Our RV Adventures

When I got up about 11 this morning, Jan was knee-deep in spring (winter?) cleaning in the rig. She had things emptied out from all the cabinets in the kitchen area, and was scrubbing them out, before cleaning the contents, and then replacing everything.

Thus there was no walk for us today. But it looks like it should be OK for tomorrow morning, so we’ll see how it goes.

While Jan finished up with her cleaning and putting stuff back where it goes, I worked on blog and website stuff. I’ve learned to only help Jan with this stuff when she directly asks me for help. Otherwise, it’s almost guaranteed that I’ll put something back where it doesn’t belong.

My Next Hack: Our daughter Brandi gave us this really nice bathroom soap dispenser for Christmas.

Bath & Body Works Touch Free SmartSoap Automatic Hand Soap Dispenser

It works great and there are a lot of different scent refills available online. But it has one almost certainly designed-in fault. It seems to spit out about twice as much soap as you really need to wash your hands.

Of course, if you’re the soap manufacturer, that’s exactly what you want it to do to sell more soap refills at $14.95 a pop.

So what I want to do is to figure out a way to change the amount of soap that comes out. And to do that I see two different possibilities. First I can try to change the actual amount of soap that comes out, based on how long the pump runs. And it’s a fixed amount, not dependent on how long you have your hand under the spigot.

Or I can try to hack the circuit so that the pump only runs as long as your hand is in place. Since the timing is possibly  hard-wired into the circuit, it may be easier to just bypass the timing circuit altogether, and wire it up so that the pump only runs as long as your hand is in front of the sensor.

So in the next few days, I’ll take it apart and see what I find. I’ll let you know how it goes.

I’m still trying to track down a new glass/LED screen for my  son Chris’ Galaxy S5 smartphone. As I recounted last weekend, when trying to replace the cracked glass, I found the underlying LED screen was also cracked. So now I’ve looking for a new screen combo, but I’m finding a lot of the one for sale are not OEM, but some 3rd party parts. And the online reviews of these are not very good.

So now I’m shopping around for an original Samsung model, with a decent price, and a quick delivery time. Hopefully I find something soon.

Tomorrow afternoon we’ll be getting together with some other RV friends, meeting them at the great BBQ buffet up at Peter’s BBQ up in Ellinger. Really looking forward to it.

“The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.” – William Gibson

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I was up at 8 am, way too early for me, and then about 9, Jan and I headed out for our day down in the Clear Lake area, missing out on walking, but since it was completely overcast, cold, and rainy, that was probably a washout anyway. Hopefully tomorrow will be lucky.

We made a fuel up/potty stop at the Flying J in Brookshire where I had planned to get a coffee/cappuccino combo for the road. But it looks like Flying J has screwed up their cappuccino selection.

I first noticed this a few weeks ago when we stopped at the Pilot/Flying J on I-45 north of Houston. They have two cappuccino machines, each with six spigots. In the past they’ve had a choice of probably 8 to 10 different flavors, like Hazelnut, French Vanilla, English Toffee, Pumpkin Spice, Mocha, Cinnamon Vanilla Nut, etc., I.e. fairly decent coffee/cappuccino flavors.

But now, at both Flying J’s, eight of the flavors are variations of French Vanilla, French Vanilla, Sugar-Free French Vanilla, Mocha French Vanilla, French Vanilla Alert (extra caffeine), etc.

The remaining 4 flavors were Hot Cocoa, Mexican Chocolate, Winter Dark Chocolate, and Raspberry Truffle (?).

Not exactly my favorite flavors of coffee. So until things change, no more coffee at Flying J for me.

Getting into Webster, we met our son Chris and his wife Linda a little after 11 at our favorite local Chinese place, King Food. It’s so good we’ve been eating here since 1978, almost 35 years. In fact we’re on our fourth owner.

Jan and I had our usual Chicken with Hot Garlic Sauce with jalapenos, Extra, extra spicy.

With Hot & Sour Soup, Fried Rice, and an Egg Roll, it’s a great meal, just  perfect for a cold, rainy day.

Finishing up, Jan and I headed off to get our haircuts, with me first dropping Jan off at the Friendswood SuperCuts, while I drove back down to Lou’s Barbershop where I’ve been going for almost 20 years, so long that I don’t even have to tell them how I want it cut.. Sheldon would say it’s because they have my haircut records.

Picking up Jan, I made a stop at O’Reilly Auto Parts to get a new gas cap for our Dodge Dakota. The old one gives me a Check Engine code every second or third tank of gas from removing and replacing it when I fill up. This should fix the problem. I hope.

Next stop was a nearby dry cleaners to drop off our summer quilt to have it cleaned. We have a lighter quilt that we use during the summer, and a heavier, winter one for the . . . well, the winter. So when we get back to Houston every fall, we drop it off at the cleaners, and switch over to our winter one that we left at our son Chris’. Then a week or so before we head out for the year, we swap back again, leaving the now cleaned winter one again with Chris.

After a client stop for a while, we drove over to the nearby Harris County Public Library so Jan could get a library card, not to check out any paper books, but so she check out Kindle books online. That way she won’t have to pay the high prices for mainstream publisher books, but can just check them out online.

By now it was after 3pm, and rather than hang around to have supper down here, we decided to head back toward home to get ahead of all the going home traffic on the Katy Freeway.

Along the way, we thought we’d stop off for dinner at the Grimaldi’s Pizzeria in the Katy area. Grimaldi’s has become our favorite pizza place, especially since they’ve spread out across the country.

When we first ate at one in 2009, it was at the original (and only) one, located in Brooklyn, NY under the Brooklyn Bridge (DUMBO) area.

Heading home, we made a pit stop at the Sealy Oasis, a new large convenience store about 15 miles out of Columbus, before getting back to the rig a little after 7pm.

Another nice day and good times.

Our granddaughter Piper is on a ski trip with some girlfriends in Breckenridge, CO this week, and sent back this photo.

That’s Piper on the left. Looks cold.

Thought for the Day:

“All pop music is about sex. Rock is about wanting to do it, jazz is about doing it, and country and western is about feeling guilty after you’ve done it.” – Robert Waldo Brunelle, Jr.

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