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Vinegar Ice . . .

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Well, I’ve gone through Plan A, B, & C trying to import the UPS database to the new Shipping Computer. So now on to Plan D.

Tomorrow I’m going to pull the old HD out of the old computer and see if I can get some data off of it using the ‘Freezer Trick’.

That’s where you put the HD in a Ziploc bag and place it in the freezer for an hour or so. Then you take it out and hook it up as quickly as possible.

And many times you can get data off of it for a few minutes until it heats up. So you have to know exactly what you’re looking for.

Lather, Rinse, Repeat.

I  should know more this weekend.

* * * * *

I spent today making 3 batches of Vinegar Ice.

I had noticed a couple of days ago that our VivoHome Ice Machine wasn’t making ice as fast as it just to.

Since we’ve had it for over two years, I decided it might be time to clean it.

The machine has its own cleaning mode that you can run, so I let it run overnight. I’m not sure what it’s supposed to do, however.

The unit has a drain plug on the bottom to drain out the cleaning water.

So this morning I made 3 batches of vinegar ice, using 1/4 vinegar and 3/4 water. Then I finished up with two batches of regular ice. I had planned to run 3 to be sure I got rid of the vinegar taste/smell, but I found that the second batch didn’t taste/smell of vinegar, so I think I’m done.

* * * * *

With all the rain we’ve had recently, I had to bring in Jan’s new Flamingo mobile.

Turns out that rainwater runs down the wires into the body of each flamingo, filling them up. So I bought them inside and drilled a small hold in the bottom of the foot, allowing the water to drain.

Actually got about 1/2 cup of water out of all six.

* * * * *

Looks like SpaceX has scheduled the next Starship flight, #9, for sometime in May.

Cross your fingers and stay tuned.


Thought For The Day:

Someone said that not believing in the existence of aliens is like taking a spoonful of water from the ocean, and then saying sharks don’t exist because there’s none in my spoon.

And Now On To Today’s Retro-Blogs.™


March 28, 2009

Well, we’re still upright…

That’s about the best I can say.

Last night was a real experience.  The wind was blowing so hard that I went out about 3am to let the window awnings in. Luckily, it wasn’t raining but boy, was the wind blowing. I also cranked down the roof TV antenna since it was also making noises I had never heard before.

The satellite dish had already blown over earlier in the evening, so it was no longer a problem. I just left it there.

While I was outside I kept hearing the strangest chirping, snapping sound coming across the swamp behind us. At first, I thought it was some animal in the swamp. But I finally realized it was the sound the wind made hitting the still-out awnings of the RV’s behind us across the swamp.

And then about 4am I went back out to cut down the windchimes that had been hanging from the awning arms and were now being slammed against the side of the coach.

And then about 6am a burst of thunder that sounded like it was about 5 feet over our heads, made the coach rock on the levelers. Man, that was loud!

And then today, not having got a lot of sleep last night, Jan and I stayed around the coach all day, napped, and ate leftover pizza.

Hopefully, tomorrow will be better…


March 28, 2010

Over the Hump to Pahrump…

Today we started out by heading over to the Blueberry Hill Family Restaurant for a very good brunch. They advertise that everything is made from scratch, including the fresh-squeezed orange juice, and it shows.

Then it was off to Fry’s and then next door to the Border’s Book Store.

Then it was “over the hump to Pahrump” as they say here. “The hump” is a long climb up and over a mountain range. And the view on the trip was spectacular.

PahrumpTrip

Pahrump is a town of about 30,000 people located about 50 miles from Las Vegas. Its real claim to fame is that it is home to the closest legal brothels to Las Vegas.

But before we tracked them down, we wanted to check out the Escapees RV Park in Pahrump. And it was nothing to write home about. It had little in the way of shade and was really kind of desolate.

Unlike another RV park right down the road a piece. And it was Terrible. Or, rather it was Terrible’s. Like many casinos, Terrible’s (yes, that’s the name of a chain of casinos) has an RV park attached.

And this one was very nice. A lot of green landscaping, shade trees, and a nice lake.

Terrible 3

Terrible 2

Terrible 1

This is a place we wouldn’t mind staying at.

And then it was off to find the whor…eh, the brothels. And it didn’t take long.

It turns out that they were at the end of the road we were already on.

There are two brothels here in Pahrump, Sheri’s Ranch and The Chicken Ranch. And to make things convenient, they’re right next door to each other.

SherisRanch

SherisRanch 1

SherisRanch 2

Based on the signs it’s really kind of hard to tell what kind of place Sheri’s Ranch ( Warning! This link is a little risqué ) is.

But the Chicken Ranch ( Warning! This link is a little risqué, too) is a different story.

ChickenRanch 1

ChickenRanch 2

ChickenRanch 3

ChickenRanch 4

ChickenRanch 5

They’re pretty upfront about it.

Although The Chicken Ranch in Pahrump is named after the famous one in La Grange, TX, as depicted in “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas”, there is no direct connection.

Our curiosity satisfied, we headed back to Las Vegas. And by the time we got back, we decided it was time for supper. Since we enjoyed Blueberry Hill so much for lunch, we decided to try it for supper. And, once again, really good.


March 28, 2011

Thousand Trails in the Mail . . .

After coffee we slowly got the morning started around 9:30.

