(written on the 20th and 21st)
I’m exhausted right now. I really don’t want to write an entry, but if I don’t, then I’m going to get even further behind, and I’m already 3 days behind. 😕
Exhausted.
I got up at 6:00 something, don’t remember exactly when, and I got going pretty quickly on my disassembly efforts, listening to uplifting gospel messages and chatting with The Big Guy a fair bit.
Something a friend wrote about life and kids and the future hit pretty hard a… couple days ago now? and I’m… battling old questions and can feel old fears knocking on the door.
Part of me wants to plead with God for what I want, as the path I felt I was given, was directed to trust in, and that I have lived for and exercised faith in (even in my dark times) for nearly two decades seems more and more foolish to hold onto with each passing day.
I can feel that crossroads knocking, the one that recurs again and again…
Do I succumb to the fear that somehow all my experiences have just been my brain playing tricks on me, and I’ll never get what I long for, because there really is no God, so I’m waiting for direction/correction from a being who just… isn’t.
I go there, because I can’t make sense out of what’s going on. I mean, yes I can, but the loss is so great, the loss of what I wanted for my life, the loss of what I hoped for. The loss of what I was promised.
But I can’t walk away. How do I walk away from those experiences? Even a brain playing tricks on me can’t reasonably explain away some of the experiences I’ve had. And how do I knowingly choose to “test” another interpretation of the promises God gave me when other interpretations are 1: not my best guess, and 2: are an exercise in giving in to fear, not choosing faith?
Even after almost 20 years, I can’t walk away. I can’t voluntarily, knowingly, throw away the opportunity to exercise faith. I just can’t do it.
Sure, I do it in other ways all the time, but for whatever reason, this is one area that I just can’t.
So I’m dependent upon God. If anything is going to change, it’s not gonna be on my end. I’m going to hold fast to the promise and to my best understanding of how God wanted me to move forward with it. For something to happen otherwise, I would need some kind of direction, some clear witness from God. There’s no mortal circumstance, nothing that anyone else can say, nothing anyone else can do that would persuade me to change course unless it were ratified by the Spirit–powerfully.
I sometimes feel so foolish…, but right now it’s fear, loneliness, heartache, and heartbreak talking. Others seem to make their decisions and move on with their lives and seem so sure about it, and I’m still struggling to choose to believe in experiences I can’t deny but feel foolish to trust in, especially now. 😞
[sigh]
Stephen’s lonely.
Never in a million years would I have guessed this would be my life.
Need to eat some light. I’m fine when I’m full of light. I’m still unsure of the road ahead in this particular area of my life, and it weighs heavily upon me, because it’s always with me, always on my mind, even when I’m in the light, but at least I’m happy despite the big question marks, wonderings, the longings.
Do you trust God, Stephen?
…I’m trying.
Anyway, I took the dog house off the parts van, grabbed my scan tool, and verified that I couldn’t beat command my fuel pump on with my scan tool.
That was a big deal.
The fuel tank was over half full, closer to 2/3, I think? which would make it super challenging to remove while on the trailer while still full of fuel, so being able to simply command the pump to turn on with my scan tool… that was nice. 🙏
I grabbed the gas can that I’d found on the side of the road on my way to Casper… last year? Disconnected the fuel line, and commanded the pump on.
Five gallons out. Five gallons put in Rover, and then back to the scan tool.
Five more gallons out, five more gallons put in Rover, and back to the scan tool.
In all, I think I drained maybe 17 gallons out? 15ish of which fit in Rover’s tank before it was full. Hopefully, I’m not ruining my EVAP System because it’s over full right now. 😅
Gratefully, I was able to get the tank off without any major issues. The fuel line connectors and evap connectors were challenging to get apart because of years of built up dirt that that gets in the way of the mechanisms from moving where they need to move in order to release their connections.
Eventually, I got them, but not before a connection released suddenly, with so much force behind my effort that when my thumb slammed into another part of the van, it bent my fingernail back just about halfway, bringing searing pain and a fair bit of blood.
Oh, how it hurt.
