Our RV Adventures

Eat your heart out, Nick!

Jan and I headed out about 3pm to meet some friends for dinner up in Clear Lake. But that wasn’t until 5pm so we had some errands in mind to take up the slack.

Our first stop was the EZ-Pawn on SR 146. Jan was looking for a DVD copy of both Finding Nemo and Monsters Inc. for Landon this Christmas. They’re on sale locally and online, but only combined with the Blu-Ray version for about $30 each. That’s $60 that we could spend on toys for him.

So Jan had the idea to check out some pawn shops in the area since they usually have used DVD’s for sale. So while Jan was checking out the DVD’s (which weren’t in alphabetical order) I just happened to wander over to the firearms area. And as I was checking out all the nice toys, and making a list and checking it twice, I heard a salesman talking to a guy about lasers. I assumed he was talking about laser sights, but I was wrong.

He was talking about a laser target shooting system by LaserLyte, a company that also makes laser sights. It works with a pistol of pretty much any standard caliber, and allows you to target practice indoors or out, at a distance of up to 50 yards, using your own gun.

It consists of two parts, an electronic target, and

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a caliber specific laser cartridge. The batteries in the cartridge are good for about 6000 shots, and it comes with a extra set.

You simply insert the cartridge into the chamber and close the slide or cylinder. When you pull the trigger the firing pin hits the pressure sensitive bottom of the shell, firing the laser.

If you hit anywhere on the target, it remembers the location, but does not display it. You can make multiple hits on the target before checking your score.

You do that by firing at the small red dot on the lower left of the target box. The location of all your hits are then displayed on the target. You can then reset the system and start over by shooting the small red dot on the lower right.

By this time Jan had given up her search and come over to the counter. As she watch the salesman demonstrate it, she looked at me and said “Buy it. It’ll be your Christmas present.”

Just another reason I love her.

So I left the pawn shop with my new toy, the target system and a 9mm laser cartridge. He didn’t have any .380 cartridges, but should have some in on Tuesday. They don’t make them for my .25 cal., but I wouldn’t get one for it anyway.

I paid a little bit more, but you can get the target system on Amazon for about $130, and each different caliber laser cartridge for about $83.

We checked two other pawn shops for the DVD with no luck, and I didn’t find anymore new toys either. I’ll probably try eBay next for the DVD’s.

After stopping by the house to check the mail, we headed over to meet our friend’s Bob and Beth Young at Abe’s Cajun Market.

We’ve driven by this place for years, and although we love Cajun food, we just never stopped. Maybe because we always got our Cajun fix quenched at Floyd’s Cajun Seafood.

It was good to get together with Bob and Beth, We’ve known them for a long time and watched their 5 kids grow up. The last two, twin girls, are in high school now, and we remember when they were born. Time flies fast.

And it looks like we now have a second great Cajun place. Their gumbos was delicious. I had the sampler platter which had small portions of their seafood gumbo, chicken and sausage gumbo, red beans and rice, crawfish etoufee, and sweet corn chowder, along with a piece of pretty good cornbread.

It seems like most places use a mixture of cornmeal and wheat flour, along with too much sugar, so it tastes more like cake than real cornbread.

Real cornbread is made from coarse-ground cornmeal, baking powder, eggs, milk, and just enough sugar so that the crust browns, and then cooked in a cast-iron skillet or pan.

Once again, It Should Not Taste Like Cake!

As I said, Abe’s cornbread was pretty good. The texture was right, and it didn’t seem to have any flour in it, but it had a little too much sugar. But it was better than any store-bought cornbread I’ve had in a good while.

BTW, when you buy a bag of corn meal at the store, double check the ingredients. I’ve come across several brands that have wheat flour in them to start with.

After a great time with old friends, and a really good meal, we said our goodbyes and made plans to do this again soon. Then it was down the road for a Wal-Mart stop before we headed home for the night.

Now to play with my new toy!

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Thought for the Day:

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and it may be necessary from time to time to give a stupid or misinformed beholder a black eye. – Miss Piggy

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Today was pretty quiet. After an easy morning, I left the rig a little after 1:30pm and headed up to the Clear Lake area for a couple of client visits and a stop at Sam’s Club for a prescription.

Along the way I stopped for gas and was amazed. Yesterday Unleaded was $2.92 at the Wal-Mart up in Kemah.

Today it was $2.69. YES $2.69!

And Diesel is $3.39. Don’t know what is happening, but I hope it keeps up.

Next up was a stop at a couple of clients. One of them had a new Sony Vaio laptop that they couldn’t get to connect to their office WiFi system. It turned out that the problem was that it was locked into WEP encryption mode, but the office system uses the better, safer, WPA2 encryption.

Normally the WiFi software has a drop-down menu so you can select the one you want use, or it will even set it automatically based on what your router is set for, but this one was different. I had to go into the adapter settings and enable the other encryptions.

And this was a brand-new laptop running Windows 7. Most people don’t use WEP anymore because it’s so easy to break. Why in the world it would default to WEP I can’t understand.

After checking in with the 2nd client I headed over to Sam’s to pick up a prescription and a case of bottled water. I was kind of dreading stopping by there because of Christmas shopping, and the fact that there’s a Wal-Mart right next door, compounding the problem, but it wasn’t bad at all.

As I tried to get on I-45S to go back to the rig, I ran into a lot of traffic around Baybrook Mall. And a lot of smoke. Turns out there was a car fire in the northbound lane, and a lot of rubberneckers on the southbound side.

I finally got back to the rig about 4:30 and then Jan and I headed right back up to the Kemah Chili’s for dinner. They have a great new soup, Southwest Chicken and Sausage, that I probably could eat every day.

Then heading home, we stopped off at a nearby Walgreen’s for a few things.

And that was about it. A pretty easy day.

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Thought for the Day:

"Environmentalists changed the word "jungle" to "rain forest," because no one would give them money to save a jungle."

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