Our RV Adventures

After a great breakfast with everyone at the Texas Chainsaw Massacre house, we all got our hugs, said our goodbyes, and went our separate ways. Brandi, Lowell, and Landon back to Katy, Piper and Derek back to Taylor, Chris and Linda back home, and Jan and I headed back to Santa Fe. Texas, that is.

We had a great time, great food, great fun, and we’re already talking about when to do it again. I’ll spend the next couple of days catching back up with all the good times.

On our way we did make a quick stop at Jan’ favorite Pottery Ranch in Marble Falls. And the first thing she saw as we got parked was this guy.

I told her that if it would fit in the Corolla, she could have it. Well, at least until I saw this.

Yikes!

Well, maybe not.

But she did find some other (smaller, cheaper) things she wanted.

Back on the road home we came across this field of Bluebonnets and an old, abandoned stone house.

Really neat.

As is this Bluebonnet close-up.

More tomorrow.

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Thought For The Day:

Looks like it’s been a lot hotter in the past.

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March 27, 2009

Gather the animals, two by two…

Gather the animals, two by two… but be more picky this time.

Maybe not two of everything!

The rainstorms just won’t let up. Some places around here have had almost 8 inches. We’ve probably had 4 or 5 inches here at the park.

Luckily, we’re parked on an asphalt pad here. The last time we had rain like this while we were parked was last October in Sioux Falls, SD. Except then, we were parked on a grass site at the local fairgrounds (A lot of fairgrounds have a small number of RV sites for rent).

When we went to leave after 6 days, we couldn’t.

We were stuck and had to be towed out. The grass that was fine when we pulled in had turned to a muddy muck by the time we were ready to leave. It was pouring down rain when the tow driver showed up and the poor guy had to crawl under the front of the coach in the mud to hook up the tow cables. Once he had us hooked up, it only took about 10 minutes to slowly winch us out.

We have Good Sams Emergency Road Service so the tow didn’t cost us anything, but I gave him a big tip.

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March 27, 2010

Showdown at Searchlight…

As I said yesterday, today we were going to do something a little different.

We left the rig about 7:40am (man, that’s early) and drove about 50 miles south to Searchlight NV for the Showdown at Searchlight Tea Party Express Rally.

We turned off the highway into what is normally a landscape rock quarry about 8:30 and it took us about 10 minutes to get parked.

We had to walk about 1/2 mile to get back to the stage area and found a lot of people already there.

I walked up to the top of a nearby hill to get some shots.

What was really amazing is that in less than an hour, all of the open area in these pictures was filled with people.

Jan got in the mood with a Tea Party hat and a Gadsden Flag.

One other interesting thing was going that you don’t see much anymore.

Skywriting.

But the new-fangled way: With computer-controlled planes. The planes fly in a vertical line and the computer tells each plane when to spit out a puff of smoke.

Kind of like an inkjet printer, but with smoke.

They also had a very large screen TV mounted on top of a truck. It looked better in person.

After the Governor of Nevada, Jim Gibbons, opened the proceedings, Sarah Palin was the first speaker.

One of the next speakers was Jerry Doyle. (Michael Garibaldi of Babylon 5 fame). A corporate jet pilot, a successful stockbroker for 10 years, and an actor, he now hosts a nationwide syndicated talk show.

One surprising thing was that, second only to Sarah Palin, Joe the Plumber really wowed the crowd. He spoke for about 15 minutes with no notes, no hesitation, just talking to the crowd.

It’s hard to believe that 18 months ago he was a working plumber who was filmed asking Barack Obama a question while Obama was campaigning on his street.

The last celebrity was Victoria Jackson, of Saturday Night Live fame. Although she is best known for her ‘blonde airhead” act, she had become known for her insightful political commentary.

The speakers were interspersed with candidates looking to run under the Tea Party banner, and a number of musical performers.

We headed back to the truck about 3:15, and were on our way by 3:30. It took us about 20 minutes to make it to the highway and head back to Las Vegas.

We thought we were home free. And we were..;.for the first 24 miles. Then, about 6 miles from the turn-off to the main highway into Las Vegas, everything came to a stop.

It took us a hour and twenty minutes to go that 6 miles. I don’t think it was all due to the Tea Party, as there were a lot of 18 wheelers in the bunch. But it was a mess.

