Hauling Stuff With The Truck

Song: “Black Denim Trousers” by Vaughn Monroe

Mood: 6.5

Nightmares: 0

Ghosts: Swarm

I didn’t sleep all that well last night. No nightmares but I was up to check in on things a lot more than usual, and I couldn’t help but get up three times to try and calm my brain down. Not the end of the world, but I’m a little more tired than usual.

Today was alright. I got up, had some breakfast, and fought to keep myself from sitting on the couch and zoning out for a couple of hours until my usual morning fog lifted.

I spent quite a bit of time today playing around with electronics. I’m still going through my stash of old and not-so-old parts, and I’ve had a lot of success getting them to work. The Arduino is a handy little machine for this kind of work and (I’m afraid to say this but) I’m enjoying puttering around with this stuff again. I’m still a little leery about hooking something up and wrecking it (ever since I was a kid, even the faintest smell of hot electronics makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up) but so far the only thing that’s melted on me is an old LCD that I suspect I’d already melted 15 or so years ago. Anything that I can’t get working or starts smoking gets tossed out (or extinguished and then tossed in the garbage if necessary).

My folks called today and we had a short chat. Nothing fancy going on but it was nice to talk with them.

It was gorgeous outside today – check this out:

Thermometer +25C!I opened a bunch of windows and spent some time outside. If the rest of the summer was like this, I wouldn’t complain.

We have nine bags of lawn clippings, tree branches, and dead leaves that needed to be put out for collection. I was weighing my options for getting them from behind the house to the curb, and my laziness won out over my discomfort. I went outside, gave the truck a once-over, hopped in, and backed down the driveway enough so I could just put the bags in the truck bed. Once the truck was loaded up, I backed it the rest of the way down the driveway and unloaded the bags at the curb. It sure beat carrying them.

Since I was already in the truck and down the driveway, I went out and drove around for a while. I learned a few things. One, the roads in my area of town are in really rough shape. Two, the truck is running like a champ. Three, there are a lot of retired men in my neighbourhood and while some of them are mowing and some of them are playing around with shrubbery or flower beds, they’re all outside wearing the same thing: sunglasses, a white polo shirt, khaki shorts, and sneakers.

I spent about 20-25 minutes out driving around and went farther west than I have for a while. Out past the mall and everything. It’s frustrating, because the actual job of driving the truck doesn’t bother me at all – it’s everything that’s even a tiny bit related that keeps poking at me while I’m driving. If I could just turn the rest of that stuff off, I think I’d be fine. I used to be able to do this, so why is it now still so difficult?

Speaking of the truck, I finally called my local dealership about the recall letter I got a while ago. When the guy in the service department answered, I said, “Hi, I got a letter from Ford saying that they accidentally installed murderbags instead of airbags in my truck and I need to get them replaced.”

There was a very long pause.

I gave up waiting and said, “I got a recall letter about the airbags in my truck.”

“Oh, okay,” he replied. We had a nice little chat after that, and long story short, I have an appointment to get the murderbags replaced with airbags in a couple of weeks.

I had a lot of trouble with ghosts today. Now that we’re firmly into spring, everything sounds different. There’s no snow to muffle sounds, more and different animals are out and about, lots more people are out walking or on bikes, people are out with their mowers or whipper-snippers, men with tiny weenies are out with their giant smoky trucks and clapped-out Mustangs, and even the house makes different sounds and noises. I hope to get used to it quickly this year and not have to go back to the earbud and ear defender scheme I’ve used (quite successfully) in the past.

No TV shows today. J and I ran out of Brooklyn Nine-Nine episodes to watch so we’ve seen a few episodes of Our Planet. It’s pretty good but David Attenborough’s narrating and walruses falling to their death don’t have quite the same comedic value that Scully and his 12 different kinds of diabetes do.

I heard that it’s supposed to be pretty nice again tomorrow. If it is, I will spend more time outside.

Stay safe.

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