I was able to record all four of the feral kittens that come to the shrine feeding station, together with Mom, all in one shot!
As you can see in the video after the image in the slideshow above, they are all very nervous and alert!
Sadly, I ran out of canned cat food last night, so no kitten soup this morning. I can tell they were waiting for it! That got taken care of with our first stock up shop, today. I’ll follow up on that in my next post.
I completely forgot to do an update after I got home from meeting with my friend, then seeing my mother, yesterday.
This turned out to be one of those “fine threads” situations. Since no one in my family was available to drive me to my mother’s town and pick up the truck from the garage, my friend was a sweetheart and drove me.
Being paranoid about vehicles the way I’ve become, I had to ask her about the noise her car was making. She said it was her transmission. Her car, a Toyota, has a recall on transmissions, and it hadn’t been done yet.
I suggested she talk to the guy at the garage about it. Which turned out to be a really, really good thing.
After talking to him, and going for a spin, he thought it might be the wheel bearings, except it wasn’t acting like it was the wheel bearings. So an appointment was booked, accidentally missed, then rescheduled for yesterday.
Originally, my friend was going to pick me up at 8am and we were going to drive in together. After doing my mother’s med assist on Sunday night, I realized I would have to run errands for her. I suggested to my friend that I take my truck and meet her at the garage. So that was arranged.
Since the garage opens at 9, and that’s when she was booked, I didn’t leave until about 8:30. I got to the garage before 9, yet there she was, watching as her car was already on the lift!
When I got there, the owner/mechanic was manually turning her rear driver’s side wheel, which is where he narrowed down as the main source of the noise, though the front tire was also making noise. He was really excellent as explaining to her what we were hearing, which was a normal sound, as he spun the tire. What he couldn’t do was spin is fast enough to hear the other noise. He was going to have to take the tire off and try to see what was going on.
So I took my friend out for breakfast.
We had an excellent time, catching up with each other. I mentioned to her about my mother’s medications and that I wanted to go to the pharmacy and see if her bubble packs were ready. The pharmacy is right near the garage, so that’s where we went next. I had just parked the truck and we were chatting when I spotted what I thought was her car, driving by behind us. It turned the corner and drove past on the other side, so we could see that yes, the mechanic was driving her car around the block!
She walked over to the garage, just as he was pulling back in, while I went to the pharmacy. My mother’s bubble packs were ready, and I found out how much they were. I didn’t pay for them because, the last time I did that, my mother got really angry and seems to think it cost as much as it did (she expected it to be “free”) because I used my card to pay for it. The folks at the pharmacy are quite familiar with my mother and her… peculiarities, shall we say! She completely understood why I just wanted to know how much it cost. I’m glad I did stop by, because there was no arrangement for delivery, from what I could tell, and my mother didn’t have any evening meds left for Monday, though she did have a full day’s worth for Tuesday.
Once I got the information, I headed over to the garage.
I could tell as soon as I walked in and saw them talking at the counter, that the news was not good.
My friend’s brakes were severely worn out, with the driver’s side half the thickness as the passenger side.
Worse, he couldn’t do anything about it.
One problem was that his 6 month old $10,000 diagnostic computer couldn’t connect with her on board computer. They can’t talk to each other. He’s never had this happen before, even when working with other Toyotas. Since he can’t connect with her computer, he can’t do the repair. He could jerry rig something together and it might last 6 months, but he wasn’t going to do that.
She was going to have to go to a dealership, and they charge typically twice as much for everything, including both parts and labour.
My friend was really unhappy to hear that, as the dealership has been really awful to her. One of the more recent issues was about the transmission recall. She phoned them about it and the guy she was talking to said, oh, I see you’ve missed a payment. She had only two or three payments left (the last payment was made just a week ago). She said yes, I missed one payment in 4 years – and what does that have to do with my transmission? To which she was told, “we can’t do anything for you”, and he hung up on her. !!!!
I don’t think that’s even legal when it involves a recall. The mechanic didn’t know for sure, but he said it shouldn’t be!
