Our RV Adventures

Much Needed Rest!

With our first down day in a while, Jan and I both just vegged out today. I only went outside to tighten down a leaking water hose connection, and that was it.

About 1pm I started putting together a beef stew in the slow cooker. Back in the fall of 2013 a Company Man on one of our gates gave us two beautiful 1-1/2 pound boneless ribeye steaks, already frozen and vacuum-sealed. We tucked them away in the freezer and kind of forgot about them.

We came across them the other day while sorting through the freezer contents, working on using up stuff to make it easier to defrost  soon. And since I didn’t want  to pull our Weber Q200 out, only to find out we’re out of propane, we decide to go with a really good beef stew.

We’d had them thawing out for the last couple of days so they were good to go.

And it was amazing how good these steaks still looked . . . like they just came from the store.

I trimmed some of the excess fat off and then cut them into cubes. Then it was into the slow cooker with a can of mushroom soup, a can of water, and a few pearl onions.

After adding salt, a lot of coarse black pepper, and a healthy dose of

Arizona Black Scorpion Sting for some heat, I put the cooker on high, and let it go for a couple of hours before I added the potatoes, carrots, parsnips, and the rest of the pearl onions.

And after another couple of hours, dinner was served.

Jan toasted up some Hawaiian Bread Rolls to go with it, and it was a real feast. The meat was very tender without being mushy, and the flavor was delicious, with enough heat to make the top of my head sweat. So it was perfect.

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And there’s leftovers, too.

Readers from last October and November will remember my quixotic search for boot laces that would last more than a month or so. I lace my boots really tight for the ankle support (needed from jumping out of a perfectly good airplane one too many times.) and so my laces only last a couple of months before they snap.

So loyal reader Lloyd Jackson suggested I get some Paracord and make my own.

You can read more about it here: I Made My Own

And these homemade Paracord laces have been great, going over six months with out a problem. Until this happened.

Karma the Kitty decided she need a new chew toy and it seems my boots, and the laces filled the bill.

So this evening I made up a new set, but this time I added some color.

We’ll see how long these last.

Jan and I’ve been following the flooding news on the TX/LA border, with I-10 possibly closed until next Monday. So it was interested to find this photo online.

That group of buildings is the what remains of the big Welcome Center / Rest Area as you come into Texas from Louisiana. Looks like it’s going to be a while until it reopens.

Wrapping up, I want to highly recommend a book that Jan and I both really enjoyed. It’s not often that you come across a book that makes you constantly laugh out loud, but also pulls at you heartstrings, hard.

it’s the true story of a young boy growing with a neurological condition called Synesthesia, causing him to see black and white text like this.

Growing up he thought everyone saw the world like this. But colored text was only small part of what he saw. Everything had its own color, and the colors changed as the objects moved.

But a few slips along the way, like when he was talking to a Little League friend about hitting, and told his friend he liked to hit the ball right behind the glowing orange tentacles, convinced him there was something wrong with him, and that everyone didn’t see things the way he did.

And it was only in college when he discovered what he had, and that there was a name for it.

Read this book. You will definitely enjoy it. And it’s only .99 cents

The Toaster Oven Mocks Me

The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools.

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This whole ‘getting up at 7am’ thing is just getting out of hand, but we did it again this morning, the 4th time in the last 5 days, and hopefully the last  one until next week.

We were on the road by 8am heading down to Clear Lake this time, for our second to last doctor visit, this one to go over our recent lab work for possible prescription changes. Then Jan has the same thing next Friday with her oncologist.

Our appointment was for 10:15, so I allowed the usual two hours for the hour and 20 minute trip to cover the normal rush hour slowdowns in Houston traffic. But I guess Spring Break has really thinned things out, because our trip only took 90 minutes getting us at the doctor’s office at 9:30. So we just sat in the truck, listened to the radio, and napped until it was time to go in.

Inside, Jan found to her dismayed surprise that they wanted to take some more blood to run a couple of additional tests.

Now I’ve seen Jan stomp on scorpions wearing tennis shoes, and watch tarantulas walk right in front of her (without stomping on them), but she is terrified of needles. She can’t watch while she’s being stuck, and she can’t just close her eyes. She actually has to look away. It’s probably the main reason she went into Medical Records rather than Nursing.