We finally got back to the rig about 5:40, and then about 6pm, we decided we wanted to go somewhere close, so we went back to the buffet at the Boulder Station Casino. And, as on our other visits, it was very good.

We didn’t talk as long as we usually do after dinner as Jan was having trouble keeping her eyes open. So we called it a night early.

Later in the evening, I was reading reports on the internet of the size of the crowd at the Tea Party Rally,

Some were just ridiculously funny. CNN’s Fredericka Whitfield estimated that hundreds, but if not, “at least dozens of people” were in attendance. Other reports said “almost a thousand”.

On their website the night before, the Tea Party Express people said they expected 5-10 thousand.

Now look at these aerial photos and you decide.

And this picture does not cover the entire area full of people.

We were packed in pretty tight.

This picture was taken at 1:35pm, 95 minutes after the event started, and, according to the Highway Patrol, traffic was backed up for 8 miles with people still trying to get in. If you look closely, you will see that the traffic line extends around the hill at the top of the picture and further off to the left.

Now you know why I wanted to get there at 8:30am..

As we were heading back to Las Vegas, we saw cars parked as far as 4 miles from the entrance.

The late news on the Los Angeles ABC station, who had a crew there, said there were over 20,000 people there.

I think they were a little closer than CNN.

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March 27, 2011

Goldilocks Pants . . .

Another lazy morning starting with coffee, and Jan and I splitting a cinnamon bun. Then I caught up on some computer stuff while Jan read. A really nice way to spend the morning.

Next I tried on the three pair of new pants I got at Wal-Mart yesterday. And once again, I bought  Goldilocks pants.

You know what I mean . . . Goldilocks Pants. One pair is too tight, one pair is too loose, and one pair is juuuust right. How do they do that?

The pants, Wrangler Cargo Pants, are all the same style, just different colors.

I’ve also purchased Goldilocks Underwear. In this case, a 3 pack of Hanes, with the same problem

Also, while I’m ranting, why do they only make pants in even sizes. Normally I wear a 36 waist, but depending on the style, a 37 would fit better. But they don’t make a 37, just a 38, which is too loose.

And getting back to men’s underwear, they all seem to span two sizes, i.e. 32-34, or 36-38, with no overlap. Why don’t they make a 34-36, which would fit me better?

Who makes up these rules?

Then a little later I went out to check on my black tank valve replacement from yesterday. Removing the cap, I found no black tank leakage, but a couple of tablespoons of grey water leakage. It’s probably been that way for a while, but was masked by the black tank stuff.

So it’s now on my list to also replace while I’ve got the panel off. I’ll try to pick one up at Camping World before we leave the area.

Later,over at Nick’s we worked on some problems with his blogs. And it looks like I may have caused another one. In trying to figure out how to add pages to the nav bar on his theme, the menu shifted up on top of his logo picture. Don’t know why or how it did that. So we called Chris Guld of Geeks on Tour who set up the blog to take a look at it.

About 4:30 Jan and I headed out to Lucky Wishbone, a steak fingers, chicken, and fish place we ate at once before, but this was a different location. But it was just as good as last time.

Coming home about 6:30, since it was on our way, we went by Camping World to pick up a grey tank valve. Figure they might already be closed, and they were. Will try again tomorrow.

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March 27, 2012

Still Living the Motel Life . . .

Since we were a few minutes too late for breakfast at the hotel, (I thought they said 9:30. It was 9.) we decided to head across town to IHOP.

Big mistake. Worse IHOP meal we’ve ever had. Pretty much everything was either uncooked, and/or cold. Next time it’s either Denny’s or get up earlier.

Leaving IHOP, we stopped off at Rush Truck Center to pick a couple of things up and plug in the coach to shop power. Clayton, the manager said they were just starting to look at the coach and he’d let me know as soon as they knew something.

So Jan and I headed back to the room for an afternoon of doing nothing. We read and napped, and then read and napped some more. Jan worked on her recipe file and I read and napped.

Did I mention I napped?

Finally about 4:30 we headed out for dinner after a quick stop at the rig to check in. Clayton said he was getting ready to call me with what they found so far.

They removed the oil pan and found about two quarts of coolant in the oil.

They then over-pressurized the cooling system and except for a couple of very small external leaks around hose connections, no coolant showed up anywhere.

