But we got home after 10pm, so I’ll catch up tomorrow night.
Now On To Today’s Retro-Blogs.™
August 11, 2009
1759 and 99…
Today was a travel day. But first I had some maintenance work to do.
The circuit breaker on our 7.5 KW onboard diesel generator broke while we were in Williamsburg a few weeks ago, so I had to order a new one.
And it was waiting for me when we got to Joan’s this week.
And what should have been a 15 minute job took about 2 hours due to the bad design of the generator case. You should not have to disassemble the entire case of a washer-sized generator just to replace a component on the control panel.
After I got the generator back together and got cleaned up, we headed out about noon for our 100 mile trip east to Foxboro, MA near Boston.
Our park is called Normandy Farms Campground, and, as the sign says, it’s been here since 1759.
Yes… 1759!
Well, not the campground, but the farm itself has been owned by the Daniels family since 1759. The 7th, 8th, and 9th generations are now running the place.
The campground had been here for about 35 years
After getting everything set up, we headed out to get a bite to eat.
We had seen a new-to-us restaurant chain here in the East called 99 Restaurants and decided to give it a try.
And a good choice it was.
Jan had one of her favorites, Turkey and Dressing, and I had a Pecan-Crusted Chicken Salad. This place is now on our favorites list.
After we got home, I got the satellite antenna set up. Due to tall trees, the last two parks we’ve been in have been ‘satellite-less’, so it’s good to have it back.
Tomorrow we head into Boston to see the sites.
August 11, 2010
Tooth Fairy gone bad…?
About 12:30 pm Jan and I headed out to the local Bob Evans restaurant for a lunch of Cranberry Pecan Salads before making a stop at the nearby WalMart to stock up on more stuff. We never seem to have enough stuff.
Coming back to the rig, we stopped at a CVS pharmacy so I could return the I-Zoom toll pass I bought yesterday. It turns out that the I-Zoom pass does not work like the toll passes in Texas.
I had thought that having a pass for the one month a year we are in this area would be worth it for the convenience and slight discount on each trip. However digging into the fine print of the Terms and Conditions (page 27 of a 28 page document) I discovered that they charge you a $1.00 a month “maintenance fee” whether I use the tag or not. That means I would be paying $11.00 a year for the months we are not here, completely eliminating any savings.
Plus, you can not suspend the account, you can only cancel it by turning in your pass.
Getting back to the rig about 2:30 pm, I decided it was a good time for a nap.
And it was.
A little after 4:30 our daughter Brandi called with the latest baby Landon update. Everything is coming along fine, and he’s still on schedule for the first week in September.
About 5:30 we headed out for dinner at El Maguey Mexican restaurant. El Maguey is our favorite Mexican restaurant in this area, and it didn’t disappoint us this time, either. We’ve also gotten hooked on their white cheese queso dip.
Coming back to the rig, we took a detour past the site of an old dentist office. The dentist used to save all the teeth he extracted, keeping them for years. Apparently the Health Department finally told him he had to get rid of them, since they were unsanitary. To get back at them he had them cast into a concrete block, using the teeth in place of the stone aggregate.
But a closer look shows that the concrete has started to erode leaving the many teeth very visible. Click on the photo for a closer view.
We got back to the rig about 7:30 and were in for the night.
Tomorrow I’ll take 3 cargo bay doors over to Phoenix Commercial Paint so that Michele can start doing her usual excellent job on our coach.
August 11, 2011
Landon’s Heerrreee!
All Landon, All The Time.
Landon getting to know his 1st Cousin Once Removed, Christina, who will probably be called just Cousin Christina.
Resting up, sitting in Daddy’s lap.
Landon standing on his own.
“Cake Face”
It’s Mac N Cheese Time.
Landon discovers he really, really likes Yoo-hoo.
Landon with 1st Cousins, Once Removed Christina and Tana, and Aunt Debbie.
Landon with 2nd Cousin Gwen.
Landon recharging for the next round.
August 11, 2013
Sour Patch Kids . . .
Brandi sent this movie over today of Landon getting his first taste of Sour Patch Kids candy.
