
From there, I decided to go to U-Pull-It (junkyard ) to see if I could get an AC clutch that might work for my van. I seemed to find one at first, but then it didn’t look quite right, the bolt wasn’t quite right. So I went back out to my van and checked to see what it looked like to make sure the clutch I got had the same type of threaded connection. My AC clutch was completely missing, so I couldn’t just compare the clutches themselves.
Going back out into the junkyard, I found a clutch that had the same threaded connection, and proceeded to remove it from the truck.
While I was out there, I called TaylorMed to correct the MRI appointment that I had made online. I don’t know if I mentioned it before, but the MRI that I needed was listed as an MRI that was available, but when you go through the self-service menu to schedule it, it wasn’t one of the options in the drop down, So they had told me to just call after I made the appointment, and then they would correct it on their schedule.
From the junkyard, it was only a short drive over to my nephew’s place in Southeast Rogers. I hadn’t seen him for a good little while, and it was good to visit, especially since he recently got married, so I was able to meet his new wife and sister-in-law who was also there.
We had a great little time eating lunch that they had made while I got to know my nephew’s wife and sister-in-law and what not.
Good stuff. 🤍
From my nephew’s place, I headed back to Haven Hill where I started working on my van a little bit. While I was there, my friend Cory sent a link to a YouTube video of someone’s perspective on a particular gospel topic. I listened to it, and then he and I chatted on the phone about it for a couple of hours. 🙃
Neighbor Dan called to see if we were going to be using the dirt down by the front gate that we had dumped out there, oh, a couple of years ago when they were building the bank in Pea Ridge. I used some of it, but the overwhelming majority of it was still there, and Dan asked if he might be able to use some of it. So I called Jim, and he gave the go-ahead, and I let Dan know.
From there, I headed over to check on something that I had loaned to somebody off Haven Hill and found that it had been… damaged pretty good.
I was… very angry.
Glad nobody was there to hear my vocabulary shrink.
The longer I live, and the more experience I have, the more I feel like very few people have similar expectations for what quality work is or what taking care of something means.
😕
It’s discouraging.
And today, I was… livid.
Chatted with my sister Heather for a little while in the midst of my frustration, which was probably good to help me come back down from my anger.
Stopped by the Walmart Neighborhood Market in Pea Ridge after that, and I think that was when I bought a dark chocolate bar for my mom. Usually, I get her flowers, but the flowers this time were… a heck of a lot more money than they usually are, and the ones that were in the price range that I normally buy were actually misplaced, so they were like three times the price.
Unfortunately, the chocolate bar turned out to be a bust, as I guess she’s allergic to the chocolate these days. 😕
Anyway, after going to my mom’s place, I spent a good long time on Audible looking for books to order. I had 19 credits, so there wasn’t much of a need to keep my membership active, because I have no shortage of books to listen to. 😅
But Audible has this sneaky membership policy where if you cancel your membership, you still have access to all the books you’ve bought, but you lose every single credit that you might have paid for or received as gifts.
If my experience is any indication, the reason they do this is to achieve exactly what happens with me. I can’t decide on a book I want to get with the credit that I’ve paid for, and then I forget, and then another month rolls around, and I’ve paid for another credit, and now I’ve got two books to try to find and decide to buy, and then another month rolls around before I get to it, and now I’ve got three…
And on and on until you realize that you’re just not using it as much as you expected to, but now you’ve got all these paid for credits that you don’t just want to lose, so you keep the membership active, but then you forget to try and find books… and then another credit comes in that you’ve paid for…
😒
In my opinion, it’s a pretty dubious policy. If the customer has paid for something, they should get it whether or not the extra membership benefits you get from being a paying member are active or not.
I paid for the membership. I paid for the credit. I should get what I paid for.
Anyway… So with all the credits that I had already paid for, and with the gifts that family members had given me, I had 19 credits. 😅
Not wanting to pay for another month, given that I had plenty of books to last me a long time, I only had like a day and a half to choose all 19 books before I was billed for a new credit.
So I went to town looking and discovered, to my delight, you can use your credits to buy some book collections. 😎
That was both exciting and set me on a path of doing a whole boatload of time-consuming searching to see what collections were available. 😆
I texted Tish and Jared about finding the collections, as they’ve both contributed to my audible library. 🙏
I spent a long time trying to choose books until I think somewhere after midnight the system stopped letting me get more books even though I had credits left.
🤷
Lift the world.
Bring it on.
~ stephen
Lift the World 