The Tech even joked he wondered if someone just poured coolant in the oil. He also said they found no sign of oil in the coolant. So whatever’s leaking is only going in one direction.

So tomorrow they’re going to put the pan back on, fill it with oil, get it running, and see what happens.

The good news is, that so far, there’s no bad news.

For supper Jan and I decided to check out Dickey’s Barbecue Pit, a national chain that’s been around since 1941. But somehow we’ve never eaten one.

And we should have. It was really very good. Good sauce, good meat, good sides. And free ice cream for dessert.

Leaving Dickey’s, I dropped Jan off to get her hair done while I read my Kindle in the car. Then it was back to the motel for the night.

Maybe tomorrow we’ll get some more news.

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March 27, 2013

Slowed to a Crawl . . .

Well, a couple of things were really slow today.

First off, nothing much happened. I worked on some stuff, and then worked on other stuff. Jan went through things in the bedroom, sorting and throwing out stuff.

Then when she was done, I got out the vacuum and gave the rug in there a thorough cleaning, but ended having to disassemble the vacuum cleaner first to clean it out before it would do a good job.

About 2 I drove over to the P.O. to mail an Easter card to Master Landon, along with a bunch of post cards to other friends and family Then coming home I made a quick stop at an O’Reilly Auto Parts store for some heat-shrink tubing and a replacement bulb for one of our floor lights.

Then for dinner, we fixed Chicken Taco Salads using the last of the El Pollo Loco chicken we got a few days ago, using some of the hot salsa we got in Fort Davis a few weeks ago. Really good.

The other thing that slowed to a crawl here is the 3G Internet service. When we got here a week or so ago, the 3G was pretty speedy at about 1.5 Mbps. But the last few days it’s dropped a cliff. I think it may be the fact that we’ve had 50-75 RV’s and trailers come into the fairgrounds in preparation for the upcoming county fair that starts the 18th of April. And probably every one has a computer and a smartphone, just sucking all the bandwidth out of the ether. Apparently leaving none of me.

Sunday we’ll be moving up to the Countryside RV Park in Apache Junction. Although it’s an Encore Park, we can stay there for $3 a night.

Nice!

I want to thank blog reader’s Ellen and Larry Clark for making me aware of this.

Tomorrow Jan and I are going to check out Brushfire BBQ here in Tucson. We’ve heard good things about it, and the online reviews are good so we’ll give it try.

See I told you it was slow.

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March 27, 2014

Fans and Hawks . . .

One of the things I got yesterday at Harbor Freight Tools was a set of drill bits with 1/4 shanks.

This lets me use them in my regular drill, and also my WORX Power Screw Driver that I find myself using more and more. Small and still very powerful.

Around 11 am I put in a call to Fantastic Vent to order another motor/fan combination for our bathroom vent fan.

I really like the look of the clear plastic blades. They let a lot more light in, and supposedly, they’re made of tougher plastic than the old one. When I replaced the front one a couple of days ago, I notice the old blades were very brittle and could be easily snapped with your fingers.

The other thing I noticed was that the motor on the new one is much more powerful and moves a lot more air on HIGH.

Hopefully it will come in sometime next week.

When we arrived this past Monday, our neighbor pointed out a Red-tailed Hawk nest across the river from us. And there’s some activity going on in there. You can see a head sticking up.

Unfortunately it’s at the far end of my 72X lens so I doubt I’ll get much more. But I have seen one flying back to the nest.

The weather today was pretty cruddy. Solid overcast all day, with rain on and off, but it still made it up to 72°, which means it was just sticky all day. In fact after dark the humidity was so high that it kept triggering the rain sensor on our vent fans, making them open and close. So finally we just bit the bullet and turned the AC’s on.

Don’t know what’s on the agenda for tomorrow. We’ll have to see how the weather holds out.

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March 27, 2015

A Problem Solved?

I spent most of the morning working on client stuff. It seems like they all want things done at the same time, and this week has been a perfect example. Every thing comes to a head at the same time.

I mentioned back in January after I installed my new power converter/charger that there was a slight problem with the voltage output.

