Long Time Gone -- a 2020 Update

So, hey, this blog still exists!  

I have, obviously, been neglecting this blog for the past couple of years. Mostly I've been busy: but it just so happens that these days I have an abundance of free time so I think it's time to blow the dust off and try my hand at blogging again.

First, I think it'd be nice to give you all an update. I mean, I think I'm directly related to more than half of the people who will be reading this, so most of you already know how I'm doing-- but on the other hand I also know that I am the WORST at remembering to tell people what's going on in my life so maybe you don't.

Anyway. I've been teaching Elementary Orchestra, before and after school classes at three different schools (and expecting to pick up another class in the fall.) Besides that I've been working on my music therapy private practice. And, despite my initial fears, things were actually starting to move. I was seeing several clients a week, and in January I hit the beautiful milestone of having made back as much money as I've put into the darn thing. Pretty exciting!

So then, of course, 2020 hit like a ton of bricks.

I'm not going to dwell on the bad too much. After all, things are rough on everyone right now and a lot of people have it worse than me. I'm doing... OK. I have a respectable savings account. I'm healthy and safe. I'm living with my parents, and my Dad still has work.

My business, however, has taken a blow. Some of my clients had to stop music therapy services for financial reasons, some had to stop for health concerns, and some just stopped answering my messages. I do have one memory care facility that I'm still working with: twice a month we set up a video chat so I can sing for them. There's some real limitations trying to work this way-- I can't collect much data because I can barely see my clients, and sometimes they have to turn their microphone off which makes it feel like I'm performing for a wall. But I'm grateful to have at least that much work, and it does seem to be doing the residents good. 

Beyond that? I'm still trying to figure out how to find new clients in a world as crazy as this one, and it feels a lot like starting over from scratch. It's discouraging, but for now it's the best I can do.

I was able to continue teaching orchestra after the schools closed; online classes, taught over skype. Again, lucky to have the work. But let me tell you: teaching virtual orchestra is awful and I don't want to do it again. There are some things that are really, really hard to do without being together in person. Like play on the same beat. Or tune instruments. Or help a student who's struggling to figure out where their fingers go.

Though it certainly does make for a memorable class when your first ever virtual orchestra class thanks to a pandemic is interrupted by a 5.7 magnitude earthquake. March 2020 was a wild ride. 

Anyway, now it's summertime. Orchestra is over for the year. I'm hoping it starts again in October but, right now, that's anyone's guess. Too much is still up in the air while school districts try to figure out how to balance safety and education and mental health. It might be some time before I know whether music classes are happening or not, whether they'll be in person or online. I honestly don't know where I'm going to be three months from now. Maybe this whole mess is leading towards some sort of career change, who knows? Like everyone else, I'm having to take things a day at a time.

So, as I said at the start, I find myself with a lot of time on my hands this summer.

I've had a few activities of varying usefulness to spend my time on. I've been playing more games on my phone than I care to admit, I reorganized and deep cleaned the kitchen pantry, I've been making "music videos" of dubious quality...

...I've done a lot of gardening, tried some new recipes, worked on my writing, and done plenty of arts and crafts. (In fact, here's a little sneak peak of a project that I think deserves it's own blog post)

Because nothing says "I've been in this house too long" like painting the walls.

Also, my long-time fascination with vintage culture and fashion, particularly from the 1940s, has been turning into a full-blown obsession.

Partly that's because I've been discovering the online vintage community. It turns out that there are a bunch of people out there who are just living their everyday lives dressed like it's a different century-- because they like the history, or because they're taking a stand against "fast fashion", or just because they can. And it makes me very, very happy to think that there are currently people in the world playing video games and cooking dinner and other modern activities while dressed like Victorians, or flappers, or seventeenth century Scottish farmers, or something equally anachronistic. Seriously, if this pandemic goes on much longer there is very real danger that this blog is going to take a hard swerve and become a vintage fashion blog. So if you find future blog posts on topics like which shade of red lipstick is better or how to do pin curls-- well, I warned you.

Another reason for my particular fascination with the 40s at the moment, though, is that I'm finding that time period newly relatable. Something I've always admired about that decade is that even in the midst of truly awful things-- war and racism and devastation of all kinds-- there was a hopefulness and optimism in so much of the culture and music. A sense of everyone pulling together to navigate a world turned upside down. And, well, that's relevant these days. 

(A video from one of the MANY vintage vloggers I am now watching obsessively, because I think it makes my point, if in a cheesier way than I probably would.)

Anyway, so that's how my life is going, circa July 2020. I haven't been going on as many "adventures" lately, but I do have a few stories to share so I intend to be more active on here for a while. Hopefully that'll mean spreading around some smiles and laughs. There may or may not be a new costume challenge in the works, too, if you're here for that kind of thing.

But wherever you are and however you're doing, I wish you the best. Take care of yourself! Here's to hoping for better days ahead.

Walking a business, try not to trip

When we last left off in my epic saga of what's happened with my little baby company over the summer, I had two main focuses (focii?): connecting with a daycare facility for adults with severe disabilities, and putting together a social skills group. 

Contacting the facility ended up taking a few weeks of telephone tag before I was finally able to set an appointment to come in person. 

