My Bountiful Ozarks Farm: Murphy's Law weekend

This is supposed to be a HAPPY weekend, right? Because right now, it's late Friday night, and I'm at my wit's end. I'm sure I should be thrilled, but right now, I'm just wiped out and worn out and struggling to pull together for what is promising to be a very long next few weeks. Oh, the news isn't all horrible, really.

Quentin got the call for his rehire interview Tuesday night, with the interview Wednesday. With Tyson, interviews are pretty much just a standard Q&A kind of thing, like "Can you stand on a concrete floor for eight hours a day?" or "Can you handle knives and scissors safely?" Basically, pro forma, and as long as you pass the medical screening, you've got the job. So by Wednesday evening, we knew he was rehired (YAY) and starting Monday night. This is good news.

It's not even that bad in the house, despite the cold outside. Thursday was foggy as all heck coming home, and I do mean foggy. There were a couple of spots that the wet fog was so horribly bad that I actually had to turn the headlights off and drive with just the DRLs on the car, because even as low as the regular headlights are, they were bouncing off the fog and reflecting to where I couldn't see five feet in front of the car. Coming home, I had to watch the white line on the right side of the road pretty close so I'd stay on the road and out of the ditch. NOT a lot of fun.

And while it was drizzly all day today Friday, and it's cold enough out right now to chill the drizzle to ice on the deck and stairs, it's not that bad in the house. We got groceries tonight for the most part, because we still haven't quite decided on dinner for Thanksgiving other than NOT turkey (after working for Butterball, we can't even look at the stuff without wanting to gag, conditions were just so unsanitary there), and so of course, Quentin insisted on bringing everything in so I wouldn't have to fight the slippy deck. Considering the afternoon and evening, which I'll tell about momentarily, it's not that bad in that particlar respect, either.

The house is okay. Of course, the rooms we closed off for the winter are awful darned cold, the kitchen is barely above freezing, the living room and bedroom/bathroom are cozy .... and I'm curled up in bed under the afghans and enjoying the warmth. It's only about 29F outside right now, but it's cozy in the house, at least in the parts we use all the time. So that's a good thing.

So why am I so flummoxed, so out of sorts? It's because of what happened at lunch. I called Quentin as I usually do, to chat for a few minutes while I get lunch out of my lunchbag and settle down for a quick nosh. I hear we have a problem, potentially a big one. Oh dear. Ok, what's wrong? The truck won't start, saith he. Oh crap. Matt, a friend of ours, had come to where the truck (well, the van, but we call it the truck) was at, at the Alpena PO. It might have been the fuel filter, so Matt took Quentin to the local O'Reilly's Auto Parts, got a new filter, took it back and they put it on. (Matt is a darned good shadetree mechanic, and a heck of a buddy to have in a pinch like this.) Still won't start. By this time, I'm done with lunch, and call back to see how things are coming, do I need to take a half-point and come to get hubster and go from there. I surely do.

So after about ten minutes of running around like a headless chicken, I find all the appropriate people, get them notified, and get my happy butt in the car to go get hubster and see what is to be done. After some running around and making arrangements with the guy we're buying the truck from to charge the necessary part at O'Reilly's, we run back to there and get the module. Matt meets us at the truck and the menfolk go about trying to get it on, only to discover that, no matter what O'Reilly's says, the truck doesn't HAVE an ignition module. So they start tinkering, and Matt says next thing to check is the battery. It comes out of the truck, and goes in the car with us for a quick trip to, you guessed it, O'Reilly's, since they do free battery testing.

Then comes part of the fun - return of the unneeded module plus core charge on the old battery leaves about $65 for the battery. Good thing we are being allowed to charge this particular part so we can hopefully get the truck running now. Because the old one apparently sparked when tested as well as testing to have low charge and from the looks of things, a plate inside shifted and is touching another plate, thus the sparking. Ooops.

New battery installed and trying to start the truck, there is now audible a low wheeeeeing sound in the motor block area. Great. Just great. NOW what? Matt diagnoses it as the truck has jumped timing. The thing he said at the beginning he hoped it was not, because up till then it could be a bunch of other things (like the battery) that were fairly cheap and quick fixes. Of course not, not with the kind of luck we have. So we call O'Reillys and order the parts needed to get the truck back on the road (about $50 all told with tax and freight, as the gasket set needed had to be "special ordered" - of course, this just can't all be easy, can it?)

So now we have to figure out a way to get the truck towed to Matt and Kim's place, Kim being Matt's wife. That way, when the parts all come in, Matt can fix the tuck at his place and have it ready to go. Unfortunately, and this is where my stress levels are now going through the roof over all this, we can't get any of the parts until TUESDAY. Quentin starts orientation MONDAY, and if you miss day one of orientation, you're screwed for a year.

What are we going to do? Well, tomorrow, we have to stop by Bill's place, he being the older gentleman we are buying the truck from. Transportation for work is a bit tricky, but doable, is we don't mind splitting sleep up into a couple of long naps instead of a whole night in one shot (which at our ages, we rarely manage anyhow). It means we both have to use the car to get back and forth to work, and on different shifts, until the truck is fixed. How are we to manage that?

Quentin will get up with me and go with me to work, then come home and take a nap. He'll get up and get ready for work, then come to the plant and park. Any errands needed he'll have to do. He starts when I get done with my shift, so he'll be there and parked well before shift change. I'll take the car and come home, eat supper, relax a tad, and get a nap in, getting up about 1 AM to head back to the plant to get him. He'll drive us home, I'll go back to bed for a few more hours rest, he'll eat and relax and get a couple-three hours nap, before getting up to go with me to work ... repeating as necessary. It's not ideal, but it will work for awhile as needed, until the truck's back on the road.

