Whew!  What a busy day.  Remember we’re the folks who never have company and never go anywhere.  This morning my friend, Doris, called to see if I had a lime green thread.  I sent her pictures of a couple of greens I had so she came over.  Visitor #1.  Then Connie, the lady who owns the big ranch house that’s for sale, was out on the RTV with her twin 2 year old grandsons and they stopped to see the chickens.  Visitors #2, 3 and 4.  Then her husband came over on the lawn mower.  Isn’t it funny how folks in the country visit on the RTV, or the lawn mower, or the tractor but rarely in the car?  He was Visitor #5.  He wanted to see if we had a weed eater he could borrow.  Yep, but it took a while to find it.  Then he came back to see if we had some kind of thing to pound poles into the ground.  Yep, but we had to find it.  Then Connie came back to see if we had a caulk gun.   Yep, but give us a minute to find it.  You’d have thought we had a party going on around here today with all the folks coming and going.  We enjoyed all the visitors!

Then, Chad called:

Chad:  Mom, don’t ask any questions . . but, do we have towing insurance?
Me: I don’t know. Look at your insurance card and there should be a number to call. Call them and see. What happened?
Chad: My truck isn’t running and I’m in Kansas City!
Me: Where in KC?
Chad: On the side of the interstate. I’ll call you back.

You know it seemed like an eternity before he called me back.

He called back and told me he does have towing insurance. They pay 50. He didn’t know if they paid the first $50 or if they paid for 50 miles and he was going to have it towed all the way back to Wal-Mart in Nevada, which was over 100 miles. I’m thinking . . you’re going to be real surprised at the bill. Then he called me back to tell me that the tow truck guy called and said it was going to cost $300 over what the insurance company was paying so Chad decided to come up with another option.

It ended up that one of his good friends lives not far out of Kansas City so Chad called him.  He’s engaged and his future father-in-law  works on big engines at work but he also has restored several old cars so he knows how to work on vehicles.  He also had a big flat trailer so he came and met them, loaded Chad’s truck on his trailer and took it to his house.  Chad, who doesn’t know much about mechanics, thought it was the alternator so they bought an alternator but it wasn’t that.  They’ve figured out that it’s the fuel pump, which is kind of an issue in that model truck.  The old guy Chad bought the truck from told him that was something that would go wrong.

They’re leaving the truck at the man’s house.  Nicole’s parents are going to KC to get them.  They can’t get back to Kansas City til Tuesday but they’ll go back then and the man will help them change the fuel pump and hopefully everything will be good.  The man wants Chad to be there while he’s working on it and that’s probably a good thing.  The more Chad sees, the more likely he will be to learning something useful.

It’s hard to not be there to help solve Chad’s problems but I guess that’s what growing up is all about, huh?

The subject came up in a comment about storing gasoline and it seems a few are surprised we don’t store gasoline.  I’m not one of those who believes the world as we know it is coming to an end.  Most days I don’t believe that!     Gasoline is the last thing we worry about keeping on hand.  First, today’s formulas aren’t meant for storing.  We don’t keep gasoline more than a month, even with stabilizer added, and even for the lawn mowers.

As far as generators, personally, I think they’re kinda useless.  In theory, they sound like a wonderful item but if you’ve ever been without power for a week or more, you realize how truly worthless a generator will be.  It doesn’t even matter if it’s propane, gasoline or diesel powered, if they’re hooked up to enough gadgets to make life comfortable, or as you knew it when you had power, you’d better have a huge bank account and cash on hand.  The whole house generators burn through the fuel at an unbelievable rate.  Having them hooked directly into a natural gas line is ideal but be prepared for an enormous gas bill if you’re running the generator to keep your house going.  If you have a gasoline generator, most of us have no chance of having enough gasoline on hand to keep them running for a week or more.

We have  generators that can be powered by just about any fuel you might think of but we’re more prepared to live without any power if the need arose.   I’m not going to go into all the ways we prepare . . just because it’s probably boring to most.  I will tell you that canned goods need no refrigeration.  All the years we lived in Louisiana where we were concerned with hurricanes and in KY and MO, where storms could take power out for days, my biggest concern was my freezer til I said . . why?  Why don’t I just can this stuff?  I never keep things in my freezer that I’d be devastated if I lost it all.  Everything that matters . . my entire food supply that I count on is in jars in my pantry.

As far as gasoline for the cars, my feeling is that if things got so bad we couldn’t get gas, we wouldn’t be leaving our little piece of land anyway.  We’d stay right here where we have everything we need.

The tractor and RTV use diesel and as much as we’ve played on those for the past 3-1/2 months, we haven’t even used 1/4 tank in either of them.  We keep diesel in cans for them but not more than enough to fill them up once.

I also try to keep my car at least half full at all times but normally, I fill my car about once every 2 – 3 months.  I just don’t use a lot of gas.  Vince drives 7 miles to work and he doesn’t use much gas either.  Lately we’ve been to town more because of buying for the fence and coop, and plants but we don’t use a lot of gas.

We do not worry about storing gasoline or diesel.