I was very anxious about said appointment-- aside from my typical issues with social anxiety (it's bad, guys, I have to psych myself up to call my insurance company to ask for a policy change. I don't do well with feeling like I'm inconveniencing someone), I'd never done anything like this before. And even ignoring financial reasons for wanting a new contract-- I just wanted to work here. One of my favorite classes to work with during my internship was the teenagers with severe disabilities, comparable to the clientele served at this facility. (In fact, it turned out that I ran into a girl I worked with at Hartvigsen while I was there). I really wanted to work with this group just because I knew it was something I would do well at, something I would love and people I would love, a chance to make a difference and have a ball doing it-- a lot of the things that make me want to be a music therapist. So I prepared the best I knew how: I read up on the research literature, I put together a fact sheet, I tried to come up with the answers I would give to any question I could imagine them asking. I was terrified of screwing things up, but I was encouraged by the interactions I had with the owner and general manager. They seemed friendly and open to hearing me out.

When I arrived, however, neither the owner or the general manager were actually on the site. There were two people in the front office, a man and a woman, neither of which bothered to give me their names. As I stepped in, the man told me that I needed to reschedule because he had forgotten to bring a keyboard. (Since this was a consultation, I hadn't intended to play any music at all, and I typically bring my own instruments, so this threw me for a bit of a loop) The woman took me on a whirlwind tour of the facility. In the first room, as I mentioned, I ran into a student I worked with at Hartvigsen-- I was delighted to see her, though it's hard to say if she recognized me. The woman told her, "Well, that's nice, that she was your music therapist before and she's going to work with you again." And I thought-- 'oh, I like that use of future tense.'

In the second room, however, the woman introduced me to some staff members as, "the music therapist who's going to volunteer some hours for us." And I thought-- 'I don't like that word volunteer nearly as much'.

So we sat back down in the little front office, and, well-- I panicked. Nothing had gone the way it had in my head, and all I could think of was that they needed to understand that I was here as a business owner, not as a volunteer. 

What followed was an uncomfortable conversation, where I tried to share what I could do and what I expected, and where she found ways to cut that down-- her idea was for me to run two fifteen minute groups a month. (Fifteen minutes? What on earth can you get done in only fifteen minutes of therapy? Especially in a group of eight people with slow response times! That's barely time to say 'hello' and 'goodbye'! She claimed the clients couldn't focus for longer than that but I know better, having worked with the same population for 45 minutes at a time during my internship) I... didn't really do very well at convincing her to let me come up with a few different pricing plans for them to look at instead of just going with the least effective possible solution. Whatever I managed to say or not say in my panicked fumbling, less than five minutes later I found myself ushered out the door. I did insist on going back long enough to give her the fact sheets I'd prepared, but that was the only chance I got to really share what I had to say. I was just told that "they'd get back to me" after they looked over their budget.

I've left a few telephone messages, but I haven't heard back since. I probably never will.

There's not really much to say except that I tanked it. I'm still trying to figure out exactly where things went so badly wrong.

It was a few weeks later that I received my next piece of bad news-- my one client, the sweetest old gentleman in the world who'd been sick with a bad cold for the past two weeks, had just been moved to hospice. He passed away the following week.

I can't exactly call it a 'tragedy'; he was 97 and it was his time. With my belief in God's Plan of Salvation, I have no doubts that he's in a good place now, with the loved ones he had lost. But it still hurts to lose someone you care about. 

And, more selfishly, it hurts to lose the only client your business has. But there really wasn't much I could do except get back to work on preparing my social skills group.

I figured the first thing I needed was a solid plan-- a location, dates and times, a basic plan of what the group would cover, age groups and such. So I did my best to put things together. I passed around a survey trying to find out more information about what people in the community might need-- but the survey only got three responses so I more or less put it all together blindly.

Location was rough. I considered just having it here in my parent's house, but there were a few good reasons not to-- the junk in the basement, two yappy dogs, concerns about what the kinds of kids who need a social skills group might do to the property (at Hartvigsen I became well acquainted with the fact that perfectly sweet but impulsive kids can be as destructive as tiny hurricanes), the challenge of maintaining a healthy work-life balance when you are working and living in the same space-- it just seemed like a bad idea.

Finding a location proved to be a challenge, however. Many of the places I tried wouldn't rent to a business unless it was a nonprofit (*technically* it's a nonprofit, since I sure haven't made a dime), or were only renting huge rooms for well out of my tiny budget. One place that seemed perfect wouldn't be available until October (and it had been a "summer" social skills group that I'd been promising, dangit). Finally I ended up settling on a Community Center in Daybreak.

The cost made me feel a little faint when I found out that I needed to pay the entire cost of rent (+ a deposit) in advance. But I could cover it. I've been putting a few dollars away into a savings account for two years now (not easy to do when you're unemployed) and if I emptied that savings account out, I'd have just enough to cover the cost of renting the room.

That was a risk. A scary risk. But if I could just find three clients (which seemed so very doable, especially with how many people had claimed they'd be interested when I talked about it at the Summerfest), I could almost break even. If I managed to fill out every slot, I could actually make a pretty significant profit. It seemed like a reasonable gamble to make, so with only a small impusle to hyperventilate I paid the fee.

Then, with everything ready, I opened up registration a month in advance. I put up ads on facebook and posted to parent support groups, I sent out newsletters, I put up fliers all over my community. And then I waited.

In the first week, one parent signed up her child.

And then nothing.

My posts and ads on facebook were picking up tons of likes and shares-- but no one was doing anything about them.

