(written on the 14th from notes taken previously)
Well, if ever there were an opposite day, today feels like it qualifies. 😊 I was super productive today, and that felt really good after the brutal, self-inflicted blows I endured yesterday.
Yes, I woke up late, but that was needed from all the lack of sleep I’ve caused myself. I listened to uplifting music, finished drying my wet clothes, dragged hay out to various places in the horse area, so they wouldn’t poo all over the barn floor, and dragged.
Then I headed into town driving Hans’ truck (Heather and Hans were going to Casper) to fill the tank in the bed with water and to the aluminum cans we have over to the recycling place (wish they had glass recycling there, too!).
I asked a few people if they knew where glass recycling was available, and none of the people that I asked were even from the area. 🙃
So I called the city, and they told me that there wasn’t any recycling drop off location, that all the recycling was residential pickup.
So I’ve been carrying this oversized, empty beer bottle around with me since Utah. 😶
Can’t seem to get rid of the darn thing. 😆
I guess maybe next time I’m in town for church, I’ll I’ll drive down a residential street and see who’s got a recycling bin and ask if I can dispose of the bottle there. 🙃
Back at the ranch, I grabbed the tractor and got rid of the rock pile that’s been next to the barn for a good little while, just dumping the rocks in the big rock pile on the south side of the house.
I dug up maybe 40 or 50 mullein plants, root and all that we’re trying to establish a colony in the strip of grass between the horse paddock and the driveway.
I dug up a prickly pear cactus that I found on the south side of the property by the road. I dug up a yucca plant that was in the west pasture.
Progress.
I found the fill hose and filled the house water tank, the horse watering troughs, and the trough that we leave out for the deer (lots of deer make the rounds each night to through our place here.
After doing all the outdoor work, I headed into the trailer and spent a good little while repairing my Google Pixel 8 Pro phone, thoroughly cleaning it as best I could to get rid of every last little particle of dirt and mineralized water residue from the camera lenses.
I was mostly successful, and I think my phone cameras might be salvaged. 🤞
I got the new camera-covering glass installed on the back, a new safety glass on top of that (though I realized I accidentally left a fingerprint on the main glass before putting on the additional safety glass 😅), and then got safety glass installed over the top of my regular, badly scratched phone screen.
In the process of doing all that, the original factory blemish that caused the phone screen to have a dead spot in it (the seemingly interminable saga in Christchurch), managed to cause more problems because I didn’t notice that I was pressing on that part of the screen when holding the new glass on while the adhesive set.
So now I’ve got a row of busted pixels from the circular dead spot (which I think continues to grow) over to my front facing camera, and a line going up from that same busted spot to the top of my screen.
But whatever. Life goes on.
I also finally got a protective cover over my new Samsung phone screen. Unfortunately though I didn’t think about covering the screen when I first got the phone, so what was a pristine screen now has scratches and nicks on it. 😕
Oh well. Life goes on. 🙃
After all the work on the homefront, I headed into the trailer and started digging into my friend’s genealogy. 🌳 Excitingly, what I thought was going to be quite challenging started off with an explosion of information. I was finding connections and attaching sources right and left, tab after tab after tab opened.
It was super cool. 😊
I hope it’ll be meaningful for my friend when I get it all pulled together. There are definitely going to be some tough ones (trying to find birth parents for an adoption, for example).
I chatted for a bit with Heather after she got home, and we looked at the stars, finally identifying as part of scorpius the row of stars I had thought was part of Orion (the bow).
It’s nice to live in a place where you can see the Milky Way every night without all the light pollution from suburbia. 🙏
During the day, I had found some cactus nubs that I wasn’t sure which species they were, so Heather and I went out in the dark, and she identified them as undesirables, so I’ll get those dug up.
After calling it a night and heading into Rover, I… didn’t go to bed again. 😅
Gratefully, it wasn’t because I chose to follow after garbage. No, it was because I was so excited with everything that I was finding about my friend’s family history that I ended up sitting there on my bed staring at my phone, finding connection after connection after connection and source after source after source until something like 3:30 in the morning!
🙃
So fun. 😁
So that was my day. A really great one to have after the really crappy one yesterday.
Oh! And I changed my home screen and lock screen on my phone to an image that I had Gemini create of Jesus holding a cell phone and with objects relevant to my struggles on a little table in front of him with the caption “Lovest Thou Me More Than These.”
Those words have been really potent for me, so having them on my phone like that increases the frequency that I’ll be thinking about them.
🤍
Lift the world.
Bring it on.
~ stephen
Lift the World 