After Jan talked to Al & Adrienne about getting together tomorrow for lunch, I spent time talking with a client for a while, and then about 11:45 I went up to the RV Office and paid for our site for two more days. They told me that we would have to start using another entrance/exit to the fairgrounds since they are repaving the main entrance before the Pima County Fair starts on April 14th.

Then about 12:30 I called the fairgrounds office and found out my Priority Mail envelope had arrived, so I jumped in the truck and headed over there.

I was waiting for my paperwork from Thousand Trails so I could get it turned back ASAP, so we can head up to the TT park in Camp Verde, AZ within the next few days. We can only stay here for a few more days before we have to leave because of the upcoming fair.

I got the papers filled out and faxed in, and then called them to make my transfer payment over the phone. Hopefully, I will have our membership number in the next couple of days so we can head north.

While I was driving around the fairgrounds we got these photos of some of the RCS carnival equipment.

This is one of their large dormitory 5th wheels.

RCS Dormitory Trailer

And out on one of the side lots are a bunch of the ride trailers.

RCS Rides

About 5:30 Jan and I drove over to Jack’s BBQ for supper. According to the online reviews, Jack’s is the best BBQ place in Tucson, and the reviews were pretty accurate. Jan had a BBQ Beef/Pork sandwich, and I had the Sampler Platter with a little of everything. All very good.

After dinner, we drove over there to get a DQ fix.

Then it was home for the evening.


March 28, 2012

Good News, so far . . .

Today started out with breakfast at Denny’s. Much, much better than yesterday’s IHOP fiasco, believe me.

In other news I decided not to win last night’s Mega-Millions drawing, to allow the prize to rise to the largest amount in world history, $500 million.

That’s Half A Billion Dollars!!

After breakfast Jan and I drove over to Rush Truck Center to check up on our RV repair But when we got there Clayton and our RV were both gone. He had taken it on a test drive. Yay!

About 20 minutes later Clayton pulled back into the lot with our RV. And after talking to him, it turns out things were a little different than we thought.

First off, the engine stopping had nothing to do with coolant in the oil, or my thinking I had run out of diesel. The problem was one of those UNKNOWN codes that my Silverleaf couldn’t read. It indicated a fuel sensor problem on one of the engine fuel rails. Replacing this sensor and adding fresh oil got the engine up and running with no other problems. It started with no further priming. And apparently ran just fine, EXCEPT . . .  but back to that in a minute.

But now the problem is, where did the coolant come from? They still don’t know. That’s one of the things that the test drive was supposed to look at. But by the time we left, the tech still hadn’t checked the oil for more coolant, but Clayton said he’d call me later this afternoon if they found a problem, and he never did. So I guess they didn’t find more coolant.

Clayton said they’ve occasionally heard of this happening, and apparently never happening again. At this point, I don’t think I want to spend big bucks to tear into the engine without having some idea what the problem is.

So unless they find something else today or tomorrow, I’ll probably just start checking the oil every day we travel and keep a close eye on it.

Now for the EXCEPT – Clayton said both exhaust manifold gaskets were leaking. I had already figured out that I had a leak in the exhaust system somewhere since my Pac Brake doesn’t work as well as I thought it should. Plus I’ve never been happy with the engine power when accelerating uphill from a dead stop.

Clayton also said that the pressure test yesterday showed one leaky radiator hose that was only going to get worse, and should be replaced at some point.

I told him to go ahead and replace the gaskets and the hose, and get it out of the way. He said the hose would have to be ordered and would be in tomorrow morning, and said we should be ready to go late tomorrow afternoon.

I figure we’ll just wait and leave for Balmorhea on Friday morning.

After finding out things were looking up, Jan and I headed back to our room for more of the hotel good life, basically doing nothing, but again reading and napping. Jan’s read 4 or 5 books since we got here, and I’ve 4 or 5 really good naps. We’re both happy.

For dinner, we wanted to try Chachi’s. Clayton, the manager of the truck repair center working on our RV had recommended it, and online reviews certainly reinforced it. So about 5 pm we drove over there. And unlike a lot of good Mexican places, this wasn’t some hole-in-the-wall place, but a very nice restaurant in a small shopping area.

Cha Chi's

Not only was the food delicious, but the prices were great too. A 3 item combo plate (in my case, two enchiladas (counts as one item), q Chile relleno, and a tamale, with rice and beans was only $8.50. And according to Larry, our waiter, everything is made inhouse, tortillas, tamales, etc.

It certainly tastes like it. We may even come back tomorrow.

When we got back from supper, we had these email pictures from our daughter-in-law Linda, of our granddaughter Piper’s prom invitation.

Piper Prom 1

Piper Prom 2

Piper Prom 3

Pretty inventive way to ask her and looks like he got a ‘YES’ check on it.


March 28, 2013

A New Favorite . . .

This morning I got back to figuring out why my dashboard gauge lights quit working. After getting some more info from American Coach on how the circuit was wired, I started tracing the wiring back and after wedging myself in between the driver’s seat and the underside of the dashboard (not an easy job, believe me), discovered that the problem is with the headlight switch. Or at least the dash light dimmer part of it.

The switch is one of those that you pull out to turn the parking lights/headlights on and then rotate the knob to dim/brighten the dash lights. I did find out that the switch is a standard truck part so a replacement would be easy to find, but getting it out looks to be a problem

I would try to spray some contact cleaner in it, but it looks to be pretty sealed up so I would probably have to remove it to do that, and then I’m right back where I started.

