Our RV Adventures

Landon’s in his 3rd day of Homeschooling, and of course, what’s school without a PE class.

Landon said he could get used to this.

I’ll bet he could.

I mentioned a few months back about my 2nd favorite book series, Bob’s Saucer Repair.

This is what I wrote back in September.

Basically, a guy comes home and finds a beautiful alien girl trying to repair her flying saucer in his garage. With a lot of interesting ideas and funny situations, it’s a really fun read. Just gloss over the fact that alien flying saucers use antifreeze for coolant as well as hydraulic fluid.

But a lot of twists and turns keeps it very interesting. Even Jan loves them.

A Great Deal at $2.99, or free under Kindle Unlimited.

Jan and I just finished Book 8 in the series and the books have gotten better and better. Though there’s still a lot of humor, the stories have become a little darker, with more action, and a lot of great story lines.

Even more recommended than before!

And in other book news, Robert Heinlein has a brand new book out, in both Kindle and Hardcover.

Yes, I know he’s been dead for over 30 years, but this new book, The Pursuit of the Pankera, was written in the 1980’s and parallels The Number of The Beast. In fact the first third of both books is the same, but then the stories diverge in a parallel, but different, direction.That’s why the subtitle of both is A Parallel Novel About Parallel Universes.

The Pursuit of the Pankera was known as a large number of fragments, plus Heinlein’s handwritten notes. But when someone started piecing the fragments and notes together, they found they had the entire book. So every word is Heinlein’s, with no ghostwriter filler.

After starting Pursuit, it was so good it made me go back and buy The Number of the Beast to read it again too.

And even better, both books are only $6.99, much better than the $14.99 usually charged for mainstream publisher novels.

Wrapping up, I saw a headline today that Tilman Fertitta, billionaire owner of about 60 restaurant chains, like Landry’s, Saltgrass, Claim Jumpers, and many others, in addition to the Houston Rockets Basketball Team, had laid off 40,000 of his employees today, about 70% of his workforce.

When I mentioned this to Jan, I think she was somewhat disparaging of him doing that. He’s a Billionaire, after all. That is until I ran the numbers for her.

Let’s say the average hourly rate for the 40,000 employees is $20 per hour. Remember this covers management as well as line employees.

$20 x 40 hours per week = $800 a week average paycheck.

But when you now multiply that by 40,000, it comes out to $32 million dollars A WEEK. And then you’ve got payroll taxes, unemployment insurance, and additional benefits too.

He may be a billionaire, but I’ll bet he doesn’t have $64 million in cash lying around to shell out every two week pay period for very long. 

Jan was a lot more understanding when I laid it out this way.

Thought For The Day:

“Stupidity is the only capital crime. The penalty is always death. There is no appeal.”- Robert A. Heinlein

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Jan and I were out the door a little after 7am this morning, heading up to Friendswood for our annual checkups.

Rob Amoto, our park owner, has been working on getting our new street lights installed, and just got them upright a couple of days ago. And this morning was our first time to see them in action.

They’re daylight LED lights and really brighten up the area.

And the daylight part means it looks like this underneath.

We got to the doctor’s office about 8am, and found that they would only let one of us into the  office at a time. Everyone was wearing masks and gloves, and complaining about how hot it made them. Then after letting Jan and I in one at a time, they put us in a room together. After the nurse drew our blood, the doctor quickly went over our prescriptions and we were out to the desk to pay.

That’s when I mentioned, “Aren’t we supposed to pee in the jar?”

Whoops!

I think they were a little too much in a hurry to get us out the door.

Then after filling our bottles, we drove down to the Home Depot on FM646 for a few things. It was interesting to find that it was pretty much business as usual there. I wanted to get a can of spray cleaner to clean the coil in the Coleman Mach 15 AC unit in the front of our rig.

I pulled the inside panel to see if I could unclog the outside drain hole, since rather than run off the side of the rig, water was dripping down inside. But while it quickly became obvious that I was going to be up on the roof in the near future, I also found that the coil was pretty dirty and I needed to clean it ASAP.

As we left HD, I submitted an online order to the nearby Whataburger so we could drive by and pick it up. Our receipt said our order would be ready in 5-7 minutes, and to park in the lot and an attendant would bring out our order.

But after about 15 minutes we had not seen anybody, so we got in the drive-thru line and found our order waiting for us. Don’t know where the problem was, but our burgers were as fantastic as usual.

Then we across the roadway to park in a shady spot in the WalMart parking lot to consume our long-missed burgers and fries. These were our first burgers in a long time since we’ve been prepping for good numbers on our tests at the doctor’s.

Done with our burgers, we drove over closer to WalMart and went in to pick up a couple of items. Though the store was about as busy as usual for a Tuesday morning, the parking lot seemed to reflect the whole ‘social distancing’ meme.

Rather than most of the cars being clustered near the doors, cars looked to be scattered all around the parking lot, even out to the edges.

So spread in the parking lot, and then huddle together in the checkout line.

Got it!

Our daughter sent over this text this morning, reflecting the trials and tribulations of Homeschooling.

Homeschooling Day #2.

Landon was getting ready to log into Zoom for his morning meeting with his class and I told him the items he still needed to do this week and he said “I don’t have to do ALL that today, do I?”

And I said “no, we will space it out” and he says “whew, you’re my savior…the lazy teacher I always wanted!” 

Our son, Chris, sent back, “Smart Ass runs deep in this family.”

He would certainly know, if anyone would.

Finishing up, readers know that I’ve been passing on the latest news about the use of Chloroquine/Hydroxychloroquine to combat CoVid-19/WuFlu/Kung Flu. In fact I mentioned it a week ago when it wasn’t yet being mentioned in the main media.

I was seeing postings about these medicines coming in from doctors in France/Italy/China, and others. But now with them being mentioned on every news channel, people are doing stupid things.

You may heard about a couple in AZ who took Chloroquine, with the result that he died and she’s in the hospital in critical condition. But what a lot of the articles failed to mention for some reason, is that they didn’t take medicine, they took fish tank cleaner.

Here’s what I posted.

This was fish tank cleaner, not medicine!

This is like someone saying, “This recipe calls for salt. And salt is sodium chloride. But I don’t have that, so I’ll use this stuff called ‘sodium hydroxide’ instead. It says it has ‘sodium’ in it, so it will work fine.”

And of course, ‘sodium hydroxide’ is LYE.

Or deciding to drink wood alcohol because you don’t have any ethyl alcohol. Hey, they’re both alcohol, right?

Unfortunately, for this couple sometimes there’s just no accounting for stupid, even with sad results.

As I mentioned before, I took both Chloroquine and HydroxyChloroquine for malaria back in the 60’s with no problems, except for more of a reoccurring upset stomach on the Chloroquine.

But I never took anything from PetSmart.

Thought For The Day:

“Don’t mistake activity for achievement.” – John Wooden

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