With all the blood and pain, I spent the next probably 10 minutes or so just groaning as a sort of reflexive reaction to the sheer level of pain, as I tried to clean out the wound and take care of myself.
I noticed that there was a darker purple spot closer to the base of my nail and wondered if that spot was blood pooling up underneath my nail, causing the pain to be so much worse. I got my drill bits and forced myself to squish my thumb into the counter to hold my thumb still and then forced myself to squish the drill bit into my thumbnail in an effort to get the cutting started.
It took a while, but eventually, I was able to get the drill bit to begin to properly cut through my nail, but I stopped just short of going all the way through.
As I was drilling, it seemed to me more likely that what I was experiencing was pain from the rest of the injury and not that little dark spot.
I had smashed my thumb so hard, that it wasn’t just the nail that was bent back: the tip of my thumb had a pretty large blood blister on it that I was able to pop with a thumbtack and drain the blood out of.
It’s amazing how many nerve endings and how sensitive they are in fingers and toes. Good golly.
My thumb injury made it significantly more challenging to disassemble the vehicle. It wasn’t just the throbbing pain, but the fact that, when taking a car apart, pressure on the hands and fingers come from all sorts of different directions, and you’re likely going to bang against your fingers constantly.
Which did happen. 😅
But I kept at it, taking off all the rest of the EVAP system and fuel system, taking off the intake and throttle system, taking out all the coil packs but one that was broken, taking off the alternator and the AC compressor and the AC condenser.
I noticed that the radiator was exactly the same model number as the radiator in Rover, and I thought about taking that, but then decided against it for a little while.
I took off the tail lights Assemblies, the two rear doors (battling it out with a nest of yellow jackets that had taken up residence in the passenger rear door 😅), and the hood.
I took off the driver’s airbag, the interior AC system, the electronic gas pedal, the brake switch, the ignition switch, the lock cylinder, the gear shifter…
I took off the door lock mechanisms on the front doors…
So. Much. Stuff. 🙃
I was making really good time today, and despite my thumb getting smashed, the disassembly was going quite well.
As I was getting ready to leave, I called the scrap yards to see which would offer the best price, and found that the one that was going to be open longer, and it also had the best pricing, required me to remove the fluids from the vehicle. 😶
That makes total sense, but I’ve never had to do it before. I’ve never had a junkyard ask me to remove the fluids before, at least not that I can recall.
So that put me in a little bit of a time crunch, getting containers to drain all the coolant out, which, if I was going to do anyway, I figured I might as well keep the radiator.
Draining the engine oil into one of Rover’s trash cans.
I wasn’t sure what to do about the transmission, as there’s no drain plug, and I’d already spilled a small amount of transmission fluid on the wooden deck of the trailer when I disconnected the lines from the radiator, and I spilled a bunch of coolant on the trailer as well. 😕
Really didn’t want to bring the trailer back in any way worse than the condition that it was in when he lent it to me. 😕
In my scrambling to get on the road in time to get to the scrap metal place before it closed, it didn’t even Dawn on me that I had a tarp in my van that I could have put down to catch the spills. 😕
I managed to get the radiator out, and the coolant removed and the engine oil removed, but I left the transmission fluid in. 😅
The power steering fluid and brake fluid as well.
Do they expect you to drain those, too?
I was grateful to have the junkyard be open until 5:00 and that it was the one that paid better anyway. Despite the last minute fluid removal, I was able to get the trailer hitched up to the truck and get on the road in plenty of time to get there.
Concerned that they might turn me away because I hadn’t drained out the transmission fluid, I stopped briefly off at the Walmart Supercenter that was nearby to grab a bin that I could drain the fluid into relatively safely without spilling it all over the trailer.
Unfortunately, I forgot that I had put the emergency brake on for safety when I ran inside Walmart, so I forgot to take the emergency brake back off as I drove away. 😬
With the power of the 7.3 engine, I didn’t even notice that the emergency brake was on. I just drove away as normal. There was a beeping, and it’s the same beeping sound that my van makes when my seat belt isn’t attached, but with the glare of the sun against the instrument cluster, I couldn’t see the light that should have been flashing to let me know what was beeping.
