(written September 30th from notes taken previously)
Spent some time chatting with my mom in the morning before giving her a ride (in Happy 😊) over to the shop that replaced the damaged power distribution box in Thomas’ truck.
Replacing the distribution box will hopefully resolve the issue that he’s been dealing with for, gosh, a couple of years now? Where unless he disconnects the battery before he leaves the vehicle, a parasitic draw, apparently from the distribution box (engine fuse box) will drain down his battery, and he’ll have to jump start it the next time he uses it.
So… though expensive, that’ll be nice for him. 🎉
Once my mom was off and going, I headed back toward the Hill, first stopping off at neighbor Joe’s place, where I finally caught him home at the same time I was driving the little roaster, which gave me the opportunity to give him the test drive he’s wanted to experience. 😊
The drive was fun, and he enjoyed driving Happy but also learned that he’s way too tall to be comfortable in a tiny little car like that. 😅
We chatted for a bit, and then I headed over to Haven Hill. Liz had asked if I could grab the tractor and help Rafe get all of the trash from the house loaded up and over to the dumpster, so I fired up the tractor, reached out to Rafe, and headed over.
This time, in the process of loading up and dumping the trash (which took two or three trips), I taught Rafe how to operate the tractor, which hopefully will be a boon for the hill with another person knowing how to mow the fields.🤞
Rafe was surprised how easy it was, and experiencing how easy it was offered to help mow 🙏 (while teaching him how to use it, I took him on a couple of mowing passes on the hill I’d been mowing… yesterday?)
After the garbage run and the tractor lesson, I stopped off at Dan’s place and pretty much spent most of the rest of the day, or about the next 4 1/2 hours, hanging out with him.
Good stuff.
With both his dad and wife dying in the last year or so, he’s got a lot on his plate, and it was good to spend some meaningful time with him. 🤍
From there, I stopped off at the Neighborhood Market on my way back to my mom’s place, and then once at my mom’s place, helped Thomas get registered for classes for the upcoming semester.
The new school he’s attending, despite being all online, has an incredibly un-user-friendly registration system.
Gratefully, despite the insanity of the complexity (fighting through some bugs in the programming, I believe), we managed to try enough permutations of possible pathways to get the system to accept his registration that we finally found a way.
Ridiculous, but done.
And now we can give exact re-creation steps for the issues the system is having.
I think they knew they were having issues, but now we can be more helpful in helping them resolve said issues.
Productive day. 🙏
And a shout out to a friend who’s celebrating a 10th winning anniversary. 🎉
Lift the world.
Bring it on.
~ stephen
