Ouch! The rigor mortis has set in.

Too much concrete, too flat feet. This has been another week that keeps on giving ....... pain.

The parts I was waiting on arrived Monday afternoon. We started our project in earnest on Tuesday morning. By Wednesday night (late) we had all the parts swapped and the pieces back under the truck. My Thursday was filled with hooking up sensors, securing wiring harnesses and checking and filling fluid levels, the final part of my day was filled with the most dreaded part. Clean up! When you are working with anything on a big truck it is usually dirty and greasy. When you are working on the power train it is even worse. I walked in last evening and Kat told me I smelled like grease. (That was not any grease, but 75/90 high $$$$ synthetic gear oil!).

Poor Krl, she has been presented an almost impossible task, getting my clothes clean! She told me yesterday she carried my previous day's work clothes to the washing machine and got her clothes greasy! That is pretty bad.

The concrete floors in KO's shop have almost done me in. My feet ache, my knees ache, and the ache goes right up my spine! I have been under and on top of that teal truck way more times than I want to count! I told Krl that if I had to get up one more time yesterday I would have had to crawl to my pickup to come home. KO and Jason, my friend and one of his employees have really enjoyed picking at me. KO is thirty-six or so and Jason is twenty-two. I have bantered back with warnings of the aging process. I am thankful for their youthful exuberance and help on this project.

I continued to do a little trouble shooting yesterday and found a few more things I wanted to fix, but today should be the completion of this job.

I have tried to get in contact with my fall employee who was on trial. I talked one evening and he was going to call me back but never did. I finally went on line to the hometown newspaper of the city where he was on trial and downloaded the story. He plead no contest to intoxicated manslaughter. For two years he had strongly denied any involvement or any wrong doing, in fact the version of the newspaper and what he chose to tell us varied significantly. I talked with the burr contractor in South Texas, (he had secured a job for the employee who was on trial, we kind of share this man from job to job), and the employee had called to tell them he would be there, just a little late, and he got off of the worst charge but they got him on another one. ???? I read the newspaper article to the burr contractor and he couldn't believe the official version. By the way, the employee received nine years probation, $900 fine, and $100 fine each year of probation.

This man is lucky. He could not have survived prison. However, someone lost their life, someone lost a child, someone lost a mother .... nine years probated. I really feel like the courts did him a small favor. There are civil proceedings swirling about and a guilty plea might have tainted those proceedings where a no contest plea contains no admission of guilt. Wrongful death suits. This man's trouble isn't over, he just started a new chapter.

I suppose my biggest disappointment is that he lied to me and the burr contractor because we asked him point blank, eyeball to eyeball if there was any merit to the charges and he said,"No". Lucy, you got some 'splainin' to do!

It has been sooooo hot! West Texas in August, and golly do we need rain!

When I arrived home last evening, Krl had all of the prep work completed for doing homemade beef tips with peppers and onions on rice pilaf. Anytime Kat is over and Krl and I are cooking she wants to help. I think this is good because obviously they don't cook at home very much at her house. Trace will call sometimes asking why she can't reproduce meals that we roll out assembly line style that her girls love and ask her to fix (apparently the two oldest girls don't want to pay the price of having their Meme and Dandy get on our soap boxes and tell them how the cow ate the cabbage, they would rather chance their Mom's cooking than come over). Last evening Kat supervised the cooking, telling me how weird everything looked, I let her do the measuring for the rice and then told her the old adage about "a watched pot never boils". Sure enough, as soon as she left the room the pot boiled! When it came time to sit down to our meal, it must have passed muster because Kat went back, twice! When Dandy went to bed last night Kat and her Meme were laying on a pallet waiting for Trace to come pick Kat up.

My brain is tired, my body is weary. I am not looking forward to the next week. With this major repair on the company truck it won't affect me personally, I am salaried, but the company will feel the affect of no income for week with major outgo for parts. The way the truck pay cycles the truck is held one week back so it takes two weeks before the truck receives its first revenue, but once the cycle starts it is O.K., unless you have to do it all over again. Oh well.

I don't think I have a thing on my horizon for this weekend. Well, the Brickyard 400. Other than that I hope to just relax and try to heal and replace body fluids from having melted down every day in the shop.

Be the real deal!

FATHER, I pray for healing. Physically, mentally, spiritually. I ask YOUR blessing on the project we have just completed, that we would have been diligent in our efforts and that the repairs would be complete and long lasting. I ask for relief from the hot temperatures and the dry conditions. I ask for YOUR blessing of rain. Renew us!