I’m going to look at it some more, but I’m kind of tempted to just disconnect the dash light wire plug from the switch and then short across the wires so the lights are on full bright all the time, since that’s the way I drive with it anyway.

More tomorrow.

My Priority Mail package finally showed up today that our daughter Brandi sent out on Monday. It should have gotten here yesterday, but according to the USPS tracking, it was “MisSent” (whatever that means) out of the Tucson PO yesterday and got lost.

A little before 4 Jan and I headed out to check out Brushfire BBQ. We read good online reviews about it, and it certainly smelled good when we drove by.

As we were just leaving the coach, Mike and Cheryl Sipes stopped by to say Hi and drop off a menu for the Hot Wok, a place they say is even better than Luckie’s Thai.

This means it must be fantastic, because Luckie’s is really, really good. Hopefully, we’ll be able to try it before we leave here on Sunday.

And Brushfire turned out to be really, really good, too.

Brushfire BBQ

In fact I think we have a new favorite BBQ place here in Tucson.

It’s as good as Famous Dave’s, a couple of bucks cheaper, and a lot closer to the fairgrounds.

Jan had the Half Rack of Baby Back Ribs with Grilled Green Beans and a Loaded Baked Potato, and I had a combo plate with Sticky Ribs (St. Louis Style) and Beef Brisket, with Grilled Green Beans and Grilled Corn on the Cob.

Brushfire BBQ Combo Plate

The meat was moist, tender, and very flavorful. But even as tender as it was, it had some texture to it. I hate it when they parboil the ribs first to make them cook faster when they’re being smoked, and the meat turns out just mushy. Yeah, it does ‘fall off the bone’, but that’s because it’s been boiled to a pulp.

And the Grilled Green Beans were outstanding. As the description says, they’re cooked on the grill and come out crisp, but still tender, and delicious.

My only regret about Brushfire is that we didn’t go sooner. They only have two locations, both here in the Tucson area, so it will probably be next year before we can go back.

BUMMER!

We got home a little after 5 and I got back on the taillight problem. I got the old, ‘extra’ taillight converter out of the system and patched around, and now the rig part of the system is working fine.

But getting that part working revealed another one. I’ve apparently got a bad ground somewhere in the truck’s wiring. If I hook my test box up to the truck, the lights work fine. But if I hook the rig up to the truck, the turn signals work fine, but the left taillight doesn’t work and the right taillight is much brighter than it should be. An obvious grounding problem

I think I know where the problem is, but I finally ran out of daylight, so I’ll try to finish it up tomorrow.

I did have a couple of blog readers drop by to say Hi while I was working on the taillights, but I didn’t get their names. Sorry. But it is always nice to know people enjoy the blog.


March 28, 2015

Good Mexican Food and Zombie Outbreaks . . .

I did manage to get a coat of paint on the center portion of the rig bumper early this afternoon before the sun hit it. I’ll do another coat on everything in the next day or two. After that, I’ll sand it with some 2000 grit and see what it looks like after I polish it up.

Rig Paint 6

So far the timer I put on my Powermax converter/charger is working perfectly so far to keep both sets of batteries charged, so I can do away with setting up the separate charger each time. Good so far.

Jan and I recently stumbled into a new TV show we kind of like. It’s on the CW network and it’s called iZombie. Now, although Jan and I like such ‘supernatural’ shows as Grimm and Once Upon A Time, zombie shows and movies have never really been our ‘thing’. But this show came on one night while I was working on the blog, and after a bit, I started paying more attention.

The heroine, Liv Moore is a medical student, who after being scratched during a party that became a zombie outbreak, becomes a zombie herself. Finding herself now craving brains, she decides to go to work in the city morgue, easing access to her needed nourishment. She’s aided in this by the Chief Medical Examiner who knows her secret and is studying her condition, hoping to find a cure.

But there’s a catch. After a brain burrito, or some brain sushi, she sometimes takes on the memories, feelings, and talents of the brain’s donor. And after partaking of a murder victim’s brain, she sees ‘visions’ of their death, which she then uses to help the police solve crimes. Of course, the police detective she works with doesn’t know she’s a zombie. He just thinks she’s psychic. I don’t know which one would be harder to believe.

The thing that makes this show really good is the humor woven into the plots, as well as Liv’s comments to the audience as she goes about her secret life.

The first two episodes have already run on the CW on Tuesday nights, but if you want to give it a try, TNT is rerunning the show from the first episode, starting this Monday, the 30th. Check it out.

About 4:30pm we headed over to Los Gringos Locos (The Crazy Americans) for dinner. Even getting there at 4:30 they were already on a wait, and it didn’t get any less busy as the evening went on. But then it is Saturday.

Everyone enjoyed what they had, and I have a new favorite dish there: the Carne Asada.

Los Gringos Locos Carne Asada

The meat was extremely tender and perfectly grilled. And it comes with a Cheese Enchilada, as well as rice and beans. Really good.

Tomorrow I’ll get back on my magnetic shade project and continue sewing the magnets in place.


March 28, 2016

No Cooling, No Cooling . . .

or Up On The Roof!

I was actually up a little early this morning, but was feeling a little ‘blah’ so we didn’t walk or sit outside. Just had our coffee and cereal in the rig.

Sometime during the night, our Direct TV DVR glitched and reset itself to no channels. I first tried powering the receiver off and on a couple of times, which has helped before, but not this time.