Looks like they grew on him after a bit, though.
About 2pm some more of my relatives, my 2nd cousins Anna Jean and Marjorie, and Marjorie’s husband Walter came to visit. They are my Grandmother’s sister’s daughters, so I think that makes them my 2nd cousins.
Anna Jean and Marjorie keep up with everything about everybody in the family so we always enjoy talking to them to catch up. In fact we spent over two hours talking and laughing. And to make it even better, they brought CAKE! You just can’t beat guests like that.
After saying our goodbyes until next year, Jan and I headed out a little after 5pm for dinner. We both had a hamburger hankerin’, but the nearest Five Guys was about 30 minutes away. So we ended up at a nearby Wendy’s. I had seen their ad for the new Pretzel Bacon Cheeseburger and wanted to try it.
The burger itself was delicious, but I was a little disappointed in the Pretzel bun. But that could be just my over-expectations, since I’ve never had one before. The taste was really good, but I guess I was expecting the bun to have a little bite or crunch something more ‘pretzely’, I guess. But that may be just me. I’ll have to try someone else’s to see. Dunkin Donuts has them too.
Yesterday coming back from dinner I stopped off to put gas in the truck, and once again I wondered about gas prices. All along the street were stations, Shell, BP, Exxon, etc., with unleaded at $3.39, and then right in the middle of them is Wal-Mart at $3.21. That’s an .18 a gallon difference! Why go anywhere else?
August 11, 2014
And the Meat DOESN’T Fall Off the Bone . . .
After our coffee and some homemade bread for breakfast, I started making a couple of phone calls. First up was the Galveston Bay RV Park to get our reservation in for this November. We’ve spent the winter there for the last six years, and see no reason to change. Except maybe for the cost.
The waterfront sites that we like, run about $525 per month plus another $100 for electric. Expensive, yes. But then we have views like this out our windshield.
The cheaper alternative would be to orbit back and forth between the Colorado River and Lake Conroe Thousand Trails parks, moving every two weeks. This would run us $240 per month, but would be a pain in the butt, and we’d be further from the kids.
So for right now it’s Galveston Bay.
My next call was to Jamie with Gate Guard Services. Jamie was our supervisor the first two years we gate-guarded down in the Whitsett area. But now he’s over in the east Texas / north Texas area, and also Louisiana. So since we’ve been thinking about trying a different location this year, hooking up with Jamie was perfect.
I told him we would be available after the 25th of August, and he was pretty sure he would have something for us up in the Huntsville/Madisonville area north of Houston. It would be nice to be a little closer to civilization this year. We’ll see.
We headed out for Pensacola about 1pm for lunch and some shopping. Our first stop was a perennial favorite of ours, Sonny’s BBQ.
Jan and I go way back with Sonny’s. It was one of the first places we had dinner together when we started dating after we met down in Titusville, FL in 1967. And this one in Pensacola is a regular stop when we’re in the area.
Jan had her usual Big Deal Pulled Pork Sandwich with the BBQ Baked Beans and Homemade Mac N Cheese, while I went with my usual Pork Three Ways with BBQ Baked Beans, Corn on the Cob and two slices of Garlic Texas Toast.
The Pork Three Ways consists of Ribs, Pulled Pork, and Sliced Pork, all delicious. And the way it works out, I eat the Ribs and the sides, and then take the toast, pulled pork, and sliced pork home for later. Along with a to-go order of a side of the BBQ Beans, we’ve got another meal for both of us.
And Sonny’s Ribs are only slow-smoked, and are not pre-cooked or par-boiled first. This means they DON’T fall off the bone. And they shouldn’t. There should be some bite, some texture, to the meat.
Now that’s a meaty, tasty rib.
The other thing Sonny’s does right is their Iced Tea glasses. None of these dinky 16 oz. glasses, that after the ice is added, you get about a cup of actual tea.
No, these are big, honking 36 oz. glasses. (I checked the size on the bottom)
Leaving Sonny’s, our next stop was Artesana, a unique gift shop we’ve been visiting since before we moved to Texas from Alabama in 1978.
