more normal than not

This is what a church could do.

Watch the beginning of this, where, when he’s asked how much the improved situation would cost, the pastor hesitates for a moment, and then says, “Oh….between 6 and 8 thousand….” …almost shy about saying something like that.

If you could see a need and then fix it…and help the people you’re helping keep up a sense of dignity while you’re improving things for them, that would be a tremendous thing.

That’s a hard thing to do.

When you see reports about how much the government spends on weird stuff…..and then you watch something like this and realize how far a little can go….it makes you sick.

Good people can make a little go a long way.

They just need to keep the government out of it.

Let’s celebrate the quiet, calm….and good people for a change.

 

Yahhhhhhhhhh!

That’s what I’m talking about!

Of course, it takes a lot of work to do something like this.

I’m tired….I don’t want to drive the mail around all day and then grow a big garden and then….go out into the community and talk to people about edible landscaping.

But…..it’s pretty darn cool.

I love it when I see people building community around something that’s so beneficial.

Is this something that could be done anywhere?

I’ll bet that it is.

Hmmmmmm.

 

Job was a guy in the Bible who passed the test.

From what I remember, there weren’t a whole lot of times when Satan asked if he could screw around with us, and God said, “Sure. Go for it. He’ll pass…”.

There were always lots of trials, but I don’t remember him asking….Him.

Anyway, Job went through horrible things and came out in the end just as loyal and devoted as when the trials began.

My Mail Jeep had a flat tire yesterday.

Satan didn’t do it, though.

Something rough up on Miller Mountain did it.

And, it wasn’t some sort of weird trial.

It was a flat tire.

And, why should a flat tire be a problem?

I have a jack and a lug wrench and a good spare that hasn’t hit pavement very often (and is probably 16 years old and that came with the car….maybe I should worry?),

I am ready for emergencies like a flat tire.

The problem is that when they did the work on the front end, they used air tools to take off the lug nuts….and all the chrome “coverings” on the nuts broke off.

Jeep puts  the chrome on them  to make the nuts look good….but when they break off, it changes the size of the nut and the lug wrench no longer fits it right. The chrome “shim” is gone….and the wrench is now a little too big for the suddenly smaller nut.

So….if the nuts were put back on with an air wrench and are hard to get off, the best you could do with the factory lug wrench is round the existing nut’s ….what? “nut like properties”?….angles and make it hard to get them off even if you could get ahold of the right tool later.

When I realized that I wasn’t going to be able to get the tire off, I raced to the Triangle Stop a couple of miles up the road to see if I could get some tools and some air.

The chuck on their air hose was broken off when I got there, so I ran over to the diesel garage, and borrowed what tools I could, and when those didn’t work, a guardian angel in the parking lot loaned me a 4-way wrench he had and I got the nuts off.

I don’t know what those nuts were torqued to, but they were hard to get off.

(To set the scene, I should say at this point that it was all taking place at the end of a heavy Monday. and I had  an hour to do fifty minutes of work, so when I ate up 45 minutes of the hour trying to figure out how to do something that should take 5, I didn’t think that I was going to have time to make it back and catch the truck with my outgoing mail. That’s what was making all of this stressful.)

Long story short, I got the tire back on, raced back to the stopping point, started delivering my 50 minutes worth of delivery that I now had 15 minutes to do, and stressed out while I was struggling to “race time”.

Of course, the road crew was blocking me, so when I swung around them on the usually traffic free road, I almost had a head on with a big F250.

Mailboxes were blocked, dogs I’d never seen were trying to bite me…I was noticing a lot of bad things.

I was cussing like a boundary free sailor.

At this point, I realized that I was a long way from being like Job.

A flat tire isn’t a trial….but, if it was, I’d failed miserably at passing the test.

I’m thankful….I was always thankful, even in the midst of the “tire struggle”, but I was CUSSING (big time) and not being very pleasant to be around. Gratefulness is hard to notice if I’m hopping around cussing like that….

It was good that I was by myself….but I guess that the things we do in secret carry some weight, too, so…

Man. I was really cussing.

Holy Smokes.

It didn’t take much for my world to fall apart.

What a weinie.

I made it, though.

This is a weird Valentines Day post.

I know that.

Sorry.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

Maybe when you really get down to it, and can see things with the “right eyes”, every day is an opportunity to celebrate the love.

If you come out of a hectic end and are left wondering why you responded to it like you did, maybe it’s just another hard part of the path towards being a “good and faithful servant”?

I don’t know.

I do know that I’m not Job.

I cuss like a sailor.

Sorry, sailors.

 

 

 

 

Zoe came home in her little car today and I told her that I’d fix the squeaking power steering belt and check it all out while she was here.

It’s not a big deal to tighten the belt a little and add some power steering fluid, so I got out my tools and brought them down to the lower part of the property, and got going on the little Sentra.

When I’d finished the job and went to move the car, it wouldn’t start.

Apparently, I’d broken the thing while fixing the thing.

That kind of stuff happens.

Before the internet, you were flying blind.

If you didn’t have a father or uncle….or aunt or sister or mother….with a lot of mechanical experience, you didn’t have anyone you could call on for guidance.

The internet gives you access to a ton of people with problems….and some of the people have even figured out how to fix them.

I spent the afternoon looking stuff up….jiggling wires….and finally got it to start and up on ramps so I could crawl underneath it and see if I could see anything that I might have bumped while I was working on the belt-tightening.

I never did figure out what was going on….even though, until the last bit of jiggling….and unplugging and re-plugging, the intermittent cranking was getting me pretty bothered.

In the end of it all, I must have jiggled the right thing , because I couldn’t get it to “not work” again, and I felt OK about sending them on their way later this evening.

That’s the trouble with something that sometimes happens….you lose faith….and, when you have lost faith in something, you’ve really lost everything.

I got her car to start pretty consistently….and she and Isaac should be able to make it back up to school without any problem.

I wish that I could know that it will always start in the future, though.

Wondering is a pain in the rear.

Knowing that things break makes me less confident about a lot of stuff.

 

(The picture is of the starter and the wires going to it. If you crawl underneath the car….if it is up on ramps and you can fit underneath the car….you can see it if you are on the passenger side of the vehicle. You have to take it out from below….if the starter is bad and not just a bad connection. You have to lay in the gravel to take it out from below. Don’t break stuff fixing stuff. What a pain in the rear….)

From the YouTube description…. “Imagine an Island in the Indian Ocean: mountains, rainforest..a population passionate about trailrunning, a race going on it’s 20th edition. We are on the Island of La Réunion, A Trail Running Island – enjoy !”

Cool.

I’m still not running….in fact, I’m stiff in the back, having hurt myself contorting last Monday, trying to organize a pile of huge packages in the restricted space we have in our office.

So….right now, I’m stiff in the back.

Of course, it only flares up if I sit for a long time.

A long time…like delivering mail for 6 hours at a drive.

Oh well.

Here’s Killian….out in the world….enjoying his friends and the new people he meets….enjoying running.

That sounds good.

I like to listen to anybody who’s enjoying their life.

Man….I enjoy my life, too !

I need to get this “back thing” back to normal.

I have a lot of stuff to do.