So I called and asked them to reset it from their end and they said they would. It seems like we have to do this every couple of years or so, Apparently, the receiver gets a garbage code command from the satellite and goes into ‘dork’ mode (yes, that’s a technical term). But after a few minutes, still nothing. But I thought I’d wait a while before I called them back.

I checked in with Barbara about 11 to see if there had been any change in her refrigerator problem. She said ‘No’, but that her tech guy had finally called her back, and agreed with me about it probably being a blockage (great minds think alike), but didn’t think much of the idea of turning the unit upside down for a while. I don’t either, because by the time you get it out, you might as well put a new residential unit in.

Around 2pm, feeling better after coffee, I drove over to Barbara’s to try another way to possibly clear the blockage. I had a foot-long piece of dowel and a small hammer, and my idea was to use the dowel rod and the hammer to gently tap along the 8 ammonia tubes visible at the top of the access panel. There are 4 tubes in front, and then 4 more behind those and offset upwards. I figured there might be a chance that this would break the crystals loose and free things up.

But when I got there, Barbara said the unit had died completely sometime that morning, with no lights working at all, not even the one inside the unit. All this indicates a loss of 12vdc to the fridge so after checking the fuses on the control board, I tracked down and checked the fuse sending 12v to the unit from the rig, but it was good too.

Before I could go any further, Barbara said she was researching residential types to replace it. I did go ahead and use the rod and the hammer to lightly tap along all the visible ammonia tubing, in case I do get a chance to look at it further.

The unit Barbara is trying to replace is a Dometic Royale RM3862, which is no longer made. But nothing on the residential side of things is showing up either.

The problem is the size. It’s 60” high, 24” wide, and 24” deep. Looking at the cabinet, she might be able to gain an inch or so on height and width, but unlike many installations where there is a drawer underneath, in her rig that’s where her heater lives.

I posted the question on RV.net and a couple of other forums asking for info, but haven’t heard anything back yet.

Finishing up at Barbara’s I drove down to the office to pay my 50 amp add-on fees, and get my car tag and gate codes.

Getting back to the rig I found I had a couple of problems of my own. One, Direct TV still wasn’t working, so I put in another call, and found out THEY have a problem. For some reason, they cannot uplink any codes to a certain swath of receiver addresses.

Every receiver has its own individual address. That’s how they can send a pay-per-view movie to only your receiver, and not everyone else’s. It’s like your computer’s IP address, where your computer is the only one in the world with that particular address.

So now we wait.

But Two is the big problem. My almost new (6 months old) Coleman Mach 15 AC that I installed (with help from my son Chris and son-in-law Lowell) back last August, is not cooling. It  runs, but it just doesn’t cool.

My first thought was that it was maybe frozen up, so I ran just the fan for a while. I didn’t really think this was the problem, since the humidity is really low, and the fan is blowing strong air, but with sunset coming it was about all I could do.

So tomorrow it’s Up On The Roof to see what’s wrong with the compressor. Maybe just a bad capacitor. Well, I can hope, can’t it?

I’m assuming it’s still in warranty. I’ll check tomorrow.


March 28, 2017

Weather Watch . . .

The weather the last few days has been really nice, with highs in the mid-70’s and low’s in 40’s/50’s.

In fact, at noon, it was still only 69° here. Just about perfect. And even better, on Friday the high is supposed to 68° and sunny.

I’m still waiting to hear back from the RV Glass people, and really hope we can get this taken care of before we leave for Las Vegas on April 8th

I also put in a call to Arizona RV Awnings down in Wellton, AZ to get some info on replacing our rig’s Carefree window awnings. Before that Jan and I went outside and measured our present ones to see what we needed.

Based on their website we should be able to get heavy-duty Sunpro replacement fabric for all four for around $430, which includes free shipping. But our thought is to pick them up ourselves on a day trip down to Gila Bend and Yuma. So maybe we can get a discount since they won’t have to pay for the ‘free shipping’.

I’m still waiting to hear back from ‘Eric’ who’s supposed to answer my questions and take my order.

Later I stuck my phone camera underneath the rig’s Kwikee step so I could get the part numbers for the step (It’s a Series 28) and the motor I need to replace.

Kwikee Step Numbers

Blog reader Steve Mesz clued me in on the fact that many of these step motors are Ford power window motors, so I’m going to follow up on that.

For an early dinner, we finished off our leftover Famous Dave’s BBQ from yesterday, along with some Bush’s Brown Sugar and Bourbon Grilling Beans. Then tomorrow Jan’s doing a big slow cooker batch of her world-famous chili. Really looking forward to it.

Tomorrow we’ll run some errands and take care of a few other chores, and hopefully, I’ll hear back from my windshield glass and awning people.


March 28, 2018

Switches and Shastas . . .

Well, our truck is finally back home after the latest repair. Hopefully the last one for a good while.

As I had hoped, (and maybe prayed a little) it did turn out that the problem was not a faulty oil pump, but instead, just a clogged oil pickup tube and pickup screen in the oil pan. That’s what 277,000+ miles worth of gunk will do. But it’s all cleared out now, and hopefully good for another 277,000 miles.

I’ve mentioned before that I’ve been gradually automating a number of things around the rig. The first one was our power converter, which needs to be power-cycled twice a day so it will keep the engine batteries charged. Others, like lights, the TV, etc., are just for convenience, or for fun.