Powermax 110 Volt to 12 Volt 55 Amp Power Supply Converter Charger

The Powermax unit has 3 voltage levels: A Bulk Charge Mode at 14.4 volts, a Absorption Mode at 13.6, and a Float Charge Mode at 13.2 volts. When you first power up the unit, it starts out in Bulk Charge Mode for up to 4 hours, before dropping back to Absorption Mode, which is where it will stay under heavy 12volt usage. But with mostly LED lights, our unit usually runs in Float Mode.

But Float Mode is 0.1 volt too low for the rig power system to switch over and keep the rig engine batteries charged. Up to now I had a separate battery charger on the engine batteries that I plug in every we part. But this is a PITA, and just one more thing to do when we park.

So this afternoon, I set up something different. Using an AC Timer like this one,

I set it up to turn the converter off for 30 minutes every 8 hours around the clock. When it turns back on, the converter starts back up in Bulk Charge Mode and then drops to Absorption Mode. Both of these voltages are high enough to keep the engine batteries charged. And so far today it’s working fine. I’ll let you know how it goes.

I had planned on trying to paint the center section of the rig bumper this afternoon, but by the time I got out there, the sun was directly on the bumper, making it too hot to paint without it drying too fast. So maybe tomorrow.

For supper tonight Jan heated up our leftover Grimaldi’s Pizzeria pizza from the other night, as well as the Fried Green Beans from last night’s Joe’s Farm Grill visit.  Both just about as good as before. We both agree Joe’s is a place we would like to go back to before we leave.

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March 27, 2016

#$%$#@& Cat !

I was up about 6:30 to finish our travel preparations for today’s move over to the Colorado River Thousand Trails. I stowed away all the satellite stuff and then got the laptop set up on the dashboard. The laptop runs our Delorme Street Atlas GPS software and our Silverleaf digital engine monitoring program.

But that wasn’t going to happen today. At least the Delorme GPS part of it.

My #$%$#@& cat sometime in the last two weeks chewed off the USB connector of my GPS module, as well as the mini-phone plug from the external speaker I also use.

#$%$#@& cat !

I know I’ll be able to replace the phone plug, but I’ll have to see if I can solder a new USB plug on the GPS cable. It might even be easier to just solder a new cable onto the GPS module.

I can buy a new one from Delorme for about $40, or a used one on eBay for about $20. But I’ll try the cheaper way first.

By 8am we were ready to roll, with only bringing up the levelers, unplugging shore power, and bringing in the slide left to do, so we headed into Conroe to have our normal travel day breakfast at the local Cracker Barrel. We were a little worried if the CB would be crowded since this was Easter Sunday, but it was no busier than usual for 8am.

We were hooked up and leaving the park by about 10:45, and after a smooth, but somewhat windy trip, we got into the Colorado River park about 1pm. As we were checking, the ranger said a prime site, A10, had just opened up and to grab it quick.

He also asks if I could work on RV refrigerators and that Barbara Spade, the head ranger here, had a problem. So I told him to tell her to give me a call.

Then after we parked and got set up, our friend Jim Dean called and invited us to dinner down at their rig about 5pm. By this time Jan was already napping on the couch, so deciding this was a great idea, I adjourned to the bedroom for my nap. Later, after we were both up and getting ready to head down to the Jim and Peri’s, I got a call from Barbara Spade about her refrigerator.

She said it was a Dometic Royale, about 15 years old, and was working fine up until this morning, when she noticed it was warming up. Later she tried switching over to gas, but it didn’t seem to help, so she switched it back to electric. So I told her I would come over after dinner and take a look at it.

Peri fixed us a great meal, complete with dessert. Our contribution was six pack of Redd’s Green Apple Ale and a box of Girl Scout Thin Mints.

We all talked for a good while, especially about Alaska, since Jim and Peri are heading that way this summer. And when I mentioned to Jim that I was going up to look at Barbara’s fridge, he offered to come along.

When we got there we found all the lights and controls seemed to be working, but the inside was at room temp. When I pulled the outside access cover off, we found that the vent stack was hot, almost too hot to touch, but there was no temp difference in the ammonia coils up at the top of the unit. They were also at room temp. Then we switched the fridge over to gas, and we could see the blue flame, and again had heat in the vent.

Later we went back on electric and checked AC voltage coming into the board and the voltage feeding out to the heating coil. All were correct, though we did not check the continuity of the coil, but since we had heat from it we assumed it was OK.

