Our RV Adventures

Jan wanted to try out her new Instant Pot today, but decided to ease into it by first making a batch of her world-famous Chili using it in the slow cooker mode.

Rather than a list of ingredients, how about a photo?

Actually we ended up two more cans of beans after seeing the level in the pot. The cans in the photo pretty much filled up our 5 qt. Hamilton Beach Slow Cooker, but the 8 qt. IP had more room.

In getting this meal going I ran into a couple of problems (annoyances?) with the IP.

First off, in Slow Cooker mode anyway, you can’t change the cooking temperature, Less, Normal, More, while you’re actually cooking. You have to shut off the IP and then start all over again.

Nor can you change the cooking time, say to add a hour. Again you have to start over.

The other problem is with the cooking temperature itself. It’s too low on all three settings. After an hour on Low today, the chili wasn’t even warm, but it would have been in our old H-B Slow Cooker.

So next I rebooted the IP and set it for More. And after about three hours it was warm enough to eat. But after three hours in our old H-B it would be boiling. So I guess we’ll have to adjust our times and temps with the IP. Or just keep using the H-B  for slow cooking, since Jan want’s to keep it anyway.

About 2pm Jan and I headed out to check out another couple of RV parks in the area, one new one to us, and one old favorite.

First up was Green Caye RV Park over in Dickinson, just north of FM517. We’ve never stayed here but it’s supposed to be pretty nice so we thought we’d check it out.

Turned out to be very nice, but kind of a weird layout, like a giant ‘T’, woven around the park  models,  apartments, and homes. When I saw the cost, $485 per month, I thought that was kind of high until I looked closer and found it also includes electric.

Pretty unusual for a monthly rate. And not a bad deal after all.

Then it on over to Galveston Bay RV Park, the park where we spent every winter from 2008 through 2013. Then it seem to be almost impossible to get a reservation, and we haven’t been back since. And that’s when we started spending the winter bouncing between the Lake Conroe TT and the Colorado River TT in Columbus, TX.

This was our site the first two years, Site 80.

But since then a new RV Park was built right next door, so this is the view now.

Not near as nice.

And this is site 75, where we stayed in 2011.

When we stayed here, we pulled in instead of backing in so we could have the bayou view out the windshield. Then we just hooked up to the pedestal underneath the rig.

And it looks like they’re getting ready to open a whole new area on the north side of the park.

Coming home we made a quick stop at the Kroger’s on Hwy 96 before heading back to the rig.

The Word of the Day is:  Enjambment

Thought for the Day:

If the earth were really  flat, cats would have pushed everything over the edge by now.

  asdfadsf

Heads up.

In case you haven’t heard, tonight’s the night the clocks fall back, so at 2am Sunday morning, it becomes 1am Sunday morning.

We both did little or nothing today. Jan read, napped, and watched TV, while I mostly did computer stuff . . .  and napped, too.

I’m sure we’ve all seen the‘snarky’, or downright nasty comments that show up in the many Facebook RV groups. I’ve regularly seen friend’s Nick Russell, John Huggins, and Ed Hurlburt threaten to kick people off, or actually kick them out of their respective groups because of what they said, even after repeated warnings.

But you would think that a cooking group would be immune, but no. Recently in the Instant Pot for Beginners group, one of the admins had to threaten several members with expulsion if they didn’t stop berating and arguing with other members.

So much for civility.

Elsewhere on the FB front, we still don’t have our ‘Like’ emoticons back. And according to Google we’re not the only ones to have the problem, some dating back four or five years. A number of different fixes haven been recommended, but none have worked so far.

I do know it’s not the browser since it does exactly thing in Internet Explorer as it does in Chrome. So I’ll keep looking.

On the Amazon front, a couple of weeks ago I ordered a 4TB external hard drive to keep on-site system image backups of the 3 PC computers at my clients.

4TB External Hard Drive

At 4-1/4†x 3-1/4†x 3/4†it’s tiny, at least compared to my very first HD, a 10MB SCSI drive that was connected to my Commodore Amiga. It was the size of a shoebox and cost $995 in the early 90’s. In comparison, the 4TB drive cost only $110 and holds 400,000 times more data,

Modern Technology!

The Word of the Day is:  Musette

dfgdsfg