Our RV Adventures

I found out last night that Jan and I will be giving our Gate Guarding seminar at the upcoming 56th Escapees Escapade, July 24th – 29th, in Essex Junction, Vermont.

We first gave this seminar, “Gate Guarding for Fun? and Profit”, at the 55th Escapade last March in Tucson, AZ, and with another episode of gate guarding under our belt, we’ve got even more good info to pass on.

See You There!

Jan and I headed out for our walk this morning a little after 11, and with the sunshine, 50° temps, and just a little wind, it was about perfect walking weather. The only problem is that we know too many people here. So, between meeting up with Jim and Claudia Horak, Dave and Janice Evans, and Ed and Debi Hurlburt, our minutes/mile rating on Runkeeper was pretty useless.

But we had a great time catching up with everyone, and even better, extended our walk to 1.21 miles, our longest yet. Hopefully in the next few weeks we’ll get back up to 2 miles, where we were a while back.

About 2:30 Jan and I made a trip into Columbus to pick up a few things. I needed a few things from the hardware store, Jan wanted some things from Brookshire Bros. and I wanted to pick up some lottery tickets for the $145 Million Mega Millions drawing tonight and the $450 Million Powerball drawing tomorrow night.

You can’t win if you don’t play.

But before we left the park, we stopped off to say ‘Hi’ to Gordon Pendergast and his wife Merlyn. They’re parked in their 5th wheel up on the ‘A’ loop, but they’re leaving Thursday so we’ll have to catch them back at Lake Conroe for dinner.

Passing the Colorado County Oil Co-op, I saw diesel for $1.85 a gallon, the lowest I’ve seen so far. I’ll probably fill up the next time we’re back over here, and if I’m lucky, it’ll be even cheaper then.

For dinner tonight we were going to finish off the last of the Christmas dinner leftovers, but since they were getting kind of skimpy, Jan wanted to bulk it up with some mashed potatoes, so we decided to try the Ore-Ida Steam n Mash Potatoes.

They turned out to be very easy, and very good. Not just some powder stuff, but these are actual chunks of Russet potatoes that you just steam in the bag in your microwave. Cook for 6 minutes, let them rest for 2 minutes, and pour into a bowl. Then mash and mix with 2/3 cup of milk and 2 Tbsp. of butter. Then serve and eat.

And we both thought these were really good, probably as good as any mashed potatoes we’ve had. Recommended.

I got an email today from Spartan Chassis announcing their new Spartan Mobile App called Spartan Connected Care. Available for both Android and Apple, it will give you diagnostic codes specific to your make, model and year, maintenance schedules, service locations, pre-trip inspection lists, shows & rallies where Spartan reps will be attending, and more. So check it out.

If you have a Freightliner chassis, they have something similar called Freightliner 24/7 Direct.

Tomorrow we’re driving down to the Clear Lake area to spend the day taking care of some errands, and catching up with some friends. Looking forward to it.

Thought for the Day:

“Sometimes I lie awake at night, and I ask, ‘Where have I gone wrong?’ Then a voice says to me, ‘This is going to take more than one night.'” —  Charlie Brown in Peanuts

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With temps in the 50’s, and a lot of sun, it was perfect for a walk this morning.
But I had to map up a new 1 mile trek for us since we’re parked closer to the river this time, and not up on the ‘A’ Loop where our previous route was located.

So I ended up with us doing a double loop around the ‘C’ and ‘D’ roads.

During our walk we did check out the Colorado River for the first time since the recent flooding. There was more water there than we’ve seen in the past, but not a lot really.

We did see the riverbank cave-in, another flooding leftover. They’ve got it roped off, but it doesn’t look like they plan to do anything about it.

Along the way we ran into Janice Evans, Debi Hurlburt, and I think, Claudia Horak and Lynette Starwalt in the back seat. They were on a girl’s day out and were coming back for a left-behind cellphone.

Getting back to the rig, we sat out in the sun with our coffee and breakfast bread, enjoying the sunshine and the nice views.

Back inside, Jan read and I worked on several projects before getting back to my cellphone repair.

Well, the operation was a success, but . . .

I worked a little longer on my son Chris’ Galaxy S5 cellphone, to remove and replace the cracked front glass.

The actual removal process went fairly smoothly, just time-consuming.

Getting to this point by using a hair dryer, it took a couple of hours of slowly and carefully prying off the glass. At this point, I put the battery back in, turned the unit on, and it still worked.

But things went quickly downhill after that.  When I completely separated the glass from the LED/digitizer board underneath, I discovered that the thing I had been trying to avoid, cracking the LED, had been pre-done for me. The board was already cracked along a crack in the glass itself, but it was still working because glass glued on top was holding it all together. But as soon as I removed the glass, the LED screen came apart and just up and died.

Bummer!

So now we’ll have to go the more expensive route and replace the $125 glass/screen combo rather than the $10 glass that I already bought. I guess I can save it in case I break my glass, but I have an Otterbox on mine which makes it a lot harder to break.

Later in the afternoon, our ex-next door neighbor’s Bonnie and Vance Clegg stopped by to say “Hi”.

They were parked next to us when we were here at Colorado River a couple of weeks ago, and are still in the same space up in the ‘A’ loop. But somebody was already in our A2 space, so we had to park down here this time.

Thought for the Day:

‘God doesn’t play dice with the universe” – Albert Einstein

“God does not play dice. He plays hide and seek.” –  Woody Allen

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