(written on May 30th from notes taken previously)
Up early early today. I wish I knew what it was that keeps waking me up so early. Is it just that dawn starts before 5 a.m.? Is it just the light?
I don’t know.
Gratefully, despite the lack of sleep, I had one of my best dailies days in a long time. 🙏
Prayer, music, math/brain games… I gave the horses some grass time, spent some time filling up my ears with gospel stuff…
It was good. 😊
I got in touch with Amber, the lady from the lending institution that I had spoken with before I went to New Zealand, and she reiterated the same things that she told me last time, so that was positive. Some of the things she had said seemed perhaps too good to be true? So to have her say the same things again… that’s encouraging.
I spent a good little while working on my file-cleanup project, still trying to sort through and organize the tens of thousands of not hundreds of thousands of files on my external solid-state drive.
That little Drive is probably my most important possession, as it’s got all my journals and all my out photos. Outside of that drive, I’ve got almost nothing backed up anywhere else. 😬
I’m trying to clean house and consolidate everything, so there are no more duplicates on the same drive, No more useless files taking up space.
I did some dishes, worked on trying to get an appointment with my branch president, spent some time working on Zoras back wound.
In the bin that I have full of outdoors equipment, I have some leftover scalpels. I thinks they were specifically designed for harvesting meat from deer or elk or something like that.
Once upon a time, I used one of those, or something like it to carve a piece of ever enlarging scar tissue out of my leg. Because it was so sharp, I didn’t really feel much of any pain. So I used the little scalpel dealy properly open up the wound on Zora’s back to make sure I got out as much of the infection as I possibly could. The little hole that it was coming out of naturally was simply too small to get the thick cottage cheese type infection out, so I opened her up a little bit more, and gratefully, just like with me, I don’t think she really felt much of anything.
Usually, if she’s hurt by something, then she’ll wince or wine, but she didn’t even seem to acknowledge that I had cut her open. 🙏
I didn’t want to slice her up too much, so I tried to keep it a fairly small. Hopefully, I won’t have to go back and do it again, because I didn’t make the incision big enough this time.
I felt really positive about how it went this time. I got a heck of a lot more infection out, perhaps all of it. 🤞
After that, I spent a little bit of time putting some duct tape around the edge of my bed frame because the wood edges catch on clothing and can pull the threads, among other things.
I should have put tape around the edges a long time ago, but I hadn’t yet. The tape definitely needed to be put on before I go on the Great Eastern Road Trip with my mom in September.
Don’t need any of her clothing catching on the little wood barbs of the plywood board.
I spent some time thinking about how stuff, hanging out in the hammock on the second floor, and I took the horses out for another little grass feed.
After putting tape along some of my bed platform, I decided that it was time to cut off the extra. The platform has been maybe six inches longer than the bed? Maybe eight inches? Not sure exactly.
It’s been a nice place to store stuff while I’m asleep at night, but it’s definitely going to be in the way of Little John come road trip time.
Don’t need that. 🙃
It’s a lot nicer to have the privacy of having Little John be between her bed and mine, as mine is much taller than hers, so she can have privacy at night while I’m asleep.
Anyway, so I traced align and then cut off the end and then proceeded to tape up all four sides of my bed platform.
Because I hadn’t taped it up in the past, the rough wood chewed through the back of my driver seat, which doesn’t look so nice now, and it was doing little bits of damage to the side paneling as well, I think.
And of course, my clothes would catch on it, as I mentioned before.
I watched a bunch of framing videos, and I spent a good long time shaping insulated plugs for my two skylights.
During the winter time, it’s nice to have the skylights, as they let more heat in, but during the summer time, oh good golly do they let the van heat up a lot faster than it otherwise would.
Creating insulated plugs that fit the hole was a heck of a lot harder than when I think it should be. 😅
Heather let me cannibalize some some pieces of insulation from some larger pieces that I think had broken during a storm, and I spent… maybe hours trying to shape the foam board into pieces that would fit my little skylight holes snugly.
I didn’t have any translucent poster board or paper large enough to cover the holes skylight cutouts, so I couldn’t just hold something up and trace the outline of the light and dark spots against the paper or poster board.
At first, I tried to just measure and cut, but that was no use. The original cutout in the fiberglass wasn’t straight at all, so it was a significant challenge to try and shape the foam board to the shape of the cutout in the fiberglass.
In fact, I failed pretty miserably in my first effort, quickly overcutting the foam board, so the piece was so small that it would let way too much light through and couldn’t be pressed into place.
Ugh.
I ate some canned lentils and then continued working on my skylight plug efforts. Heather came home around that time, and I think we chatted briefly before I continued my shaping efforts.
I ended up using the little scalpel to shape the foam board because the blade on a sheetrock knife was just too dull, so it tore up the foam board instead of letting it cut cleanly.
I was grateful the little scalpel tool worked well enough. 🙏
After recognizing that it wasn’t really reasonable to try and shape the foam block into the skylight cutout hole without a pattern to follow, I decided to use cardboard, cutting it out bit by bit with scissors and then taping another piece of cardboard together because the piece I had wasn’t big enough, until I was finally able to shape the piece of cardboard into a template for the foam board.
Once I had the template, I set to work tracing it out on the foam board, and then cutting it out.
It still took me a good long time after tracing it out to cut and shape the first block to fit. Super slow going trial-and-error efforts.
And I think I even failed yet again... I’m forgetting the order of events, but I want to say that my first tracing attempt still came out badly, and I had to grab a third piece of foam board.
Eventually, I was able to get foam board for the first sky light sufficiently trimmed to be able to press it into place, the fit being tight enough to hold itself in. 🙏
After I started working on the second one, thinking that I now understood how to successfully shape the foam board, if I’m remembering correctly, I managed to cut the piece too small again, even after making a new template to fit the differently-shaped second opening.
😠
(by that time, I was frustrated by the amount of time I spent just trying to put in some stupid foamboard sun blocks.)
Gratefully, if I’m remembering correctly, I was able to use the discarded piece of foam board from the first cut out to fit in the hole for the second.
It still took quite a long time to shape it, but eventually, I got it shaped sufficiently to also be able to press it in and have it hold itself in.
So much work! 😅
Chatted with Heather about how stuff and took the horses out for another munch. Tried to spend a little bit of time answering questions online, but there wasn’t really anything at all.
Ate dinner, spent some time on my journal efforts, and called it a night.
Lift the world.
Bring it on.
~ stephen
Lift the World 