Last Week Today! S2024E9
Sunday, April 7, 2024
Was a busy (two) week(s) since the last one, so let’s catch up with happenings:
🎂 March 20th and 31st marks “Birthday Week” with the fam, as it’s BoyType and MonkeyGirl’s turns to celebrate getting one year older. And me and SuperWife’s time to be broke AF. BoyType wanted a miniPC for his birthday to tinker on so he combined all his loot and bought one on his own after making sure it could FortNight OK; he wanted to be able to play with his schoolmates. (Don’t tell him I was going to make sure he could play on my Xbox when he told me the first time, but this is a better way since I want him to learn to troubleshoot technology.) MonkeyGirl wanted cashola plain and simple. The big issue this time was me trying to pay lots of bills and have some cash left for our trip and then some foolishness happened that delayed me hooking her up with her gift for a few days, annoying the newly minted 11-year-old. I said, “get used to having deferred dreams for the sake of necessities, especially in this family,” which is a lesson she needs to understand as she learns how to manage money. In my own childhood, my parents were constantly using my allowance stash like a petty cash pot to cover bills and things that would come outta nowhere, so I got used to waiting well past my allowance days to “make a withdrawal;” at least until I was able to get a bank account. She’s got her own account we monitor, and a lot more scratch in it than I did when I was 11– I’m making sure it doesn’t burn a hole in her pocket now.
🎌 One of my BFFs came back home for a visit with his wife and kiddo. He’s from Atlanta, spent lots of time in Japan and both moved back at the same time in 2008. He’s still there in fact, settling down for the long haul and I had done the same until we came back in 2021 (but I’ll tell that story another day.) They wanted to know what it’s like to stay in a RV so we set BigHank up for a driveway camp for them. Other than the water pump being broken because stupid me didn’t winterize it well enough, it made a good guest house for them. So glad to see him again and catch up with everyone. Of the things I miss the most about JapanLife, kicking it with my friends is the biggest.
🤦🏾♂️ After our guests left, we had one day to prep for our spring break trip to Jacksonville. Thanks to the aforementioned water pump issue, we wanted to get it fixed before getting on the road, and in our haste SuperWife and I didn’t properly lock the cargo “basement” hatch. To make a long story short, our spare tire slid out of there along with a few items all just 300m up the road but by the time we noticed, of course it was gone. Who could pass up a perfectly good commercial grade tire & rim just lying on the corner of the road like that? I’ll be buying a replacement before we head on our next journey in May; until then, are there any Pick-A-Part specials for these things?
🏖 We made it to Jacksonville Beach without any troubles actually. I’ll be posting a more detailed trip report in the next few days, but here are some snaps for your consideration: [gallery type=“rectangular” link=“none” ids=“543910,548926,543868,541099,542056” orderby=“rand”]
And that’s all I got, see ya next week! 👋🏾
