(written on the 29th and 30th and 1st from notes taken previously)
After getting up at the parking area and moving the barrel that I’d put in the front seat back to the back, I decided to head up to the Walmart Supercenter in… Layton? Clearfield? 🤷, thinking maybe I could get another pair of cheap shoes. 🙃
A little to my surprise, I realized that I had been to that Walmart Supercenter before, I think the last time I stayed at that particular freeway-side parking area before a medical appointment last year?
No cheap shoes, unfortunately, but once again, I grabbed some popsicles 🙃, this time I figured I’d bring them over for John and his family to enjoy.
Buuuut… I think his family is too healthy to want the popsicles, as they definitely were not a hit (I should probably say there wasn’t any kind of negative reaction, just no interest). 😆
Or maybe it’s just that I’m one of the few people willing to eat popsicles for breakfast. 🙃
Oh well.
I hung out with everyone for a bit before John, his two daughters, and I headed out to pick up his son from the airport.
Little did I know that the girls had already warned John’s son that I would be peppering him with a hoard of get-to-know-you questions, so he was ready. 😆
Admittedly, that did take a little bit of the wind out of my sails, but we still had a good time, joking and laughing and enjoying each other’s company. 😊
When we got back to the house, John’s son played the piano a little bit (because we had sort of already scheduled his first activity, because I wanted to hear him play, and the girls wanted me to hear him play, as well).
He’s amazing.
Let’s just say that I had absolutely zero desire to play the piano after he did. 😆
One of the people at the house had a birthday, so we had a little birthday cake, and then we started playing a game that was… kind of like verbal charades and… kind of like battleship? at the same time. I don’t remember the name of it, and that’s probably a terrible way of describing it, but it was fun.
Basically there was a bingo chart, and then you had words you needed to act out for your team to guess what the word was that you were acting out, but the bingo chart was filled with words the other team expects you to use while trying to get you to guess the word. If you use those words they’ve written down that they think you’re going to use, then they get points, and if they get enough of them in a row to form a bingo, then they get even more points.
I’m perhaps one of the last people to suggest games (generally, you can pretty much count on me voting against game nights), but I usually have fun when I actually play them (despite the fact that I seem to be genetically predisposed to zone out the moment someone starts trying to explain the rules of the game 😆).
I finally did end up playing the piano a little bit, mostly just hymns and hymn medleys, and then one of the little kids who was also at the house wanted to play badminton, so John and I joined the others who were already there.
It’s been a long time since I’ve played badminton, and it took me a little while to get my hand-eye coordination going with the little… birdie? that starts off going quickly, and then slows down because of the drag.
I forget what you call the little ball with the nut thingy on it, and I don’t have a data connection right now, so I can’t look it up.
After playing badminton, one of the little kids wanted to play catch (baseball), so he got me a glove, and we played catch in the backyard for a little while. I taught him how to hold his glove depending on where the ball comes, as he kept trying to catch balls at eye level with the glove facing up, which results in balls to the face. 😅
I didn’t have the longest attention span at that point, so maybe we played catch for 15 minutes? The whole family was getting ready to go to a cabin for the rest of the week, so I headed back in and hung out for a little bit longer before saying my goodbyes to everybody and driving away.
It was kind of fun to hear John’s oldest say that I was a legend. 🙃
I hope I didn’t disappoint. 😅
After heading out, I stopped off at the Walmart on 9th East in Murray, I think buying another pair of shoes? 🙃
From there, I headed over to Cory’s place, as all of the things I ordered from Amazon had arrived, including a new sun hat, new rear glass for my Google Pixel 8 pro (which I didn’t realize was replaceable without replacing the entire rear backing plate! until I decided to go look it up and found out that it was 🙃), and a valve stem repair kit that allows you to replace a car’s valve stem without removing the tire. 😎
Thank you, to all you wonderful people who invent fabulous things. 🙏😊🙏
Cory wasn’t home, but I grabbed the package off the porch and then headed to a nearby park where I, gratefully, was able to successfully replace the valve stem 🎉 (though I didn’t have an air compressor to fill up the tire to make sure it actually held air).
