Our RV Adventures

Jan and I were on the road for the 2 hour trip down to Seabrook, TX  by 10am to meet up at T-Bone Tom’s for a reunion of Taft Broadcasting’s NASA group employees.

Our last reunion was in 2007 at the Outpost in Webster (that doesn’t even exist anymore) so it’s been a while since most of us had gotten together. And before that, it had been 20 years since some of us had seen each other. So  it was good to see so many friends again. We had almost 20 people there, so it was a good turn-out.

And what was even better was how quickly we seemed to pick right back up regaling each other with almost-forgotten tales of wild times out at White Sands, and stories about people and things at JSC here in Houston.

But the biggest thing was the fact that we all got OLD!  I mean I had just turned 30 when I started at JSC in December of 1978, and now I’ll be 68 in October. And when we moved here our son Chris was 10, but he just turned 48 a couple of weeks ago.

After a really great time, and the great food at T-Bone Tom’s, the party started breaking up around 3:30. For some reason we just can’t party all night like we used to.

I want to give a big shout out to Perry and Molly (Quintero) Kuhns for putting all this together again. Thanks guys.

Don’t wait too long to do another one. There might not be too many of us left.

Finally heading home we made a Buc-ee’s stop for gas and Cranberry Walnut muffins, before our next stop at our son Chris’ to pick up the new Captain’s Chair armrests he had made up for us.

The old ones on the left were made from OSB board and they started coming apart as the glue broke down and the screws wobbled out. Another case of old age taking its toll.

So Chris made up these new ones out of 2 x 4’s and plywood. I’ll take the metal pivot arm off the old ones and install it on the new wood. Then I’ll put the foam back on with the leather cover. And they be good for another 17 years. Or more.

Getting back home about 6, I packed up Barbara Spade’s laptop and took it over to her rig. After de-gunking the computer, I increased the memory from 2GB to 4GB,  which will speed things up considerably.

I had left the MemTest86 running for over 36 hours to be sure she wouldn’t have any problems. And nothing showed up.

But when you run a long-term test like this, you have to be aware that you may get an occasional random error caused by cosmic rays

An article by Berke Durak  calculates that your probability of having at least one bit error in 4 gigabytes of memory at sea level on planet Earth in 72 hours is over 95%.

Of course that assumes you are using non-error-correcting memory (non-ECC). With ECC, he figured, you can wait 2.7 million years before you get an uncorrectable bit error at a probability of 96%.

And since Barbara’s Toshiba laptop uses non-ECC ram, I guess it’s lucky no errors showed up.

On a recent forum, people were discussing kids being punished unfairly by teachers for disagreeing with them, and I said that it was nothing new.

When I was in 3rd grade, 1956 or so, I got a spanking, when the teacher told another student that he would get lead poisoning writing on his arm with a pencil, i.e. pencil lead.

When I told her pencil lead wasn’t really lead, but carbon like charcoal, she said I was wrong, I said, “No, you’re wrong.”

That got me a spanking and 30 minutes standing in the corner. Then at the end of class, as we were leaving, she overhead me mumbling “She’s still wrong”, and I got another spanking.

I guess that was my version of Galileo’s “And yet it still moves.”

Unfortunately two spankings in one day was not my record. That would be three.

And now don’t you feel sorry for Jan for having to put up with me for almost 49 years.

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For us at least, the weather has really been nice here for the last two days. With temps in the high 70’s/low 80’s, and night temps in the high 60’s, it’s been almost perfect.

Once again, the morning and early afternoon was consumed by website work, this time by two different sites, trying to iron out some small fiddly bits, and one bigger one.

I had mentioned before about setting up a MySQL database on one website, and that I was having trouble getting it to work. Well, after talking with Godaddy today I confirmed what I was beginning to think.

I can’t get it to work, because it won’t work that way, Or at least the way I always done it before. Godaddy handles PHP code differently from what I’m used to, so I’ll have to come at the problem from a different direction.

Later in the afternoon, our Sharp Convection Oven – Microwave developed a problem. The door won’t open. When you push the button it feels like it’s not connected to anything and nothing happens.

Our 17 year old Sharp has been a workhorse and this is the first problem we’ve ever had with it. Apparently this is a somewhat common problem, and repair parts to fix it are only about $18, but first I’ll have to figure out how to get the door open. Hopefully I’ll find something online to help out. But it’ll have to wait until we’re back at Lake Conroe on Sunday. It’s always something.

About 3pm we decided to drive into our daughter Brandi’s in Katy to pick up our Amazon packages. We were going to pick them up tomorrow on our way back from Clear Lake, but one of the packages was the new memory for Barbara Spade’s laptop and I wanted to be able to run MemTest86 on the new memory before I give it back to Barbara Saturday evening.

So we combined the trip with meeting Brandi, Lowell, and Landon for dinner at Little V Vietnamese Bistro, one of our all-time favorite places.

Their Shaking Beef with Vermicelli Bowl can’t be beat.

After a great get-together we got back home about 7pm and I got the new memory installed in Barbara’s laptop and set it up to run MemTest86 all night. I’m not expecting any problems with the new memory, but it helps to be sure.

One of the things that came in today was my new Shurflo RV Water Pump. Another job for Lake Conroe.

Shurflo 3.0 GPM  RV Water Pump

Tomorrow is something Jan and I have been looking forward to for a while, especially since we decided not to travel as much this year, meaning we would be here for this.

Jan and I are driving down to Seabrook to attend a NASA/Taft Broadcasting Employee Reunion at T-Bone Tom’s. Taft was the NASA contractor that I worked for on the Shuttle program at Johnson Space Center from1978 to 1987.

The last time Jan and I meet up with a lot of these people was another reunion in 2007 before we started RV’ing. And a few of them I’ve bumped into in the last couple of years. But some of them I haven’t seen since 1987. So it will be interesting to see how old we’ve all gotten.

Thought for the Day:

You may avoid the consequences, but not the consequences of avoiding the consequences.

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