(written on July 21st from nodes taken previously)
Wow, busy day today, and not what I expected. I’ve been planning to spend a good chunk of the day preparing for the message I was going to share in sacrament meeting tomorrow, but… things didn’t work out that way.
It shortly after I got up, I walked around to the driver side of my van and noticed that my rear tire was completely flat.
Gratefully, and perhaps even a bit miraculously (considering where I’ve been), I didn’t even have a momentary negative reaction. I just looked at it, accepted it, and went right on my way happy and unfazed.
That was really really cool. 🙏
And thinking about it as I write this now, I’m grateful to have had that experience to show me what is possible for me if I put complete trust in the Lord.
I would completely lose sight of that perspective later on… but I’ll get there.
I also got a message from somebody up in Rapid City selling a van that I had hoped to possibly be able to use as a parts van for my CNG van in Arkansas. I’ve been looking for a parts man, as I think y’all know, for probably 3 years now. 😅
But nearly every van that I find has the wrong engine in it or is far too expensive to use as a parts van. This one also had the wrong engine, but the seller was willing to sell it for $500, and that was worth it to get the parts I needed. I couldn’t get all the parts I wanted, but I could get most of the essential ones that I would need to at least convert it back to a gasoline-powered vehicle.
And then when I asked for the VIN number, what did I find? The van actually did have the right engine size. 😶
The owner had been wrong.
🥳🎉🥳🎉🥳
Wahoo!
I got my tire changed, I dragged the horse apples and splats, helped Hans a little bit with the tractor (it’s having hydraulic power issues) and with the hay efforts, and then headed over to talk to my neighbor to see if it was okay if I borrowed his trailer to drive to Rapid City and buy the van.
Our neighbor is super awesome, and gratefully, he was totally on board with letting me use his trailer. The van itself is heavier than what the trailer can handle, so I was going to need to partially disassemble it in order to get it back without overloading the trailer, putting everything that I could take off in the bed of Hans’s truck.
After having Hans help me get everything set up with the truck and trailer, I headed up to Rapid City to go buy the van. Along the way, I spent a little bit of time chatting with my mom and Heather and my friend Cory, testing the reception all along the way.
With T-Mobile, there are definite spots where you lose data connection, lose reception, etc, but with Verizon, I seemed to have both data connection and cell signal the whole way. 🥳
The gentleman selling the van was really nice. He ran his dad’s electrician business, and the van was just one of the ones that his employees had accidentally run out of oil. 😅
It fired right up when I turned the key, and at first, I didn’t hear a knock, though I definitely did later.
I drove the van over to the back side of the property and got it set in a place that I felt would be relatively simple to get it loaded up onto the trailer. I hadn’t brought blocks with me to keep the back of the trailer from sinking while driving up it, which would put massive strain on the tongue, but gratefully, the gentleman I was buying the van from had a couple of jack stands that he put under the trailer for me.
We got all the paperwork taken care of, the title signed, bill of sale, everything, and then I set to trying to take off heavy parts to bring the weight of the van down to what would be the max acceptable for the trailer.
Except everything that I touched seemed to give me grief. 😶
I spent probably 20 or 30 minutes anxiously trying to get parts off, with Rusty parts giving me grief, broken parts giving me grief, and being unable to get almost anything off the van in that time.
Meanwhile, the seller was patiently waiting for me, so he could get his jack stands back, close up shop, and head home.
After fighting and fighting and fighting to try and get anything of meaningful weight off, I finally gave up, loaded the van on the trailer, so as not to keep bothering the seller who was patiently waiting for me, and then left.
I didn’t drive very far, as I still wanted to disassemble the van, but I at least wanted to get the jack stands back to the gentleman who let me borrow them, and get off his property, so he could close up and leave.
I ended up driving down the road maybe a half mile and pulling into the empty parking lot of the business, hoping to successfully remove a sufficient amount of weight in a relatively brief amount of time.
But those hopes… didn’t come to fruition. 😅
I spent probably the next 3 and 1/2 hours in that same spot continuing an all-out battle with the van just to get weight off of it. 😕
It didn’t take long before my frustration reached boiling levels to pair with the intense heat of the day. 😕
My vocabulary dropped substantially, and my frustration for Ford engineers increased dramatically.
I don’t know what on earth they were thinking having plastic parts as the retaining components for metal bolts.
😶
And then having no way of removing the metal bolt if the plastic part fails. 😶
Sometimes I really do not understand engineers. How can you go to school for that long and not think through slightly important things like materials science? 😤
To be fair, I don’t know what constraints they’re working with. They probably know exactly what they’re doing, and they probably don’t like it any better than I do, but they probably have to deal with the bean counter setting ridiculous expectations.
