When It Rains, It Pours...

Some serious storms came thru the area this morning. It was 10:00am and still almost as dark as night because of the cloud cover. Wish I coulda been at the beach watching the light show. Lots of lightining and thunder. Temps in the high '70's today. More thunderstorms tonight both North and South of us and more predicted for tomorrow. This is more than likely the last batch of thunderstorms for this year. That's one of the many things I miss during the winter.....a good ole thunderstorm and the smell of the rain. Anyhow, here's the update for this past week.

It seems the bill for summer has come due in the last week or two. Just one thing after another goin’ wrong, messin’ up……..time to strap in and hold on for the bumpy ride for awhile I guess. The wedding took what little cash that we had in reserves and the week after I find out that the motor in my daily driver is going south on me and the fix for that is a new motor. That’s 3 grand I don’t have for a motor that I need to get somehow. I’m hoping I have the wagon sold…..a guy and his wife were here 2 weeks ago and gave me 50 bucks to hold it until they could get back with a trailer but so far they haven’t followed thru. The guy called last week and I was under the impression they were coming this past weekend to pick the car up but that didn’t happen. The pisser is that now, even if I sell the wagon, the money won’t go towards the reason I was selling it in the first place, it’ll go towards the new motor for the van. Then, on top of the motor, last night I went out to close up the windows in the van and pop....the drivers side window mechanism gives out and now there's no way to get the window back up without another infusion of cash. So if they eventually do come and get the wagon....the cash I get in return is already spent plus some to keep the van functional enough to get back and forth to work. It's not like I want to buy a new vehicle either, even if I could afford the payment I'm not real impressed with the new vans or the gargantuan pickup trucks they're trying to sell us these days. I'm not sure what I'd get if I had to.....not interested in some overpriced, gas guzzling SUV.......don't need a huge 4-wheel drive Pickup....I've never been anywhere yet that I needed more than two wheel drive to get me where I wanted to go.....and I've been a ways off the beaten path.

Not much at all to report for this past week. Rainy and cold pretty much sums most of the week up and when I tell you that my own personal vision of hell is being cold and wet you can pretty much guess my enthusiasm level for the past week's weather patterns. The weather for the weekend was suppose to be crappy and that fact along with the fact that I needed to get the garage doors up before it snows forced me into the decision to stay home for the weekend and do something constructive.

So, fairly early Saturday morning, after making breakfast, I gathered my tools and my ambition and set about taking apart the old door. the son-in-law Adam came over (Ri came too) and from about 10:00 until they had to take off for work, we worked on assembling all the hardware for the new door. By the time Adam had to leave we had the door mostly up and I spent the next couple hours finishing up the details. By 7:00pm I had a fully functional garage door that could be raised and lowered with the use of only two fingers. I was impressed that we did it and that it worked so well when we were done. The rest of the evening was spent watching "The Green Mile" for the 23rd time.......one of my favorite movies for some of the same reasons that The Wizard of Oz is a fav.........by the time it was over so was the day. I tried reading Email but couldn't even stay awake long enough to do that so I gave it up and got horizontal.

Sunday was spent assembling and installing the 2nd garage door. This time I was on my own, but having been thru the process once, things went much quicker. I didn't get started until almost 11:00am and was done with a second completely functional door by 5:00pm. After a couple raising and lowerings I deemed the project complete excepting a bit of tweaking that I'll do in the next couple days and the lnstallation of lock assemblies on both doors which I'll do in the next week or so. l Eventually hope to have garage door openers installed, but that's not going to happen before next spring, along with a paint job for the exterior of the garage which it is painfully obvious it needs now, with the new doors for contrast.

Not much else to say about the last week. Today the weather was warm and summerlike with the storms, but by the end of the week it's suppose to be back to more seasonal temps and weather. We're hoping for some nice autumn weather and sunshine for next weekend so we can spent a couple days up at the campsite, getting some details taken care of before we have to batten down the hatches for the winter. We'll see how that goes.

Time to head for dreamland now.

TC