I started out using these TP-Link Switches,

TP-Link Switch 2

but they’re expensive, $22 each, and they’re big. Big enough that they cover up the other outlet on the wall plate. But they allow me to control them from anywhere using an Android app, and locally from our Alexa.

So next I tried out these PECHAM WiFi Switch units.

PECHAM WiFi Switches

At  $11 each they’re half the price and half the size. The only real downside is that it will only handle 10 Amps vs 15 Amps for the bigger ones. But nothing I’m controlling uses anywhere near that current, so cheaper is better.

Another nice thing about these is how quickly these can be set up. Once you’ve installed the app, just plug in the unit to an AC outlet, hit Search on the app, and in a few seconds you’re done. Then you can give it a name and it’s ready to go.

Our son-in-law Lowell recently alerted us to the fact that one of our favorite diners has come to town. Black Bear Diner, a staple out west, has a new location out in the Katy area, with more to come around here.

Black Bear Diner

We’ve also enjoyed the very first ‘Black Bear’ Diner located in Weed, CA., home of Mt. Shasta.

Mt Shasta RV Park

I put the name in quotes because it’s actually called the Hi-Lo Diner. Hi-Lo was the first, then there was a divorce. So one side went down the road a piece to the city of Mount Shasta, and utilizing the same newspaper-like menus and décor, they named it the Black Bear Diner, and a chain was born.

We’re looking forward to checking it out soon.

Tomorrow I’ve got a 1:30 appointment with my GP again to rerun some tests. She’s unhappy about my calcium levels. And after I did a little research I think I know what the problem is. I’m not getting enough calcium.

Doh!, right?

I figured that I was getting enough calcium from my vitamins, but looking at the bottle it only gives me 20% of my daily needs. And since I don’t eat a lot of milk, dairy, cheese, etc., that wasn’t enough. So I’ve started taking Viactiv chews to make up the difference.

But we’ll see what the doc says, I guess.


March 28, 2019

Red Green . . .

No, not this guy, who can build pretty much anything with duct tape.

Red Green

It’s more like Red v. Green. As in Antifreeze.

Jan had her very last doctor’s appointment today, a wrap-up with her oncologist. But since it was at 12:30 we decided to have lunch first, this time at East Star Chinese Buffet, where we haven’t been for a while.

We knew we were getting there early, about 10:45, and figured we’d just wait until they opened at 11. But we found they were already open, so we went in and got started. However they were still putting food out, but somehow we did find enough to eat. Really delicious, and of course, VERY fresh under the circumstances.

Afterward, we had enough time for me to pick up a couple of things at WalMart before heading over to the doctor’s office.

Since Jan had already gotten a good report from her mammogram so this was just a final checkup. One thing that Jan was hoping would happen, and did, was that since it’s been 5 years since her cancer, her doctor took her off her cancer preventative, Anastrozole, that she’s been taking.

She started out on Tamoxifen, but had a very bad reaction to it, saying it made her feel like she was crawling out of her skin. So after a few months, the doctor switched her over to Anastrozole. And she’s had no problems since. But she was glad to be off it anyway.

And after another stop, we were on our way home for the day.

I talked to Cummins again yesterday, but not about my oil filter, or my Onan Genset. This time it was about antifreeze, and the whole Red v. Green thing.

Our RV has the Green diesel antifreeze in it, and though I don’t use a lot, the green version is getting harder and harder to find. In fact, truck stops like Flying J and Pilot no longer carry it, at least the ones I’ve checked. And the last time I bought some I had to order a case of 4 from NAPA. And the price has doubled since then.

So I’m probably going to change over to the Red version sometime in the future. But I’ve heard a lot of stories about whether or not they can be mixed, with people who should know on both sides of the issue.

Plus now, there’s all the in-between colors, like pink, orange, and yellow. Mixtures that some say can be used to transition between the other colors.

But what I really wanted to know was what I needed to do to change over from Green to Red, since I’ve heard various stories about that too. But what I got pretty much confirmed what I already thought. So according to the Cummins Tech –

Drain the Green antifreeze, fill the engine with distilled water, and then run the engine for about 15 minutes. Then ideally, drain the water and do this again.

Finally, change out the coolant filter and fill the engine with the Red stuff, and I should be good to go.

But first, there’s my engine oil leak problem, and of course, my long-neglected Onan Genset problem.

It’s always something.


March 28, 2020

Fixing . . .

After a quiet, isolated morning, I spent the afternoon on the rig’s roof working on our Coleman Mach XV AC unit.

Coleman AC 2020 Repair 0

I mentioned the other day that our front AC wasn’t draining, but was leaking down into the rig. So grabbing my tools Jan steadied the ladder while I got up on the roof.

It takes a bit of time to get the unit apart, because of all the screws that seal up the evaporator side of the unit. You don’t want any outside air leaking in.

Coleman AC 2020 Repair 1

But I also had to take the sides off so I could get to the drain holes. I had brought an old coat hanger up with me just for that purpose, so I was able to poke it down in there to open up the hole.

Coleman AC 2020 Repair 2

I know they keep the hole small as part of keeping the unit sealed as much as possible, but next time I have to do this I’m bringing up a drill bit to ‘waller’ it out a little bit more.

After the built-up water had drained away, I dumped some water/bleach solution down in the drain pan to kill any more fungus/mold to help prevent the problem from reoccurring for a while.

