Our RV Adventures

It was another nice, slow day today. The temps have moderated, staying in the 90-91 degree range with even cooler weather in the next few days.

And the vehicle count was only 28, which is kind of typical for a weekend. Later in the afternoon the Rainy Days Radar app showed the rain that was heading our way, split apart and pass to either side of us, though we could have used a 30 minute or so shower to settle the dust on the roads.

And we may get that chance in the next couple of days, with rain chances in the 40 to 60 percent range. But be careful what you wish for. As far as we’re concerned, we’d rather have too little rain than too much, though I’m not sure that Tony, our farmer/landowner would agree.

Yesterday, giving up on hearing anything back from Colaw RV Salvage about my screen door catch, I drew one up and this evening emailed it off to our son Chris so he can whip one up for me. This is what I need.

I figure anyone who can cast the metal parts and then mill and build his own lathe, will have no problem with a little bracket.

Miss Piper had her cast changed out the other day, I think from a soft cast to a hard one, after they checked the results of her recent surgery to set the pins as you can see here.

This arm/wrist, which she broke in a recent fall, is the same one she broke in a ATV accident two years ago, so hopefully this will be the last time for this body part.

Thursday when I was at Wal-Mart I came across a sales display for their Ozark Trails 30oz Insulated Mug and picked one up. They were marked $7.74, which is a $2 markdown from the normal $9.74, and is the same price that they charge for the 20oz version. In fact at a nearby display they still had the 20oz ones marked $7.74 too.

I figured that when I got to the checkout it would probably show up as $9.74, but it didn’t, so I got it for the lower price. One thing I found funny just now is that when I went to Google to a photo, it showed that Wal-Mart had them for $9.74, but you could get one on eBay for the rock bottom price of only $19.95. What a deal!

I’ve heard of people doing this before, buying and selling retail stuff, I guess for people too lazy to go to WM, or maybe people in other countries, I dunno.

Anyway, I’d seen some of the comparisons between the Ozark Trail version  and the $40-50 competitors like the Yeti and others. And all the ones I saw showed that WM’s version was as good or better than the higher price ones. But I had to do some checking for myself.

So I put the mug on the counter and let it sit for 30 minutes. Then I used my infrared thermometer to measure the outside temperature, checking several places around the surface.

Next I dumped in my ice-filled Chick-fil-a lemonade and again let it set there for 30 minutes. And when I measured it again, the outside temp had not changed, still exactly the same to the tenth of a degree.

Really good.

And in real life trials, it will hold a small amount of ice for over 24 hours, with almost no melt. My only nitpick is that I wish it had some sort of plug or stopper to close off the drinking/straw opening and make it spill proof.

Still a great product, especially at 1/5 the cost of its competitors.

Well, just as I was finishing up my shower tonight we ran out of Gate Guard Services water. No problem. I just turned our coach pump on. I’m always careful to keep a full rig tank just for this possibility/eventuality.

Jamie, our Gate Guard Services supervisor/support guy was out when he came by last Saturday to service our generator, but he said we had about 250 gallons left and he would be back by later in the week to top us off.

But in the meantime he ended up out in west Texas near Ft. Stockton, where he was when I called him about 6pm tonight. He said he’d try to get back by tomorrow, either before or after he takes care of our fellow gate guards and friends, Lynette and Gregg McHenry. I told him no hurry, and that we were fine for a few days with no problems.

Finally, on a water note, I keep meaning to ask Jamie where he’s getting our water this year. It’s very good, but most surprisingly, it’s very soft, leaving your body with that slightly slick feel after your shower. And it makes good coffee too.

Last year at our Carthage gate we were getting our water from a 400 foot well right next to the coach, part of the water supply for the frack ponds. And it was really good too.

Thought for the Day:

Actual statements by Scientists and others over the last 44 years.

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Today was pretty nice, with temps in the low 90’s, partly cloudy, and a nice breeze.

Even better, it was combined with a fairly slow day with only 39 vehicles coming through. The low traffic count was probably helped by the fact that all the sales critters know that Pete, the Company Man, is back from his two weeks off.

Unlike Billy the CM who was here for the last two weeks, Pete only allows sales calls on Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday. But Billy just lets them all come in, anytime.

This makes our job easier too, since we don’t have to screen them out. And they will lie to you.

So, all in all, a very nice day.

