Category Archives: Family-Friends-Home

Post related to our family and close friends and projects around the house.

2014/06/06 (F) Chapter Business

I spent a good portion of the day working on the membership and financial records for the FMCA Freethinkers Associate Chapter. My work as VP/Secretary of the chapter is sporadic. Weeks-to-months go by where there is very little that needs to be done, but when something pops up I have to take care of it in a timely manner and it often takes half a day to do it. This usually involves updating the roster and notifying the members and FMCA HQ when a new member joins. It also involves updating the financial reports as people pay their dues.

We have a chapter treasurer who handles the money and maintains the checking account but I maintain the membership records, which include keeping track of how much members have paid in dues and what calendar year those dues are for, and prepare the financial statements. The busy times of the year for me, however, are September and October, when we prepare for and hold our annual meeting, and December through March, when I have to certify our roster to FMCA HQ and most members pay their dues.

Linda had more work to do for the bakery today but was able to do it at home. She heated up an Amy’s Roasted Vegetable Pizza for lunch. This is now my favorite pizza and cheese, vegan or dairy, would not improve it.

When I bought the Apple TV unit last night I also bought a Logitech wireless (Bluetooth) t630 optical Touch Mouse that I have been considering since I got my ASUS laptop. I let it charge overnight (USB port) and today paired it with the computer, which was very easy. There are some things about Windows 8/8.1 that I like and this is one of them. I downloaded Logitech’s software package and installed it, which was also very easy. Besides the usual cursor movement and left/right click functionality this mouse supports “touch” movements for vertical/horizontal scrolling and single/double finger soft taps for switching between the Start and Desktop screens and for switching between apps. It’s very thin, but large enough to fit my hand comfortably, and feels solid and substantial. So far I really like it.

Linda made a one pot dish for dinner with potatoes, black beans, kale, onions, and spices, including cumin, and probably some other ingredients. It was delicious and healthy with lots of dietary fiber. Earlier in the day we watched the latest NutritionFacts.org segment on the typical protein-rich, fiber-deficient American diet. Most Americans, including vegans, consume way more than the recommended daily average of 42 grams of protein, but very few come anywhere near the recommended daily intake of fiber. Vegetarians and vegans are the exception as dietary fiber comes only from plants, and the more whole-food the plant-based diet, the better.

We watched Season 2, Episode 1 of Doc Martin before turning in for the evening. As with any TV series it has a formula, but it’s a formula I like. I’m waiting for the episode where Doc Martin finally accepts and embraces the dog. The dog is very loyal and will obviously win the day in the end.

20140605 (R) Apple Roku

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Linda had to go into the bakery today which left me to catch up on phone calls and errands. I made more phone calls to contractors this morning and had better luck than yesterday reaching people or at least leaving messages. I rescheduled with Gary from GM Construction to come discuss the pole barn project. I also got hold of Bratcher Electric and determined that the annual maintenance on the whole house generator could wait until we are ready to do the conversion from propane to natural gas, which they can handle. In talking to Mike Bratcher I also determined that we can install a main panel in the garage just after the transfer switch and then run power directly from there to the pole barn rather than from the main panel in the basement. While we are at it, we could redo the sub-panel in the garage, feeding it directly from the new main panel rather than the main panel in the basement. The basement panel is very crowded and we have wires carrying electricity back and forth unnecessarily.

I got a call from Butch with an update on the negotiations of the sale of the major portion of their business assets. Linda has been advising them relative to valuation, accounting, and tax issues and we have been helping them with purchase agreement language. It looks like they are in the final stages leading up to a closing of the deal. Their big annual event is coming up in early July and they will likely be busy with the transfer of inventory and training of the buyer during and after that event. I need to get our bus down to their place to work on some projects and help Butch work on getting their bus conversion done enough that they can live in it this winter in the southwest. Based on things going on at both ends, it looks like the window for that work will be mid-September to sometime in November, weather permitting.

Our converted coach friends, Pat and Vickie, have some older Motorola GMRS handheld radios that they like but the charger bases have disappeared. My ham radio friend Scott (AC8IL) is in the commercial mobile communications business so I checked with him to see if chargers were still available. They were and he had a couple of the drop-in style charger/bases in stock! Scotty is just that kind of guy. I picked them up this morning and will deliver them to Pat and Vickie at the GLAMARAMA rally.

Apple Roku sounds like an interesting dessert, but it’s not. It might be an either/or situation, but it could be a both/and. John Dewey was a both/and kind of guy, so I favor that approach. We were intrigued by Steve and Karen’s Roku Internet TV streaming device last night so I stopped at Best Buy today on my way home from running my errand to see if they had them in stock and if so at what price. Not only did they have them, they had three different models. The “stick” was $50, the Roku 2 was $70, and the Roku 3 was $100. (The Roku 3 does not have A/V connectors like the Roku 2, only HDMI, but it has a five times faster processor.) But that was not all, oh no. They also had the Apple TV device for $100 and two other similar products, one of which looked like an Amazon/Kindle thing and the other one a WD thing, whatever that is.

The Roku units (2 and 3) have access to a lot of content on a free, subscription, and pay-per-view basis. The Apple TV unit has access to content on the same basis but the selection may not be as extensive; it’s hard to say for sure as the devices are not easy to compare directly. The Apple TV unit, however, has one huge, unique feature; it can mirror anything on an iOS device, such as our iPads, to a TV/monitor. The iPad can also be used as a control panel for the Apple TV device.

We do not have to choose between a Roku and an Apple TV unit, of course, we can get and use both if we want; it’s just a matter of money. Between the two TVs in the house and the two in the bus it could be a lot of money if we wanted dedicated units of both types on all four TV/monitors. We always have the option of moving things back and forth, but in general I prefer not to do that. To the extent we can afford it I prefer to have the house and the bus set up so that the only things we move between them are the things we have to, such as ourselves, our food, our laundry, our computers, our cats, and some of our ham radio gear (at least for now). The best solution, however, may be to get one of each device and move them around as needed. That would give us the best cost/benefit ratio, but not the most convenience.