Is just so… dumb. Why skimp out and go cheap in areas where it makes no sense to skimp out and go cheap and then waste so much money on excess in other areas? Why make bolts that are 10 threads longer than they need to be? All that is extra metal and extra weight and extra cost. It makes zero sense. Shorten all those bolts that are far longer than they need to be, and use that extra metal put metal parts where metal parts should be instead of plastic parts that degrade over time, leaving you needing to get torches and grinding wheels to remove parts because plastic parts broke.
End rant. 😒
I was… not happy. And the heat of the day, mixed with my genetics, meant that I lost probably a gallon or two of sweat, and I was so dehydrated that the liquid inside my mouth had turned into a nasty-tasting paste.
I got the hitch removed back at the electrician place, and I got the bumpers removed at the new place. I removed the flooring (3/4-in plywood that added extra weight to the already super heavy vehicle). Of course, I didn’t think about needing to remove screws, so I didn’t have the tools I needed to quickly zip out gazillions of screws that head screwed the 3/4-in plywood into the floorboard of the van.
So I got to do that by hand. 😶
Extremely time consuming, extremely energy draining, and not very easy on the hands. 😅
I removed the headlights, the grill, and the battery.
I removed the roof rack, one of the side doors, and the charcoal canister.
I finally, after battling with it for a good while, managed to remove the inside cage.
I wanted to remove the exhaust, but the way Ford has it designed, you cannot remove the exhaust pipe without the vehicle being up on a lift unless you literally cut it apart.
Did I mention I really dislike Ford engineers?
Or maybe most automotive engineers, in general?
Or whoever takes the blame for the stupidity of the designs.
Or perhaps I am the one who is stupid and don’t realize why things are designed the way they are. 😅 But it certainly seems pretty ridiculous as a mechanic looking at how things are designed, seemingly purposefully to make it more of a pain in the butt.
After hours of battling with everything, I think perhaps dealing with a little bit of heat exhaustion? (I was at the point of dehydration and exhaustion where even small efforts, just walking from one place to another, would cause me to lose my breath).
Eventually, finally, I was able to get enough removed from the van and put in the bed of the pickup truck to feel good about driving it back without being overloaded.
With my body is messed up as it was, and being as dehydrated as I was, I didn’t head home right away: I badly needed hydration and nutrition, so I headed over to the Sam’s Club on the north side of town and spent the next, probably hour, eating a quarter of a pizza and sucking down refill after refill of Pepsi zero from the soda fountain.
The drive home was extremely slow going, as I wanted to take it easy on the truck and trailer. It probably took me closer to 2 hours than an hour and a half just to drive back. 😅
I was supposed to bring the trailer back to my neighbor tonight, but strategizing in my brain, I felt like it would be a whole lot easier and make a whole lot more sense for me to leave the van on the trailer, disassemble it while on the trailer, and then drive it right back up to Rapid City to drop off at the metal scrap.
Gratefully, our neighbor was totally on board with that. 🙏
Such a great guy.
My Verizon testing on the way home was yet another success, and I chatted with my mom for a bit on the drive. Once back, I spent a good little while unloading the truck in the dark, then eating dinner with Hans and chatting a bit.
One of my friends started a new blog to replace an old one, and one of the things I read hit me pretty hard.
Funny how big the swings can be in a day. I went from not even having the tiniest negative reaction at the site of my flat tire, but continuing along happy as a clam at high tide. And then there was the excitement at the possibility of finally getting a parts van, And having it be just about everything I could have hoped for (though someone did steal the catalytic converters off of it, so I couldn’t use the exhaust system to replace Rover’s damaged system), to being significantly frustrated and angry at the ridiculous efforts required just to remove simple parts, completely physically depleted, and now battling emotional pain (sorrow, fear, loss and longing).
Big swings.
When Heather got home, we chatted a bit, and I hydrated a bit more.
I didn’t get any pictures of the tear down. That would have been cool. But I was just in such a hurry and then so frustrated…
I’m grateful that it turned out that the damage to the rear tail light on Hans’s truck wasn’t anything that I did. The damage looked fresh, so I was pretty positive that I must have done it, though I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how, because I’d been so careful.
I ordered a set of replacement tail lights, only to find out that the damage did indeed predate me. 🙏
And now I have a talk to give tomorrow, and it’s late late at night, and I’m exhausted. Do I stay up and prepare for the talk, guaranteeing I don’t get enough sleep but at least have something pulled together to draw from? Or do I go to sleep, get enough sleep, and hope to be able to come up with something meaningful in a super short amount of time.
I prioritized other things ahead of my talk preparation, perhaps understandably in a sense because I’ve been waiting for a parts van like this for three years, but I’m the one who made my choices this week that led me to where I am now. I have no one else to blame but myself.
I’m exhausted.
What a day.
Lift the world.
Bring it on.
~ stephen
Lift the World 