For normal office visits, she kind of psyches herself up, knowing she’s going to have it done, but today was a complete surprise, and she turned white as a sheet. I was a little worried that she might faint, but she came through OK.

I, on the other hand, have passed out in a doctor’s office. But it was Jan’s fault on that one too.

A little over 10 years ago Jan was having trouble with her thyroid, and the doctor wanted do a needle biopsy. And yes, that means sticking a big, long needle through the front of her neck and into her thyroid. And then moving the needle around to get samples from different areas. And I was along to hold her hand and provide aid and comfort. Unfortunately there was no one doing that for me.

Now I’ve seen compound fractures with bones jutting out, gunshot wounds, knife wounds, and fingers torn off in accidents, I’ve watched doctor’s stitch me up, and watched one doctor as he sewed the end of my thumb back on. I even found my first dead body when I was 5 years old. (Yes, I’ve led a very interesting life at times.)

I don’t know why, but that kind of thing just doesn’t bother me. But sitting there with Jan that day, as she gripped my hand so tightly that her nails were drawing blood, and listening to her whimper in pain as the needle was going in, I apparently reached my limit.

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Everything swirled around me as I got cold, and then I hit the floor. Now Jan can’t move, she’s got a big needle in her neck. And the doctor can’t move, he’s holding the big needle in Jan’s neck. So he calls out to his nurse for help.

“June, June, come in here quick!”

Now what Jan couldn’t see, and the doctor didn’t notice, was that my head was in the path of the soon-to-be-opening door. So just as I was coming to, Nurse June flings the door open to see what all the excitement is about.

“Whomp!”

And I was out again.

The next thing I remember is sitting up in a chair with Nurse June handing me a cup of water. Once my vision settled down to showing me only one cup at a time, I brought to my mouth to take a sip. At this point, for some unknown reason, Nurse June decided it was the perfect time to snap an ammonia capsule (aka smelling salts) under my nose.

I don’t know if you’ve ever had this done to you. but for me, it caused an inhalation of vacuum cleaner strength, sucking all the water from the cup in through my nose.

Now my friend Nick Russell had caused me to squirt hot coffee OUT of my nose a couple of times, and it hurts like hell. But this was a whole nuther level of pain. For some reason water going in hurts a whole lot more than hot coffee coming out. I know, it seems like it would be the opposite. But No, it’s not.

So now between the ammonia capsule, and the water entering my nose, it takes me a few seconds to realize I have a whole new problem. I can’t breathe.

Now I’ve visualized a lot of different ways I might die, and come very close to achieving a few of them. But drowning in a doctor’s office didn’t make my Top Ten. Or my Top One Thousand, for that matter.

But after a minute or so of Nurse June pounding me on my back, and me leaning over with the water dribbling back out of my mouth, I finally started wheezing a few breaths in and out. But now, since Jan doesn’t have a thyroid anymore, hopefully we’re both safe from another occurrence like that.

We were out of the doctor’s office by 11:30 and on our way to meet our son, Chris, at King Food for lunch. Just Chris this time, since Linda was working, and Miss Piper was still asleep after getting off the night shift at UTMB in Galveston.

After the usual delicious King Food meal, Jan and Chris headed back to the house while I drove over to a clients for an hour or so. Then it was back to the house for me to pick up Jan. Since due to our early start this morning, we didn’t have coffee, we made a quick stop at Starbuck’s for a couple of Smoked Butterscotch Lattes before hitting I-10 north.

Finally, wrapping this up, I want to thank Debi and Ed Hurlburt for the very nice site they apparently saved for us. As I mentioned yesterday, they came by to offer us their site that they were vacating this morning. They knew from the blog that were looking for a new site where our right side tires weren’t six inches off the ground.

But since we were leaving so early this morning, we figured it wouldn’t work out.  However, when we got back to the park this afternoon about 4:45, I drove through the ‘G’ section to check things out.

And very surprisingly, both Debi and Ed’s site, and the site from the Binns, their friends right across the road, were still vacant. So seeing our chance, I dropped Jan off at the rig and then drove the truck back over to park it in the site to save it, and walked back to the rig about 4 rows away.

Getting back to the rig at 5:05, we were packed up and moving by 5:45, and parked and plugged in by 6:00pm. A new record, I think.

So thanks again, Debi and Ed.

Thought for the Day:

“You need to be fearful when others are greedy, and greedy when others are fearful.” – Warren Buffett

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