Adsense Revenue Appreciation: A Candle In The Dark

Deep in the night of April 16, 2009, Adsense revenue was hardly uppermost in my mind. My first magical Google Adsense check in the amount of $108.55 had arrived in the mail unexpectedly a couple of months earlier, but aside from cashing it immediately and using the proceeds to purchase three tiny, handheld radios for communication between vehicles during our upcoming move, I hadn't given it much thought.

What did require total focus was the clock. Having been accustomed to the paychecks that went with a rigorous, dangerous, exhausting job driving big rig water tankers in the western Colorado drilling boom, we'd been briskly slapped upside the head when the boom went bust. Not totally bust, but such a severe slowdown in business that my employer had to go reluctantly into survival mode. I did not get laid off, but I did lose twelve hours of $34.50 per hour overtime per week.

Since all the belt tightening in the world didn't quite cut off a continuing slow drain of our financial reserves, I told Pam it was time to get out of Dodge while the gettin' was good. She leaves those decisions up to me, but she also happened to agree wholeheartedly. Then I added,

"Let's get you back home to Sierra Vista (Arizona). I'll find us a cheaper place to live, and we'll go from there."

She lit up with pure joy when she heard that. Cochise County is her favorite area on the entire planet, not to mention that her favorite child, her only son, Zachary, lives here. But now, as 2:30 a.m. of April 17 rushed down upon us, her candle sputtered badly. My wife is both physically and mentally ill. No, she doesn't mind me saying so. Any change of residence turns her into a basket case. She pushes her body beyond the point of sanity, doing more than she should in an attempt to shoulder as much of the load as possible.

And she was out of it.

I'd quit my job in late March to allow time for packing. Zach had flown up to spend the final week helping out and to drive one of the rigs southward from Colorado to Arizona. Pam, as stated, did all she could and more than she should. We'd not made the April mortgage payment and would never make another, deliberately abandoning our two year old home to foreclosure despite never having been late on even one payment prior to that.

Yet we still had to scramble. Pam was losing it, yet she was going to have to drive the Subaru Outback because of a U-Haul glitch: So many people had been leaving Colorado that when we picked up the truck to start loading, no auto transport trailer was available in the entire state. In her current state, every extra ten minutes of delay in departure risked a seizure, and she'd already fallen over the ramp support cable on our two wheeled cargo trailer, crashing all of her ninety-two pounds face-down on the concrete sidewalk. Zach and I insisted she stay in the car until we could finally get going, listening to Garth Brooks and talking with the pets we already had loaded, but her son and I were scared.

Though not as scared as we were going to be.

At 2:19 a.m., our little convoy pulled away from the curb in Parachute and headed west. Radio checks confirmed that the tiny radios purchased with Adsense revenue were performing as advertised. I was filled with appreciation.

I just didn't know how strong that appreciation was going to get.

As we lined out on I-70, I led in the U-Haul truck. We placed Pam and the Subaru in the middle with Zach riding in rear guard position. At this time of night, we could only judge each other's position by watching headlights and/or taillights, but the radios were working, traffic was light to nonexistent, we were jazzed to actually be on the road, and things seemed to be progressing in good order.

One of the reasons for a middle of the night departure had been my desire to pass the westbound Port of Entry near mile marker 14 while the Port was closed. Though most of the time the D.O.T. folks don't bother with chasing down U-Haul trucks for driving on by without stopping, any risk at all was truly unacceptable: Though I've long been a commercially licensed driver packing a CDL, I was leading not one but two unlicensed drivers on this epic journey. Pam has been a race driver and certainly qualifies as an expert behind the wheel, and Zach is a twenty-three year old who can outdrive a whole pack of police at one shot. Trouble is, Zach did did do just that in 2006 and hadn't quite managed to get his license back yet, while Pam has an ages old argument with the state of New Mexico that stubbornly refuses to get resolved.

Thankfully, the Port came and went slick as a hick slidin' into the crick. A few miles farther on, at an exit labeled Rabbit Valley, I knew of a great hidey hole where we could park for a few hours and get some sleep. Though Pam would have preferred to continue on through the rest of the night, wired on adrenaline and ready to rock, I knew Zach and I would be fools not to pull over.

Even before we got there, though, the first Travelin' Trouble reared its snakebitey head: Calling me on the Adsense Radio Station, as we had goofily started calling our little communication devices, he announced that the 1996 GMC pickup he was driving...was having great difficulty topping some of the steep hills in that area. When he could get a strong enough run at a hill, no problem, but otherwise....

All three of us are mechanically inclined, Zach certainly being no exception. By the time we had stopped for the night, he knew the exact problem: The automatic transmission had lost second gear entirely. Overdrive, okay. Third gear, okay. But try to shift down to second, and the poor, hardworking thing just couldn't manage to do it. Same way for upshifting; it had to make the long leap from first to third, every time. Not only that, but the transmission fluid checked out as being low when we investigated--which had not been the case before we left Parachute--and we had more than 700 miles left to go.