When Linda got home from her day at the bakery we finished the Egri Merlot we had opened the other night and caught up on the day’s events. We decided to try the Apple TV device first and see how it worked in our situation. Linda made an onion, mushroom, tomato Ragu, and served it over the leftover power grains. It was very tasty. After dinner I went to Best Buy to get the Apple TV device while Linda prepared fresh strawberries for dessert. Fresh strawberries are a favorite treat of ours. She served them with small pieces of Dandelion Small Batch Chocolate made from 70% Ambanja Madagascar 2013 Harvest beans. The chocolate was excellent and unique. It was a thank you gift from our son and daughter-in-law for Linda’s babysitting services while they were in San Francisco, California.

We connected the Apple TV box to one of our HD TV/monitors and went through the setup procedure. We decided to test it on some PBS content, which required us to set up an account with PBS and enter a validation code that the Apple TV box provided. We also downloaded an app onto Linda’s iPad2 that allowed it to mirror whatever was on its screen to the Apple TV.

We used the mirroring feature to watch Season 1, Episode 5 of Doc Martin, but it proved to be unusable. The image was fine on the iPad2 but the Apple TV could not keep up. I found that to be odd as our home WiFi network should have more than enough bandwidth to deliver the data stream between the devices, but maybe not. I presumed that the limiting factor in our network was the data rate coming into our DSL gateway from our AT&T landline, but that was obviously fast enough to deliver the content from the gateway to the iPad without buffering hesitation.

We turned off the mirroring and finished watching the episode on the iPad. Still, the content delivered directly from the gateway to the Apple TV looked great, and the mirroring will be useful for showing photos and anything else on our iPads. We may reconfigure the Apple TV to use one of our other wireless networks and see if that helps.

2014/06/04 (W) Indian Street Food

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After working hard on our fire pit project the last three days we took it easy today. I put a load of laundry in to run while we had breakfast and browsed our blog and news feeds. A couple of recent installments from NutritionFacts.org reminded us yet again why we are following a whole-food plant-based way of eating. I made follow up phone calls to various contractors and left messages as no one seems to answer phones anymore. We often do not answer our phones if we don’t recognize the number or the caller ID is blocked, but we are not running businesses. I did get hold of Ed and we had a nice chat about the restricted water flow problem in his Aqua-Hot and what he did to fix it. I’m starting to form the impression that these are “fussy” high maintenance units.

I got a call from Chuck in reply to my e-mail to him yesterday. He is working on a project to replace the conventional bulbs in his side cargo lights with LEDs. He found a source for a double contact base that fits in place of an 1157 bulb. He can solder the wires from the LED arrays to the base and plug it in; no modification of the cargo light housing or wiring needed. I like those kinds of solutions.

I got a call back from Darryll Mech at DCM Heating and Cooling. Darryll installed a garage heater and a furnace/air-conditioner for the addition to our previous house. He is going to schedule a time to come back to the new house and figure out exactly what we need to do to prep the house for natural gas. It is going to involve running additional black pipe, installing a garage furnace and a small furnace/air-conditioner for the library, and then converting the kitchen stove, whole house generator, and hot water baseboard furnace to natural gas. We have a local guy (TOMTEK) who services the hot water baseboard furnace, so we will probably have him do the conversion on that unit. We also have a company that installed and services the whole house generator and will probably have them do the conversion on that unit along with the annual maintenance. We would like to have all of this done, except the appliance conversions, in August. The natural gas pipeline and hookup is scheduled for “late summer to early fall.” When I talked to the contractor it sounded like that meant the end of August to early October. I hope it’s closer to the former than the later.

Scott Barnes from The Renewal Group in Hartland, Michigan retuned my call. He wasn’t able to work today due to the rain so he came over to discuss our pole/bus barn project.

We got together with Steve and Karen Limkemann for dinner this evening and then went to their house in Westland to visit. As we moved to being vegetarians and then vegans Indian food rose towards the top of our list of favorite cuisines, and one of our favorite restaurants in all of SE Michigan is Neehee’s in Canton. Neehee’s is a small, unassuming semi-fast food place that serves “Indian vegetarian street food.” As the name implies, you will not find any dishes with meat, fish, or fowl. You will, however, find dishes made with paneer (an Indian cheese) and yogurt. They also serve ice cream. They have a nice selection of vegan dishes, however, and some of the vegetarian dishes can be made vegan on request. It’s a long way for us to drive just to have dinner, but very much on our way to Steve and Karen’s place. They were good sports and agreed to try it.

The menu had changed since the last time we were there. The “Indo-Chinese” section was gone, and with it one of our favorite dishes, a fried cauliflower in a spicy sweet and sour sauce. We had the Special Gujarati Thali which consisted of nine different curries and sauces, two types of puri (crepes, thin breads), and rice. It was very good. Steve and Karen were not as thrilled with their dishes, but the issue seemed to be a bit too much “heat.” Almost all Indian food (that we have had) is spicy, in the sense of being pungent and aromatic, and some of it is “hot”, in the sense of having a burning sensation in the mouth.

We drove to Steve and Karen’s house after dinner, looked at photos from trips, and talked at length about past and future travels. Steve had resurrected some very old computer games and had them running on his Raspberry Pi and displayed on their large screen TV. We played one for a while based loosely on A Hitch Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy. It would have been a trip down memory lane if I had any memory of having played it years ago, but I didn’t, so it was a new old experience for me. He also demonstrated their Roku device, which connects to their WiFi network and streams a wide variety of programming to their television. Much of it is free, some of it involves a monthly subscription, and some of it is “pay-per-view.” It might be part of a solution for us at home.

2014/06/03 (T) Work-n-Play

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Linda made a tofu scramble for breakfast with sautéed onions, mushrooms, and asparagus. Nutritional yeast, soy sauce, salt, and pepper rounded out the dish. The texture and taste is very similar to the same dish made with eggs.

We resumed work on the fire pit at 9:30 AM and had it finished by 1 PM with the original burn pile raked out level. I did not count the number of bricks we used but I think it was around 80. The weather was much more pleasant for this work than the previous two days with highs in the 70’s, lower humidity, and brisk west winds. I would like to get a six foot diameter metal fire ring and install it centered in the fire pit and flush with the top of the top course of blocks. The space between the blocks and the metal ring would be filled with dirt and a top layer of rock such as egg rock.

