Haywire

Dearest Rachel –

I hear that in certain circles, there has been talk of reducing the work week from five to four days. While I don’t know how that would work for retail in particular, I have to admit that the idea of an extra day off is an attractive one. Of course, I would choose to take Wednesday off, and break up the work week, unlike the concepts that seem to be floating around about making creating a three-day weekend out of either Monday or Friday.

That being said, this was not the way to go about breaking up the work week, and creating an extra day of rest. For one thing, it hasn’t been particularly restful, as you can probably tell from the title.

The term, which you might be familiar with, being from somewhat rural Illinois (even though your folks were through-and-through academics) comes from the fact that baling wire is wound up pretty tense, and has a tendency to scramble itself when released. Basically, when things go haywire, you’re in a right mess, indeed.

And I’d say that’s about where I find myself at the moment.

It turns out that the steering frame of my car had completely rotted out, which it why the wheel wasn’t able to keep the car going in a straight direction. They’ll have to order a new one from several states over, which means it will take time both to ship it over and to install it. It’s also a little pricey, but it’s still well less than 10% of the cost of a new car. And I really had no business driving it for the last day or too, considering.

In the meantime, I’ve already told you about how Daniel was unable to get to church when I was in the booth a couple of weeks ago; and now we have to rely on your call for all our transportation needs. So I called in AAA to give your old car a jump, except it didn’t work. Basically, your battery was dead. Fortunately, the guy called over a colleague an hour later to replace your battery, and now it runs just fine. The one thing that caught me off guard, though, who is the fact that the old battery seem to have the date ‘January 2020’ chalked on it, suggesting that it wasn’t all that old to begin with. However, both of them asserted that it was a secondhand battery from a junkyard, and I’m in no position to tell them otherwise. Considering how little use we put that car through, it’s a little surprising that it failed so quickly, but maybe that’s what comes of getting a secondhand battery.

So sorting all that out chewed up the morning, but at least it allowed me to take care of things like laundry and the like here at home in between visits from AAA and all that. You gotta make the best of things while you can, I guess.

The phone has been ringing off the hook a bit today, as well. Lars had hoped to see me when visiting the folks for the first time in at least a month, while Larry contacted me about a message I’d sent him the other day about camp information. It’s like everything happens at once – and it would happen a day I can’t make it into the ‘office.’

At least I have a decent computer set up in the office upstairs these days, so I could handle the latter, if not the former.

It’s all been a collection of small, niggling little things, but it does rather add up by the end of the day – or even, the middle of the afternoon. But, with a little bit of strength and fortitude, we’ll manage to grit our teeth and muddle through, somehow.

Wish us luck, honey. We’re going to need it.