Trashebunkport

Today we got greasy! Well, Ev and Rob got greasy. Kwachie supervised from the adirondack chair while chatting on the laptop and sipping an ice-cold beer. We thought you'd enjoy these snapshots taken around the Family Compound as the work progressed:

Ev and Rob are degreasing (with my KITCHEN SCRUBBIE!!!!!) and making assessments.

Here we see the e-Bay Ford lending some power to the operation, which I think may have really been just an excuse to park on the lawn like the good Lord intended.

Here are the dogs helping me supervise.

As it turned out, there was no need to get into the transmission. Yay!

After a couple more beers ...

and a couple more stories ...

and a couple of trips to Auto Zone for a transmission line and a pipe bender ... voilà ... Katie was able to drive to work in time to serve the pizzas!

Our landlord spent the day hauling off trash in preparation for their move (and ours ... yay!) and repairing the drainage ditch so none of our multitude of vehicles will end up nosediving into it the next time it rains. Lucky for us, part of the repair involved the installation of a support structure, which we were happy to make use of.

What's a family compound without a snazzy gated entry???

Kwach

Woe Is Me, I Am Woe.

Today is one of those days where I volunteered to work my shift and half of a night shift so Chemene can get at least one night off per week. I did it to be nice, and maybe to build up a little emotional currency in my coworker bank for my own unanticipated meltdowns. I remember how bad working nights is. It destroys your life and leaves you a vicious, depressed, emotionally-unstable weepy husk of a human. And working 7 night shifts in a row is more horrible than anything I can imagine. Remember those 10 plagues? Cake. I'd take boils and locusts over 7 night shifts any day, hands down.

However, as they say, no good deed goes unpunished. I'll clock out at 3am, I'll be home by 3:30 and we're heading out for our Nebraskan Adventure at 7am.


Pitiful much?

I mention this, not just to elicit the sympathy of my foil-helmeted friends and minions (although that would be a nice gesture, if anyone is inclined), but also to pre-justify my lack of blogging this weekend. Hopefully I'll be back Sunday night with a freshly-killed and tastily field-dressed Jeep.

In the meantime though, I have one dose of seizure medicine left, so I'll be spending the day stalking my neurologist for a new prescription. Is there anything more Hunter S. Thompson-esque than a sleep-deprived, seizure-prone Med Tech crossing the country with her lesbian lover to bring back a $350 car in a weekend?

Can I be any more of a clichè?

Well, Huh...Nebraska Anyone?

As you know, I love eBay. And what's not to love? It's like the world's largest garage sale. All sorts of crap that no one ever knew they needed until they saw it advertised and heatedly contested. I bid on all sorts of stuff. Some of it pans out, some not. This morning I saw a 1986 Jeep Cherokee at $350 with nine hours left on the auction. Owner says it runs good, he drives it to work; it needs some stuff, but it's basically sound...so I bid on it.

Oddly, no one else did. Probably because it's in Nebraska, which is a good long way from anywhere. So I won the bid. $350 for a fully functional Jeep Cherokee without rust...which is a major consideration in the salt-encrusted Midwest. So now Katie, who gets her license on Wednesday, will get a car on Saturday.

And this is particularly heartwarming to me, since the first car I ever owned all by myself was a Jeep CJ-5. Just goes to show you...Jeeps make excellent starter cars. Oh...except mine got nailed from the side and launched me head first like a pavement-seeking missile out onto the road, and burst into flames. Whoops! Another heartwarming story shot to hell by reality.

But that won't happen to Katie, because it's statistically incorrect for a mother and her child to both be launched out of their first car. See? By sacrificing myself, I have saved my child. Nobility, thy name is Evie.

Anyway...It appears to be in excellent shape. It sounds like it needs some fairly minor fixing up, but nothing really outrageous. I'm thinking this is the beginning of us branching out from the crappy pickups to the crappy SUVs. Apparently the sky's the limit on crapitude here.

And now our weekend, which was previously allocated for fishing, will instead be spent on a leisurely drive to Nebraska and back. That's not a huge hardship for us, but it certainly has altered our plans.

But that's cool. Once again, I'm the envy of janitors everywhere. Well, at least I have the admiration of the guys at the hospital. The janitors and security guards all gathered around my monitor and said, "That's so fuckin' cool. Can you find me a deal like that? That's so fuckin' cool!"

That's me. So fuckin' cool.