I certainly don’t mean to come off as ungrateful. For the most part, I have a pretty good life. It is now officially Fall and I was thinking about my Summer. I realized I could make a country song about it. Of course, there is a little bit of sarcasm to it. I really didn’t lose a home, I traded it. Like I posted last month, this move is going to set me back years in terms of organization an getting settled in. That is a slow go.
But I really did lose my truck. This picture is from June when my pickup suddenly stopped running in a busy intersection. I was on my way to a doctor’s appointment over an hour from home. At that time, I thought that this is a temporary setback. There were a few things that I wanted to work on anyway like the constant engine ticking. I suspected that it was some broken manifold bolts and that was a job that I was really not going to take on.
About a week later, I got a call from the mechanic saying that the engine was seized. I said give me an estimate so that I can decide if it was worth moving forward. Weeks turned into months and that was OK since I was stuck in financial limbo anyway. I couldn’t spend money or use credit until my house sale was completed.
Getting an estimate took so long that I started investigating myself. I had second thoughts about whether this mechanic was competent in the first place. I called local part stores about crate engines and all signs pointed to buying a remanufactured engine from Ford at a price of $5000. By the time you add labor and incidentals like belts, filters, etc. we were talking over $7000. That was too steep. I can buy a running version for half of that with significantly less miles as well.
As a result of financial analysis, I made the call and surrendered the title last week. I have to say that I was kind of down. I purchased that vehicle over 23 years ago. We drove from South Carolina back to Oregon in 2004. It was my daily driver until 2016, that is when I got my Mustang. All my kids drove it until last year. I was looking forward to getting it back and doing some work on it before we started talking about moving.
This is just one memory, I remember putting my kids in the back when they were babies. We always went to the same gas station in town. They grew up and started driving to the pickup to that same gas station on their own. I could have sunk the money in and I probably would have if the price was half of the estimate but this is smarter even if I was sad.
I know that I have been pretty lucky. I never had any problems with that pickup until the last and final one. I also am lucky because I haven’t had a car payment since 2020. When I sold my Mustang, I only had paid off vehicles. I also know that my Navigator is on its last legs. It has 265,000 miles on it and is on the verge of being loved to death. So, a replacement vehicle is coming onto the horizon.
You already know all about my dog. What you don’t know is that she was knocking on death’s door a couple of weeks ago. We had scheduled a follow-up veterinarian visit on recommendation of her diagnosis and the new vet offered steroids. It has helped a lot in that by the time we met with the vet, she had not eaten in a week. Now she is eating twice a day and wanting more. This is not going to prevent the ultimate end but it is allowing us to enjoy what time we have left.
That same week that we got the news about our dog our cat went missing. As of this moment, it has been about a month. On the last night we saw him, my wife said that she heard a terrible scream. We found out a couple days later that there has been a cougar alert in the area. Given that he has never been gone longer than one day, I am reasonably sure that we will never see him again.
I didn’t have quite the same relationship with the cat that I do with the dog. I did appreciate his instincts however. We found a dead mole in the grass a few days before his disappearance. In my observation, not all cats are good cats. Even the good ones take a couple of years to develop. I guess that this is the hard lesson of city moving to the forest. I never considered this to be a risk, but now I know.
Fall is also football season and we are about a month into it already depending on how you measure it. I have never played football but my nephew did and it is common knowledge that a day or two after the game is film day. Film day is when you review every detail of the previous game in hopes of identifying things to work on as well as the things that went right. Clearly, not every team/staff is equal in using that information to improve. Just like in life, identifying problems is only part of getting better. I cant say that I would have done anything different only that the result is not how I would script a ‘good summer’.
End Your Programming Routine: I think that I have told this parable before but it is worth repeating. Lobsters become very vulnerable when it is time to molt. But, without taking that scary step to grow a larger shell, they are never able to grow to full potential. I think that we as humans sometimes are so scared of pain and risk that we get stuck in our potential to do more. Of course I did not want that day to come when I signed over the title for my pickup. But, this is the step to next pickup to go another twenty plus years.
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