As the days hurried onward, and it became increasingly obvious that I had invested in a sinking ship, I did my best to keep things moving. My parents and others told me that it's normal for people to sign up last minute for things like this, that getting close to the deadline would help give a sense of urgency. So I paid for a new round of ads that emphasized the urgency-- one week left to register! As many capital letters as my over-considerate nature would allow. 

And... nothing. Well, not entirely nothing, there was a message from that solitary parent who signed up, expressing concerns about whether or not the group was actually going to happen. And a couple of college students who wanted someone to job shadow (and obviously picked the wrong therapist to ask). But no one registered. It reached the point where every time I checked my phone I felt like throwing up. 

I tried to stay positive, but it reached a point where I couldn't pretend otherwise anymore-- I was going to lose everything. All my savings, all the money I'd put into advertising and getting supplies and printing fliers-- just wasted. Because I made a stupid mistake of thinking "interest" was equal to "commitment", and putting everything on the line for people who didn't even open the newsletters they signed up for. 

In the last week, as I tried so desperately to salvage the mess I'd made, I asked for feedback on a Facebook group for music therapy business owners. The answers made it very clear where I'd gone wrong. I paid money for a program that no one had committed to yet. I didn't have the resources other therapists had when they pulled off something like this. One post got to me in a way that was hard to explain. After listing off amazing resources I don't know if I'll ever be able to access here, and strategies that never would have occurred to me in time to use them, as if they were the simplest things in the world-- she then followed up with, "But, you know, Failures for the Win! 😀 (But it's hard, some days I just want to hide in bed.)"

It was too much. That glimpse into what I'd been trying for, in the hands of someone who could actually pull it off-- and my "for the win failure" was my financial ruin. I didn't know if it would be possible to ever recover my business from this loss. I still don't know that-- in fact, if nothing changes then I will have to close my business by December, because I can't afford to renew all the things that need renewing when the year ends.

After reading that post, I collapsed on the couch and I didn't just cry--I howled. I cried harder than I've let myself cry in years, cried like every stress and hurt and heartache in a year of bitter disappointment and terrible doubt and fear was hitting me all at once, the dam of foolish optimism broken, the flood knocking me down and crystalizing into one terrible truth-- I was a failure. Not good enough to get a job as a music therapist. Not good enough to know how to run a business. Not good enough to do anything more worthwhile than hanging shirts at a thrift store for minimum wage while I dreamed stupid dreams of being something eternally out of reach, of changing a world that was better off without me screwing things up.

I don't know how long I sat there and cried. It feels like hours, but it was probably more like twenty minutes.

On this blog, I talk a lot about that elusive concept of "adulting", of that mysterious transition from dependent to independent, from child to grown up. It's hard not to feel like I've completely failed at that-- I've never worked a full time job, I'm single and living in my parent's basement and I'm generally a walking disaster.

But I'm starting to think that truly being an adult has less to do with where you live and where you work, with whether you can bake a pie or fix a car engine, and more to do with what you decide when there is no one who can make things OK, who can pick you up and tell you it's going to be fine and they'll take care of everything. In the end, other people can support you, but you have to be the one who stands back up and makes things right.

And if I have one virtue in all this world, it's that I don't give up.

So I got back up, and I started putting the pieces back together.

I'm flat broke-- but it could be worse. Yes, I used up all my savings, but at least it was all my own money. I didn't go into debt. This mistake won't make me lose anything else.

I am a good music therapist. It's hard to feel that way now, but I've seen lives change. I've seen the data. There are things I am better at and things I am worse at, but I am capable of doing something amazing if I can just find the chance.

I haven't been finding the chance. So I need to learn how to make the chance instead.

Right now my focus is on saving up whatever money I can. I'm going to get some job coaching, to try to learn how to market myself better, especially to facilities. It's not going to be easy, but I'm not going down without a fight. Not now. Not ever.

Two good things came out of this mess, at least. The first-- that parent who did sign up? After we talked about it, I offered to let her pay the same rate as she would have for the group to do individual music therapy with her son for those ten weeks. She agreed. So I do have one client, a little boy who needs help with attention span and social skills. Those are things I've treated with music therapy before. That is someone that I can help, who I mightn't have had the chance to work with otherwise. Helping this little boy is well worth making some mistakes for. 

The other good thing is a little more indirect. While putting up fliers for the ill-fated social skills group, I found another flier. Riverton Music is recruiting music teachers for after school programs at Granite School District elementary schools.

The job interview was probably the easiest one in my life. 

So, starting in October, I'll be working a second part time job teaching elementary school Orchestra. Only four hours a week, but it'll make a huge improvement to my financial situation, and I think it will be a lot of fun. I have fond memories of being in elementary orchestra myself, squeaking out nails-on-a-chalkboard impressions of "Hot Cross Buns" and learning to love Mozart and hate the key of Ab.

I'm still a long way from where I want to be, and I still have plenty of wrestling to do with my own issues. Running a business is so much harder than I ever would have imagined-- and I went in imagining it would be pretty hard. I seem to be learning almost everything the hard way, and that's kind of a painful way to learn. It's hard not to compare myself to other music therapists, the ones I went to school with who all seem to be having amazing successful careers-- but probably they're having their own problems that just don't show up on Facebook.

Probably.

But, anyway, challenge aside-- I'm not finished yet. 

I don't know, maybe my optimism is naive-- there are certainly times I think so-- but there are also times I can believe that as I dig around in the dirt trying to get this thing off the ground, I'm on my way to building something beautiful. Maybe. We'll see. 