Now normally when you’ve got heat, you should have cooling . . . unless you have no ammonia, or maybe a blockage. And if your ammonia leaks out, you definitely know it. Plus you have a yellow residue at the leak point. But no sign of that here.

As far as blockages, they don’t usually occur in operating units, but ones that are used on and off, or turned off part of the year. But you never know. And of course, one of the recommended fixes for a blockage is to take the refrigerator out and turn it upside down for a while.

So for right now, we left it running on gas, and we’ll check back tomorrow and see what we have.

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March 27, 2017

Just Didn’t Want To Work On Sunday . . .

At 10:45 this morning I got a text that my replacement Cradlepoint CTR-350 router had been delivered at the park office.

So I quickly walked over to pick it up, and got a surprise. My new Amazon mouse, you know the one that couldn’t be delivered yesterday, yesterday being Sunday, because it had an incomplete address.

Well, it made it with no problems today, and it looks like the address is just fine to me.

This is the second time I’ve had a Sunday delivery scheduled that didn’t go through, the last one because the Pima Country Fairgrounds was CLOSED during the Escapade. But apparently it was open the next day with no problems.

Guess they just don’t like to work on Sundays.

It took some fooling and resetting, but I did get my new Cradlepoint router working so we once again have Wi-Fi in the rig. Our Kindles, Galaxy Tab, and Alexa are all happy once again.

Later I put in a call to the Kwikee Steps people. which is now owned by Lippert Components. Lippert also owns Power Gear and Attwood Water Heaters, as well as a bunch of other companies.

But their Tech Support was helpful, and confirmed what I thought, that the loud grinding noise I hear whenever our rig steps go in and out is caused by a bad motor.  So that’s next up on my repair list as soon as I order a new motor.

My next call was to Mobile RV Glass to see about resetting our passenger side windshield. It was broken when our rig was being repaired in Prescott, AZ after our blowout in May 2015.

As they were lifting the front end to replace the damaged diesel tank they torqued it enough to crack the passenger side windshield. So it was replaced during the blowout repair.

But after a couple of months back on the road, the windshield and the gasket starting pulling away from the frame, leaving a gap at the top right of the windshield.

It’s not in any danger of coming out, as you can pulled on the windshield at the crack and it won’t budge, and it’s not loose at all.

I had tried several times over the last few months to get a guy in Conroe to come out and look at it, but he never showed up. So I figured that Apache Junction would be a good place to tried again.

The guy at RV Mobile Glass asked me to send him photos of the separation, and also the front of the rig to be sure it’s still square.

Looks fine to me.

About 2pm we headed out a for a Wal-Mart run to drop off some prescriptions and pick up a few things. Then it was back to the rig to drop off the cold stuff and off to the SanTan Village over in Gilbert to have dinner at one of our favorites, Famous Dave’s BBQ.

Service was somewhat slow, I think due to the fact that they only had one server on duty who was handling 6 or 7 tables plus the outside patio area. But the food was as good as ever.

We both started out with salads, very good salads with a really great Ranch dressing.

Then we both went with our usuals, Jan with her Half Slab of St. Louis Ribs with Fries,

while my choice was the 3 Meat Combo with St. Louis Ribs, Texas Brisket, and a Hot Link Sausage, along with Wilbur Beans and Firecracker Green Beans.

Famous Dave’s has a range of sauces, with our favorites being a combination of Devil’s Spit and Sweet & Zesty. I also spice things up a little more with some Wilbur’s Revenge, their hottest sauce. All good.

And as usual, we both had plenty leftover to take home.

I’ve been having trouble answering comments on the blog, so bear with me if I haven’t responded.

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March 27, 2018

No News Is . . .

Probably Not Good News.

I didn’t heard from Brock’s Car Care today, which I’m afraid means that the problem ended up being the more expensive oil pump replacement. Of course I’m hoping that the real reason is that they’re just really backed up and haven’t gotten to it  yet.

Well, I can hope, can’t I.

I’m spend some time day today researching how to move a ZenCart shopping cart website to a new server. Now that I’ve got control of the SQL databases I can start working on the move up to the Godaddy cloud.

I plan to first set up a test move using a slower shared Godaddy server. Then once that’s perfected, I’ll shut the websites down over a weekend, copy all files off and then up to Godaddy using a faster dedicated server. Then I’ll turn everything back on, and we should be good to go.

