NOT MY TIME TO GO, PART II

For almost a decade, I have been building a home on a few acres in the hills of Montana.  It is the only thing my wife and I can truly call our own.  The banks own everything else.  We are slaves, folks.  And if I do not pay the taxes on that, it will be sold on the steps of the county courthouse within 3 years.  If my wife and I die, though the estate has title to it, it will have to be sold to satisfy a 50% estate tax.  How free do you really think you are?  I maintain most people historically have been more free under King George III - do not believe the lies you are told by the main stream media.  It is pure fiction and propaganda - we have been asleep at the wheel for decades.  President Benson was right.

I read the Mosiah Hancock quote (from Joseph Smith - its in the archives) about the "spirit of speculation and extravagance" taking possession of the Saints back in 1999 and that there would be a financial collapse.  I pegged the extent of it being a 40% correction in the housing market.  That has since come to fruition - what remains to happen is that our financial system will go off a cliff.  That could be as soon as 2015 or even earlier - maybe a few months from now.  I am such a conservative, I have taken no chances and liquidated anything that cannot be used for food, water, heat or shelter and turned it into those items.

One of those items I converted cash into was a pair of 40' shipping containers.  One of them, the nicer one, was to be loaded with 60,000 pounds of used glu-lam beams for the post and beam-style home and shipped over to MT on a low boy trailer.  I had no way to cheaply get the container into the air, so I took a welding class and built 4 legs with sliders that moved inside.  The sliders were to be mounted in the four corners of the container with 8 ton hydraulic rams to do the lifting.  I hauled the 1500 lbs of posts out to the site and just needed to drill 8 holes in order to get the 9500lb container the 42" in the air so the trailer could be backed under it.

I had brought my large generator with me - I had bought it the previous fall brand new at the Home Depot - and, after running it for just a few hours to see what it could do, it had been sitting all winter and I had no idea the carb was gummed up.  It was pouring outside so I put the generator inside and I tried for a good hour to get it to run.  I only needed it for 20 mins to drill 8 holes and then I could drive the 25 miles back home.  It was getting very fume-rich inside that space as I pulled away on the handle.  Finally, in exasperation, I pulled the spark plug out and pulled on the handle a few times to see if I was getting enough gas - it was spraying out of the spark plug hole and I consciously knew I was approaching the LEL (lower explosive limit - where the fuel to air stoichiometry was the proper ratio for combustion).  The only thing that lacked was a spark.  I also knew, that might have been one of the things that was missing from the basic AIR/FUEL/IGNITION SOURCE of small engine troubleshooting.  I just needed to hook the spark plug on the end of the wire, place it next to the head of the engine and watch for the blue spark to eliminate that as the possible source of my headache.  I did not have the proper tools to rebuild the carb on the spot and I was not driving 25 miles in that rain just to get a lousy screw driver so I could drill 8 lousy holes!  My mind told me to not introduce a spark at that juncture - because the fireball would be substantial.  Another part of me was so fed up with the situation, it overrode logic.  Literally, something was screaming in my mind DON'T DO IT.  YOU WILL DIE!!!  My stubborn natural man said  I DON'T CARE IF I DIE (I really did - but I had had enough of fiddling around and it was getting dark, to boot).  I reached down and gave a crank on that handle as hard as I could on that cord of that Generac generator with less than 8 hours on it as my mind is screaming out not to do it. 

Two seconds later, I was standing in front of the generator shaking with the handle in my hand and the cord swinging in the air.  The knot had come undone and the generator did not even turn over one revolution - and produced no spark.  I was HUMBLED in an instant.  I knew immediately my bacon had been saved in spite of the screaming warning in my mind.  I set the cord down, walked out to the car and drove the 25 miles back home thanking my Maker the entire way home that someone or something had stepped in to save me from my own stubbornness and stupidity.

Always heed that warning voice - even when it is not so still and small as it can be sometimes......