We had a light lunch of apple slices and chickpea salad spread on rye toast and then got cleaned up. I worked at my desk for a few hours, off-loading photographs from the Sony alpha 100 and onto my Dell laptop. I edited blog posts going back to May 26 and uploaded the ones through May 31st.

Ed Roelle (Great Lakes Converted Coaches chapter) called and left a message while were working in the yard. The message indicated that he had spent the last five days working on his Aqua-Hot hydronic heating system. Apparently the fresh water tubing was clogged, severely restricting the water flow. He attributed this to the extremely hard water in Florida where they have spent most of their winters in their Royale Coach bus conversion. He knew we had just spent the winter there and wanted to make me aware of the potential issue. I was vaguely aware of having read, or been told, that the Aqua-Hot units really prefer to have softened water run through them. We have a portable water softener that I used to fill the fresh water tank most if the time we were in Florida, so I am hopeful that we are avoiding this problem to some extent.

We met Kate at The Pound in downtown Brighton at 6:30 PM. The rooftop patio was being used for a private party so we had to sit downstairs. They had the roll up doors open, so there was plenty of fresh air. Kate brought her official certificate from the Guinness Book of World Records for her participation in the Rosie The Riveter event last year at Willow Run Airport. She brought her iPad and shared photos of some of the places she and Brian had been in the last six months, including the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas. Kate is a very good photographer, and SXSW affords unique photographic opportunities due to the stage lighting at the various venues.

Linda and I had large dinner salads that were excellent and Kate had a chicken wrap. A few bottles of beer were consumed as well. After dinner we went for a stroll on the boardwalk along the Mill Pond. There were lots of Mallards and Canadian Geese with young but the highlight for use were the turtles and 30″ carp. As best we could identify them the smaller and more numerous turtles were painted turtles, Michigan’s state reptile. We also saw half a dozen common snapping turtles, a couple of them quite large. We strolled around Main Street until we found ourselves in front of Two Brothers Coffee Shop and decided to have an after dinner cup of coffee. By the time we finished it was after 9:30 PM and Kate needed to get back to Ypsilanti, tomorrow being a work day for her. We got home and watched the next episode of Doc Martin on Amazon Instant Video.

2014/06/02 (M) Fire Pit Project

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I resumed work on our fire pit today. The probability of rain jumped up and back down at 10 AM, but the rain held off. The revised forecast had the probability back up starting in the late afternoon and remaining elevated through the evening and overnight. Clouds streamed in from the southwest all day. It was warm (~80) with 70% humidity, but the clouds provided much needed relief from the direct sun.

The fire pit being constructed around the old burn pile. View to NE towards the marsh,

Keith was mowing our neighbor’s lawn, which he does every week, and I waved him down to see if he had time to also do ours. Our normal schedule is every other week, but our clay soil is holding a lot of water that, combined with the abundant sunshine of the past five days, has caused everything to grow; a lot. He got it all done before the rains came, which was great.

Looking east towards the pond.

Linda made her scrumptious chickpea (garbanzo bean) salad/spread and we had some for lunch while Keith mowed the area of the yard around the fire pit. She served it on toasted rye bread with fresh Bing (sweet) cherries on the side. Linda loves rye bread and will eat anything on it including peanut butter and jelly. I really like rye bread for certain things, but not others. Hummus and onion; yum. Chickpea spread; absolutely. PB&J; no way. Of course in a former culinary life it was always my favorite for a ham and Swiss cheese sandwich. Rye bread is still an agreeable choice for sandwiches made from the “fake” cold cuts we occasionally buy, including “ham and Swiss” and “pastrami'” both with mustard, of course.

Looking SSW towards the house.

I took a few photographs after lunch and then worked for another hour or so until I hit my personal wall and knew I was done for the day. I gathered all of my tools into the wheelbarrow and rolled it back up to the garage. A cool shower and a long nap had me feeling almost human again just in time for dinner. A quiet evening with a small glass of Egri Merlot and a piece of the (vegan) chilled double chocolate torte, followed by Season 1, Episode 4 of Doc Martin. What’s not to like?

2014/06/01 (N) Farmer’s Market

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As of today I have been “retired” for two years. It has been a very busy, and very satisfying, couple of years and I don’t see that trend changing anytime soon.

Madeline in her Junior Park Ranger outfit.

Starting around this time of year the Howell Farmer’s Market sets up outdoors every Sunday morning around the old courthouse in the heart of downtown and operates from 9:00 AM to ~1:00 PM. During the colder months the market moves indoors and only operates every other week, featuring crafts and prepared foods, such as baked goods, jams, and pickles rather than locally grown fresh fruits and vegetables. When we were both still working we used to spend Sunday mornings at Panera. We still go there on occasion, but if we are around, and the weather is nice, we prefer to spend an hour walking through the market and buying locally grown fresh organic produce.

Our son, Brendan, called last night to check on our health and we suggested that he and Shawna, and Madeline drive up in the morning and we could all go to the Howell Farmer’s Market and then visit at the house. Shawna is deep into her professional life as a professor and researcher at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor and is currently putting her tenure package together, so Sunday is not really a day off for her. Brendan drove up with grand-daughter Madeline and met us at the market around 9:45 AM. She was finally big enough to wear the “Park Ranger” outfit we bought for her at Yellowstone National Park last summer. Too cute.

Madeline in her new Adirondack chair with matching table.

June 1st is still early for the fresh produce that will eventually be available in abundance at the Farmers Market, but it’s a great time of year for locally grown organic asparagus. Linda bought some to use for dinner along with onions, potatoes, and eggplant. One of the things we like about the Howell market is that several local area farms set up stalls and sell produce they harvested the day or two before. Other vendors sell fresh baked goods that they made or preserved foods that they personally prepared.