That was just one example. Knowing the dealership she went to, he had more. Turns out he had a story involving someone that turned out to be a mutual friend. She had towed her vehicle to the dealership and they told her she needed a new engine. Which would have been $8000 at the time.
She had it towed to him and he took a look.
Her engine was flooded. That’s all.
He told her about another location in the city, but they’re franchises owned by the same parent company. The only other one he knew of that was NOT a franchise dealership is in another small city that’s a 2 hour drive away.
My friend is going to take it there, because she refuses to deal with the place in the city.
He spent time explaining to her what he did, what he was, and why he couldn’t figure out what was going on to cause her brakes to wear like that. There’s something happening that he can’t see, nor diagnose with the computer. When he first mentioned the problem, I suggested proprietary software, but he said that’s illegal. They can, however, make it so that it’s really, really hard for anyone else to be able to do anything. Whatever the problem is, he can’t tell.
For now, he says he’s not worried about my friend driving her car normally. The way he put it, he could tell she isn’t a “rally driver”. The problem would be if she had to suddenly brake to avoid an accident, the brakes might not work. She needs to get it fixed as soon as possible.
I could see my friend was getting really worried, so I asked if he could give some sort of ballpark figure on how much it will cost, so she at least had some idea. That’s the issue. If he did the work, with what he charges for labour per hour, and being able to use off label parts, it would be a few hundred dollars. At dealership prices and how long they tend to charge for, it’ll be probably more than double that. She’s probably looking at $800 or more to get it done at a dealership.
But it’s her brakes, and there’s no messing around when it comes to brakes! They need to be done!
At least we know that where she plans to go is likely to be ethical about it. The entire town (city? I’m not sure if it’s officially big enough to be a city) has a strong reputation for reputable car dealerships. A lot of people will go out of their way to get vehicles there. So she should be in good hands.
Since he had to take her tires off, he made sure to let her know she needs to get her tires torqued between 50 and 100km. She didn’t know what that was, so he explained it to her. Since she lives in the town nearest us, I recommended to go to our regular garage. We reassured her, no one will charge her for torquing her tires.
Then she asked how much she owed him.
Nothing.
He said he couldn’t do anything to fix her car. He couldn’t even diagnose it properly. He wasn’t going to charge her for anything.
She was so thankful! He spent more than an hour trying to diagnose her vehicle, and no one would have had an issue with him charging for his time. She tried to pay him anyhow, but he refused.
What a good man.
From there, we parted ways. Given the distance to town, she was going to go straight to our regular garage and get her tires torqued sooner rather than later.
As for me, I headed over to my mother’s.
She was surprised to see me, even though I told her I’d be in town and wanted to take care of getting her medications. I told her how much is was going to be, and she asked me to pick something else up for her as well. She gave me the cash for it, but couldn’t find her loyalty card anywhere. She kept looking through her purse, but she has so many odd things in there, and has a habit of going through it and moving things around. After a while, I told her it was okay; I could just get her stuff and she could keep the receipt to get her points later. The only thing she uses them for is to get cash back off her purchases, so they add up.
After I picked her stuff up at the pharmacy, I tried going to a small department store across the street to see if they had some sort of organizer wallet for my mother. Unfortunately, the only designs they had were not accessible for my mother’s arthritic and twisted hands.
My sister works at a Walmart, so when I updated my family, I asked if she could keep an eye out for something that would be easy for my mother to use.
Once I got my mother’s bubble packs home, I made sure to put them into the lock box, before she had a chance to hide one of them away. When I went to open the combination lock, I realized that it was already on the combination. Whoever did her morning meds forgot to roll the tumblers after they closed up the box!! Thankfully, my mother didn’t try to open the box herself!
All of this was done by 11:30am, and my mother’s Meals on Wheels would soon arrive. She was looking really tired and overwhelmed, too, so I didn’t stay for very long. My mother wasn’t the only one feeling tired! As soon as I got home, I crashed in bed and didn’t get up until it was time to feed the outside cats!
Which means I didn’t get much done at home. Laundry doesn’t count. 😄
Today hasn’t been any more productive at home, either, but at least I got the shopping done!
Which will be in my next post.
See you there!
The Re-Farmer
The Re-Farmer 