Misbehavin’ truck

Today was eggplant parmigiana day – the first of this year’s eggplants and sauce from this week’s sauce batch. Delicious. All the window sills in the hallway and back bathroom are full of partially ripe tomatoes. These, along with 5 pounds of cherry tomatoes, will be ripe for this coming Thursday’s sauce project. This could be the last batch of sauce since the onset of rainy weather is causing the tomatoes plants to rot. We have plenty of sauce in the freezer – enough to get us to next year’s tomato crop – but sometimes we get to supplement it with a fall crop. I always try but it’s tough to predict since the seedlings go in when it’s too hot and the tomatoes start to ripen when frost is possible. If you plant too early, the seedlings just can’t handle the heat and humidity; if you plant too late, a December frost could nail them. It goes without saying that a hurricane wipes them out so you just have to be well aware that the fall tomato crop is a bonus, not to be counted on.

Father’s day turned out to be exciting. We had planned to celebrate the event at Tommy’s. When we visited there last week he mentioned that if we weren’t using our smoker (which he had bought for us a few years back), he could use it. Then during the week Joey called and asked us to pick up a few bags of fertilizer for him at Pierson Supply, a local farmer place with good products and pricing. so it made sense to load up the truck and take that instead of the car. There was also a good sale on steel fence posts (aka tomato stakes) at Tractor Supply in Deland on the way to Tom’s, so taking the truck made real sense.

I knew the truck wasn’t performing at peak and had planned a tune up in Crescent City on Wednesday when I took Nancy to her bridge game but had no doubts about driving it to Lake Mary. Bad decision. We got about half way when it started rockin’ and rollin’. I got out and checked under the hood and saw a mud dauber nest right overtop of the ignition wires. I knocked that off and started again and all was well – for about a mile. Each time we stopped, we called Tom and told them we were still on our way or on our way back home. It finally got really bad so we decided to call off the Lake Mary trip and change the venue to Barberville. Making it home became problematic so we decided to try for a local Deland repair shop and have one of the boys come by and pick us up there. All that worked and we ended up with the celebration happening but at a different venue, the lake. The original plan had us bringing the pasta and pasta sauce down to Tom’s and Tina making the salad and dessert. Instead we made the pasta at the lake and they brought the dessert and salad with them. As far as the truck, $600 later………………… It had been at least 15 years since anything resembling a tune up and probably that long on the brakes so I guess it was long overdue. One good thing is that the shop where we left it is owned and
operated by a “neighbor” here on Purdom Cemetery Road so he just drove the truck home. With Nancy not driving any more, servicing the cars becomes a little more complicated.