On our way to the market we stopped at Meijer’s to get a blow up beach ball for Madeline to play with in the yard. While we were there we found a small plastic “Adirondack” chair with a matching table that she was just big enough to use. Back at our house she picked up quickly that this was her special chair and seemed to enjoy using it. Brendan and Madeline stayed until about 12:30 PM. She is usually down for her only nap by 1:00 PM, so Brendan changed her outfit, got her buckled into her car seat, and headed back to Ann Arbor.

Madeline and her dad.

We had a light lunch after which I decided to work on our fire pit project. I am not sure why I felt I had to do this in the afternoon sun on an 84 degree day, but I did. I believe my thinking was that I was sick and tired of being sick and tired and thought the physical activity and deep breathing would be good for me, not to mention the feeling of accomplishment at getting some blocks set in the ground nice and level. The base course is where all the work is; it requires digging a trench in the dirt and then filling it in with gravel and sand and compacting it to create a proper base that allows the first course of block to be firmly planted, fully supported, level side-to-side (block-to-block), and sloping back slightly towards the inside of the curve; all while making the curvature of blocks as circular as possible. I worked all afternoon, with help from Linda, and by 4:30 PM had seven first course blocks set with six second course blocks on top. We are building the fire pit into the side of a slight hill, so the second course of blocks will be the first one that forms a complete circle and should take about 28 blocks for the diameter of fire pit we are creating.

Madeline knows about cameras.

We are using the blocks for the fire pit from the old retaining walls by the basement walkout as these walls are being replaced with low boulder walls with proper drainage and grading. We will have many more of these blocks than we can use in the fire pit project and most of them will be used to edge planting beds around the house.

We have been thinking about getting an umbrella for our patio table so Linda looked for one online. Lowe’s had a selection, so we headed to our local store to see what they had in stock. We found one we liked, got a base to go with it, and picked up four bags of paver base and two bags of paver sand. There is a 30% chance of thunderstorms in the forecast, but if we get a break on the weather we will have the materials on hand to continue working on the fire pit tomorrow. We would also like to get a small street-legal utility trailer that we can tow behind the Honda Element and the Cub Cadet lawn tractor. Lowe’s did not have anything like that so we stopped at Tractor Supply Company. They had what I was looking for, sort of, but they were not street legal (no lights) and used a pin rather than a ball coupler. We will keep looking.

Looking to the north. There is a lot yard in that direction.

Linda made roasted vegetables for dinner (asparagus, onions, potatoes, and eggplant with a little olive oil, salt, and pepper) and served it with a simple green salad and a side of “power grains” consisting of red and white quinoa, millet, and buckwheat. We finished off the evening with Season 1, Episode 3 of Doc Martin on Amazon Video, which we get as part of our Amazon Prime account. Our AT&T High Speed Internet is not very fast, but it seems to be able to keep up with streaming video to an iPad, at least most of the time.

Lots of yard to play in at Grandma and Grandpa’s house.

2014/05/31 (S) End of May

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We were both finally feeling well enough to go to our ham radio club breakfast this morning in South Lyon. We picked up a graduation card at the drug store on the way home and had a quiet late morning and early afternoon that included a light lunch and a nap. Linda had made a spread earlier from leftover lentils, chilled it, and served it on slices of Italian bread for lunch.

Nickolas, the son of my long-time friend and colleague Kristine, recently graduated from Central Michigan University with a double bachelor’s degree in psychology and family studies. Today was the backyard party to celebrate this wonderful accomplishment. Kristine and I first met as doctoral students in the late 1990’s, so Linda and I have watched Nickolas grow up and blossom into a very cool young adult.

On the way home we detoured to downtown Brighton to walk around, absorb the Saturday night Brighton “vibe,” and scope out restaurants for a Tuesday get-together with Kate. On a Friday or Saturday evening this time of year Downtown Brighton is alive with people, especially if the weather is pleasant. We photographed various restaurants that looked interesting so we could remember their names once we got home and research their menu options and prices. We decided to try The Pound, assuming that choice is OK with Kate, based on a couple of interesting full-meal salads and $2 Tuesday appetizers and beers. They have an open air covered roof deck. We will try to sit there if the weather is agreeable and seating is available.

Linda has the Amazon Video app on her iPad and we watched Season 1, Episode 2 of Doc Martin. We (I) “discovered” Doc Martin while we were in Florida and had a good OTA TV signal from the University of Florida Gainesville PBS station. The series has completed at least six seasons of eight episodes each, so it will take us a while to watch the whole thing, if we ever do.

2014/05/30 (F) Outlook Contacts

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I have had a Palm PDA for most of the last 13 years, and for most of that time it has been a Palm Tungsten T3. While I was still working at Wayne RESA it was synced to their GroupWise e-mail and calendar system but also synced to the Palm Desktop software on my laptop for Contacts and Tasks and my Passwords Plus program. I did not use the Tasks list much, but I did keep all of my personal contacts, and some of my business contacts, on the Palm along with all of my encrypted passwords. Linda also had a Palm PDA for a while and had it synced to Outlook on her office computer. Her PDA quit working years ago and never got replaced. Once she was settled in at the bakery she did not have a need for a PDA.

When I retired I reverted back to using the Palm calendar, which I always liked. I even installed a new Lithium Ion battery, which was no easy job, to prolong the unit’s life. But three things have converged to finally spell the end of the Palm era for me: 1) the unrecoverable failure of the Passwords Plus app on the Tungsten T3; 2) the porting of our home Outlook Express information into Outlook 2007 after the loss of our twmi.rr.com e-mail address, and; 3) getting a new laptop computer due to the end of support for Windows XP.

Over the winter we were able to purchase an updated version of Passwords Plus (CS 2.0) that synced through the cloud. Versions were available that ran on our iPads, Linda’s Samsung laptop, and my then current Win XP Dell laptop. It is also available for Android (I think) but so far we have not installed it on our phones. The new PWP apps allowed us to successfully migrate all of our passwords from the old Palm version and make them available on four devices with back-up and synchronization via the DataViz cloud servers. Just this past week I installed PWP CS 2.0 on my new Win 8.1 machine and got it synced with the other four. When the passwords are available and secure, life is good.