Pam immediately reminded us that she had a bottle of Slick 50 transmission additive we could add to the Jimmy's tranny. Slick 50 is the only oil additive for either engine or transmission we trust in the slightest, but that one? Trust is absolute. I made an on the spot funnel from a piece of heavy paper (you just roll the paper into a tight cone with a small opening at the bottom) and added the additive. That brought the fluid level back up to Full, we all breathed a sigh of at least momentary relief, and it was time to get some rest.

Come daylight, we got back on the road in pretty good order. Zach was coaxing the pickup as expertly as anyone could have done, and the other two vehicles were running smoothly. But there was Trouble in Paradise, and it didn't take long to start scaring us.

Pam tells us to this day that she did not have such a problem during those first nighttime miles, but somewhere along the line she had experienced a stroke. We didn't realize this until later, which turned out to be a blessing in disguise: Had Zach and I known, we'd have shut down the entire operation until we figured out the next desperate move. But we didn't know. None of us did.

What Pam did know was that the right side of her body, including the foot that controlled both gas and brake pedals, refused to do precisely as commanded by her brain. The diagnosis was delayed by another confusing factor: Our monster twenty pound kitty cat, Moe Key Man, insisted on trying to wedge himself under her pedal foot. We solved that by stuffing his chubby tail into the cage near the Subaru's cargo hatch, but the problems persisted. It didn't help Pam's mental state that she could hear Moe Key crying about being caged for at least two hours, either.

Most terrifying of all, Pam's lane position really suffered. Her vehicle wandered, not constantly but all too often, drifting from side to side. This is not Pam. Since we were now in broad daylight, the drifting was all too terrifyingly obvious to Zach as he watched from rear guard as well as to me as I constantly checked my rear view mirrors. On occasion, her fading ability to control the Outback allowed my beloved wife (and of course Zach's beloved mother) to put herself at risk outside the lane lines.

"Mom!" I would hear Zach calling Pam over the Adsense Network, "You're over the line!"

I was beginning to appreciate the gravity of the situation. My lady's ability to "Cowgirl Up" in any crisis has always earned my appreciation, but something obviously had to be done. After leaving I-70 in eastern Utah and heading south on the two lane road--making Pam's frequent lane violations even more horrifying for one and all, especially for oncoming traffic and the young man who thought he might well see his mother literally go up in flames before his eyes--we finally stopped for breakfast and to fuel up.

Now it was obvious to me that my unstoppable little honey was pretty close to getting stopped once and for all. Magically, I could see a U-Haul dealership right across the road from the restaurant. The Internal Revenue Service might or might not agree that it was a deductible moving expense, but an auto transport trailer had to be found. Maybe this dealership would have one....

They did not.

Understanding my desperation, the dealer promptly went the extra mile, calling other dealers. He started with the first such, then went right down the line, town after town, proceeding along our projected line of travel. It took a while and several calls, but in the end, he found one...still in Utah, some 155 miles down the road. If Pam could manage another three hours behind the wheel.

She made it, but to say it was a near thing would be the understatement of the decade. Once, she actually drifted into the oncoming lane, avoiding a headon collision with a midsized red car at the last second as that frightened driver prepared to dive over the embankment and take his chances. Our Adsense revenue radios were frantically busy with verbal warnings from both Zach and me, so much so that Pam finally threw hers across the car seat and screamed at it,

"Shut up!! I need to keep both hands on the wheel!!"

Severely rattled and upset at her body's refusal to operate properly, she pulled the Subaru in "hot" at the U-Haul dealership where I could see not one but two auto transport trailers ready to be rented. Zach and I were all over the airwaves, warning her to slow down while parking, to no avail. Her failing body didn't quite get the wagon stopped in time, and she slammed the right front corner into the left rear tire of a parked pickup. Fortunately, it was a Bigfoot tire, a true monster, so she hit nothing but rubber. Even with that, though, she bounced the truck ahead a good foot or so, not to mention marking her vehicle's bumper and slightly denting the fender.

Zach and I were gesturing and yelling through the closed window at her, trying desperately to aid her attempt to get safely parked. She backed up, pulled over to the next stop, and hit that car, too. Well, not really hit it, more like came to a stop with the bumper just firmly touching the bumper hitch. But contact, definitely contact.

No damage to anything but our Outback and not much of that. For the rest of the move, the Subaru (with pets inside) rode on the trailer behind the U-Haul. Pam rode shotgun in the wounded GMC with Zach. A few hours after shifting roles from driver to passenger, it suddenly hit her: She'd had a stroke. I knew immediately that her diagnosis was correct. She and I have seen her through any number of ministrokes, but this one had gone beyond "mini".

My wife had just managed to drive nearly three hundred miles immediately after a stroke and lived to tell the tale.

The title of this story, Adsense Appreciation: A Candle In The Dark, might lead the reader to logically conclude the candle being discussed is Adsense itself. Almost. But not quite. Pam is my candle, emitting a glow that chases the dark by her very existence in my life. On the other hand, if you think I have more than a little appreciation for that $108.55 Google Adsense check that went to purchase the radios that kept her alive, you'd be right.

Thanks for reading,

Ghost32