Hopefully.

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March 27, 2019

I Did It My Way . . .

But Jan still says it’s weird. But I’ve lost about 70 pounds with another 15 or so to go, while Jan has lost about 50 pounds. But she has her own plan.

But mine works for me.

We’ll start off with my take on the Law of Conservation of Mass.

You cannot gain more weight than the weight of the food you eat. The calories in that food determine how much of that weight hangs around.

If you drink 5 – 16 oz. sugar-free Green Tea’s and then weigh yourself, you will be 5# heavier than when you weighed right before you drank them. But with no calories involved, in a few hours the weight will all be gone. So to speak.

But if you eat a gallon of ice cream, also about 5#, and over 4000 calories, a large part of that is going to stick around.

The USDA says the average person burns about 2000 calories a day, though some sources say around 3000 calories. So if you have that gallon of ice cream for lunch, there’s as many as 2000 calories left over. Which the body will mostly convert to mostly fat.

So, don’t do that.

Things I do do:

1. Coffee – I drink a lot of coffee. I make 12 cups every morning, with Jan getting 2 cups and the rest, 10 cups, goes in my big 40 oz. Ozark Trail Insulated Mug. Then I spend drinking it over the rest of the morning/afternoon.

2. More Coffee – I make 8 cups of Decaf every evening, with Jan again getting 2 cups, and I get the remaining 6 cups.

The coffee fills me up and cuts down any urges to snack.

It works for me, so I don’t want to hear any comments on how coffee is good/bad for me.

3. I weigh every day – I have weighed every day since I started dieting on 12/30/2017 without missing a single one. It’s interesting watching how the body handles ‘heavy’ and ‘light’ food.

Something like a steak hangs around for a couple of days,so to speak. So if you’re weighing once a week, and the night before you have a steak for 850 calories, you will weigh more than if you have 850 calories of breakfast, eggs, bacon, fruit, and English Muffin. So if you’ve been dieting faithfully all week and then weigh without losing any weight, or maybe even gain 1/2 pound, that can be discouraging.

And yes I’m taking the scale on our trip.

4. Change Your Habits – When you’re trying to quit smoking, you’re told to try and stay away from situations where you smoked before. And that’s what I did.

I’ve usually always been a night owl, staying up until 2 or 3 in the morning. But when I’m eaten dinner at 5, it’s now been 6-7 hours since I’ve eaten, so I ‘snack’, pretty much my downfall. So I’ve started going to bed between 10-11pm and getting up earlier.

5. Eat One Meal A Day – I normally eat one meal a day, usually lunch or dinner. Monday, Wednesday, and Friday’s we normally eat at home.

I make  up a meal with the following:

360 calories – 9 oz. of Angus Beef Strips
140 calories – 1 Steam Bag of Petite Carrots
120 calories – 1 Steam Bag of Birdseye Broccoli, Cauliflower, and Carrots
  60 calories – 3 Cups of Chicken Broth to make a soup.
680 calories Total

Along with 200 calories of the Creamer used in my coffee, that totals 880 calories, pretty much a normal day’s calorie intake for me.

On Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday, we normally eat out, and it’s usually breakfast, at either Denny’s or SnoozeAM.

If it’s Denny’s, it’s this:

130 calories – 2 Fried Eggs
200 calories – 4 Strips of Bacon 
170 calories – English Muffin
110 calories – Fruit
610 calories Total + 200 calories for Coffee Creamers gives 810 Calories for the day.

Snooze is pretty much the same, with 3 eggs instead of 2, but 3 strips of bacon instead of 4. Pretty much a wash.

When we go to Cheddar’s, I get their Veggie Plate which comes with the following:

260 calories – Bowl of Chicken Tortilla Soup

120 calories – 2 Servings of Carrots
  80 calories – 2 Servings of Green Beans
180 calories – Croissant
640 calories Total + Creamers, of course.

So that’s it for meals, whether we eat out or at home. It’s pretty much 800-1000 calories a day. And yes, we do splurge every once in a while. But then it’s back on the diet the next day.

A blog reader commented that we don’t seem to exercise much. We do, just not as such. When we’re in WalMart/Sam’s Club I’m tracking our distance and it’s not unusual for us to do over a mile just shopping. And that’ normally twice a week.