When we moved from the previous house to the current house last year we lost our long-time home e-mail address. I took that as an opportunity to export our home address book and all of our personal e-mails from Outlook Express and import them into Outlook 2007 on my Win XP Dell laptop. Since that time I have continued to build out the address book with contact information, but I still have and use my Palm Contacts. Yesterday I learned that I could export my Palm contacts in a vCard (.vcf) format. Further research suggested that I could convert the file to a comma separated value (.csv) format and then import it into Outlook 2013 on my new laptop. It would be a lot more work than it sounds as the vcf –> csv conversion would require me to review each entry, but it would still be a lot less work than re-entering everything by hand.

I figured I would need the better part of a long day to accomplish this task, so before rushing into it I decided to do more research. Today I discovered that there are add-ins available for Outlook that will take my single .vcf Palm output file and import it into Outlook directly, as long as I am willing to pony up the $$. The idea of spending $20 -$25 for a program I will use once does not sit well with me, but the idea of sitting all day reviewing entries one at a time does not sit well with me either. If I want to clean up duplicates, I can do that semi-automatically for another $25. I’m thinking about it.

The calendar is another matter. The Palm calendar can be “archived” but not exported. My Palm calendar goes back at least a decade, and this history may just have to remain in the Palm Desktop on the old laptop. On the upside, once I start using the Outlook calendar I may be able to set it up so I can access the address book and calendar on my Android phone. That would be nice; I have long enjoyed having my contacts and calendar information “in my pocket,” or “on my belt,” depending on my clothing choices that day.

It was yet another beautiful day today; when Michigan weather is nice, it’s the best. Linda decided to do some weeding in the front planting beds and I decided to install the new rear-view mirror on the bus. You just can’t let a day like this go by without doing something outside. After a little break we decided to work in the back yard. We had several large pine trees that had large limbs broken over the winter. I used our pole saw to cut those loose and dragged them over near an old burn pile. I cut the small branches off, cut up the larger central limbs, and made a pile. We gathered up some of the dried grass clippings from Tuesday and stuffed them under the limbs and twigs. We added a few old, large logs to the pile that were laying around in the yard and soaked everything in diesel fuel. Forget gasoline and charcoal starter fluid; let the diesel fuel soak in (it does not evaporate like gasoline) and put a match to it. You will get a sustained fire.

After the fire had burned down to a smolder we moved some of the blocks from the rear retaining walls and laid them around the burn pile. We’ve decided to use some of them to build a fire pit and wanted to see how many it would take to make a circle of the appropriate size. We plan to build the pit 2 or 3 courses high on the low side.

Kimber, from GM Construction LLC (GM Decks), called to let me know that Gary had taken ill and would not make it out to the house late this afternoon to discuss our pole barn project. We will try again next week. Village Landscape Development also did not show up or call today. I will give Steve a call tomorrow and suggest that we set a firm start date for Monday June 16.

The afternoon mail brought a Jury Summons for Linda for a two week commitment for U. S. District Court in Flint, Michigan starting Monday, June 30. That interferes with some travel plans we have and will now likely have to adjust. She won’t be able to find out if she needs to report on the 30th until 5 PM on Friday the 27th.

2014/05/29 (R) 43

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Today was our 43rd wedding anniversary, and it was a beautiful day for it with blue skies, few if any clouds, nice temperatures, and a faint breeze. While we were eating breakfast Linda spotted what she thought was a female wild turkey in the back yard. Binoculars revealed it to be a male Mongolian Ring-Necked Pheasant, the first one we have seen here. A pair of robins have a nest under our deck and we have been watching them come and go. We had a rabbit on our front porch this evening that was intent on picking something out of the sisal fiber door mat. It kept the cats transfixed for a very long time as they sat stone still and watched it from less than three feet away through a window next to the door, never revealing their presence. The hunting instincts of domestic cats are still very powerful.

We took it easy yesterday and the day before as were both still recovering from being ill. We were both finally feeling enough better, however, to get a decent night’s sleep and spend enough time at our desks during the day and get some things done. I also had a nice chat with my sister and filled her in on our plans to visit St. Louis in late June.

Keith came over and cut our neighbor’s grass (5 acre lot) and then cut ours (another 5 acre lot). The boundary line between our two lots is a long low swale that drains towards the pond to our east, sort of. It has marsh grass in some low spots and Keith managed to get his zero-turn mower stuck in the soft ground near one of them. Neither of us had a tow rope, strap, cable, or chain but I found some scrap 10-3 + ground electrical cable. I added some “fresh” gasoline to our lawn tractor tank (it had been in a full, air-tight can with fuel stabilizer for the last year), checked the oil, put a battery charger on the tractor battery, and managed to get it started. The electrical cable was long enough (20+ feet) that I was able to keep my lawn tractor out of the really soft soil. A little bit to my surprise the lawn tractor and electrical cable were up to the task and able to pull the zero-turn free. I was thinking of getting rid of the lawn tractor but perhaps I will keep it. Not to cut grass, but to haul around a small utility/garden trailer for moving mulch and other garden and small landscaping materials. I may just remove the mower deck as it does not work well anyway.

Yesterday I spent a good part of the afternoon and some of the evening writing an article for our FMCA GLCC newsletter on the recent Escapade rally. After Linda proof-read it I selected 10 photos I had used in blog posts about the event, inserted them at the end of the article, provided captions, packaged everything in a Dropbox folder, and got an e-mail off to the newsletter editors with the Dropbox link and editorial instructions.

Butch (and Fonda) called yesterday evening to wish us a happy anniversary because they thought our anniversary was the same day as theirs. It’s not; they have been married one day longer than we have.

Gary was scheduled to come over yesterday morning to discuss our pole barn project but it was raining heavily at the time, and was forecast to rain most of the day, so we rescheduled for Friday afternoon. Village Landscape was tentatively scheduled to start work today on our front entrance sidewalk/stairs and rear retaining walls. I knew that wasn’t guaranteed as they were still finishing up projects that fell behind because of how wet May has been. Once it started raining hard I knew I would not see them today and probably not this week. If they cannot start soon we may have to put them off until next month after GLAMARAMA.