Eventually, I realized it wasn’t for seat belts but was for the emergency brake. 😬
I ended up driving nearly a mile, I think before I realized that the e-brake was on, which resulted in the smell of overheated brakes, which I smelled once I got out of the truck at the weigh scale of the scrap metal place. 😬
Gratefully, the emergency brake system doesn’t use the regular pads for the emergency brake. It’s got a set of dedicated pads, so I wasn’t ruining the regular brake pads. 🙏
The guy at the scrap metal yard didn’t turn me away, even though there was a big sign saying that I needed to have the transmission fluid drained as well.
I’m grateful for that. 🙏
I’m also grateful that the workers in the yard operating the huge machinery that picks the van up off the trailer and moves it around gave me the opportunity to pull the two rear wheels off while the van was up in the air. 🙃
I had removed all the lug nuts, and then when the big gripper came and squished the van and lifted it up, I ran around to both rear wheels and pulled them off quickly.
That will make things easier for me in Arkansas when I drive there in a couple days.
I wish I had someone else with me to video the spectacle. It was pretty amazing to watch the van get crushed right before it was getting picked up. The walls of the van are so much thinner than the frame underneath, so in order to grip it sufficiently to pick it up, the walls on one side of the van were basically squished all the way over to the walls on the other side of the van. 😲
Heavy equipment is amazing. 🙃
What was also amazing was that they gave me $361.xx for the carcass!!!
I paid $500 for it, spent a half of one day and most of another taking parts off, and still got $361 out of it!!!
Hungry, exhausted, and dehydrated, although much less so than I was on Saturday, I headed over to Sam’s Club to meet my sister who’d been dropped off there there 45 minutes earlier by her boss after coming back from a work trip Pierre.
I grabbed another pizza combo, sucked down multiple refills of zero sugar Pepsi, and then spent the ride back with Heather listening to talks on YouTube.
I don’t think we ever even had buffering issues. I had talked to my mom a little bit on the drive up without any connection issues, and Heather and I didn’t have any as we listened to the uplifting YouTube videos on the way back.
Looks like Verizon is going to be really good. 🙏
I’m not sure exactly why it feels the way it does, but the drive from Hot Springs to Rapid City and from Rapid City to Hot Springs just feels so… long. 😅
I’m a road tripper. I can drive for days, but for whatever reason, this hour drive just draaags ooon. 🙃
Back at the ranch, I quickly transferred the fluids that had been left out to the air into Sam’s Club frosting buckets that I had bought while at Sam’s Club.
I’m kind of surprised that they charged for those. 😶
But whatever. They worked out perfectly for what I needed them for. 🙏
I then set to work cleaning the trailer, getting dish soap and water and a little brush, only barely bigger than a toothbrush, because that’s all I had, and started trying to clean off the transmission fluid and coolant residue.
I went at it for maybe an hour before rinsing everything off and finally taking the trailer back to my neighbor.
Sunny enough, my neighbor didn’t care one iota that I’d spilled a little bit of fluid, as he himself had planned on soaking the entire deck in oil to keep it from rotting. 😆
🙃
I wish I had known that before I spent all that time cleaning it, but I never would have guessed. 😆
I forgot about the ramps, having left them back at our place, so I headed back home, grabbed the ramps, grabbed the hitch lock key, and then headed back over to my neighbor’s to stow everything away properly.
Once again back at the ranch, I realized that I’d forgotten to put the spare tire back on the trailer as well, having removed it to save weight on Saturday. 🙃
I’ll get that back to him tomorrow morning.
Long day. Exhausted. Dehydrated.
I don’t remember how long I spent working on it, but I spent well into the evening hours cleaning up and organizing the mess I’d made while taking everything apart.
Gratefully, it’s a lot cooler in the dark, and I was able to get a fair amount done.
After getting another drink and chatting with Heather for a little bit and vegging for a little bit, I crashed for the night.
Going to be another busy one tomorrow before I head to Arkansas, hopefully tomorrow night. 🤞
Lift the world.
Bring it on.
~ stephen
Lift the World 