They have a little bit of everything, and Jan always finds something she wants. Except this time. Don’t know why, but she walked out empty-handed. Cheaper for me, though.
After a stop at Sam’s Club for some bulk stuff, we headed home via US98 through Foley, rather than the beach road like our trip over. Coming through Foley, we stopped off at Dodge’s to get gas for the truck and scope out rig access for diesel when we leave here this Friday. At $3.53 a gallon, their diesel is the cheapest around.
August 11, 2015
Fan–Tastic . . .
About 2pm there was a knock at our door and it was the UPS guy delivering our new fan. I really love parks where they deliver right to your door.
I had been looking for a better fan to circulate the cold air around the rig. Although our two roof AC’s are ducted together, the bedroom is always cooler than the front of the rig because it’s smaller and has less window area.
In the living room, the driver’s area is always 4 or 5 degrees hotter than just a few feet back. This is especially noticeable when we’re traveling and running both AC’s,.
So I was looking for a fan that would move the air around better, and this is what I came up with.
And boy, does it do the job. When I unpacked it and set it in the kitchen aimed for the front of the rig, it was 75 degrees at the sofa and 79 degrees at the dashboard. And 30 minutes later, it was 75 in both areas. Nice.
Surprisingly, even with all the air it moves, it’s very quiet. It measures 12” x 10” x 12”, and the output nozzle can be rotated from straight up to straight down. I think it’s going to make a big difference in keeping the rig more comfortable.
A little after 4pm Jan and I headed out to have dinner at King Neptune’s Seafood, another of our long-time favorites here in Gulf Shores. We’ve eaten here for years and always enjoyed it.
Until tonight.
Neptune’s has always been a place for good seafood, moderate prices, and great lunch specials. In fact at lunchtime you generally find more locals than tourists. But looking over the menu, the first thing we noticed was the big jump in prices since last year. Your first thought might be, well, prices are up everywhere. But, no.
For example, I had the Blackened Shrimp Po-Boy last night at Tacky Jack’s.
It was delicious, and only $11.
Tonight at Neptune’s I had the Shrimp and Oyster Po-Boy. It was not as flavorful, not as good, it was smaller, and it was $19.
Well, maybe the price difference was because I had both Shrimp and Oysters tonight. But no, their basic Shrimp Po-Boy is also $19.
Note the size difference too.
Next, compare the Fried Seafood Platter we had at DeSoto’s Seafood Kitchen our first night here.
It was $20, came with Flounder, Shrimp, Oysters, Crab Claws, and two sides, and was really good.
Neptune’s version comes with Flounder, Shrimp, and Oysters, and just Fries. And it’s $30.
For her meal, Jan got a mini Platter with just Catfish and Shrimp. The Mac N Cheese shown was a $3 extra order.
And it cost the same $20 as DeSoto’s for about 1/2 as much food. And Jan said it wasn’t near as good, either.
The one good part of the meal was the dozen raw oysters we ordered as an appetizer.
Paradoxically, at $10 a dozen, Neptune’s cost was less than any other place we’ve been.
Maybe that’s why everything is so high?
Tomorrow will be our last full day here in Gulf Shores, and the week sure went quickly. Too quickly, really. Thursday we’ll leave for Houston and the Colorado River Thousand Trails with a one night stop in Breaux Bridge on the way.
August 11, 2016
Not Overly Impressed . . .
About 12:30 my cousins (2nd), Stahlie, Darby, Luke, and Harlan, came over to visit for a while.
Stahlie wanted to get my stories about the Calvin and Peagram families I had for a college paper she’s doing, and Darby is writing a book using the characters from the original fairy tales and myths, many of which were pretty bloody until Walt Disney got a hold of them. She wanted some information about getting her book into Amazon Kindle format and online.
This is Stahlie and Darby. Luke and Harlan got bored and left.
She was kind of worried about the way her book was going. She said the characters seemed to be going off on their own. I laughed and told her not to worry, and that many authors say the same thing, and not to worry. Let the characters tell the story they want to tell.