Mike (W8XH) came over this morning to help us with some Windows 8/8.1 issues. We had a problem this winter in the bus where Linda was not able to connect her Windows 8 Samsung to our NAS device via a WiFi connection to our network. She has had the same problem when connecting wirelessly to our network at home. Mike suspected that it had to do with the workgroup name settings and/or the Win 8/8.1 “home group” settings. He took care of Linda’s Samsung laptop first and that turned out to be the case. She left to get her hair cut and we turned our attention to my new ASUS laptop. By the time we finished we had all of the issues on my list resolved and some good thoughts about how to approach a few other things. We discussed the SLAARC WP website development and made a few decisions about when/how we want to unveil it and what functionality needs to be in place by that time.

In the past we would normally go out for dinner on our anniversary but decided to dine in tonight. Linda made amazing pasta and lentils dish with salsa and walnuts. I know, it sounds crazy, but it was soooo good. It was one of the top 10 recipes for 2011 from the OhSheGlows website. She also made a refrigerated vegan double-chocolate torte dessert thingy. It was almost too good to eat, but we managed to each have a piece. 🙂

2014/05/26 (M) Memorial Day

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This is what I think about on Memorial Day. For most Americans Memorial Day, or rather the Memorial Day weekend, marks the beginning of the summer “play” season; time to prep the cottage or the get the RV out of storage, get out the summer “toys”, attend summer camps (or summer school), and take vacations. It has a much more serious and official meaning, of course, which is to remember those who served and died in the defense of our country while on active duty. It is not necessarily a day to honor “all” veterans, although it seems to have turned into that. We have another holiday for that purpose; it’s called Veteran’s Day.

Regardless, there is no doubt that each citizen owes the existence of our nation, and the freedoms we enjoy within it, to those who served to build it and defend it, and especially those who paid the ultimate price. It a shame that some of those lives were wasted in the name of foolish nationalism, but the shame is not the soldier’s, it is the government’s. And the government is merely a political manifestation of the will of the majority. In our system the majority rules (or is supposed to) but that does not always make its actions right. Those who served did so with a sense of duty without which we could not have a functioning military. My father survived the invasion of Normandy on D-Day. He was one of the troops who took Omaha Beach. His unit suffered 90% casualties. He was barely 19 years old at the time. He was wounded on the drive inland through France and received the Purple Heart and almost 50 years later a unit commendation for the service his unit rendered that day and in the days that followed.

My cough subsided enough that both Linda and I finally got a little sleep last night. She made her yummy vegan pancakes for breakfast and my sense of taste had returned to the point that I enjoyed them. I still wasn’t feeling up to much physical activity, but managed to pull up all of the stakes for the pole barn and mark the location of each one with green marker paint. I was feeling well enough to work at my desk and spent a good portion of the rest of the day downloading and installing apps on my new ASUS laptop.

I was working at my computer this afternoon when I had one of those associative moments where I suddenly remembered something I was trying to recall a week ago. As a young pre-teenager in the early 1960’s there were three things that I had set as “life goals” but I could only remember two of them, although I was clear that I had accomplished all three. I was looking at the support thread for the Participant’s Database WordPress plug-in, where there was a lot of detail on “coding,” when I recalled that the missing goal was to “learn to program a computer.” Duh!

These “life goals” were not career goals; they were just ideas that sounded interesting and “out there” at the time. I actually ended up “programming computers” for a living for a while and did some very fancy FORTRAN programming for my electrical engineering Masters Degree project and again to create the Monte-Carlo simulations that were the foundation of my doctoral research and dissertation. My other two goals where to “understand nuclear energy” and “learn to fly an airplane” both of which I also accomplished, at least to my satisfaction. I never made a living in aviation, although my dad spent almost his entire adult working life in the aerospace industry, both defense and space. I did end up studying physics as an engineering student, and teaching it at the high school level, so in a sense understanding nuclear energy also touched on earning a living at one point in my life. As an Air Force ROTC cadet from 1973 – 1976 I was a pilot candidate. If not for the sudden end of the Vietnam Conflict, I would have made my living in aviation, at least for a while.

Perhaps these seem like strange life goals for a pre-teen, but they were very forward-looking and exotic notions in the early 1960’s. The fact that I accomplished them does not mean my life is complete or that I have accomplished everything else I attempted in the last half century. Nor does it mean that I ran out of things to do or the motivation to do them. I simply find it interesting that I accomplished them and find a certain satisfaction in that. To this day whenever I see an airplane fly by I wonder how many people see that same plane and wonder what it must be like to fly it or are mystified by how it is able to stay in the air? I also wonder how people manage to make sense of a world connected together by technologies about which they have no real understanding, or how they understand a universe ruled at its most fundamental level by randomness and chaos. Downloading and installing software leaves me a certain amount of time to think, and I downloaded and installed a lot of software today.

Linda made a wonderful vegan potato salad this afternoon and we had it for dinner with jumbo vegan hot dogs, with mustard, onion, and relish, of course. And grapes; but no adult beverages as they are contraindicated for my medications, and frankly are not the least bit satisfying when ill. I know I’m getting better when my appetite starts to return. I will know I am fully recovered when I once again look forward to a glass of wine with dinner.

Technomadia did a one hour live video chat at 8 PM with RVillage founder/CEO Curtis Coleman. It was a good, relaxed chat with enough questions from the audience to keep it moving. I think they had 45 people online at one time. They use UStream for these live video events and were interrupted three or four times by commercials. The first one I got was in Spanish, but someone else got one in French. The problem was that the hosts do not get a heads up that UStream is going to cut them off, so they keep talking until someone messages them that they are not on the air. But it’s a “free” service, and of course almost everything in life that’s free has a hidden cost, especially if it involves the Internet. Somewhat ironically the RVillage website went offline during the broadcast. The head of development was monitoring the chat and got right on it as soon as it was reported; something about “backend server overload.” RVillage passed the 7,500 member level just before the video chat went live. Whatever the issue was they had it straightened out quickly. RVillage lives on very robust servers run by Amazon.