I had originally planned to clean the ‘gunked-up’ evaporator coil, but when I looked at things, I decided to just do it while I was up there. I had Jan pass me up the can of coil cleaner I got the other day, and a towel to cover up the opening down into the coach.

Coleman AC 2020 Repair 3

After getting the coil nice and clean, I buttoned the AC back up and came down.

Jan doesn’t want me up on the roof until she’s sitting outside watching me. A while back I asked her if she was going to try and break my fall if I fell off the roof. She said, “No, but I will call 911.”

It’s the little things in a marriage that keep things interesting.

For dinner tonight I did another batch of Chicken Tenders in our Ninja Foodie Digital Air Fryer. As before I dipped the tenders in egg whites and then rolled them in crushed BBQ Pork Rinds.

Though you can buy Pork Rind Panko, I crush my own using a Ziploc bag and a heavy jar. This is because the pre-crushed Panko is about 6 times the cost per ounce as the ones in the bag.

And 25 minutes later at 400°, this was the result.

Air Fryer Chicken Tenders

The egg white batter gives them a crispy crust, and the pork rinds get them a delicious crunch.

Don’t know why, but the distinctive BBQ of the Pork Rinds seems to disappear with the taste of the chicken.

Tomorrow if the weather holds we’ll try and get started on assembling our storage shed.


March 28, 2021

Well, 90% Anyway . . .

Jan and I headed up to Webster about 12:30 to have lunch at Snooze once again, but first I went by the office to start up a cloning job to an SSD drive, so it would be finished, or almost finished, by the time we got done with lunch,

Even getting to Snooze a little before 2pm, we still had a 20-minute wait for a table. But as usual, it was worth the wait.

Snooze Bravacado Toast

Snooze Classic Breakfast 4

When we got back to the office the clone job was finished, so I shut down the computer, opened the case, and moved the SSD driver over in place of the regular HD. As I was doing this I did notice that there were two HD’s in the case, not just the one I had expected. And this quickly turned out to be an unexpected problem.

So when I connected the SSD drive in place of the two HD’s and rebooted, I got a Boot Error saying it couldn’t find the Boot Block on the SSD. So I hooked the two HD’s back up and booted up into the BIOS area. And there I saw my problem.

The two HD’s weren’t configured as two separate drives, but a RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) array. And I’m assuming it was a RAID 1 array, which means that the two drives are mirrors of each other, so that if one fails, the other one takes over.

Well, as it turns out you can’t clone a RAID correctly, so I’ll have to break the array and try again. But that’s for another day.

While I had the case open I installed the new TP-Link WiFi 6 high-speed network card, and then booted up and found it worked fine. Then I went in and reconfigured that network settings . . . again.

For some reason, often when we get a Win10 update from MS, it goes through and configures all the network settings back to the default, I.e. no network. So then I have to go in and set it all up again.

Have I mentioned I hate ‘updates’?

Close to finishing up, I installed the final WiFi card in the Point of Sale computer and got it working. So sometime this week I’ll get all 3 machines moved over to the new, much faster network. So I guess I got 90% done of what I wanted to, so not bad.

And sometime in here I need to break the RAID array apart so I can re-clone that drive, and also clone the POS computer too.

Busy, busy, busy.

Coming coming back toward home, we made a quick HEB stop for a few HEB-specific things that Jan likes, finally getting back to the rig a little before 6pm, a long, but interesting day.


March 28, 2023

Whether I Wanted It or Not . . .

Well, despite my blocking it every way I could, all of a sudden, about 11am, my HP desktop rebooted and started downloading and installing Windows 11.

%#&@#$!

But at this point, there was no way to stop it without probably screwing up things completely so I just had to let it go. And about 30 minutes later, and after several reboots, I was running Win11.

And all I can say now, is So Far, So Good. Everything seems to be working OK, though I did have to reset a number of things, like the WiFi signal.

The only really obvious difference I’ve seen is the new look of the requestors and pop-up windows.

Anyway, I’ve got 10 days to easily roll back to Win10. After that, I would have to reinstall Win10 from scratch.

I’ll keep you updated.

Lunch today was at Snooze once again, with Jan getting her usual, favorite Bravocado Toast,

Snooze Bravocado Toast 20230117

while I got the 3 egg omelet, with something I haven’t had in an omelet before, Shrimp.

As well as Ham, Jack Cheese, and Pico de Gallo.

Snooze 3 egg Omelet 20230328

I always get the Fruit instead of Hashbrowns, and a Grilled English Muffin.

Delicious as always.

Then it was on up to Kroger’s to pick up a prescription and down to WalMart for additional stuff. And after P.O. stop for our mail, we were home a little after 4pm.

Nice Day!


Getting back to our Fredericksburg visit last Tuesday, after our delicious Der Lindenbaum German meal, including the fresh-baked German Marble Rye bread,

Der Lindenbaum Bread 20230323

we drove around the town for a while before checking into our La Quinta Inn a little after 3pm, and were in for the night.

A very nice hotel.

Friday morning we headed out toward Kingsland, with our first stop at the local HEB for gas, according to GasBuddy the cheapest gas in town. And it showed since we had to wait in line for about 10 minutes.

Our next stop was only a few miles down the road, and the other reason, besides Der Lindenbaum, for our visit.

And that was Wildseed Farms.

