more normal than not

This guy reminds me of the guy from Napoleon Dynamite.

He should be throwing a football out in a field somewhere.

Traveling around on a bus sometimes sounds like more fun than driving around with a bunch of mail in the Jeep.

Awwwwwww…..who am I kidding?

I’M HAVING THE TIME OF MY LIFE!!

I get such a kick out of these videos.

I drive the mail around….pretty much the same (or at least very similar) day everyday….so I don’t do any bike touring….but….this looks so cool to me.

I wonder if I could do it with the littlest of the little in a bike trailer….and the older of the two little guys hauling his own load with miniature panniers?

This is forestyforest’s latest….as of this writing about 4 hours old!

It’s a cleaned up, re-edited version of an earlier film….

Thanks, forestyforest!

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.