2014/05/23 (F) Over And Out

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I called the clinic at 6:30 AM, as I was instructed to do yesterday, and got a 9:30 AM appointment. My temperature was 101.7 which seemed to surprise the nurse; she said they do not often see adults with that degree of fever. They had me wear a mask and the doctor wore one too. My lungs sounded clear and X-Rays did not reveal any spots, but given my temperature and productive cough she prescribed a 10-day course of antibiotic, plus Tylenol for the fever and Mucinex as an expectorant. I was told to stay home for 48 hours, as I would continue to be contagious for that long, limit my activities, stay hydrated, and rest. And that is what I am going to do. This will be my last blog post for at least a few days. Being ill and inactive doesn’t give me very much to write about and I don’t really feel like doing it anyway.

2014/05/22 (R) Still Resting

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I called Mike (W8XH) last night and we agreed that it would be better for him to wait until I was better to come over and help us with our computer issues. I finally got up around 8 AM, having spent 11 hours in bed. I took a nice, warm shower and felt almost human. Not well by any means, but enough better to have some granola for breakfast and catch up on the blogs I follow in Feedly. It was a spectacularly beautiful morning and I opened all of the doorwalls and some of the windows.

I planned to take it easy today and maybe just sit on the rear deck and enjoy the weather, the view, and the sounds of the birds. It got cloudy as the morning wore on and never got as warm as I had hoped so I closed up the house. I worked at my desk for a while and got badly chilled and started shivering uncontrollably. I had forgotten to turn the basement furnace zone back on and the temperature had dropped to 65 degrees. I made some hot tea and some hot soup for lunch, which helped a little, and finally wrapped myself in an afghan and lay down on the couch. Around 3:00 PM I called Henry Ford Health System Columbus Center in Novi, Michigan to see if I could get an appointment with our internal medicine doctor. She was off tomorrow and it was too late to book an appointment with anyone else. I was told to call back at 6:30 AM tomorrow for a same-day appointment. Duly noted. I went back to sleep on the couch. The chills and shakes had left me completely drained to the point where I could not sit up or read.

I was finally tired of lying down, so I examined the printer drivers for our HP CLJ 3600n network printer on Linda’s Samsung laptop to see what was installed. There were 40 files listed! Someone has got to be kidding. A notice popped up on her screen that Windows 8.1 was available as a free download. I checked with Linda (it’s her machine, after all) and she gave me the green light. I let it install and then restarted the machine. I sent a test MS Word document to the printer and it printed just fine. Great, so the printer can be installed under Windows 8 and then the machine updated to Windows 8.1, put it cannot be installed directly into Windows 8.1. Microsoft “blames” HP stating that printer manufacturers are solely responsible for their drivers. Even if true it’s still lame, very lame and there’s plenty of shame to spread over both companies. It’s a “business class printer” designed for high volume use. Since our volume is not high, our (expected) use is obviously long. It’s enough to make my next computer a Linux box or a Mac and my next printer anything but an HP.

Speaking of which, I signed up for a free Intro to Linux course from The Linux Foundation offered through edX. It starts August 1st. My friend Steve has been trying to get me interested in Linux for a long time. My problem has never been a lack of interest but a lack of a good, organized approach into the subject. There are books on the subject, but I am unlikely to just sit down and read one as an academic exercise. I have Linux running on one of my old computers (a dual processor Dell Precision Workstation) and Steve has been helping me set it up as a local web-server that I can use to test my WordPress sites, so that provides the needed sense of purpose.

I spent a little time in the evening uploading blog posts and then went to bed. I can’t remember the last time I felt this bad.

2014/05/21 (W) A Twilight Zone

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Linda has been ill since last Thursday with a cold and/or allergies. Until yesterday I had managed to avoid her symptoms, but in the morning I started sneezing and in afternoon I developed a cough. It wasn’t a response to a tickle in my throat from post-nasal drip, it was the deep raspy cough that comes from the lungs and makes them hurt. By evening the cough had become productive. I have not been sick in a very long time and the one thing I try to avoid getting is pneumonia, which I have had three times in the same spot of the same lung. The scar tissue there makes me more susceptible to re-infection, and I take my nasal spray and allergy pill every day to avoid sinus problems which can settle into my lungs. Until Tuesday this had been very successful.

We both had a very poor night’s sleep last night and got out of bed feeling like we were in a twilight zone. Instead of coffee I had a big cup of Tazo Ginger Spice tea. The warmth and ginger taste were soothing and I figured it could not hurt to stay hydrated. I put a load of laundry in the washer (I only have two loads to go) and then had a large glass of orange/grapefruit juice. Linda also had some tea and then gathered up clothes for the next five days. She will be watching grand-daughter Madeline around the clock until Sunday when her parents return from San Francisco, California.

I checked on my new laptop and the Adobe Creative Cloud Desktop (ACCD) app showed that Photoshop had been successfully installed; at least it showed that in one place, but in another place it said I had no apps installed. Hummm? I did not see the icons at the bottom of the screen but the one thing I have learned about Windows 8/8.1 is that I can go to the Start (Metro) screen and start typing and I usually get directed to what I am looking for. I noticed a little arrow in the lower left corner of the screen that said “4 new apps.” I clicked on that and it took me to the screen where all if the installed programs are listed and there they were! I opened Lightroom and registered it and then opened Photoshop; twice. It appears that I have a 32-bit version and a 64-bit version. I’m not sure why, as my new laptop has a 64-bit processor, but they are both listed.

I got out my iPad2 but did not have the energy or interest to even play a game and lay down on the couch to take a nap. Linda had a couple of hours before she had to leave for Ann Arbor, and made a batch of her super special granola. I got a call from Kimber at GM Construction letting me know that Gary would not be able to stop by the house today to look at our pole barn project. He had to go up north for family reasons. Given how I felt it was for the better. He will stop by on Friday or sometime next week.