Wildseed Farms Entrance 20230324

A large gift shop, plant nursery, clothing store, and snack bar.

Wildseed Farms 1 20230324

Wildseed Farms 2 20230324

Wildseed Farms 3 20230324

One of Jan’s favorite places, and she always finds something she just has to have.

Then we were back on the road for the hour-long trip over to Kingsland and our son Chris’ place, seeing a LOT of Bluebonnets and Paintbrushes along the way.

Getting there a little after 1pm, we spent some time sitting out in Chris’s great backyard.

Chris' Backyard 1

Chris' Backyard 2

Chris' Backyard 3

He and Linda have put a lot of work into it, with something new every time we visit.

I’ll have more about our trip tomorrow.


March 28, 2024

We Had To Kill The Owls . . .

I got an early wake-up call from Rob, our park owner, this morning asking us to move our vehicles down a few spaces so he could upgrade the gravel in our parking space. So we went from this,

to this.

Looks really nice. And this stuff seems to compact and become solid as it ages, almost like asphalt.

While this was going on, I had a chance to check out the zoom setting on my S21 Ultra cellphone using my Eclipse filter.

Looks like 60x will be about right. Even though at that setting, it’s a digital zoom, and not an optical one, it still looks good.

Not as many sunspots as the other day.

About 1:30 we headed into Webster for our monthly Alvin Opry Alumni get-together, at Saltgrass Steakhouse once again.

And we’re going right back to Saltgrass again next month, the third one in a row.

We had to kill the owls to save the owls.

Feds propose killing nearly 500,000 ‘invasive’ owls to save Calif. native owls

On Monday, 75 wildlife organizations sent a letter to Interior Secretary Deb Haaland asking her to abandon the plan.

The goal, according to the plan, is to eliminate habitat competition between barred owls and native northern spotted owl and California spotted owl, two endangered subspecies of spotted owls. While still in its early stages, the proposal calls for shooting an estimated 470,900 barred owls — primarily with shotguns — across land in Washington, Oregon and California over the next 30 years.

And what do you do when your endangered owls are attacking your endangered shorebirds?

ENDANGERED OWLS PREY ON ENDANGERED HAWAIIAN STILTS

Kind of like the saying in Vietnam, “We had to destroy the village to save the village.”

Leading into Easter weekend, thought I end the blog with this great version of Hallelujah, done by sisters Cassandra and Callahan Star.

Thanks, Anne.

 

 

 

 

 

Posterior Capsular Opacification . . .

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I’ve been fighting with UPS for the last two days trying to get UPS Worldship set up on the new Shipping computer. After jumping through all the hoops that UPS throws up when you’re trying to set up the new one.

To verify that you are who you say you are, (no problem with that) they require you to enter the Invoice # and Invoice total of your latest invoice. No problem with this either.

But what they don’t seem to be able to handle is if they’ve issued you a new invoice, but you haven’t received it yet. But finally after an hour on hold, I got them to look back to the previous invoice and let me finish the install.

Next up, was to install the UPS database (address, past invoices, etc.) from my iDrive backup file.

I’ve done this before when I was upgrading machines where you just use the Worldship program to export the database on the old machine and then import it on the new machine. Easy Peasy.

But no matter how I Googled it, I found nothing telling me how to do this from a backup file.

So very reluctantly I got on the phone to UPS Support and after 1:45 minutes on hold, got Rajesh. And Rajesh, after hearing my problem, told me that there is no way to do this. You can only export from the old system and import to the new one. And he had no answer about why this wasn’t doable.

So if you’ve got a dead machine, you’re dead in the water, I guess.

But I’m still working on it.

* * * * *

Getting back to yesterday:

Yesterday afternoon Jan had an appointment with Dr. McMullen, her ophthalmologist, and the doctor who did her Cataract Surgery a few years ago.

Recently she’s been noticing some haze or fogginess in her vision, so she wanted to check back in with him. And it turns out this is quite normal after cataract surgery. It’s called Posterior Capsular Opacification (PCO), also known as a secondary cataract.

These cloudy patches, or secondary cataracts, may form as part of your eye’s healing process after surgery. If this happens to you, your provider can remove the secondary cataract through a quick, outpatient laser procedure.

A secondary cataract can develop months or years after your cataract surgery.

Secondary cataracts are the most common complication of cataract surgery. They affect up to 50% of people who have cataract surgery within five years of the surgery.

And it only takes about a minute per eye with a YAG laser to zap it away.

So she’s got an appointment on April 17 to take care of this.

* * * * *

After Jan’s eye appointment, we headed over to BoomerJack’s and got to see both Sylvia and Juana this time.

Jan got her usual Blackened Catfish with Grilled Veggies,

while I got my usual Mango Habanero Wings, but only 5 this time, since I also got a salad.

Delicious as always.

* * * * *

Getting back to Today:

Today was our monthly get-together with the Alvin Opry Group at the Webster Saltgrass Steakhouse once again.

Jan got her favorite 9oz Filet with the Grilled Green Beans.

Her steak looks kind of disheveled here because she always cuts it open as soon as she gets it to be sure it’s done to her liking.

I got my usual 16oz Ribeye, also with the Green Beans.

As long as mine’s south of Medium Rare and not moving too much, I’m good to go.

A great time as usual.

* * * * *

Tomorrow I’m back to fighting the UPS war.


