Repairing the Struts: The Bitter Taste of Defeat.

After recovering from the previous evening of getting trashed and yelling at the movie Thor, plus the countless drunken reenactions of said movie, we drug ourselves back out to the car with the same motivation and energy as Frodo crawling up mount doom.

Except this time I can't get Sam to carry me.

While waiting for our parts to show from within the ancient and tumultuous world of the Fedex truck, we decided to replace one of our motor mounts. Which went about as well as anything else we have done recently.

Meaning that we had to use the angle grinder to remove a bolt because apparently when they built my car they used grade F bolts. Ha ha. Luckily we had already anticipated this move and bought a replacement bolt, because when life just keeps raining shit on you, you learn to buy an umbrella.

I'm still a little bitter.

So we fight the motor mount out and fight the new one in, and then we give each other the saddest slowest most painful high fives while sarcastically saying go team with dead sounding voices and then I went in to eat a goddamned sandwich.

Which is of course when our new sway control bar links Patrick Swayze bars would arrive. Because sitting down and eating is for losers. So we rip open the package and discover that the bars did not come with nuts like the pictures would have us believe.

Remember the old nuts? The old nuts that we sawed off? The nuts that are laying in three and four pieces in a coffee can in the shed? Those nuts.

What followed was the saddest montage ever, where we went to sheds and got every bin, coffee can, peanut butter jar, and plastic organizer of bolts and nuts and dumped them all out on the kitchen table and proceeded to go through them.*

None of them fit. Not a goddamned one.

We also noticed at this juncture of despair and anger, that these parts looked suspiciously like not the right part. But, we knew these were the generic part, made to fit several different cars so we armed ourselves with the part and some nuts that almost but not quite threaded and marched on up to the car.

We pulled the tire off, assembled our tools, and realized that these were not just the wrong part, that these were totally super not the right part in the history of ever. For one thing, they were about three inches too short. For another, the bolts were not even facing the right way.

At this point I had to talk Scott out of fashioning a working Patrick Swayze bars out of the parts we had. Citing such compelling arguments, as in, it won't work, it's not safe, no really this will not work, and it's getting dark.

So Scott left to call the place we ordered them from. It turns out that they were the right part.

They were just the right part for a MERCEDES.

Which is so far from what my car is, you can't even see it from here. Needless to say they are giving us our money back, because if they didn't I think I would have to get on a plane to whereeverthefuck and murder them in person.

Anyway.

We called every auto parts store ever and found one that had the part. Which we would have picked up that evening except our truck, aka the only fucking vehicle we own that runs, has no headlights to speak of.

Which means that we will be going to the auto parts store bright and early to pick up the bars, and the motherfucking nuts, drive home and finally repair the damn car.

So if anyone needs me, I think I'll be drinking while cursing the cold uncaring universe that drove me to this point.

Pray for me.

Pray for us all.

*I cleaned it afterward, stop looking at me like that. Although that sandwich was damn gritty.

No Sign of Jack.

Jack has not yet returned. So I find myself dogless. Which is not something I particularity enjoy. I feel like I had come to depend on having a dog. For emotional support and the whole barking when something is not right thing. However I don't want to rush out and get another dog when there is a possibility that Jack might come back.

The whole thing is kinda fucked up is what I'm saying.

I still feel like there is a possibly that Jack might return when he hits the desperately hungry stage. Also, I am beginning to suspect that the nice lady that runs the dog shelter might not be believing us anymore. You know that Razzle died from a snake bite a after we had her only a year, and now I am claiming the poorly socialized dog we adopted ran off after we had him for less then three months.

Look, I'm not saying that she believes we are running some sort of dog sacrificing cult, but the evidence is not in our favor here.

Of course all this would be moot if Jack would just get it through his think skull to home to that land of napping on blankets and getting wet food every afternoon. I miss my little doggy boy. Sure he might have been paranoid that everything was out to get him, all the time, and he might have been just a touch fearful of all people, all the time who weren't me, but dammit he was my paranoid fearful emotion train wreck of a dog and I want him back.

I miss having him sleeping at my feet while I am on the internet, I miss the way he would be frantic during storms unless I read to him, and I miss out daily walks where we would explore the woods together and when we totally reenacted the scene from Calvin and Hobbes where they find the snake and run around in circles except this was a nest of bees that didn't want to hurt us but still scared the shit out of us anyway.

Maybe it was the fact that Jack was an older dog with signs of having an emotionally abused past, but when we would go for walks or he would be hanging out with me I got the impression he was doing this less because it was what was expected of him and more because he had decided he enjoyed these things.

Let me explain.

Razzle was a younger dog, maybe a year old, and our relationship reflected that. I was Razzle's parent. I had to lay down the laws and make sure they were enforced, I had to stop her from testing my rules and I had to make her understand why doing certain things was good and others were bad. But with Jack, I got the impression that him and I were friends. Except for a few things, like sitting before going out and taking baths, Jack acted more like an adult human roommate.

Except I never could get him to pay rent.

He would eat his meals in his room, but when he spent time with you, it wasn't because you were the much loved parent who-must-not-be-let-out-of-your-sights-lest-she-disappear, and more the sense that he thought what you and he were doing was an enjoyable activity.