Stahlie wanted to know what I remembered about my Grandmother and Grandfather who lived on the farm right across US-31 from here. In fact this RV park is built on part of their original farm
This is me with them when I was about 8 months old.
We had a great time, and spent several hours talking
Around 4:30 Jan and I headed out to have dinner at a favorite local BBQ place, 306 BBQ, out on Hwy 72 E toward Huntsville. We’ve always enjoyed this place in the past, but maybe because we had just recently eaten at Sonny’s BBQ in Pensacola, it no longer measured up.
Jan had a jumbo pulled pork sandwich with Cole Slaw.
Putting Cole Slaw on a BBQ sandwich seems to be pretty much a regional North Alabama, Tennessee, South Carolina thing. I know if you ask for Cole slaw on your BBQ in Texas, they look at you real funny.
I had the Two Meat Combo Plate with Ribs and Pulled Pork, as well as the Brown Sugar Green Beans and Turnip Greens.
And you know this is a southern BBQ place since they do have Turnip Greens, and the Pepper Sauce to put on them.
Although Jan liked her sandwich fine, I was disappointed with my BBQ. Both the ribs and pulled pork were bland and tasteless, and the pulled pork was dry.
If I could have slathered on some good BBQ sauce, it might have been saved. But the sauce here is vinegar-based with a lot of Tabasco in it, not my favorite. All I taste is vinegar with these type of sauces. Actually I think I enjoyed my Brown Sugar Green Beans and Turnip Greens better.
Tomorrow we’re getting together with my Aunt Virginia for lunch and a lot of catching up since last year. Really looking forward to it.
Jan and I went outside about midnight to take in the ‘magnificent’ Perseid meteor shower. But for us it wasn’t very magnificent, more of a Comet Kohoutek.
They said we should see 160 to 200 meteors per hour, which would be about 3 a minute. Well, in 55 minutes we saw 12, so it was kind of a letdown.
Maybe we just needed some middle-age school teachers in a VW bus to give us cookies and we wouldn’t have cared.
August 11, 2017
A Warning To The Wise . . .
Our grandson Landon starts 2nd grade this coming Wednesday, the 16th of August. Here he is meeting his new teacher for the first time.
It’s amazing how early they start school now. When I was growing up it was usually the Wednesday after Labor Day, not 3 weeks earlier like now. Gave everyone time to rest up from the holiday.
Regular readers will remember the saga of Landon’s missing teeth, when he lost two to hitting Miss Kitty’s hard head, Miss Kitty being their 120# Black Lab. Then a few months later he hit his father’s knee and lost the third one.
Well, they’re coming back in.
Just hope he doesn’t manage to knock out these permanent ones
This past week I was called back into an old client’s office down in the Clear Lake area. The client had replaced me a couple of years ago with a new IT guy, someone who said he could do the job better, cheaper, faster, whatever. And the client fell for it.
So now the IT guy, who’s I think in his late 30’s, is dying in a nursing home. And the client has NO passwords for ANYTHING. Not for Godaddy, not for the office network, not for PayPal, not for the websites, not even for the office Wi-Fi. Nothing.
So I have spent the last 3 days ‘hacking’ into things. I have started the procedures with Godaddy and PayPal to reclaim control of those accounts, and I reset and reprogrammed the Wi-Fi router so that’s working now.
Now when he took over from me, he had no problems like this. I immediately sent him a copy of a file I keep with all the necessary codes and passwords. The client had a copy of this himself, but couldn’t find it right then.
I actually talked to the guy on Wednesday, but he was so high on drugs that when I asked him about passwords, all he kept saying was ‘69raccoon’, 69raccoon’. But I don’t have any idea what it’s the password to, or if it really is a password, and not a hallucination. It certainly hasn’t worked anywhere I’ve tried it yet.
So the moral of all this is that if someone has almost complete control of your livelihood, be sure you have an up-to-date copy of all the passwords and codes. And check a few out now and then just to be sure they’re correct.
August 11, 2018
Trying To Finish Up . . .
Jan and I spent the morning talking over our Viking River Cruise plans, trying to get a better handle on when we want to go.
