Still a mechanic

Yesterday after school I came home to see how Dick was doing after his chemo treatment (last one!!), then I headed toward Reading to pick up Destiny. After about 20 minutes I noticed that a red light was lit on my dash and that a needle on one of the gauges was in the red zone. I pulled over as smoke or steam(??) came out from under the hood. I called Dick and he came to my rescue. After just a little bit of poking around he noticed that a hose had popped off of something. I remembered I had heard some kind of unidentifiable noise shortly after I left home in the morning - must have been that hose popping. I took the Explorer to Reading and Dick called AAA to send a tow truck to take him and the Buick home.

When I got home from Reading he was waiting and ready for the Explorer. He had a very important high school football game to attend.

Shortly after he went to bed (around 11:30 PM) the phone rang and it was Ray. He was driving home from Virginia Beach and was having car trouble that he needed to ask Dick about. Apparently his power steering belt was seriously frazzled and slipping. Dick gave him advice and Ray did make it home.

So today Dick tuned up his auto mechanic skills which aren't getting much use these days. This morning he fixed my car here in our driveway. This afternoon he and Ray went to Dick's dad's place, where Dick is storing his tools, to fix Ray's car. Apparently to get to that particular belt they had to practically take half of Ray's car apart, and Dick was concerned that he might not get it finished before he had to start work at Advance Auto Parts at 5:00.

I was shopping for groceries when Ray called me at 3:30 and said, "We're done!" I exclaimed how wonderful that was and he said, "Yeah, Dad's an animal. He's a BEAST!" In case you're wondering, that was a compliment from Ray, his way of exclaiming about Dick's strength! And anyone who knows Ray knows exactly how he sounded when he said that! He also wondered if he could clone Dick and take him along back to Virginia!

How ironic that this guy who handles chemo like a breeze and knows how to fix every mechanical problem we have, has 30 job applications out there, and still no job. We can only rest in the fact that apparently God wanted to give Dick a break, He wanted to give us a chance to more fully rely on Him, and hopefully He's still orchestrating the details of that next job!

And speaking of grocery shopping - does anyone else out there HATE when your grocery store remodels and you just can't find anything anymore? And if you go on a Saturday, nobody that's working there knows where anything is either. At one point today I was so frustrated trying to find the new location of the store's brand of chopped garlic in a jar, I honestly felt like sitting down on the floor and bursting into tears. (Now that's a picture!) I was quite sure it should be in the produce section, but there was nobody working in produce. The three clerks working in the deli nearby admitted that they had no idea. The teenage girl working at the service desk told me confidently, "Aisle two." She was wrong. A mother of one of my students was there. I asked her and she pointed toward where it used to be, but no longer is. Later, after I had given up, she found me and told me to follow her. Sure enough, there in the produce section, on low wooden shelves at the far end of a refrigerated fruit display case, were the jars of chopped garlic. Quite a switch from being above the fresh vegetables. Thanks, Deb Newton!!