So I dunno. It's hard to imagine that Jack's natural aversion to people will cause him to wash up on our doorstep once he fails to find a kibble dispensing tree, but I am still hoping.

Hang in there little guy.

Hang in there.

Jack Ran Away and I Picked up a Stray.

So the other day I woke up the sound of all my metal porch furniture being drug across the porch. I hadn't been feeling well the night before so I had taken some over the counter cold medicine that had put me out as effectively as if I had been tranquilized as part of a study on adult human females. So of course my first thought upon waking out of my drugged stupor was that I had died and was in hell for my sins.

Hell sounded a lot like a steel cable hitting porch furniture.

So I put on whatever clothes were closest to me and blearily wandered to the porch to find what looked like a full size pure breed coon hound had broken loose from someone's yard dragging 15 feet of cable tie that she had proceeded to wrap around my front porch. At the slight on me she launched into a happy people dance and proceed to dump a chair and a table into the lawn.

I should also mention that I was leaving for a three day business trip the next day and really really didn't want to dump this problem on the farm sitter.

What followed was hours of talking to the neighbors, calling the vets, driving the dog around in the truck in the hopes somebody recognized her, putting a sign on the mailbox, and even having two people show up to look at her and take down my number. I should also point to those of you who are chanting call animal control I will point out that I did. Except they never did pick up their damn phone. And they are only open two hours a day. And they only keep dogs for 48 hours before sending them to that big kennel in the sky because they lack any real kennels.

Yeah.

So it pretty much became the farm sitters problem. Except in the middle of worky time I get a call saying that my dog, Jack, you know, the dog I got to “replace” Razzle my first ever dog after she died from a snake bite, you know the dog I was hoping that would fill that dog shaped hole in my heart and give me many great years to look forward, yeah that dog, well it turns out he had slipped off his lead and taken off on a magical journey with the new new dog.

The new dog who, from this moment on, shall be known as Stupidface Fuckbrain.

So Stupidface comes back, but Jack doesn't. Now as you may recall, Jack is a somewhat traumatized dog, from what we suspect was abuse followed by tow years in a kennel with only limited human interaction. He is not going to come up to people. If he doesn't find his own way home and start begging to come inside, then he is not coming home.

Period.

I would like to gloss over the next bit, which involved a lot of trails for everybody, including farm sitter who nearly bust a lung climbing around the fucking mountains trying to find Jack, the brief sighting of Jack Scott got while taking Stupidface Fuckbrain out for a walk because we had to keep her kenneled in Jack's kennel to protect the chickens, my desperate attempts wandering around the forest calling for a dog that I was not sure loved me enough to return to me, Scott's desire to keep Stupidface Fuckbrain, WHO HAS STOLEN MY DOGS PLACE, and the fact I am writing this when I should be sleeping because I am on the road again and far from home and wondering where my sweet little doggy boy is now.

So to recap, my car is still in the shop, we are still traveling in a rental car that is starting to smell less new car smell and more stale food and sweat smell, I am still waiting for the septic system to be approved (if it even will be or we will be stuck with the less desirable system), this the time of year I am gone the most because this is when the work is, and now my dog has run off to be replaced by a dog that thinks my cats and chickens are chew toys.

Um. So I may be under just a little stress right now.

Just a little.

Maybe a tad.

You know. Tiny bit.

AUGGGHHHHHH.

My Dog Just Died.

My dog died last night. It was traumatic. That is all.

The Driveway Is A Venus Fly Trap

I got back from work at 5:35 am this morning. I feel like I've been run over by a truck. A big truck. Speaking of trucks guess what happened when I ordered gravel? 

If you guessed the gravel truck got stuck in my driveway, you'd be right. Like really stuck. This was unexpected as it was like 4:30 in the afternoon. The driver got out, and we stood looking at his truck. It had slid off the road, and the right rear wheel was just chilling in the ditch. We tried shoveling gravel under the tires to give him some traction. 

It didn't work. 

 It was getting dark. I offered him some shots, he declined. I kept apologizing for my road that had just eaten one of his trucks. I really had no idea what to talk about in that situation. The weather? 

He called someone, who showed up with a skid steer and a flat bed truck. He made the mistake of pulling in behind the gravel truck, which you should never ever do. Ever. We almost didn't get the flat bed back out again. Then the skid steer got stuck. 

This is sadness, also expensive.

 At that point they told me that would have to come back in the morning with a bulldozer. They climbed into the only vehicle that was not stuck in the mud and drove off. I went inside, intending to have a god damned drink, only to discover that the dog had eaten a shit ton of fresh made-from-scratch- cookies off the table in my absence. 

It was not a good day. 

Of course Scott was in DC though all of this so he missed almost all of the fun, arriving home just in time to see them victoriously dump what was left of the gravel in the lawn. He wasn't here when the fuel oil tank started to go when they were filling it either. I'm beginning to get tired of apologizing to various delivery people for things. 

I had asked the man with a bulldozer what to do about the driveway and he told me that we had to scrape it back down to the clay, add shale, and then add gravel. In a way it's fortune that this happened, because we were both unsure as to how to really go about fixing the damn thing. I was working under the assumption that the previous owners had done that step, but he assured us that, no they hadn't. The road was a lie. 

So all in all, not one of the better days of my life.