Right now we’re still looking at the last two weeks of April 2019 or the first week in May. The cruises actually start in March, but if you go too early the spring snow melt can make the rivers so high that the ships can’t fit under the bridges. So your river cruise becomes a 15 day bus trip. And there are a lot of complaints online about this happening to people.
It’s not going to be our problem, but often if you cruise in the late summer/fall, often the rivers are too low, and it’s back on the bus.
Jan has discovered a lot of info online about river cruising. Blogs talking about “What To Do On Your River Cruise., What Not To Do, What To Take, What Not To Take, etc. And in some cases they seem to contradict each other.
We headed out a little after noon to first have lunch/breakfast at the nearby Denny’s. Then it was on up the house to start getting the last of our stuff out. We had originally planned to make at least two, or maybe three trips back down to the storage unit. But it didn’t work out that way.
We ended up spending most of the afternoon sorting through and throwing a lot of stuff away, so by the time we were done we only had time for one load. And even that didn’t quite work out.
When we got down to the storage area we found a large moving van parked in front of our entrance door with no indication that they would be moving any time soon. So we decided to drop the stuff off tomorrow before we head back up to the house again. At least we hope they’ll be done by tomorrow.
So it was on to our next stop, Pho 20 Vietnamese Cuisine, for a light dinner of a House Crunch Salad (we split it) and an order of Shrimp Spring Rolls. The perfect meal.
Tomorrow we’ll do it all over again, but with Mexican this time.
August 11, 2019
Don’t Be Stupid. Be Crazy . . .
After a nice quiet morning I drove over to the NTB tire store (not Discount Tires) to get my rounded-off lug nut off. I got there about 12:20 for my 12:30 appointment and found them really busy. After finding a place to park, I went inside to check in.
When I said I had a 12:30 appointment to get some lug nuts off, the clerk said he couldn’t find my appointment, and since they were really busy, I’d have to come back at another time.
I told him to check using my phone number.
“Nope. Nothing here. You’ll have to come back later.”
“So you’re saying I don’t have an appointment.”
“No, there’s nothing in the system about it.”
“Then why is my name and appointment time scheduled on the monitor right over your head?”
Turning and looking up at the monitor, he grinned sheepishly and said, “Oh, here it is. Pull up to Bay 2.”
Since he had a lobby full of ‘real’ customers, I guess he didn’t want to fool with me.
About five minutes a tech came out with a special socket and a big hammer. When I pointed out the bad lug, he hammered the socket on the lug, and used his impact driver to remove the lug.
Or tried to.
It even took him several tries to break it loose with his driver, but finally it came free.
Now I don’t feel so bad.
Then I ask him to break loose the lugs on the driver’s side rear just in case. As he was doing that, he said what must have happened was the wrong impact driver was used. Some of them are set up to mount heavy truck tires and shouldn’t be used on regular vehicles.
He left the bad lug nut off and handed it to me, saying that the wheel would be OK with just five.
This reminded me of a favorite story of mine.
While driving out in the countryside, a man found himself with a flat tire. As he removed each lug nut he placed it in the hubcap for safe keeping. Mounting the new tire on the hub, he accidentally stepped on the edge of the hubcap, flipping 4 of the 5 lug nuts into the water-filled ditch next to the car.
As he was trying to figure out what to do, he hears a voice behind him. Turning, he saw a high chain-link fence topped with barbed wire. And a small sign on the fence that said, “Meadowbrook Insane Asylum”.
The voice belonged to a man standing behind the fence, who said,”You wanna know what to do?”
“Sure. What?”
“Take one lug nut off the other three wheels, and that, with the one you have left, will give you four lugs on all the wheels, fine to get you to the next town.”
“That’s brilliant, but why are you . . .?”
“Why am I in here? I’m in here because I’m crazy, not because I’m stupid.”
Moral: Don’t Be Stupid. Be Crazy.
About 4pm Jan and I headed over to the Denny’s to have our usual Sunday afternoon breakfast for dinner. Always good.
August 11, 2021
A New Toy For Work . . .
When I got to work this morning, I had a new toy waiting for me. A new (to me) Dell OptiPlex 9020 Tower Computer for the Shipping Department.
