Even my Time is Worth Something

Yesterday I wrote a long piece and then decided not to publish it. Basically, I had noticed something about my dad. He woke me up yesterday, yelling from downstairs. He wanted to go out to breakfast.

When I walked out of my bedroom, he was angry at me. We had not said good morning to each other yet. We had not interacted at all, and he was already mad. That made an impression on me. I thought about his nature; what an angry person he is. Who gets mad at people because they don’t come to the door instantly when you yell for them? That is far from normal.

Also, even if you’re upset, how can you feel entitled to yell at someone over something like that? The fact that you’re upset entitles you to nothing. It certainly doesn’t entitle you to make other people suffer.

When you deal with someone who mistreats others habitually, you have to sit back once in a while and take stock. If you’re not careful, you will start to accept their behavior. You will stop seeing anything wrong with it. That’s not good. When that happens, you sort of decide you’re a toilet for other people to dump in.

I told him we weren’t going to breakfast and went on with my day. He wants to go to a restaurant for every meal, and I want to go to a restaurant about three times a month. I have other things to do. If I let him call the shots, we would spend $20,000 per year on restaurant meals, and dining with a dementia patient is taxing.

I have trained myself to say “no” a lot, and I have also learned that it’s okay to walk away while he still wants to talk. He can turn a two-minute conversation into 20 minutes of confusion and yelling. Sometimes I have to walk off and let him wind down on his own. Later in the day, he won’t remember it, and it will make no difference.

He wants to eat out because he’s bored. I have learned that his boredom is not a crisis I have to respond to and mitigate.

He’s going to be bored a lot for the rest of his life, because he has dementia. That’s normal and inevitable. Even if he were in a home, they wouldn’t be able to hire jugglers and minstrels to keep him and the other patients amused at all times. Sometimes life brings you problems you can’t fix. I make a good effort to spend time with him, but after a couple of hours, I have to rest. I can take a certain amount of exposure, but then I have to get away from it.

I wrote about this, and it turned into a very long essay. I decided to file it. This is why you didn’t get to read anything new yesterday.

Today has been productive. I primed my ballast box and changed the oil in our SUV.

I bought a Titan ballast box for my tractor. This is a steel box that holds sand or other heavy things. You use it to balance your tractor so it works better and lasts longer. I found it impossible to get one of these things delivered without damage, so I got the seller to give me a discount which I applied to paint.

This was by no means a good deal. The box should have been ready to go out of the box. I got a $30 discount, I’m going to end up spending $50 on paint and brushes, and I’ll do a lot of labor in the process. At least I’ll have the box.

These boxes arrive with damaged powder coating, and the hand-done Chinese welds are so bad they may need grinding. If it weren’t for these problems, they would be very good deals. As it is, they’re merely better than the overpriced competition.

You can make your own ballast by putting three-point hitch connections on a block of concrete, but I didn’t want to fool with that. In retrospect, I probably should have. It would have cost $50, and I would have worked less than I’m working now.

I’m painting the box with Rust-Oleum farm implement paint. I don’t know how good this paint is. I was advised that I had to prime the box even though it already had powder coating on it, so that’s what I did today. I sanded all the surfaces I’m painting (except for the inside of the box, which will be full of sand), and I applied primer with a brush. I’ll post a photo.

I’m not going to paint the bottom of the box. At least I don’t think I will. It will not be visible, it’s a pain to get at with a paintbrush, and even if I paint it, it will look bad because every time I put the box down, paint will come off the bottom.

One benefit to all this aggravation: my box will be Kubota orange. The Rust-Oleum people are not stupid. They know Kubota and John Deere own most of the market, so they make paint that matches the familiar orange and green.

I got this behind me, and then I gritted my teeth and changed our Explorer’s oil.

Oil-changing technology has changed since the last time I shopped for oil-changing tools. They have really neat catch basins now. I bought one which holds 5 gallons. It’s a big flat bowl about two feet wide. It has a rim that curves back into the bowl to keep oil from sloshing out. There is a neck molded into the rim, like a jug neck. The neck has a screw cap on it.

You slide the bowl under your vehicle, drain the oil into it, slide it out, open the cap, and use the bowl’s neck to pour your oil into a container so you can take it to the auto parts store for disposal. It’s neat.

The Ford is not set up all that well for oil changes. It’s not a real SUV, like an Expedition. It doesn’t have 4-wheel drive, and the ground clearance is not great. The low stance means you can’t get under it very well to reach the oil filter and plug.

I found I could get to the plug and filter if I turned the wheels to the left and crawled into the right wheel well. It was tight, but it beat buying ramps.

The last time this thing had an oil change, I took it to Jiffy Lube. I was having a busy month, and I didn’t feel like changing the oil myself. They must have used an impact wrench to put the oil plug in, because I had quite a time getting it out. Sometimes dealers and mechanics overtighten things in order to discourage car owners from doing their own maintenance. I don’t know if this is a Jiffy Lube policy.

Thank God, they didn’t use a wrench on the filter. I was able to get it out by hand, and that’s as it should be. If your filter won’t come off without tools, it was installed by an ignoramus or someone who wanted you to bring it back for more work.

My Harley received a free fluid change when it was nearly new. I don’t know what they used to install the filter, but getting it off was a Herculean chore. I have read that they do that intentionally. I had to use my machine tools to modify an oil filter wrench into a tool that works on Harleys. There was no way I was going to splurge for an overpriced Harley tool.

Manufacturers and dealers ought to make things easy to work on, because people remember things like that when they buy new products. It doesn’t do you any good to pressure customers to pay you for products and labor if they hate you so much they start buying from someone else.

I bought 5 quarts of synthetic oil for the Ford, and I figured I would dump the used oil back into the jug. When I tried to do that, the oil overflowed. At some point, American car makers decided to go from 5 quarts of oil to 6 quarts, and no one told me. I had emptied a 5-quart jug into the engine, but 6 quarts came out into the pan. I now have a vehicle which is starting out a fresh oil change one quart low. Oh well.

I was highly responsible when I spilled the oil. I don’t think a few ounces of oil can turn a property into a toxic waste dump, but the oil spilled near my well, and what the hell. I got a shovel, scooped up the oily dirt, and threw it out. Rachel Maddow would be proud.

I don’t drink water from my well, but still.

Tomorrow, I hope to get the ballast box painted. I hope to apply two coats of Kubota orange. The next day, I plan to fill it with sand and pat myself on the back a lot.

I have all sorts of jobs waiting for me in the days ahead.

I ordered a subsoiler to help me remove rocks from my yard, and I have a big rock exposed, ready to yank. I have to do some fence repairs. I have to fix the fuel shutoff solenoid on the Kubota. I need to take the mower deck off the John Deere and see just how badly I damaged the blades when I plucked a canteloupe-sized rock out of the ground with them. I have to loosen the bolts on the golf cart dump bed and move the tailgate to where it should have been in the first place.

As the ballast box picture shows, I still have boxes of stuff from Miami which I have not figured out what to do with.

I am starting to get on top of this place. I’m even using an edger now. It arrived last week. One day the farm may look like it belongs to a responsible person.

If I get that big rock out, I’ll post a photo. I know that will be exciting for everyone.