Our RV Adventures

Last Tuesday, the 15th, I mailed off two packages via the USPS’ Priority Mail. One of them went to my friend Nick Russell, who’s up in Washington State with his wife Terry. The other one went to my daughter-in-law Linda, who’s down south of Houston, in Friendswood, TX. Both of them were supposed to arrive yesterday, Thursday.

But only one of them did, the one to Nick. The tracking on both showed them leaving Carthage for Shreveport, La Tuesday night, but after that, the paths differ. Nick’s package went on to Portland, OR, and then Seaview, WA where he picked it up today. And the tracking showed all that, including what time he picked it up at the Post Office today.

However, Linda’s package went to Shreveport and then disappeared, at least according to the tracking. According to that, it’s still sitting in Shreveport. So if it doesn’t show up by Monday, I’ll have to call them.

Nothing’s ever easy. But then if it was, life would be really boring.

Today was grocery day/errand day so I headed into Carthage about 11am. And after my Wal-Mart stop and before my Chicken stop, I stopped in at Tractor Supply. I wanted to pick up a couple of electric fence posts to mount my Mighty Mule Driveway Monitor transmitters on.

The higher I can get the transmitter, the further away I can receive the signal. And these 4 ft plastic electric fence posts are perfect.

The Mighty Mule works by sensing large pieces of metal moving by, i.e., cars and trucks. Which means it’s not affected by wind, light, pets, etc., just metal. But this also means that it doesn’t like any metal nearby, because it reduces the sensitivity of the system. So these plastic ones are perfect for that.

I think I mentioned that I was going to order another Mighty Mule to cover trucks leaving the pad, so I was happy to see that Tractor Supply had one in stock, and I probably would have gotten it, but the box had been opened, as well as the fact that it was $10 more than on Amazon, so I took a pass on it.

Used and more expensive is a bad combination.

Coming home, I made a stop at our new favorite place, Chicken Express. And this time I was in and out pretty quickly since I didn’t let anyone in line ahead of me who ordered 250 chicken tenders.

I only fall for that once.

Well, maybe twice if she was cute.

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Thought for the Day:

“I babble, therefore I am?” – Tisiphone to Ravirin

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I certainly hope so, because we’ve got 3 or 4 days of mid to high 90’s in store before it cools back down. At least unlike before, where we also had mid 70’s at night, we’ll still have night temps in the 60’s. And by Monday we’re supposed to be back down in high 80’s to low 90’s. We can hope.

As of this morning, our water heater is back in full operation. This morning I replaced both the ECO cutout and the thermostat with the new parts that came in from Amazon yesterday.

Turns out that when I got into it, my water heater doesn’t use the stick-on method of installation, but the parts are held on behind a metal plate. The new ones also come with springs to press them against the side of metal tank.

And just to help things along, I found a tube of thermal paste left over from my computer-building days and used a dab of that on each thermostat to help the heat transfer. Thermal paste was used between the top of the computer’s CPU and the heatsink/fan to help cool the CPU as much as possible.

After I finished the installation and tightened everything down, I turned on power to the water heater and used my voltmeter to check things out. Measuring from ground, I found I now had voltage all the way through to the heating element, so it appeared to be working. But the big test would be when I took my shower tonight.

The frack has been shut down since early this morning while they prepare to switch to the second of three holes they’re doing at this site. So it’s been relatively quiet all day with only 100 vehicles coming through, rather than the 125 to 130 we’ve been running.

So I decided this might be a good time to take the trash down and drop it off on the pad. We hadn’t seen the usual wire-sided trash trailer come through, so we were wondering what they were doing for trash onsite. I had been dropping our trash off at the Whataburger’s dumpster after getting permission from the manager.

But then a few days ago one of the workers mentioned that they did have one on the pad, but rather than the wire one, it was an open-top goose-neck gondola type trailer.

I found it all the way at the back of the pad, and threw my bags in with no problem. While I was there, I was surprised to see actually how much equipment is on site.

This is what it looked like before they started the frack,

but now it’s just wall to wall trucks, trailers, pumps, and cranes. There’s just barely enough room to drive around the sides.

Finally getting my shower this evening, I found everything working fine. One thing I did notice was the water temperature. When we started using it on propane all the time, I was surprised to find how much hotter the water was on gas than when we were on electric, figuring it was just the difference in the two heat sources. But tonight’s shower on electric was just as hot as one on gas, so I figure that thermostat had been slowly dying before it finally quit for good.

I mentioned yesterday that I’d gotten an Amazon Echo with my order that came in yesterday. I’m going to wait a few days before I talk about it so that I can give you more info.

But for now, I LIKE IT!

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Thought for the Day:

I used to be indecisive. Now I’m not so sure.

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