Coming home from groceries yesterday I stopped to take a photo of what could possibly/hopefully be our new home in the next month or so.

It’s just a mile and a quarter back down the road toward B/CS from here and looks like it’s got plenty of room for a pad on the left side there. You want to be on that side if possible so you’re on the driver’s side as they enter, though we have been on the right side a few times.

But we really don’t know what’s going to happen yet. Historically this oil company apparently doesn’t use gate guards, and like last year’s gate near Carthage, we’re actually here because the landowner wanted us. So we don’t know if we’ll be asked to move with the rig or not.

The last time we followed a rig, was our first year down in the Whitsett area about 60 miles south of San Antonio. We followed a Marathon/H&P rig for almost 4 months until we left in August.

And of course we have no idea what’s going to happen here after the rig moves out. Completion, workover, coil tubing, fracking right away, we don’t know yet. As far as we’re concerned, all we want to do is be on a gate until first part of December. So we’ll have to see how it goes.

As usual.

My new TP-LINK N900 2.4GHz or 5GHz Dual Band PCI Express Adapter showed up in the mail today, but too late for me to install it before I went on the gate at 1pm.

So it had to wait until I got up about 10pm.

As you want to do anytime you remove a card and replace it with another one, before I started, I right-clicked on Computer on the desktop, selected Properties at the bottom, and then Device Manager at the top.

Then I clicked on the Network Adapters entry and found the Wireless LAN Card listing. Then I right-clicked on it and selected Uninstall Drivers, but told it to leave the old drivers on the computer, just in case.

I do this because there’s always a possibly that the new card is dead, or just bad. If I haven’t deleted the old drivers then I can just pop the old card back in the computer and I’m back in business.

But if I’ve deleted the drivers, then I’ll have to either dig up the 3 year old Driver CD (Yeah, right!) or download the old driver from the Net. But of course I’ll have to use another computer to do this, because I  now don’t have a  working Wi-Fi card.

So plan ahead.

Now I could shut down the computer and replace the card. In this case, after removing the old Wi-Fi card, I installed the new one in a different slot to allow more clearance for the little antennas, since the new card has three instead of  one.

Putting everything back together, I powered it up and inserted the supplied little Drivers mini CD in the drive. And a couple of minutes later I had the display window that showed me the Wi-Fi sources that it could see.

The first thing I noticed was that I could now see a lot more signals. And looking closer the DC Wireless_2 signal that I wanted to connect to, now had 4 bars instead of just 2.

Well, that’s better.

So as happens a lot of time in this kind of stuff, it was a combination of two problems – I just needed a better antenna and a new Wi-Fi board.

One thing I’ve noticed about this Wi-Fi access point is that like a lot of ‘company’ sites, it has Content Blocking. These services keep a blacklist of unacceptable sites that you are blocked from visiting.

So . . . no porn for you on company time.

But the algorithms they use to select the sites for blacklisting lead to some funny problems. Like not being able to access a breast cancer site because it has . . . you know. . . breasts on it. Or not being able to visit the Smithsonian Museum site because the home page is promoting a new exhibit of those evil guns.

But closer to home, the other night I was on a political forum site and was directed by  a link to an article about the BREXIT posted on the BBC.com site in England, and I got this:

So what’s the problem with the British Broadcasting Corporation, too many rig workers streaming reruns of Downton Abbey? Or what?

And the other strange thing is that they have disabled, but not ‘officially’ blocked Facebook.com. When you go to Facebook.com, you get this:

So what, now they’re against funny cat videos too?

For some reason, they’ve just blocked Facebook’s DNS address, which is that string of numbers you sometimes see online like this:

192.168.112.0

Every website, every server, and every computer, even yours, has a separate, unique address on the Internet. It’s how every thing knows where to go, like a phone number.

In this case, for Facebook the DNS address is 173.252.89.132, or at least one of them is. Most big sites have multiple DNS addresses for redundancy.

So why they’re doing it this way, I don’t know. Maybe to keep the complaints down, so they can say, we’re not ‘blocking’ it so it must be your problem.

Tomorrow I’ll spend some time fooling with the Yagi antenna, seeing if I can find that elusive 5 bar signal sweet spot.

And on a final note, tomorrow is also Blue Moon BBQ Saturday.

It oughta be an official holiday.

Thought for the Day:

First you forget names, then you forget faces. Next you forget to pull your zipper up and finally, you forget to pull it down. — George Burns

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