One of "Those Days" but we Still Have to Do the Best we Can!

I had a lot of plans for this day.

Mrs. Denmarkguy is away at a 3-day poetry retreat, and whenever she's away I always try to tackle some of the "house projects" that have been sitting in the "we really need to deal with this sometime" space for a while.

But life doesn't always go as planned.

Sometimes life is a spiky situation!

First thing I found myself dealing with was a backed up toilet. Yeah... ewww, gross! But no big deal, right?

Not so simple! As it turned out, in order to get "things" flowing again, I needed to hose the septic tank filters and backwash some of the pipes.

That ate 60 minutes off the clock!

So that being done, I finally got around to project of the day, which was hauling a bunch of garbage and recyclable items from the garage to the local dump and recycling center.

Looked like about three runs in our full sized pickup truck.

But not so fast!

Aforesaid pickup truck did not start. Actually let's just say it was so dead that not even the dashboard lights came on when I tried to turn the key.

So, back in the house to order a house call from AAA... thankfully our membership gives us four such calls a year at no charge. Estimated time of arrival: 85 minutes.

Might as well use the time in between to get all the stuff ready to go... assuming all we're dealing with is a dead battery.

To AAA's credit, the driver was actually here in somewhat under a half hour! And fortunately, it turned out that it was just a completely dead battery. This has been a recurring — and unpredictable — problem with the truck. We have some kind of "parasitic energy drain" that only manifests intermittently... but most likely is something like a glove compartment courtesy light accidentally getting switched on and staying on when the truck hits a bump... or something like that.

So anyway, I load up and off I go on the first dump run!

Minor problem... NONE of the dashboard lights or instruments work. But I know the truck is in good mechanical order and has at least a half tank of gas, so I chance it... learning along the way that I have a pretty good sense of what "50mph" and "30mph" feels like.

It's remarkably disorienting to drive a vehicle where you have ZERO idea what's going on, other than you're rolling down the road.

In the end, I managed to cram everything into two loads instead of three, so that was a blessing. But now we have a trip to the mechanics' to look forward to... electrical problems are a pain in the butt, and since everything in newer vehicles is computerized, it's definitely not a fix-it-yourself issue.

In spite of these setbacks, I did actually manage to get most of what I had wanted done! It was just rather more cumbersome than expected.

What I did not have time for, before it got dark, was doing any yardwork... oh well, that'll just have to wait!

Thanks for reading, and have great week ahead!

How about YOU? You ever have "one of those" days? What you do, are you usually able to move forwards, regardless? Or do you just resign yourself to canceling everything? Leave a comment — share your experiences — be part of the conversation!

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Created at 20210323 23:18 PDT
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