(written October 1st from notes taken previously)
[Hope it’s a beautiful dayb! 🤍🕍🤍]
Spent a little bit of the morning cleaning up and cleaning out my van and dealing with my trailer’s dead battery until Gary came by looking for his dogs that had run off.
Wanting to help find them, I set out on foot through the property, first the road toward Gary’s place, and then off into the woods via the forest road between Stevie’s and the house I used to live in.
I thought about ticks, and figured I might get some, but figured that it was also August, super hot, and well past tick season (May-June), so I didn’t think I would get many.
I… was wrong.
And not just wrong: I was off by two or three orders of magnitude. 😶
😲
Oh yes, I managed to walk through a section of tall grass that contained a tick bomb (a tick nest with up to several thousand tick larvae in it).
For being so tiny, those little guys move incredibly quickly.
Needless to say, my search for the dogs lasted probably less than an additional minute after seeing all the ticks covering my legs and shorts. 😅
I headed quickly back to the carriage barn next to my van, stripped down, grabbed a can of brake cleaner and took a brake cleaner shower. 😅
I’m grateful that brake cleaner is just as effective at killing those little devils as it is at killing the aggressive red wasps.
After spending what might have been an hour trying to make absolutely sure I’d killed every last little tick on me, which I think had to have at least been in the hundreds? (Those little tiny ticks are so small that when you look at your skin, they just look like a speck of dirt or dust.), I headed over to my mom’s place to throw my clothes in the laundry and take a shower.
Ticks can survive underwater just fine for a long time, so the wash doesn’t kill them, but the dryer definitely does.
After tickpocalypse, I… didn’t really want to do anything, but there’s a lot on my to-do list. Gratefully, I was able to manufacture the will to get moving.
First stop after my mom’s place following the Great Tick Cleanse was the junkyard to see if I could get the mounting plate for the charcoal canister (if I’m remembering correctly. I was going to go again, this time asking if maybe they wouldn’t mind lifting up the vehicle or repositioning it for me so I could get the part that I needed. Unfortunately, when I got there, the van I had been getting parts from was gone. 😶
Man, what are the odds. Usually you see the same vehicles in there for months.
I guess this one must have already been there for months. 😅
Hopefully it wasn’t because of my previous… extracurriculars. 😅
So the junkyard ended up being a bust, so I drowned my sorrows in a combo meal from Sam’s Club with my favorite bottomless drink. 😁
Never would have guessed it would be this hard to find a stupid charcoal canister bracket. Good golly. Manufacturer doesn’t make them anymore. Junkyards don’t have them. There’s not even anybody on eBay selling them. 😶
I stopped off at the recycling center before heading back to the hill, hung out with Jim for a bit, did some stuff with the trailer, and then headed to the Neighborhood Market in Pea Ridge in preparation for my long drive tonight down to Quitman, AR in the hopes of accomplishing some genealogical work for a friend of mine. 🤞
I didn’t even get on the road until about 10:20 p.m., But that’s… how I like it. For whatever reason, I like to start road trips off at night, driving as far as I can go before I need to stop, because I just need to sleep.
Gratefully, the drive went beautifully, through winding roads and small towns until, about 2:30 a.m., I arrived at the LDS Church parking lot in Quitman. I drove around the parking lot a bit to find the spot I felt would be best for the night. I knew it was going to be a short night’s sleep, because the sun was going to come up and cook my van relatively early in the morning, but I prioritized reduced visibility from the main road over getting blasted by the morning sun.
Quite the day. 😊
Oh! And shout out to my wonderful sister! I had left parts at her place after cannibalizing that Ford van that I bought in South Dakota, and then I put the parts up for sale, thinking I was going to be back soon. Well, I’m obviously not back in South Dakota, even further from, but someone was interested in buying the parts, and they came by, and night $200 worth of parts!
So, not counting all the time I spent taking everything apart, and driving the carcass back to the metal recycling (which of course was a massive amount of time), I’ve actually come out on top. 😆
Thx, Heather!
And it was fun for my sister as well, because the people who bought it came with a bunch of kids who had a blast with the horses. 🤍😊🤍
Lift the world.
Bring it on.
~ stephen