It’s an i7-4GHz with 16GB of RAM, a 512GB SSD, and a DVD drive. Then before I started setting it up, I added another 16GB for a total of 32GB, and 1TB Hard Drive for daily internal backup of the SSD.
This computer, as well as all the other computers I’ve bought for work, and as my personal one at home, are Amazon Renewed, I.e. Refurbished with a 90 day full warranty. Then for $61 I add an additional 3-year warranty.
In pretty much every case these are computers that are surplused from business who often change out their computers every two years. Refurbishers buy these in bulk, check them out. and often upgrade them at the same time. Then they’re put up on Amazon.
Coming home I stopped off at the Verizon store at FM646 to see if they could figure out what was wrong with the text messaging on Jan’s phone. Or rather with Jan’s account.
We discovered this when we moved Jan over to my old S8+ and the text problem followed along. Then last week when the S8+ died and she moved back to the S5 the problem moved back too.
And after I finally convinced them it was not a phone problem, three techs spent about 20 minutes rummaging around in her account, using the phone, a computer, and a tablet before they finally found the weird setting that was causing the problem. And then after rebooting her phone, she finally has texting.
Tomorrow we’re heading up to the Spring area to meet up with Debi and Ed Hurlburt for our monthly get-together once again, this time at Razzoo’s Cajun Café. Then instead of coming straight home, we’ll detour back down SR99 to the Katy area where I’ll drop Jan off for a weekend of fun, frivolity, and dog-sitting while Brandi, Lowell, Landon, and Sophie head up to Lake Livingston for the weekend.
Finishing up, I thought this was a really neat shot of the Pharaoh Khufu’s intact Solar Boat being moved from the Great Pyramid, where it has rested for over 4,600 years, to its new home in Egypt’s new Grand Museum.
Solar boats were buried in pits next to royal burial chambers in the belief that they would transport the departed into the afterlife.
The boat was commissioned by Khufu, a Fourth Dynasty monarch who ruled during the Old Kingdom.
The ministry boasted that the 42-metre (138-foot) long and 20-ton solar boat is “the biggest and oldest organic artifact made of wood, in the history of humanity”.
Amazing!
August 11, 2022
My Beautiful, Brilliant Wife . . .
Has ‘Insights’.
Well, my lost in transit UPS package is still lost.
The tracking still shows that the shipment was picked up by UPS on August 6th, and that’s it.
Zip, Zero, Nada, Nyet.
So still I wait.
I spent part of this afternoon trying to find and fix a leak in the bathroom lavatory. I let the water run, a mixture of both hot and cold, for about 30 minutes without a single drop showing up on the shelf underneath.
Giving up for a while, I called Jan up in Katy to check in. And that’s when my beautiful, brilliant wife gave me the solution.
She said, “What about the overflow drain?”
I hadn’t even thought of that, and didn’t even think it was a problem, since we never fill the sink up that high. Or so I thought.
Jan said that sometimes when she’s washing stuff out that water will splash into the opening. And that was it.
When I closed the drain and fill the bowl to the overflow level, water gushed out of the tube that connects the opening with the drain pipe. It looked like the tube had split along the top where I couldn’t get to it.
And in fact, it looked like I couldn’t replace or patch the tube without pulling the sink. And that would mean that entire countertop would have to come up, since it’s all one piece.
Or I could just put a piece of Gorilla Tape over the opening so no water could splash in.
Decisions, decisions.
As I said, Jan has ‘insights’. Often when I’m stumped on a problem, I’ll talk it over with her, knowing it’s something she doesn’t really know anything about. But then she’ll say something that puts me back on the right track.
And this has happened over and over.
Like I said, Beautiful and Brilliant.
Rob, our park owner, got the pad finished for his new shop/garage the other day.
I’m not sure why he built it up so high, unless he’s worried about flooding. There is a small drainage ditch about 20 feet behind it. But the park didn’t flood even with Hurricane Harvey back in 2017 right before we moved down here. And he’s going to need a big ramp, too.
We’ll see, I guess.
