Our RV Adventures

It was really great to have Jan home again, at least for a couple of days. I got tired of just talking to the cat.

Jan and I may be rethinking our winter stays here as we bounce back and forth between Lake Conroe and Colorado River. If I run the numbers (and I do like to run the numbers, especially when $$ are concerned), it looks like it would be cheaper to spend our out-week from Lake Conroe at the Hillcrest RV Park over in New Waverley about 20 miles away.

I talked about this a couple of days ago in relation to us going over to Medina Lake vs. staying here, while Colorado River is offline. But here’s how it works for Colorado River.

The round-trip over to Colorado River is 240 miles, so figuring 8mpg, that’s 30 gallons of diesel. At $2.50 a gallon, that’s $75.

Since we’re out of our 50 TT free days, we pay $5 per day, plus $3 a day for 50 amp, so that’s $112, and $187 total w/diesel for our stay.

Now for a stay here at Hillcrest, it’s

$14.50 a day x 7 = $102 + 40 miles / 8 = 5 x $2.50 = $12.50

So that’s $102 + 12.50 = $114.50 for our out-week.

That means a savings of $72.00, plus the wear and tear savings on the rig.

So now it kind of depends on how we like Hillcrest. I guess we’ll see.

And now I have another decision to make. The black ink cartridge in my HP 2542 printer is skipping and the color cartridge is running low as well. So I have a choice to make.

I can buy a set of of Black and Color XL cartridges from Amazon for $62, Or I can replace my 3-1/2 year old HP 2542 printer

with a brand-new HP 4650 . . . for only $70.

So $8 more gets me a new printer.

A new printer that’s faster, has automatic two-sided printing, a document feeder, a touchscreen, and does borderless printing.

Not bad for $8.

Of course I could try a set of these remanufactured LxTek cartridges that are guaranteed to work and not hurt the printer.

Only $20.

What to Do, What to Do?

Tomorrow afternoon I’m going to take Jan back down to Brandi’s where she’ll stay until Wednesday, when I’ll pick up on my way back from Clear Lake.

Finally, help fund Nick’s Escape from Irma!

Buy A Book!

Bg Lake Tragedy

Thought for the Day: 

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Once again I was up and out the door by 9:30 this morning, on my way back down to my client in Clear Lake.

I’m still waiting for the new USB WiFi adapters to come in from Amazon, which should be here by Monday. Then I’ll reconfigure the entire network and get the server computers, including the mystery one, out of the small closet and into another room where I can more easily hook up monitors/keyboards/mouses to them.

So today I worked on a lot of little niggly bits, including repairing a couple of broken RJ-45 connectors with the new repair clips that came in this morning.

They just snap over the bad connector and lock right in place and seem to hold in the socket with no problems.

I’ve also been using my Ethernet cable tester to map out some of the many unidentified cables so I can tag them. Right now I’m using masking tape and a Sharpie, but I’ve ordered a set of these labels to make things permanent.

They’re tough, waterproof plastic and come in sheets that you can print on a laser printer. A set of 300 labels (10 sheets) is less than $10.

The cable tester I’m using is one I had for 20 years or more, and in fact, I’m sure it’s not even made any more.

It’s so old that it not only has the RJ-45 Ethernet connectors, but also the old coax cable connector which is what networks used before the Ethernet/RJ45 twisted pair standard came along, pretty much in the 1990’s. BTW the ‘RJ’ in RJ45 stands for ‘Registered Jack’ and was developed by AT&T for phone use long before it was appropriated for Ethernet use.

All I have to do is plug a cable connector into each unit and turn it on. The 4 lights on the smaller unit flash and tell me it’s the same cable and whether all the wire pairs are good or not.

Later in the afternoon I was able to make our reservation at the Hillcrest RV Park over in New Waverly, about 20 miles from here. We’ll use it for our week out (actually 11 days) and then come back to Lake Conroe on the first of October. This will put us back on our regular two week schedule, although right now we’re thinking about changing things around, so I’ll let you know.

Finally about 3:30 I headed up to Katy to pick up Jan at our daughter Brandi’s. Jan’s been Landon-sitting all week since his school’s been closed for the hurricane. Normally it’s a little over an hour trip, but again, due to all the extra traffic, it was about an hour and 45 minutes.

By the time we left Brandi’s it was after 5:30, and since I didn’t want to head home in all the rush hour traffic, I decided to celebrate seeing her for the first time since Monday by having dinner at the Katy Longhorn steak house, probably our overall favorite steak place, with Saltgrass a close 2nd.

After our salads, (yes, I like a lot of pepper on my salad)

Jan go her standard New York Strip Sirloin with Baked Potato,

while I went for the Ribeye Steak, also my usual.

One of the best steaks I’ve had in a while. I don’t think I’ve ever had so-so steak at Longhorn, much less a bad one. Just consistently good.

Though I will say our service wasn’t very good, extremely slow, with people who sat down after us, placing their orders and getting their salads before we even saw our waitress.

By the time we finished, the traffic had died down, so we headed west for a couple of miles to get on the Grand Parkway and went north to hit I-45 about 20 miles south of Conroe, with hardly any slowdowns. Nice.

Right now it looks like Miss Karma and I will be on our own again for a few more days next week. Brandi’s going out of town for a convention in San Diego and Lowell won’t get home in time to pick up Landon at school, so Jan’s on chauffeur duty for Monday through Wednesday.

Nick said I ought to be suspicious that Jan’s leaving me one babysitting job at a time.

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