House Hunters, Boise Edition, and Examining My Motives

I put a lot of time into finding apartments to check out for this newest batch of apartment hunting. My previous experiences helped a lot in avoiding the kinds of places that you needed to meet a certain poverty level to get or that had a three-year waiting list, and with so many places to look at, I was pretty confident I'd find somewhere in my budget.

House Hunting Stage One!

I knew I wanted to stay in Boise--I've kind of fallen in love with this town, with the Greenbelt and all the interesting places to go and the beautiful trees everywhere-- but I was willing to move to another part of town if I had to. My first day of in-person apartment hunting was July 12th since I wasn't working that day and could dedicate the entire day to apartment hunting.

I started out in the North End. I was delighted for an opportunity to drive around there-- a lot of beautiful old houses in wonderful condition are in that part of town. This was not one of them.

I chalked this one up in the "maybe" column of my list and continued on.

The next few places seemed nice enough but didn't actually have any openings until well after I needed to vacate my current premises. Then I found a place that stopped me cold-- a beautiful sky-blue house on a fancy street. How the heck did something like that make it onto my list?

Well, I quickly figured out that it was the basement that was for rent, which explained a lot.

After walking out of there, I immediately called the company to see if I could turn in an application. Turns out someone bought the lease the day before I got there. 

The rest of the day was filled with disappointment. Everywhere I went either had no available apartments or had apartments more expensive than I'd anticipated. Though I'd scheduled an entire day's worth of visits, by 2PM I was physically and emotionally exhausted and wasn't sure whether I was more likely to fall asleep at the wheel or start crying. I decided the wisest course of action was to go home and take a nap.

After I had recovered a bit, I wised up and started making phone calls to places instead, crossing off everywhere that I couldn't afford or that didn't have openings.  I did make it out to one more lock box showing that evening.

I wasn't encouraged.

Now, meanwhile, my roommate was doing some searching of her own. She was determined to move to Meridian, since it's closer to her work, and was doing her best to persuade both me and the third roommate (the one who's lease is still good until May) to move with her. She very quickly found and fell in love with a townhome out there and turned in an application, willing to take the risk of paying the full rent if she couldn't convince two people to move in with her. I didn't really want to move to this place-- not because of any bad feelings towards her, but because of the fact that I had no desire at all to live in Meridian-- but I thought it was nice to have that as a backup if my efforts in Boise failed.

Well, the owner of the townhome called back to say that this house had a limit on unmarried adults who could live in it and they were wanting to rent it to a family. So, too bad about the $40 application fee.

Back to my apartment hunting in Boise-- while my first day was a disappointment, I did not give up. I decided that I needed to raise my budget for potential rent by $100, which made me wince since that meant looking at places that cost more than half of my current income. But I am supposed to be getting more hours as the year goes on, I could survive a couple of lean months until then.

House Hunting Stage Two--with an increased budget

I didn't end up visiting most of those places. Phone calls eliminated them quickly. But I scrounged up a few more apartments that had just gone on the market and were for sure available still.

House Hunting Stage Three--and I'm getting a little concerned at how short this list is

Alas, I found that all of these places were very run-down and not really anything I felt appropriate to pay more than half my income to live in.

In retrospect, using a clear pin as a reference point for my current apartment isn't super helpful 

The above is a slight exaggeration; there were a few places I hadn't quite wiped off my list yet (like the apartment in the first video). But I was certainly feeling discouraged. Still, I came up with a few more places I could call, a few more listings I hadn't tried. Maybe a few of the more pricey (but not too much more) places were worth considering.

And then my one roommate fell in love with another place out in Meridian.

There's another girl in the ward who needs a place, so the two of them worked together to find The Franklin at Ten Mile--this fancy new place that's still under construction and features a website where all the "photos" are obvious computer renderings of the hoped for final project interspersed with random photos of people smiling. No, seriously, check out their website.

And while there are two bedroom apartments, getting three roommates would make a considerable difference in rent (putting the rent we'd each pay well below even my original budget). So my roommate proceeded to turn every conversation into an opportunity to try to convince me to move in with them. To her credit, it wasn't only the reduction in rent--we are friends, and she knew I was still looking. Still, I dug my heels in. After all, Meridian is not Boise, and has less trees and less biking areas and adds 20 minutes to many of my commute distances each way.

That itty bitty half a centimeter on this side of the map is about ten miles in real life

It got to the point where I was avoiding my roommate a bit. But despite my stubborn refusal, I wasn't sure I'd get a choice. Could I really afford to live where I wanted to live?

Now, I usually try to keep things pretty light here. But sometimes bigger issues have to be addressed, like it or not, and depression is one of them.

Depression has been a part of my life for a long time, though it's only in the last couple of years I've been able to admit to myself that I needed help and start getting treatment. And I'm actually doing quite well, perhaps the best I have in a long time, at managing my symptoms. I take medicine that helps, and I've been learning more and more about figuring out which of my thoughts are rational or irrational and how to manage them.

Still, I get "moods", times where nothing is OK and about me least of all, and all of the stress and pressure I was under threw me into one. I spent some time crying in my room, unable to sleep until very late at night.

But I felt much better when I woke up the next morning. I sat in bed for a while, taking my time about getting up. I took a look at my notebook where I've been writing down all the addresses and phone numbers and rent and details.

And I realized I needed to move to Meridian.

It wasn't, understand, simply a matter of running out of options in Boise. I still had places to try. But that night of feeling broken put some things into perspective for me.