I also used the rear glass repair kit for my Google pixel 8 Pro phone, but unfortunately put a scratch in the actual lens itself of the wide angle camera lens. 😶
😬
It still took great pictures, but I was worried that perhaps I wouldn’t think of all of the circumstances that it would be put through to test them before putting the replacement glass on, and that I would then be putting new glass on the back only to perhaps have to take it back off, because the scratch needed to be fixed after all.
So… I decided to try and fix the scratch on the camera lens–a decision that turned out to be… not a good idea.
😬
I found a YouTube video of someone removing the scratches from the camera lens, but I didn’t think to watch the video: I just listened to it. 😅
The video was of someone using toothpaste to remove minor scratches, so I took some toothpaste, put it right on the camera lens, and rubbed it all around.
What I didn’t realize was that the person who had titled the video and said they were cleaning scratches off the camera lens meant that they were actually cleaning scratches off the glass that goes in front of the camera lens.
😶
😬
Why that face? Well… 😅
Let’s just say I caused myself problems that I didn’t have before–a really foggy camera lens full of micro scratches.
😕
AI was pretty much convinced that there was nothing that could be done to repair the camera lens with all those super fine scratches on it from the toothpaste. It talked about how the plastic on camera lenses is measured in nanometers, and any removal of material, even to remove super fine scratches, would ruin the camera’s ability to do its job, because it would mess up how the light went through the lens.
Basically, AI said trying to fix the damage was hopeless, that the part would need to be replaced. 😕
At that point, the lens was totally unusable, which had me thinking about how I had once again made the issues with my phone worse while trying to fix them. 😕
The common denominator I think, however, is not always that I screw it up: It’s that I don’t take enough time to make sure I’m doing the best thing I could be doing before I dive in.
Ready, fire, aim. 😅
Impatience.
So what could I do at this point, I wondered. AI was convinced it was hopeless, but AI is incorrect frequently enough that I decided to see what might be able to be done.
I wondered to myself… what might be able to remove the scratches as gently as possible without removing almost any additional plastic.
What did I come up with?
😛
Yep! My tongue. 🙃
So I spent the next, gosh, I don’t even know how long, basically French kissing my wide-angle camera lens. 😆
When Cory got home from work, I headed over to his place, and we had a great little conversation while we sorted rocks, and while I simultaneously continued French kissing my wide-angle lens. 🙃
That’s the extent of my love life. 😆
It was a great visit with Cory, and I was glad that I was able to see him one more time before heading out of town. 🥰
After driving away, I decided to stop off at the same Walmart that I had earlier to grab some more… popsicles. 😅
The house brand real-fruit popsicles are pretty good. 😁
While shopping, I chatted with my sister Rebecca for a little while, and then when I headed out to the parking lot, I noticed that there was a guy with his truck hood up, so I went over and chatted with him, and he mentioned that he thought there was transmission fluid leaking.
So I spent a little bit of time with him trying to find a leak but was unable to find any leak anywhere at all. He had a little paper towel that he had wiped some fluid on, and one of the little spots smelled like coolant, and the other little spot smelled like transmission fluid.
I think maybe the spot that’s smelled by transmission fluid was from him wiping his dipstick off? I think the actual leak was probably his coolant, but I couldn’t find any evidence of a leak anywhere. Nor were the fluid levels low enough to cause any concern, so I told him that my suggestion was to continue as he was, but to watch it closely.
Hopefully he’ll be okay.🤞He was heading up to Idaho, west of Boise.
I’d arranged with Jared and Cortney to take Cortney’s kids on a hike tomorrow morning, so I spent a good little while texting back and forth with them about plans for the trip before finally crashing at my normal spot in the parking lot of Slide Canyon (the canyon we’re going to be hiking tomorrow).
Though I’ve been up that canyon many many times, I’ve never thought about hiking it from the vantage point of a… nine year old? So I wanted to do the hike again to be better prepared for the little obstacles we might come across that might not be so easy for a little’n.
Hopefully, I’ll be able to give them a fun experience. 🤞
I spent a little time on my journal, but with it already being rather late, and needing to do the hike myself first thing in the morning before I even drive all the way back to Highland to pick everybody up.
Short night, so… not much journaling going on. 😅
Prioritizing sleep over journaling.
Lift the world.
Bring it on.
~ stephen
Lift the World 