So there's good this week, and bad, and not a lot of homesteading going on because, honestly, between work, house chores, getting Quentin back to work and now this, I just don't have it tonight. Night all, it's sleepy time for this middle-aged homesteader wanna-be. I need to get up early tomorrow to get stuff done, so I'm off to bed on this Friday night.

****
Saturday evening, about 5PM

I have determined that I do desperately need a new laptop. Several of the keys on this one are sticky and don't want to type the letter when I am busy, because it's a few years old, I'm hard on laptops because I tend to eat around them (I know, shouldn't do that, but I do clean it out regularly), and I've kind of worn the darn keypad contacts down on certain letters. So eventually, it's going to have to be replaced.

As to the truck and Turkey Day. I'll tackle Turkey Day first, because it's easiest. We settled on summer sausage, extra sharp cheddar cheese, crackers, sweet gherkins, olives, some shaved virginia ham all for snacking. Dinner is green beans, two kinds of mashed taters (he wants to cheat this year and do instant, ugh), brown gravy, my homemade herb stuffing, and ham steaks. We got four different kinds of ham at the Wally World deli, trying them all before buying. A couple he liked better, a couple I liked better, so we got them to slice ham steaks of all of them which I'll brown up in the electric skillet with pineapple on them for the meat. I'll eat the pineapple, as Quentin likes the flavor on the ham but not pineapple itself. Me, I'll eat the whole durn can by myself as a snack given half a chance. Stick it on top of some cottage cheese and I durn near have a meal in the summertime! So we got enough food for us (no company this year) and that's it for dinner.

Now for the truck. We got to Bill's today about lunchtime, and got with him and one of his mechanics, Randy. We explained what had happened and what we'd done so far, where the truck was, what it's doing, etc. Randy also thinks it may have jumped time (sigh), and tomorrow, Sunday, Quentin will be coming to McQuack's with me to start. Around noon, he and Randy will meet at the truck, figure out how to get it on the flatbed car hauler, and drag it back to Bill's, where Randy will tear into it and figure out what's wrong. If it really is the timing, and it's cheap enough to fix, parts are on order already, so no biggie. If it's something else or not so cheap, Bill's going to do a swapout with us for a different vehicle, crediting the money paid on the current truck (the Ford van, but it's basically an enclosed truck, so we call it the truck), and putting that money towards a different vehicle, which we'd then pay off under the terms of the old contract.

Bill's about ready to just do that anyhow and sell the van to the scrapyard, because, as he put it, he's tired of getting vehicles sold and folks get them just about paid off when they break down for good. It would help if he wouldn't get older vehicles in that respect, but then he'd have to charge more for them and demand bigger payments, plus folks would then have to pay sales tax on them when they bought them. He keeps his prices low enough that no sales tax is due on the sale, to help his customers out. So right now, it's one vehicle, shared commuting as I mentioned above which is not going to be fun or easy, and trying to get everything done that needs doing.

Oh yeah, and to top off this incredibly lovely weekend ... the radiator on the car has sprung a small leak. It's not bad, and honestly, a bottle of the radiator stop leak is enough to do the trick so it will hold until we can replace the radiator. But it does mean checking the antifreeze every time we go to start the car when the engine's cold for a while. Oh well ... that is a minor annoyance compared to the current fiasco with the truck, and I knew something like this would start to happen because the Aveo is a 2006 model and pretty much everything on it is still factory original, including the radiator. And it's lasted longer than expected, considering the car's been through the wars, mileage-wise, and has 136,000 miles on it! So the radiator's had it's wear and tear, that's for certain.

And I finally managed to get some more done on the online money making book I'm working on under a pseudonym ... which means once I have internet at home again, I can start even more work on things like ClickBank products (they don't just have diet plans and junk stuff like some folks think, there's a lot of home and garden and green/organic products and craft stuff and such like on there, too ... so there's that as a money-maker for helping with at-home income from the farm, too.) So there's a lot going on in bits and pieces, and I'm happy about that.

But nobody emailed or commented or anything on what their Turkey Day traditions are! How'm I supposed to have a great blog post for you guys if you don't cooperate, lol! I've a lot to be thankful for this year, including a working car so we can both get to work, Quentin getting his job back, the house being reasonably comfy to live in this winter, a repaired or different vehicle for Quentin is in the works, the online income is picking up a tiny bit, one bill got paid off this past week, we have plenty of food in the house, Thanksgiving dinner is planned (other than having forgotten the gherkins the other day, so I guess it's a good thing we're near the store today), we have our health, Mom is doing okay other than a cold, Amber's doing ok and doing well in college, and all is generally well in the short term at the least.

And hey, at least the baby's socks are done, barring doing the toe on the second sock and weaving in the ends on that one.

Anyhow, I'm off here because it's Saturday and I want a nap before dinner and movies. See you next week!

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2 comments:

PostitnotesNovember 27, 2013 at 2:32 PM
Happy Thanksgiving. I clicked on a few links. I was wondering if it pays for each click I make or only once per visitor. If you get paid for each separate link I will try and click more than the one I am interested in. There is always time standing in line at the pharmacy or watching a game at the high school.

Sunday, November 24, 2013

Murphy's Law weekend

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