When I'd been so upset and angry the night before, the idea of accepting the offer to move to Meridian had felt like admitting defeat. Thinking about it more, I could see that I was getting attached to the idea of romanticized independence-- that's what adults do, right? They get their own place and they pay for it themselves and they find it themselves and they keep it running themselves and they don't need help ever because no needing help means that you are strong and successful. Right? 

Yeah, no, that was being irrational.

And my roommate's persuasions had triggered some of my knee jerk reaction too. Now's not the time to get into that story (maybe later, this person will certainly show up in other stories), but there was a person who put me through a lot of emotional manipulation and abuse. I didn't recognize how much she had hurt me until after she was out of my life, but I did learn that I am susceptible to that kind of thing. So when a repeated argument focuses less on the logical reasons I should do something and more on how the desired action relates to my relationship with another person-- I get a bad taste in my mouth. It reminds me too much of what happens when those tactics go too far.

When I stepped away from my more irrational thoughts and feelings and considered my choice from that saner standpoint, I saw the one vital reason that I couldn't stay in Boise.

If I stayed in Boise, I'd be alone.

I mean, I'd make friends, of course. I've made some friends in my ward in the short time I've been here. But at night, after a long day, when I'm most susceptible to the demons that live in my brain, I'd be alone in my room every time.

I'm an introvert with social anxiety, so it's very easy for me to be a "hermit". Don't get me wrong, some time alone is good for you. But too much is like a very weird drug; you hate it but you can't figure out how to stop. Being alone at home seems so much easier because there's no one to judge or reject you.

But dealing with mental illness sometimes means recognizing that the person who rejects you the most and judges you the most harshly is, well, you.

In college, I had a lot of lousy roommates. And a handful of absolutely wonderful ones. But during my first year of school, I was alone. The structure of the apartment meant I never saw my "roommates" unless we passed each other on the way to the bathroom. And that was the year when I went through the worst depressive period of my life. I just... I couldn't handle being that alone. I needed other people around to pull me out of my brain. Even lousy roommates were better than that lonely year had been. And when I had good roommates, that support system made a huge difference.

So, through that lens, my choice was pretty clear. I could spend a year living all alone in Boise, in a lousy apartment for a price I could barely afford. Or I could spend a year living with two girls I actually liked in Meridian, in a nice apartment for a price I could definitely afford.

So I swallowed my pride and asked if they'd still let me move in with them to Meridian.

I still haven't seen the place in person. We had an interesting time with the application process-- computer errors, it turned out, so it took them longer than expected to tell us and we still haven't signed the lease. But the application was accepted, and somehow (if we can manage to get everything up the stairs) we're going to move into this new place on Saturday. 

Maybe in the future, I'll move back to Boise. With more time to anticipate the move, I could find roommates there and struggle less with the fact that a two-week window does not leave a lot of available apartments. But that's a good way into the future. For now, I have a place to live, and people to share it with. Maybe it isn't perfect, but it's enough.

Runnin' on a Prayer

Let me tell you a little bit about my car.

You've heard some things already, but I'm going to give you a bit of background: My car is 19 years old. It belonged to my grandparents, then was used interchangeably by my siblings and cousins and myself before my Mom just bought the thing and let me use it for the past few years for school and work.

For such an old car, it's served me well. There have been a few odd repairs needed here and there, and the car definitely has its quirks, but it was more than usable and I've come to like it a great deal. I've even given it a name--Perseus, or Percy for short.

Back in May, however, trouble began.

Well, actually I suppose you can look back to February to see the seeds of ruin. Back in February, the engine started to short out randomly while I was driving. My dad, despite his skill as a former diesel mechanic, was unable to fix it and it ended up going to a shop for a couple of days.

That week, both of my parents got influenza. My dad got dehydrated and passed out while standing in the bathroom, breaking several ribs, and then got pneumonia. Being the caretaker of my sick parents, it wasn't a surprise to anyone when I got the flu myself a few days later. So February was a fun month for all parties. But, by the time the plague that swept through my house had ended, my car was fixed and back to normal.

When the check engine light came back on in May, I was concerned--but my car was still working just fine. I got the engine light checked out, and didn't understand a word of the results, but my Dad said it was probably a problem with the gas cap (which had been replaced during the February repairs by a generic gas cap.). I got a new gas cap from the dealer and then went on my merry way.

The engine light came back on, though.

Now Dad was worried about something involving a vacuum seal  (is it obvious that I don't know much about cars?) and did some repairs. The engine light stayed on.

When I was moving up to Idaho, I took my car and my parents took the minivan. When we stopped for gas, my Dad noticed something concerning--after I filled up on gas, gas was leaking from the bottom of my car. After a cursory examination (during which the leaking stop) he said to not fill the tank up quite all the way and to regularly check to see if it got any worse. He'd do a more thorough investigation next time I visited home.


And everything went smoothly, despite the continuous presence of the check engine light, until a couple of weeks ago. On my way to an appointment with a client living out in Eagle, Idaho, as I took my foot off of the break to enter a green-lit intersection, my engine shuddered and my car came to a stop.

I tried to restart the engine, but still the engine sounded like it was struggling and my car wouldn't move. Cars behind me were starting to honk. Quickly I said a prayer, asking Heavenly Father to help me get safely to and from this appointment, whatever else I had to manage in the future. I didn't know anyone who could pick me up or come to my rescue if I was stranded up here, so far from the mechanical expertise of my father and brother-in-law, and this was too far from my apartment to walk.

