Our RV Adventures

Today turned out to be really nice, with a high of 90 and a lot of clouds cutting down on the sun,

Of course the two big oak shade trees overhead didn’t hurt either.

With the help of reader Art Raeck, I did figure out how to get the DirecTV remotes apart. What was confusing me was that I took one apart about ten years ago for this same problem, and although it looked the same on the outside, it came apart completely different from the way it does now.

But of course I’ve already got new ones coming tomorrow, so it’s all kind of moot now.

Don’t know about ya’ll, but a couple of days ago Amazon gave me money back. After a recent court settlement with Apple for anti-trust violations, involving them illegally jacking up the price of e-books, they had give money back to buyers. So I got $20.14 credited to my Amazon account.

I had assumed that the credit would just apply to more books, but it applies to anything you order.

Nice?

Of course lawyer’s who negotiated the settlement got $50 million.

I’ve looked a little more into the long-term annual/semi-annual lease situation here at Colorado River and found a couple of pluses and at least one minus.

The pluses are that we get a physical address, and can receive both US Mail and packages without the extra service charges. The minus is that we become responsible for the site upkeep, i.e., mowing, trimming, etc.

I don’t know if we can pay extra to have the park guy do it or not. We’ll see.

Tomorrow we’re heading down to the Clear Lake area to meet Chris, Linda, and Piper at Outrigger’s in Kemah for lunch. Outrigger’s, located under the Kemah Bridge, is one of our favorite local fresh seafood places, and we try to eat there whenever we can.

Next up, I going to get a new battery for the truck. This one seems to be on its last legs. The best deal I found on line was a Duracell from Batteries Plus. And there’s one down in Webster, so that works.

I actually didn’t know that the Batteries Plus places even sold car and truck batteries, but I guess they do. I did call them this afternoon to be sure they had one in stock.

Then after Jan and I get haircuts, we’re meeting up with a friend so I can get her new stereo/DVD/TV system wired up correctly. And finally it’s on to dinner with them, and then head toward home.

On the way, we’ll make a stop at Brandi’s to pick up our mail and packages.

Thought for the Day:

“I was married by a Judge. I should have ask for a Jury.†– Groucho Marx

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For A Month, anyway.

A little after 2pm, I went back down to the park office to set up our month-long stay here in July. Once I got that set up I cancelled our two  two week stay’s at Conroe and Colorado River for that time period.

One thing I want to check into further is about longer duration stays. At first I thought we could only do an annual lease, but it seems we can also do shorter periods of time.

As I said before, we’re not settling down, but the 3 or 4 months we normally spend in Houston area would be nicer if we didn’t have to keep moving every couple of weeks. I’ll find out more when I go down to pay for our month stay next weekend.

You may or may not have heard of Fiverr. It’s a website where you can hire people to do stuff for you, usually pretty cheaply.

Draw a carton, design a logo, write your resume, put your lyrics to music and sing it for you, write you a business plan for a load, or even do some programming for you . . .  or me, as the case may be.

I’ve got some simple but time-consuming programming that I need done. But I’ve also got a lot of website stuff to take care of, So I decided to give Fiverr a try for this. Now Fiverr is called that, because many things are priced at $5. But actually it’s a haggling type of thing.

After signing up, I posted what I wanted done in some detail, and then waited for the offers to roll in. You get them 6 at a time, and as you eliminate ones you don’t like, another one takes its place. Then when you pick one, the bargaining starts. The points of contention are price, # of revisions, and how long to delivery.

My guy started off the negotiations by asking me what the budget was for this project,

Wrong!

I countered by asking how much he would charge for the job, telling him to keep in mind that if it was too expensive, then it would pay to just do it myself.

He came back with $70, but said he would drop it to $60 since this was my first buy on Fiverr. The $70 would cover 3 revisions and 1 Day Delivery. By the time we got finished, we were at $25 for 1 revision and 3 Day Delivery.

Works for me.

Later in the afternoon, I went through a couple of outside bins and finally found my old Winegard Carryout satellite dish power cable. I thought I had saved the old one. This will give me a cable to go with the Carryout Dish I found by a dumpster at Lake Conroe. So now I’ve got a complete set.

In fact I’ve been using the found one ever since, and I can’t be absolutely sure, but it does seem to find the DirecTV satellite at 101.1 degrees faster than my old one.

I mentioned a while back about problems with our DirecTV remotes. All three have developed flakey keys and I was hoping that Strike-Hold would fix the problem. But apparently even a miracle liquid like Strike-Hold couldn’t fix these keys.

When that didn’t  help I tried to take one apart, but the cases are firmly glued together, so  no luck with that. But I did have luck with Amazon. 

I found that I could buy two DirecTV Remotes for $8, with Prime 2 Day Shipping.

A great deal,

So good in fact, that I ordered two sets to have spares.

Thought for the Day:

“After death, hair and nails continue to grow, but phone calls start to taper off†– Johnny Carson

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