Day: August 9, 2023

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Thank goodness!

Okay, things are finally starting to bend to my will!

I know that sounds terrible! Maybe not terrible, just arrogant as hell!

The second car is in good shape, the overheating issue had been addressed.

I cleaned out one of the two dead trucks today and I’m sitting my ass on the couch! I got hotter than hell sorting through all the crap the other half left in his truck. It’s cool outside, but damn! Inside the truck it was hot and with no battery power I couldn’t drop the windows since they’re power.

I’m hoping my truck is in better shape. Although since the other half was driving it until he blew the engine, I have no idea how much crap he left inside.

I found all kinds of interesting things inside his truck. Hymnals for example, that I distinctly remember him being upset about misplacing. I found it amusing, I was laughing as I pulled stuff out. I used to tease him that he had too many places to lose things. I’d get a glower and go hide in the office.

Now I can schedule the dog for his grooming appointment, I can pay the registration on the other halfs car, (Needed a SMOG Certification). This clears the way for me to be able to load and transport the boxes and boxes of music to where they can be sorted. I’m working toward getting rid of the dead trucks and feel like I’m moving forward.

Tomorrow the backflow inspection is happening it’s only 3 weeks late! Another one of those things that you can’t just call and schedule. The folks who do this service, want to schedule a lot of stops at once. I get it, It’s not cost effective to send someone 30 minutes up the hill and then 30 minutes down the hill for one 15 minute appointment. So folks that do this kind of thing want a cluster of inspections in town because it makes the trip worthwhile. Especially now with gas prices what they are, and considering that a lot of these inspection guys are plumbers and therefore driving a truck with a lot an equipment. Coming up the hill costs a bunch of gas.

I’ll be sad to see our old trucks go, yeah they’re non-functional but they’re from a time when we were both younger and healthier. They need to go, they’ve needed to go for years. But there’s a nostalgia associated with them.

As with many of these kinds of things, it feels like I’m letting go of “US”. This is normal. In fact I am letting go of stuff that didn’t add to our relationship or life and now it adds even less.

I’ve sort of concluded that donating the music folios will be a good thing insofar as buying me back a lot of space. If this music was sorted, I might consider putting it up for sale. Some of the items are kind of rare. I’m not qualified to curate it all. The other problem is I don’t even know what he had.

To be honest I’m not sure that he knew what he had. I’ve found a few duplications of music here in the house, he had two storage areas, neither were anything other than “stacks”, it’s no wonder he lost track of what he had versus what he thought had been lost in the fire.

The music and Truck should be taken care of this month. That leaves the stacks of junk stored in the basement. Toss it? Or should I set it up for the Labor Day garage sales???

I’m still thinking about what to do…

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Sometimes you just have to say Screw IT!

I’ve been trying for 3 days to get a tow truck to get one vehicle to a service facility.
It’s less than 10 miles.

But because…

What? Why is it always so difficult to get almost anything done here? It’s not that there aren’t folks to do stuff, it’s that they’ve always got attitude about it as if they’re the only ones available, and truthfully sometimes they are.

When you try to locate someone else it’s like pulling teeth, there’s tons of scheduling difficulties and lots of hemming and hawing.

So this morning, after spending Monday and half of Tuesday and the first couple hours this morning trying to locate another towing company. I said screw it! I fired up the car that has been overheating, and in the cool overcast I allowed gravity to assist me down the mountain while keeping cool airflow over the engine. I made it to the repair facility before the temp reached 212° F.

The difference between being someone who can drive versus someone who Drives I guess. This is probably why I got almost 100,000 miles out of the brakes on my 1 Series.
If you can gauge the weight and how your car slows down when you take your foot off the gas, with engine braking you don’t really need brakes until you need to stop at a light, stop sign, or because someone else in front of you is slamming on their brakes every 8 seconds.

So I’m at the repair facility and I was thinking about the general difficulties of living where I do.

Things were never as easy as when I lived in dense urban areas. But over the past decade things have gotten a lot harder.

It’s simple things, like mandated inspections. Getting tow trucks, finding someone to do a septic tank replacement, or paint the whole house. Repairs around the house for which I may not have the tools, the skill, or both, are also a pain.

Theres a lot of good about being here.

I love my view, I’m becoming less fond of winters. Even so, the sound of snow, the beauty of full moon on untouched snowdrifts, the rainbow sprinkles you sometime see on fresh snow in the sun, these are things that I will miss if I leave this place. Typically the Summer isn’t too hot or uncomfortable and as in winter, I appreciate the sounds of nature, the beauty of a sunrise or sunset, the rare rain and rarer thunderstorm. I like hiking around the area and having pretty safe places to walk the dog. I enjoy watching the hummingbirds and their battles around the feeder. Their aerobatics always put a smile on my face.

There’s a lot of bad about being here.

One or two neighbors up the road who make things super miserable for everyone else. Slow police response time, The difficulties I mentioned before about getting things done. The exceedingly long commutes to get to basic services. The general cost of everything here in California. There’s no sign of that changing any time soon. I suspect that it’s going to get worse before the state figures out the people they’re increasing the taxation on are the same people they’re forced to pay subsidies to because otherwise those folks are below the state poverty line, but not the federal level.

It’s with a lot of this stuff in mind that I’ve started a pro and con list of remaining here.
It’s questionable if I can stay here without finding a job. There are a lot of memories here. Most of them are happy, but some of them are very sad. Finding people to interact in positive ways is difficult. Dating, should I choose to do that, will be almost impossible. Commuting to a job will be more difficult. Traffic has gotten so bad that even a short commute is not as easy as it once was. Sadly the bad list is outweighing the good.

I’ll keep working on it. It’s been suggested that I pack the dog up and take a road trip to some of the places I’ve been considering as alternatives to California. I think it’s a good idea…

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THANK YOU WORDPRESS!

Thank you ever so much for breaking the API between Ulysses and your publishing mechanism in your wonderful lemon fresh update. Oh and by the way… When the hell are you going to make Tags and Categories have the same selection mechanism on the web creation page??? Or is that too freaking logical for you bozos.

Thank you for screwing me out of being able to easily create something on my iPad without having to be ONLINE. What? do you have stock in cellular data plans or something?

Thank you for forcing me to use your shitty web creation form. I know you have some BS mobile application. I dumped the app when it looked like you were wanting me to pay for something or some other service to be able to use it.

And MOST OF ALL, Thank you for flushing 4 blogposts that I’ll now have to recreate in your shitty web form.

Oh sure I can maybe copy the text from Ulysses and paste it into your web page but doing so creates a wonderful editing task where each block has to be cleaned up by hand and stripped of all of it’s formatting then reapply the formatting. I’ll probably run it through a straight text editor to flush all the markup then copy plain text into your web POS.

What’s the matter WordPress? are you miffed that more people are creating content with applications that don’t rely on your web or God forbid that crappy mobile WordPress app?

Maybe instead of getting upset that people don’t like your editing or creation interface, you should take a hint…