After finishing my prayer, I started the engine one more time. This time, it roared to life, and I was able to continue driving without incident. In fact, for the rest of the week and the coming weeks, my car didn't have any obvious problems at all, other than a bit of sluggishness when I first ignited the engine. Still, I told my Dad about what had happened, and he planned to take a look when I next visited home for the fourth of July weekend. He said it sounded like something was wrong with the gas tank, so he advised me to try to arrive in Salt Lake with a quarter tank of gas so that he'd have an easier time taking my car apart.


So, on Saturday, July 2nd, I packed my overnight bag and headed out to spend a nice weekend at home with my family and hopefully get the needed repairs on my car. I had no doubt that my temporary lack of problems was due to some divine intervention in response to my prayer, so I still tried to be cautious and pay close attention to what the engine was doing as I hit the road.

The trouble started as I passed through the small town of Eden, Idaho. I'd been speeding along with my car on cruise control when I noticed the sound of the engine getting louder and faster. I looked to see a dial that I think is called a tachymeter (maybe?) heading into the red section that means the engine is working too hard. I tapped the breaks and the engine calmed back down--but every time I touched the gas the engine would speed up again and the car would only continue to slow down. I ended up coasting down the exit ramp and parking in the closest parking spot I could find.

Back in February when I'd had car problems, the car would work again after a bit of a break. So I turned the engine off and took a second to check my map. Then I started the car again--and, success. I pulled back onto the freeway and continued on my merry way.

Until I had to slow down suddenly upon entering some road construction near Burley, ID. As I hit the breaks, the engine began to chug like a 5k runner attempting a marathon, and again every attempt at pressing the gas only led to the engine speeding up again.

(If and when Dad reads this, he will probably wince at my inaccurate descriptions of what was happening, but I'm calling it the way I saw it at the time).

I coasted onto the next exit ramp, where my car stopped entirely in the middle of the road. I gave it a minute then restarted it--nothing. Except, I heard a grinding sound and smelled something burning. Opening up my windows, I realized that it was my engine making that terrible sound, even though the ignition was off.

Now getting very worried, I tried calling my parents. But it turns out that they were still on their fishing trip, and so didn't answer the phone. I waved some cars to go around after they lined up behind me, then sat in growing anxiety. If I were closer to the Utah border I could maybe call on my sister to come give me a lift or give my parents a chance to come get me. But this far away, I wasn't sure I could do anything but call a tow truck. I've never done that before, but I've heard it's expensive, and as I frequently mention--I'm about broke. Not to mention, would a tow truck get me as far as home or just take me back to Boise where no one I knew could fix my car?

I looked out at the cornfield next to where I had stalled, then I said a prayer. I expressed gratitude that I'd been helped so much already, but I didn't know what to do now. I asked if I could be helped a little further, at least until I was close enough to home that my parents could potentially come and get me after their fishing trip was over.

I turned the key again, and the engine roared to life.

The rest of the trip was long and boring. It seemed like the engine worked best at a consistent speed, so I chose one that I wouldn't have to change for the rest of the trip-- twenty miles per hour slower than the current speed limit. It was agonizing driving so slowly when I knew it would add two hours to an already overlong trip, but I wanted to be cautious and not push this miracle engine too far. The engine gave me trouble a few more times, but each time I was able to pull over, wait a minute, then restart the engine and get back on the road.

It's a good thing that I made it all the way home myself because my parents had some issues with the boat and didn't make it home until an hour after I did. That evening, as I related my experiences, Dad grew concerned. He said that it sounded like there might be something catastrophically wrong with my transmission.

Catastrophic is a very descriptive word. It is not a word you like to hear in reference to your car unless someone is saying your ride is "catastrophically awesome." But I don't think anyone actually says that.

Well, early on Monday morning (July 4th), Dad came and knocked on my bedroom door, waking me up. He told me, "You need to get your knees and thank Heavenly Father that you made it here safely because that should not have been possible."

Now, I know absolutely nothing about car engines, so I'm going to let Eric The Car Guy tell you about something called a Torque Converter. According to my Dad, he got most of it right except for talking about the stator.

The short version--the thing he called a "pump", that gear looking thing--that's what was broken. As a matter of fact, that grinding sound I heard when I turned the engine off back in Burley was the pump tearing itself into shreds. Also, that lubricant fluid you can see in the video is kind of red--mine was black and smelled burnt. My Dad helpfully translated these facts into layman-speak by telling me the following: "These are bad signs. I don't know how you got that car started again."

The damaged parts are too expensive to replace in a 19-year-old car, so we really didn't have much choice but to spend our Fourth of July car shopping.

Although I came along for my ride, my parents were the ones paying for this and so they were the ones making all of the choices. We were helped by a very kind older gentleman who has this awesome conspiracy theory that ever since they started using the hadron collider, lines in books printed years and years ago have been changing. He gave some examples from the Bible. The whole thing was as nutty as a fruitcake, and he mostly cornered my Dad with it, leaving Mom and I free to giggle over Dad's "I-am-too-polite-to-tell-you-that-you-are-insane-and-I-don't-know-how-to-escape-this-conversation" tone of voice.

Anyway, we got a used car, and I don't even want to think about how all we're paying for it (this is actually the first time my parents have ever taken out a loan to pay for a car) and sold poor old Percy for a grand total of $300 so that it can get converted to scrap.

