(written on May 27th and May 29th from notes taken previously)
I was up early again this morning. I’m just… not getting the sleep I need. Not sure why. I’m waking up naturally. I’m not going to say that I’m super exhausted when I wake up, but I know I’m not rested.
Anyway, it was harder to be grateful today with my frustrations about my equipment and the concerns that come with worrying about the value of equipment that’s been badly damaged.
Not to mention other discouragements.
Trying to be grateful.
I spent a little while calling different MRI locations in Arkansas and South Dakota to see if there were locations similar to the one that I went to in Utah a year and a half ago or so.
Rapid City didn’t have one that was anywhere near as inexpensive as the one in Utah. Northwest Arkansas had one that was close in price but was booked out for a good while.
So I weighed my options and figured it was going to be best to just go right back to Utah, as it was both more inexpensive, and immediately available.
I chatted with Thomas for a little while, who asked how I was doing, and I talked about my frustrations from the day before and how it’s hard to have the perspective that I have about quality work and taking care of stuff when it seems like so many others don’t share my views.
It was nice of him both to ask and to listen. 🙏
Hopefully I’m getting the order of events correct, but if not, at least this next story gets told. 😅
Remember the chocolate bar that I bought for my mom? Well, since she wasn’t going to be able to eat it because of allergies, I ate several chunks of it late last night? but left it sitting on the exposed bed platform, immediately behind my brand new curtains and on top of my laptop and also quite chummy with my laptop. 😶
😬
So yeah, chocolate melts in hotter weather.
Which created absolutely the perfect circumstances to coat both sides of my brand new curtains with lovely chocolate streaks as the curtains flapped in the wind well I drove down the road.
Lovely.
😕
I decided not to do anything immediately, because I wanted the chocolate to harden as the temperature dropped, so I could scrape most of it off without it penetrating deep into the fabric by smearing it while it was still wet.
Once it was hardened, and after telling my mom about it, she mentioned that she had some stain remover that she was confident would keep it from staining, so I removed the curtains from the van, and we set to work scraping all the dried chocolate off. Once off, we coated all the leftovers with her stain removing chemical and sent the curtains on their soapy swim in the washer. 🤞
I also noticed that Mom’s dehumidifier wasn’t working properly (again, I might have the day wrong on this 😅), so I completely shut it off, messed with it a bit, and finally was able to get it to start working again.
It’s worked for probably… 9 years? We bought it used out of the back of somebody’s pickup truck on Facebook Marketplace.
It’s been a good little dehumidifier. Wouldn’t be surprised if it finally gives up the ghost, but maybe we can coax a little bit more life out of it. 🤞
I fired off an email (after first calling) to a local window company in the hopes of getting a better estimate from companies in Arkansas than the ones in South Dakota. 🤞
I got my MRIs (one for my sacral spine and one for my lumbar spine) scheduled in Utah for this coming Monday, so it looks like I’ve got a bit of a drive ahead of me.
I also spent a fair amount of time on Audible both with customer service and trying to find and choose books to buy before my membership renews for yet another month.
I finally was able to figure out a pattern with the errors I was getting. I discovered that if I clicked on a book from my wish list in order to add it to my library, I couldn’t do it. I’d get errors. It didn’t matter if I was using the website or the app. It didn’t matter whether I cleared all my cache or uninstalled and reinstalled the app; But as soon as I searched for the very same book using the library search and added the book from the search results instead of from my wish list, I didn’t have any issues whatsoever. 🤷
So I wrote out the re-creation steps and sent them to their tech support. 🤞
One of the errors that I was getting was telling me that I wasn’t in the correct country to allow me to have a digital copy of the particular books.
When I looked at all the shipping addresses that were available on my account, none of them were out of the country, so that seemed to rule that out.
Later, however, a different tech support person linked me to a place in my profile (or somewhere?) where there was a billing address for New Zealand or something?
I have no memory of how that happened.
🤷
Either way, there is a bug in their system, as if there was a legitimate problem because of a foreign address listed in my settings, then I had found a way around it. 🙃
It’s a moot point for me personally now, as I’ve used up all of my credits and canceled my membership.
One more recurring payment off the books. 🎉
I really don’t like recurring bills, especially when I’m not utilizing the services provided with whatever it is that I’m paying for.
I’d like to get rid of my YouTube membership, too, but I really enjoy both not having commercials and being able to listen to videos without having to have my screen on.
Small dilemma.
Speaking of small dilemmas, one of the other dilemmas that I was experiencing in my search for books with Audible was the reality that several of the books that I wanted to order were inexpensive, costing less than a credit costs to buy, so it felt like a waste of money to use a credit to order a book that didn’t even cost the amount I paid to get the credit. 🙃
In the end, though, I figured it was just better to order the books I wanted and be done with the membership for now than to continue trying to find more books that weren’t necessarily at the top of my list.
It might sound funny, but I consider it a small victory over my sometimes destructive/unduly stressful desire to always get a good deal for things. 🎊
Eventually, I headed back to Haven Hill and started working a little bit on Rover. Or wait… do I have my day wrong on this as well? 😅
(It’s been so long that I’m second guessing the notes. I don’t always end up taking the notes on the same day.)
🤔
Oh well, whenever it was, this happened.
I spent some time testing the towing portion of the wiring harness to see about connecting a new 7-point connector to Rover thinking that I might drag one of the trailers back with me to South Dakota.
Ok, no, I think it was today. I started messing with the towing stuff because the 7 seven point harness connector that I had ordered a couple days ago arrived yesterday, and though I’m not going to be towing a trailer anymore because I’m heading to Utah instead of straight to South Dakota, I figured that I did at least start trying to work on it.
But I don’t think it was very long before I decided to not worry about working on it, as there was no need to spend all that time right now, since I wasn’t going to be towing anything.
I headed down to my shed in the lower back pasture and spent a good long time trying to sort and organize and clean everything up.
I also hung out at Jim and Steph’s for a little while, Stephanie inviting me over for dinner. I had hoped to say goodbye to Liz, but she was out and about. Stevie was also busy for the moment working, but I arranged to come back a little bit later (I hadn’t yet seen Risa at all, as she had been out of the country for the whole time I’d been in Arkansas).
While waiting for Stevie to finish up work, so I could go back over and visit, I went back down to the shed and spent more time organizing and cleaning up.
You can actually open the door now without crap in the way. 🙃
🎉
One of these days when I actually have a place of my own, I’ll drag all the tools and supplies that I have in the shed to wherever it is that I live.
I hope 🤞
I still have no idea where that’s going to be.
None of my family lives where I want to be, and I always figured I’d get married and make the location decision together with my wife, but that never happened, so… where to go?
My family is so spread apart anyway that it doesn’t really matter where I am, as I’m going to have to travel all over the western United States to visit family anyway, just like I do now.
🤷
While down at the I shed, I did manage to get all of the greenhouse frame out of the tall grass of the field and under the other greenhouse frame, so at least anybody trying to mow the back lower fields won’t run into greenhouse frame hiding in the super-tall weeds.
I headed back over to Stevie’s place and hung out with him and Risa for probably a couple two or three hours just chatting.
Good stuff.
Then it was back to my mom’s place, where she graciously offered to let me use both her shower and washer and dryer. 🙏
So I got my laundry started, took a shower, and called it a night.
Back to Utah tomorrow.
Lift the world.
Bring it on.
~ stephen
Lift the World 