Our RV Adventures

Jan and I headed out for lunch et al. about 1:30, with our first stop at the Cheddar’s up in Clear Lake. Cheddar’s is one of our go-to places, no matter where we are in the country, and we’ve eaten at them all over too. And as usual at places we frequent, we both have our favorites.

Jan got her usual Key West Chicken and Shrimp with Green Beans and Carrots  as well as some of their Bourbon Sauce.

My fav is their Vegetable Plate, which comes with a Bowl of the Chicken Tortilla Soup,

as well as 4 veggies and a croissant . All for $7.99. Obviously I like the Green Beans and Carrots, just like Jan.

A really great deal.

Finishing up, we stopped off at my client’s to pick up my saline eye drops that I left there yesterday. While I was there I noticed that the ‘95 Mustang Front Passenger Window glass I had order off eBay for my client, had arrived. My client wasn’t there, but when I mentioned it to Jennifer, the office manager, she said, “But isn’t that a Thunderbird, and not a Mustang?” And when I walked over to the corner of the parking lot, she was right.

In my defense, I didn’t know what vehicle he was ordering the window for. And in his defense, he owns over 20 vehicles, including two Studebaker Avanti’s. I guess it’s easy to lose track.

Our next stop at the El Dorado WalMart for a few things, including 3 gallons of Shell Rotella 15W-40 oil for the rig. I’ll need two gallons to top off my oil level, and then one gallon to fill the new LF9009 filter after I drop the old one to get a better look at the problem area.

Then it was on toward home, with a stop at the Costco on the way to fill up the truck.

When I last got gas a week or so ago, the price was at a low point of $1.67. But as I mentioned in the blog a couple days ago, when I saw the increases at HEB and WalMart, I checked Costco’s price in GasBuddy and found it had jumped 2¢ to $1.69. But by today, it had jumped another 5¢ up to $1.74. This is going the wrong direction.

Don’t know if this is due to the turmoil in Venezuela, or what. But I have a bad feeling about this.

Then after a stop for lottery tickets, and then the PO, we got home a little after 5pm.

As I mentioned yesterday, the oil filter and wrench I ordered from Amazon, was delivered via Amazon themselves. And the order that came in today was also via Amazon.

And according to the tracking, the hard drive coming into tomorrow is also coming by them.

I don’t know yet if this constitutes a long-term pattern, but I do like the Real Time Tracking that Amazon gives you.

Anybody want to buy a used 1995 Mustang Front Passenger Window?

Thought for the Day: 

Some things are too coincidental to be a coincidence – Yogi Berra

fhjjh

Today is the 33rd anniversary of the Shuttle Challenger explosion.

I was working at Johnson Space Center and had just come off a 16 hour night shift that ran long due to some equipment problems. And since I was dead tired, and the launch was not for another almost three hours, I went to bed. I was planning to get for this one, but slept though it, the first launch I had ever missed.

But as it turns out, our daughter Brandi, who was12 had stayed home sick that day, and was watching when the Shuttle exploded. So she called Jan at work and said, “Mommy, the Challenger broke!” So Jan told her to go wake me up.

And that kicked off six months of long hours and confusing requests from Washington, doing video support for the Rogers Commission inquiry into the Challenger .

The crew of the space shuttle Challenger honored us by the manner in which they lived their lives. We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for the journey and waved goodbye and “slipped the surly bonds of earth” to “touch the face of God.” – President Ronald Reagan.

Early this afternoon I went to the Amazon site to check on the delivery status of my rig oil filter and filter wrench that were supposed to arrive today.

And I found something new – A button on the Track Package page that said “Click To Track Your Package in Real Time”. And here’s what I saw.

And a little later I saw this.

A couple of minutes later I saw the map icon on my street, so I walked outside, and about 10 seconds later, this pulled into the parking lot.

And I have a couple of more things arriving tomorrow that look to be coming the same way. Neat.

A little after noon, and after the office manager said she was finished processing last night’s website orders, I took the server down to move it over to the new UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) that came in last week. I had plugged it in after it came in last Tuesday to let it marinate before I put it online.

So this morning I first shut down the website and then the server and moved the plug over to the new UPS, and booted the server back up and waited for it to initialize and come back online.

And waited . . . and waited . . . and waited.

Becoming more and more anxious as the minutes elapsed.

The reboot time does vary though. Sometimes it’s back up in 5-10 minutes, and once it was a little over 20 minutes. But it has never taken 46 minutes before.

And since it’s a Centos 6 Linux server, there’s not a lot you can do but wait. So I don’t know if it was checking the integrity of, or repairing the databases, or what, but it finally popped back up and was working fine.

Whew!

Several readers asked what the girl was holding in my niece Stahlie’s Blood Moon artwork.

I’m not absolutely sure, but I think it’s a telescope. You know, for looking at the moon. Though it is kind of bent, I guess.

Thought for the Day: 

If you’ve never met the devil on the road of life, it’s because you’re both heading in the same direction.

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