Goodbye, Percy. :(

While I was sad to see the old car go, I couldn't help but be pleased with the car my parents decided on:

Meet my new car, Sheila. So. Shiny.

No, they do not let you keep the ribbon. As soon as they give you the keys, the ribbon goes into a big Tupperware of them on the side of the room.

Sheila runs very differently from my previous car. Percy was, to be quite frank, a boat. That car made wide turns and skimmed over bumps like they weren't even there. Sheila makes tighter turns, which makes parking much easier. My new car also lets me feel every single bump in the road and shakes if I'm driving slower than 30 mph. Pros and Cons, I guess.


Driving back up to Boise tonight was fairly uneventful, other than me taking a wrong turn and ending up in Idaho Falls. I wasn't too sad about the detour, though, since it gave me a chance to check out this:

To give you a sense of scale, that little blue speck in the river is a woman in a kayak. That slightly bigger white speck in the river is two guys in a canoe.

According to my roommate, who used to live in Idaho Falls, people come from all over the world to jump off this bridge with a parachute. Unfortunately, there's been a few known cases where the parachutes malfunctioned with fatal consequences. But I didn't see any such daredevils today, just some people enjoying the river below.


Anyway, this weekend was a little more eventful than I expected. But now I'm safe in Boise with reliable transportation, so I'm content.

Also, it really goes to show that God answers prayers in amazing ways. Getting my car to start felt like a small but wonderful miracle at the time. After seeing my car unable to move five feet without coming to a stop and after hearing my Dad's explanation of exactly what went wrong, I'm awestruck. I really shouldn't have been able to drive away from Burley. With the condition my car was in, it should have been physically impossible. I can't think of a better way to close out this entry than with Matthew 19:26.

But Jesus beheld them, and said unto them, With men this is impossible; but with God all things are possible.

Cars make giving talks complicated

So I was asked to give a talk in church today.

In case of any readers who are not Mormons/LDS, in our church members of the congregation are asked to prepare talks for church instead of having one person give a sermon every week. I was a little surprised to be asked so soon upon moving into the area, but I agreed readily enough.

This morning I decided to wait and travel by car to church with my roommates rather than leaving early to walk to church. I usually would rather walk or bike (surprising no one who knows me) but I'd had my roommates get after me (in a friendly way) for not riding together with them so I decided to be social and join the car group.

Except we were getting really close to time to leave and neither of my roommates were stirring. When it got to the point of "leave now or be late" I discovered, to some embarrassment, that one roommate was out of town (I'd forgotten) and one had texted me two hours before to say she was too sick to come to church that day. So I dashed down the stairs as quickly as I could manage in heels to get to my car so I could get to church on time.

Well, despite the fact that I was running close to the wire I made especially sure to look behind me to make sure I wasn't backing up into anything. Apparently I was looking that direction too much because I then heard a sickening "crunch". The side of my car had just come into contact with a concrete pole.

As I pulled out of there, I was hoping that maybe it would just be a little scratch. But to my panicking eyes, a large section of my car was dented inward and scraped white. The damage was only cosmetic-- everything still worked-- but ugly enough to be distressing. And now I was definitely going to be late for church.

I saw a definite look of relief on the bishop's face when I slid into the chapel during the opening hymn, so I'm sure I caused at least some concern with my tardiness. Sitting down, I sighed and thought that this was turning out to be kind of a lousy day.

During the sacrament, though, I felt inspired to make some last minute changes to my talk--mentioning what had happened to my car. The topic of my talk was on fearing God more than fearing man, and I ended up tying the incident to the fact that superficial things-- what we look like, what we own, what damage our cars have taken, etc --don't matter as much as the way we live and how well we cling to the Gospel. I guess it went over well because for the rest of church people kept coming up to me and saying, "I liked your talk, and I'm so sorry about your car."

Actually, after church when I'd had the chance to calm down, I found that the damage to my car wasn't as bad as it had seemed during that first crisis moment. I don't know, here's a photo so you can judge for yourself, but it really could have been worse:

Well, I'd better be OK with it because it is not currently in my budget to fix it and since it's just cosmetic it's not urgent either.

And, all in all, it's ended up being a good day. I really like my ward up here; it's a smaller ward, but I do better socially in smaller groups, and everyone has been very welcoming and friendly. I met a girl who is currently meeting with the missionaries and I sort of invited myself to join in on a lesson this week. We had a "linger longer" (group lunch after church) and I found myself at a table that spent the entire time discussing twilight zone episodes so you know this is a group of people I can feel comfortable with.

So I guess the moral of the story is that, yes, cars do make life complicated, but that doesn't mean that they have to ruin your day.

Preparedness Adventures!

So a couple of weekend ago, my friend Tara (who had been one of my mission companions) asked me if I was interested in "Preparedness". I said it depended, which is true, because I'm all for learning first aid, and food storage lectures can be fun if they include free samples and recipes, but I don't have much attention span for water purification, and really it all depends on how entertaining the presenter is.

Tara clarified that she was inviting me to a "preparedness expo" that she and her sister were going to, and sent me a link to the event Web page. Looking it over, what most caught my attention was the variety of topics-home defense, essential oils (one of these times I will have to tell you about essential oils), first aid, government conspiracies, the "fountain of youth", and the Book of Revelations. It looked like about the kookiest event I'd heard of this year.

So of course I had to go.

