Rain

We had more rain yesterday than we did in the whole month of July.  In fact, we had two rains storms blow through and each one gave us more than July did.  I didn't even look at the water bill last month because I know that Barbara worked hard to get the trickle system to water the garden in an efficient manner.  Based on the number of tomatoes she sure did something right.   The first storm had about a 60 MPH wind with it and we did loose power for a couple of hours. 

As we get nearer and nearer to our trip out west, I get more and more ready to get on the road.  No, I haven't even packed, yet.  I will throw a lot of my old clothes together and leave them when they are dirty.  I don't need to replace them as there is what I am sure a breeder shirt in the closet that is turning them out until the clothes rack falls off the wall, again.  I am sure that like most of you, I have almost a complete wardrobe of shirts and pants that are at least two sized smaller than the one I wear. There is always the hope that I might fit in them again and they hang there just waiting.  On the other hand, skinny people are doomed if they get sick.  Me, I am good for a hard two or three week illness and I will come out the other side healthy.  Skinny people will succumb in less than a week.  After all the good money I have spent on food, the extra padding should be good for something.

Here is the dilemma,  do I get the oil changed before or after our trip?   I know that changing the oil every 3,000 miles is not needed but it will be closer to 5,000 miles after the trip.  I am tempted to just go out and top off all the fluids and go on west smartly.  The only level that concerns me is that the rear end has developed a drip (I CAN SEE IT ON THE GARAGE FLOOR) and I am not sure if I can squeeze my fat butt under the car to check that fluid level.  I guess I will need to wait a couple of days until the driveway dries off and use my floor jack and jack stands.  I had a friend who's father went to a local salvage years ago and tried to take a transmission out from an old car.  He couldn't find the base plate for the bumper jacks so he just jacked the car up with a pair of them without the base plates.  He crawled under the car and the car started slowly sinking in the ground and he didn't notice it until it had him pinned.  Today he would have whipped out his trusty cell phone and called for help.  In the 60's, no such thing and he was crushed as a giant Buick anaconda sat on his chest.  They didn't find him over the weekend and he was one smelly dude when almost a week later they did drag him out and bury the leftovers.  I am sure that he would have qualified for the Darwin Awards had they been around. 

Speaking of death,  several of my relatives passed on this year and last.  Many people are expressing their sadness on Facebook.   I guess I am unusual in that I am doing my level best to only remember the good things and not how much I miss them.  I don't want people rolling on the floor laughing every time my name come up after my death but I sure don't want people to cry for hours at a time.  Life is for the living and the future is so dynamic that I think people need to keep looking forward and keep a level head.  I can get a smile out of people when I tell them that my mother was buried with a giant silver fork in her hand.  For the best part of her lifetime she loved to go to dinners at the churches.  As someone would gather the plates, there would be the admonition to keep your fork, something better is coming.  It was mostly a piece of pie and mom loved pie.  I also kind of tell people in a self deprecating way that it took a couple of years for me to not want to rush over to the phone to tell Dad to watch a program that had either the Navy of planes in it.   I am pretty sure that my Dad loved the cable TV better than about anything.  He loved to watch golf, bowling, tennis and anything with cars, train or planes in it.  There near the end of her life, my mother found a Western channel and that and Murder She Wrote kept her pretty damned busy. 

Seems like my life is running parallel to what I read in the funny papers more and more each day.  Pickles had a conversation between Grandpa and Grand ma about the fact that Grandpa can have arguments in his head with Grandma.  She said he could not do that.  He said not only did he have them, he even wins some of the time.  My perceptions are my reality, I don't care if there is a woman to tell me I'm wrong. 

I want to share a success story.  I called the Verizon Cell Phone Service Center to see if I could get my new voice mail mailbox to work.  I got a great young man, John, to help me and he got me up and rolling in just a few minutes.  It seems there is a default to the last 4 of the telephone number for the system and voice mail password.  If you do a dumb thing like I did and turn the speaker on when you are trying to set the password, your voice mail password will be the instructions to press two in Spanish.   I could not ever get that right even if I got shipped to Mexico for a year or so.  Oh, by the way, if they ever get things settled down in Mexico there is a bus that leaves Topeka about noon each day and my butt will be on it.

MUD