Surprised to see me so soon? I know I'm a little surprised. 2021 is still determined to undermine my normally happy disposition, but I'm hanging in there. The smile may look a tad more maniacal than normal, but it's still there.
Who we are is shaped by what the world throws at us and how we respond to it.
What the world keeps throwing at me is work. I was driving the Suzuki around last weekend, because I'd left the $500 Honda at work and brought a work truck home to fix. For no particular reason, both the hood latch and the safety latch failed while I was going about 60mph on a 55mph section of 4 lane highway. Fortunately I was able to get the vehicle safely parked without having a more serious accident.
The windshield didn't break, though I expect it will on one of our cold nights this winter. The hood is going to need to be replaced, and both front fenders.
This damage up near the top of the panel is all that is actually wrong with the fenders, but if I leave this it will lead to rust in parts of the body that aren't so easy to replace. The repairs aren't super expensive, but they will be fairly time consuming. It will probably take me three days to replace and paint the hood and panels, and I still have to figure out what went wrong with the hood latch!
With the Suzuki in less than optimal driving condition, I hurried through the work truck repairs so I could get the Honda back. While driving the Honda back home, just as dark was setting in, it threw the serpentine belt.
The belt didn't break all the way through, so it whipped around in the engine compartment a few times before it fell off. It didn't seem to actually break anything, but there is some damage to the insulation under the hood and some of the plastic in the engine compartment.
There is no cell phone reception on the back road where the belt went. so I had a pretty exciting drive in the cold and dark, with no headlights, heater, or power steering, trying to get the car to a place I could park it and call somebody. I did manage to pull it off, with the engine only slightly overheating.
After all that excitement, it can be fun to break something. I like to put my destructive urges to good use, so it seemed like a good time to cut the decorative grass.
I normally weave a basket or two with this, and make some craft rope, but this year I don't have the time or ambition for it. I ended up throwing this in the mud we've had all year at the back of the house, so now we only sink to the ankle, not the shin.
All that hard work and anger management deserves a reward, so I made this pumpkin pie from scratch. If you've never had it, the difference between pumpking pie from scratch and those nasty frozen things they sell in the supermarkets is like the difference between syrup and real maple syrup. This pie tasted like a little piece of heaven, and Hedge Witch and I ate it all in a day.
That's not everything, but it's what I have time for. Now I need to go do more Christmas Cleaning. My goal for the rest of this year is to get through it without anything else breaking. I know that it's not really in my power to control that, but I've reached a point where hope is my only defense against the slow march of entropy.
I hope life is going a little smoother for all of you. If you see some guy in winter clothes, head down, pulling an ox cart, that's probably just me.
Until next time...