Thanksgiving Chaos!

We've been busy lately. Arthur is working in Illinois, which means that he leaves here before 5AM and doesn't get home until about 5:30 PM. :-( That has seriously restricted the time available for us to do ANYTHING! It's dark when he leaves and dark when he gets home, and since we get up so early, we don't want to be out too late, so we don't get out much. I know, I said we've been busy, and so far, this post makes it sound like we haven't been doing anything, but we have! Thanksgiving day, Arthur got up at 3AM and went duck hunting. It was SNOWING when he left! Yey! When he got home, he had to go put straw on his mom's outdoor plants. (She was gone to Minnesota to be with the Baber family for Thanksgiving). Meanwhile, I baked cinnamon rolls and cooked some green beans to take to my cousin Shar's house, where we had our Thanksgiving meal. Thanks, Shar! I also made a stocking. I still need to make one more, and when they're done, I'll post a picture here. I wanted something cute and creative for our stockings, so I decided to make our own.

Arthur had to get up and go back to work on Friday, and I left the house shortly after he did to go Christmas shopping, so by the time he got home from work, we were both VERY tired. While he was gone, I packed up to get ready to go to Oklahoma for Thanksgiving, and we left as soon as he got home and got the car started (which was acting up AGAIN). Before a previous trip to Oklahoma, my car refused to start. Arthur replaced a battery (as my dad recommended), unreplaced the battery as he had got the wrong one, replaced it again, unreplaced it again since that turned out not to be the problem, and several phone calls to my dad and two trips to O'Reilly's auto parts later, replaced the starter, which seemed to fix the car. We made a trip to OK after that, and the car started acting up again. My dad said it was probably a fuse problem. He also said one of the belts needed replaced. My car is falling apart! When we got home Arthur said I should not drive the car until he could replace the belt and the fuse. If the fuse acted up, the car could refuse to start, stranding me, and if the belt broke, it could overheat, stranding me, so I have been busily driving over curbs in Arthur's truck while he drives the old beater he bought to get him better gas mileage to and from work.

Anyways, back to Friday afternoon. Arthur had got off a little early, because the whole crew wanted to be with family for the holiday weekend. He went to pull the car around to load it, and it wouldn't start! He had bought fuses so as to be ready the next time the fuse blew (they think a wire or something keeps hitting it). He put the new fuse in, but realized he'd got the wrong size. (We hate dodges. Nothing is standard)! Our neighbor drove up about that time, and he happened to have a fuse in his truck that fit, so we borrowed that, loaded up the car, and got on the road about 4:30. When we got almost to Nowata, OK, roughly an hour from home, it was snowing a LOT. The road was warm enough that it wasn't particularly slick except on the bridges, which are many around there, but the snow was falling so fast that visibility was only about 10-15 feet. Long story short, we were going 30 in a 65, even with no other cars on the road, which, if you know my husband, is NOT normal procedure for us! As we turned toward Oglesby, the snow lightened up, and we were able to resume a relatively normal speed. We got home around 11 or so.

Saturday morning, Arthur and my dad went to winterize one of our rent houses we recently purchased in Ochelata. They are trailer houses. Arthur fixed one of them enough to be liveable, and we got it rented the same day we finished cleaning it up! The other one will require a lot more work! After winterizing it, they worked on my car, replacing two belts, I think. After a scrumptious dinner at my Grandma Jane's, the guys (Arthur, Uncle Tony, my cousins' husbands John and Dustin, and my brother Justin) went to Mom and Dad's house to play paintball. We ate again at Grandma's that evening, and then Mom, Uncle Tony, and I went to see my Grandpa Don in the hospital in Tulsa (more on that another time). We got home kind of late, and Justin, Arthur, and Sami'O we playing Justin's Wii. Mom and I joined in, and I won a game of bowling! I tried boxing later, and Justin made fun of me! :-P

Sunday morning, we went to church in Ochelata, had dinner at Grandma's with my family and Uncle Tony and Aunt Shug, then packed up and headed home. End of story? Not quite! We were almost to Oglesby, when Arthur was going around a curve and nearly didn't make it. I looked at the spedometer and saw that he was only going about 35, not nearly fast enough to have that much trouble turning a corner. We heard something hit the bottom of the car and the ground, but I thought it was probably gravel from skidding around the corner so hard. Arthur said, "What just happened?" He decided that the power steering had gone out. The fluid had been low before, so we thought maybe the power steering fluid had leaked out. We stopped at a gas station and got some, but when he started to refill the fluid, he saw it was full! He got back in the car and tried to start it. It didn't turn over, so he replaced yet another fuse and tried again. This time, it started, but it was so hard to drive on the curvy road that we stopped again and called my dad. He told Arthur to check the belt, and sure enough, it was GONE! We drove all the way back to Missouri, on those curvy country roads, with no power steering. VERY irritating! So, I am still running over curbs in the really long truck.