Getting there was a but of an adventure itself; my phone seems to really struggle with figuring out where addresses are in Cache Valley and had led me wrong a few times, and weird side effect of using a car on my mission is that when you are used to having a 650 mile restriction per month you feel guilty for wasting miles on wrong turns. But I finally arrived. My friend was already in a class when I showed up at the little expo center, so I wandered around a bit and was very aggressively advertised to by a guy selling animated Bible videos-but I managed to walk away without signing up to pay $30 a month for a stack of movies for my not-yet-existant-children so I guess it was a victorious encounter. (Maybe that's why people are so reluctant to talk to missionaries, they probably expect us to talk like that...)
But, anyway, I meet up with Tara and her sister, and we meet her sister's friend that was saving us seats for the big star lecture of the afternoon-a promising one, all about what is going to happen to the U.S. during the apocalypse. Tara's sister's friend, whom I ended up sitting next to, was a cheerful grey-haired woman who told me she was so delighted I was there.
"What do you notice about the age of most of the people here?" she asked me. I looked around at the room, which was mostly filled with senior citizens.
“A little bit older than me." I conceded.
"More like a lot bit older than you." She corrected me. "Why isn't more of your generation awake? We're all half dead so we aren't that awake ourselves." Then she gave me some chewable vitamin C supplements.
On my other side, Tara and her sister insisted that I try some fancy hot chocolate that they had bought during the expo the night before. Apparently they toast and crush the actual cocoa beans, "like coffee. But it's not coffee." At their insistence, I tried a sip of the substance in the thermos they produced, and find my mouth full of a bitter, gritty, grainy substance. "Sorry about that," the sister said when she saw my face, "you're supposed to filter out the grounds, but I was in a hurry this morning."

Well, in terms of entertainment, this lecture did not disappoint. It was one of the most detailed conspiracy theories I've ever had the pleasure of listening to. You must understand, I do believe that the world is going out eventually, and that there will be a Second Coming. But I also know that it's not going to happen when or how we think it will happen, and serving as a missionary in Brownsville, Texas towards the end of the Mayan calendar made me a little sick of speculating. Too many people freaking out, asking us about when the zombies would show up or about the cloud in the shape of the angel of death that appeared over the shooting in Matamoros or the killer tidal wave or "what about the mermaid on discovery channel? WHAT DOES IT MEAN?!?" And these individuals were not impressed by our answers of, "Well, the world probably isn't ending and we're really here more to talk about how you can follow Jesus than how the world is going to end". Not to mention that everyone's favorite books in the Bible down there are Psalms and Revelations. (I still don't get it, but I guess people will read those same two books over and over and ignore the rest of the Bible)

Anyway, the point is that I approach anyone telling me how the world is going to end with a certain amount of amused skepticism. This guy does win over the usual stories I heard in Brownsville since he was well dressed and wasn't high, but it was still a little convoluted. Using the Bible, the Book of Mormon, news blogs, dreams that random people have had, and a good old fashioned dash of the Red Scare, he's come up with a timetable of how "They" (ie, the communists, or in other words an alliance between China, Russia, and Iraq) are going to destroy the American dollar and the stock market, get us all on welfare and install Obama as our dictator so that we can get used to communist rule, collapse our civilization so that we all starve to death, and then invade with a gigantic army. He even had an approximate time table for how long each part of their plan is going to take. So what do we do about it? Get a years' supply of food and ammunition. Just before the year long famine and super winter, any person with a years food supply (LDS or not) will receive an invitation from the prophet to go camping for an "indefinite period of time" and it is there, in tent cities up in the mountains, that we will safely wait out the apocalypse.

Yeah. Serious.

One of my favorite parts was am anecdote about a group of elderly gentlemen in Cache valley that he meet with who had all been having scary dreams about the world ending. They asked him, "What do we do with our food storage? In all our dreams, the valley gets flooded."
"Well, what are you doing now?"
"Burying it."
"Well, that's a good idea because Cache Valley will only be flooded for a week." (How does he know this? No idea.)
So then they tell him about a guy who'd been having dreams about the valley flooding, and instead of burying his food and ammunition in his field like his neighbor (who said, I'd like to see "them" find that. For now I'm assuming we're still talking about the communists, who have nothing better to do than dig up a dairy farm looking for food storage.), used his dreams to select a point in the mountains that looked well above the floodline. He picked a spot and started digging, only to find some else had hidden their food storage in the same spot. He took it as a good sign, buried his food 20 feet to the left, and wondered who his new neighbor is going to be.

Anyway, that was the highlight of the event for me. We also had a Green Berret talk to us about self defense (more or less he told us that self defense is American so we should all buy guns. Also the creepy guy sitting behind us kept throwing out weird and violent suggestions like "stab his eye out with a knitting needle". We changed seats.) And an energetic young woman who spent the entire presentation bouncing on a mini trampoline told us that if we want to stay young we need to exercise and if we study a lot we can survive lobotomies. There was also an oven powered by tea lights, and Tara and her sister made me try a free sample of their new favorite hot chocolate (sans grounds). It was slightly more edible but I wouldn't buy it, however many antioxidants it's supposed to have. But, when I looked at the schedule and found myself having to choose between "Gold For the Middle Class" and a thinly disguised ad for essential oils, I decided I'd had enough for the day and left.

So, am I now more prepared as a result of this preparedness expo?
Lets just say that if you find a can of tuna and a slingshot buried in Cache Valley with a note reading "In Case of Apocalypse", it's mine.