Now as far as the results. We just had our yearly checkups last Thursday, and everything was normal. My A1c, which had dropped down to 5.7 last year, was down to 5.4 this year. And all my other readings were very good. HDL, LDL, Triglycerides, BP, Kidney Function, Liver Function, PSA, etc., all good.

So that’s my diet plan.

Weird, I know, but it works for me.

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March 27, 2021

An Early Adopter . . .

After a nice slow morning/early afternoon of coffee and conversation, Jan and I left the rig for the Denny’s and WalMart over on I-45.

I’m not normally an ‘early adopter’. You know, that person that’s at the front of line after waiting all night to grab up the latest iPhone, see the latest Star Wars movie, or buy tickets for the Beatles Reunion concert (well, since John Lennon and George Harrison are dead, I’d get in line for those tickets too.)

The last time I was actually an early adopter was April 17, 2017, when I bought a Samsung Galaxy S8+ the day it come out. And that’s turned out really good, since I’m still using it. Though I’m looking at upgrading to a S21G Ultra in the near future.

So after almost 4 years, it’s time to do it again.

Just as soon as I confirm that I have a good site picture to the right portion of the sky, I’m signing up for Elon Musk’s new Starlink Internet service. According to their signup page, it should be available in my area between mid and late 2021.

There’s a $99 refundable signup fee, with the hardware costing $499 when it’s ready to ship. Then the service is $99/month.

The 34” Starlink Dish

The Starlink Modem

The reason I’m looking to do this, even though we have free WiFi here at the park, is that we have so many outages, interruptions, and slowdowns, that it’s not that reliable.

In other words, Xfinity sucks.

Right now, we’re lucky to get 10Mbps from the park WiFi, with sometimes only about 3Mbps. And at that speed, we can’t get consistently HD quality video on our streaming.

But beta Starlink users are seeing 50 to 150Mbps, with 300Mbps promised by the end of the year. And Musk says that ultimately they hope get it up to 1Gbps.

Hopefully we’ll be on the schedule pretty soon.

Tomorrow we’re headed up to Webster to have lunch once again at Snooze, but first we’re going to stop by the office so I can start a clone job on the shipping computer. We’re switching both office computers over to the much faster SSD (Solid State Drives). So using WD’s software I’ll clone the old HD onto the new SSD drive, and then just swap them out.

Easy Pezy. I hope.

It normally takes a couple of hours to clone a 1TB drive so I thought I’d get it going before lunch to get a head start. Then while it’s finishing up, I’m going to work on a couple of other things, like getting our new much faster WiFi 6 network in the office working.

Jan’s bringing her Kindles and tablets to keep herself occupied.

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March 27, 2022

Just An Error?

My new water tank ball valve should be here tomorrow from Amazon.

It’s a little shorter than the original one, but I think there’s enough slack in the piping to make it work. But if not I can always put in some spacer pieces.

I did check outside after our showers and found no evidence of any leaks, so, so far so good.

I’ll try to install the new valve, as well as my 4 port hose splitter on Tuesday. Maybe.

Jan and I headed out about 1pm, with, unusually, a few errands before we were going to have lunch. Our first stop was at the UPS Store next to the HEB to drop off an Amazon return. We wanted to do it first since the close earlier on Sunday.

Next up was the nearby Home Depot to pick up a couple of things, before ending up at the big Goodwill store right next to the WalMart. Jan was looking for a couple of things, but didn’t find anything that caught her eye.

After that it was over to the Denny’s right across the street, and the reason for delaying lunch.

Denny’s is very, very busy on Sunday mornings/early afternoons, but we’ve learned that if we wait until after 2pm, we can get right in.

I do have a correction about our last visit to Denny’s. Or maybe it was Denny’s correction.

The last time we were here I noticed that our Ultimate Omelets, previously $10.99, had jumped to $16.49. So today when we sat down, I looked at the menu and it said the Ultimate Omelet was still $10.99. Now I know our receipt last said Ultimate Omelet, so the only thing I can see is that someone mistakenly mispriced the omelet. So just an error.

And when we got our bill today, it said $10.99 each.

Good.

Finally our last stop was HEB for next week’s groceries. And then we were home by about 3:30.

Our son-in-law Lowell posted this photo, saying that the pool is open for the summer.

Looks like Landon, and probably his BFF Sophie, are enjoying the warmer weather.