Thought For The Day:

Makes you wonder how accurate those drawings of dinosaurs are, based on their fossilized bones.

And Now On To Today’s Retro-Blogs.™


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!

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


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.

TurnIn1

TurnIn2

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.

Hilltop 1

Hilltop 2

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

Jan - Tea Party

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

One other interesting thing was going on 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.

Skywriting1

Skywriting

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

BigScreen

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

Sarah 1

Sarah 2

Sarah 3

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.

Doyle 1

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.

Joe The Plumber 1

Joe The Plumber 2

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 has become known for her insightful political commentary.

Victoria Jackson

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 an 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 about 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.

Left-Click to Enlarge
And this picture does not cover the entire area full of people.

Left-Click to Enlarge

We were packed in pretty tight.

Left-Click to Enlarge

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, which had a crew there, said there were over 20,000 people there.

I think they were a little closer than CNN.


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.

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.


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.


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 postcards 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 in 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 everyone 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 readers 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 a try.

See I told you it was slow.


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.

HFT Drill bits

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.

WORX Screwdriver

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

Fantastic Vent Fan and Motor

New 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 ones. When I replaced the front one a couple of days ago, I noticed 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.

Colorado River Red-Tailed Hawk Nest 1

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.


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. Everything 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, an 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 time we park. 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,

Brinks Timer

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.


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.

Chewed Plugs_thumb[1]

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 quickly.

He also asked 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 the 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.


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.

Amazon Mouse Package

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.

RV Windshield Separation 3

It’s not in any danger of coming out, as you can pull 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 try 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.

Rig Front for Windshield Repair

Looks fine to me.

About 2pm we headed out 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.

Famous Dave's Salad

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

Famous Dave's Ribs

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 3 Meat Combo

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 left over to take home.

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


March 27, 2018

No News Is . . .

Probably Not Good News.

I didn’t hear 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 spent 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 the 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.


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 finish 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 eating 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 Snooze AM.

If it’s Denny’s, it’s this:

Denny's Greg Eggs 2

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

Cheddar's Chicken Tortilla Soup
Cheddar's Veggie Plate 3

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’s 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.


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 the 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 came out. And that’s turned out really good, since I’m still using it. Though I’m looking at upgrading to an 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.

Starlink Dish

The 34” Starlink Dish

Starlink Modem

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 to 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 Peazy. 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.


March 27, 2022

Just An Error?

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

New Water Tank Ball Valve

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 they 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.

Brandi's Pool Landon & Sophie 20220326

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


March 27, 2023

I Still Wonder . . .

Our recent sojourn to the Texas Hill Country started with our 8am departure Thursday morning with our first stop at the Buc-ee’s up in Katy for a pit/coffee stop.

Our Jeep is still in the shop, and we really didn’t want to take Old Faithful, not because I don’t think it would make it, but because we wanted something a little more comfortable and a little less smoky.

So I picked up a 2022 Toyota Corolla like this one.

2022 Toyota Corolla

I had asked for a Chevy Malibu, but it didn’t get returned in time.

Turned out to be a lot better than I expected.

But I still wonder if it can really do 160mph.

Toyota Corolla 160 mph

It had a lot of pep, especially for a 4 banger, though it sounded like an angry sewing machine when you punched it.

But Jan told me I wasn’t allowed to check it out. But she has been with me when we’ve done a little over 130, so what’s another 30 mph or so?

Bummer!

Our second stop was another 90 minutes along at the Luling Buc-ee’s, again for a pitstop/coffee break, with us finally getting into Fredericksburg about 1:45. Perfect timing since Der Lindenbaum, our favorite German restaurant opened at 1:30. And It was already half full when we got inside.

It’s that good.

And it was, but more about that tomorrow.


March 27, 2024

Getting In The Mood . . .

I just came across this T-shirt on Amazon and had to have it. I mean, it’s the Sounds of Silence, Van Gogh’s Starry Night, and the Eclipse.

What more do you need?

Hello Darkness My Old Friend T-Shirt

And now NY wants to call out the National Guard, including a HAZMAT unit, to help control the unruly crowds.

The only Texas county that’s doing something that actually makes sense says they putting out 100’s of Porta-Potties around the county.

And even Wildseed Farms up in Fredericksburg is getting in on the fun.

I’ll pass.

Looks like we’re getting another big resort in the local area.

First, there was the Great Wolf Lodge complex up in Webster, then the big Margaritaville Resort down in Galveston.

And now this one.

$80 million RV resort complex in La Marque

Located just north of Galveston Island and called La Marque Crossroads, it will include a retail center, an RV resort, a lake, million-dollar clubhouse and pools, tourist attractions, as many as 10 open-air multi-level restaurants, a hotel, and a convention center. And even a bird sanctuary.

An $80 million project at Interstate 45 and state Highway 146 will include an RV resort, a hotel and a 4-acre lake with a boardwalk, along with restaurants and bars, and pump about $40 million in revenue into the city over 10 years, officials said.

Community RV Resorts, developer and operator of RV resorts along the Texas and Louisiana Gulf Coast, will lead the 62-acre project and cover the construction and development costs with no incentives from the city, Vice President Michelle Sanders said.

Tomorrow still looks to be sunny, so hopefully I’ll be able to try out the Eclipse filter on my camera again. And since I was able to see Sunspots last time, maybe I’ll also be able to see Solar Prominences during the Eclipse.