I didn’t feel like sitting up but I was tired of lying down, so I had some granola, sans soy milk, and worked at my iPad2. I have been keeping up with writing my blog posts, but not with posting them. I want to select a few photos from the Escapade to include in the posts but have not felt like going through them. I shot over 2,000 images during the event. Linda keeps suggesting that I only write weekly posts when we are home. It seems like that would be easier, but I have tried that and it’s not. For one I lose track of details, and sometimes even the day/date something happened. I also found that the weekly posts just ended up being very long. What I really need to do is focus on writing shorter posts. But as a weblog, the blog is first and foremost an online diary, so the details I include are there because they are important to me at the time.

Although I did not feel like doing it, I forced myself to select a dozen photos from the 15th and 16th and post process them. I have everything I need to upload my posts for the last week except the energy and desire. UPS showed up around 5 PM with the mirror from Prevost. I spent most of the day lying down on the couch and finally went to bed around 9 PM.

2014/05/20 (T) Software Redemption

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Linda was off to the bakery again this morning, but not as early as yesterday. She had a mid-afternoon meeting which put her return trip at the worst of the evening rush hour. She is still under the weather, so the last two days have definitely been more work then fun.

I was disgusted enough with my experience yesterday trying to download and install the Adobe Creative Cloud Desktop app (ACCD) that I decided not to work on my computers this morning. I had, however, left my new ASUS laptop on all night in the hope that the ACCD app would finish downloading and install correctly. Sometimes you have to just step away so I started a load of laundry and made a list errands. Sometimes the best way to step away is to literally get out of the house (or bus) and since errands have a purpose, and provide a sense of accomplishment, they are always good therapy. I got the laundry out of the dryer and left just after noon. I got back around 4 PM with bags full of essential but inexpensive stuff; think “TP” and you will have the right idea.

While I was out I got Mike (W8XH) on the S. Lyon 2 meter ham radio repeater and arranged for him to help me with my e-mail issues on my new laptop. I started another load of laundry when I got home and then checked on my computer. ACCD had finished installing correctly! I have no idea how long it took; the progress bar did not move when I sat and watched it. I started up my old laptop to check e-mail and discovered that we appeared to have a very slow Internet connection. All of my online programs worked fine yesterday (except the ACCD installation), and they were all working today, but not very fast. The difficulty I had installing ACCD may have been an Internet connection issue rather than an Adobe issue, but I will never know. We have an AT&T High Speed Internet (HSI) landline. The only thing slower is dial-up.

ACCD was open and showed me a list of apps. Most of the apps had a “Try” button, which is an attempt on Adobe’s part to inflate our monthly bill to gigantic proportions. Lightroom (Lr) and Photoshop (Ps), however, had “Install” buttons, a good sign that Adobe had the correct details for our ACC account. I clicked the Install button for Lightroom and went upstairs. I was feeling progressively worse through the day and after Linda called with her ETA I decided to take a nap.

Linda reheated the leftover pasta from Sunday’s dinner. After dinner I checked on the progress of the Lightroom download/install. It was done and showed the status as “Up To Date”. Today was turning out to be a good day, so I clicked Install for Photoshop, finished editing some blog posts, answered a few e-mails, and turned off my old computer. With no other devices trying to use our Internet connection I was optimistic that I will find it downloaded and installed in the morning. Linda tried to install Microsoft Security Essentials on her laptop earlier today and suddenly had programs she did ask for or authorize as best she was aware. Thanks Microsoft. Attempting to remove them brought up additional vendor dialog boxes so we let it be for now. We were both too tired and feeling to poorly to think carefully or do online research to figure out what was going on. With any luck Mike can help us with this on Thursday.

2015/05/19 (M) Software Frustrations

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Linda had to go into the bakery today and left early this morning before I even woke up. I wasn’t all that hungry when I got up, which us unusual for me, so I started a load of laundry and got to work at my desk. I have had my new ASUS laptop for a couple of weeks now, but I do not yet have it set up for use. I’ve lost track of the exact count of updates, but it was somewhere between 70 and 80 when we left for the Escapade and 25 more got installed yesterday. The only software I have added so far is Microsoft Office 2013, but the computer came with quite a few “apps” already installed. The salesman at Best Buy had alerted me to expect quite a few updates initially so this has not come as a big surprise.

At one of the Geeks On Tour seminars we attended at Escapade they suggested that laptop computers may eventually disappear. I doubt that desktop or laptop computers will ever completely disappear from the market, but we know from recent experience that the selection is narrowing and there are fewer companies making them. Perhaps someday I will be creating documents (text and spreadsheet) and editing photos on a tablet, but if so, it will be with a large external monitor, full-size keyboard, and a mouse. It’s not that I am “old fashioned” or resistant to change, it’s that some tasks are more easily accomplished in certain ways.

On the other hand, I write most of these blog posts on my iPad2. It’s small and light and I can work on the couch, the deck, outside our motorhome, at Panera, in bed, or pretty much anywhere, and I have worked in all those places and more. Before they go into WordPress, however, I e-mail them to myself, copy and paste them into Word, edit them, and insert captions as markers for the photographs. I select and process all of the photographs on my computer. The post is copied from Word and pasted into the WordPress editor where I make some final changes and then upload and insert the images. I often review the post on my iPad to make sure it formats OK and if I find a typo I will log into our site from my iPad2 and make the correction.

This morning I purchased, downloaded, and installed the password program we use on our other devices. The process was easy and it sync’d up with our Cloud account as soon as I activated it. This is one of those cases where the Cloud really makes a lot of sense to me as the amount of data that gets moved around is small. We now have this same app on three laptops and two iPads. The original password program was on my Palm Tungsten T-3 and was sync’d only to my old laptop via a USB cable. We were able to install the new version of the program on that laptop, capture all of the existing password information, and store it in the Cloud account that was included in the price of the app/program. From there it was a simple matter to put the app on other Windows laptops and install the iOS version on our iPads. We can add/change the information on any device and it updates the Cloud database (if we are connected to the Internet) and then updates all of the other devices the next time they are online.

I still have a lot of contact information and my main calendar on my Palm, and it is still sync’d with my old WinXP laptop via a USB cable. I plan to “move” that information to Outlook on my new computer, but in this case “move” may mean “manually enter.” If so, I am not looking forward to that process.

Prevost’s U. S. parts center in Elgin, Illinois operates from 7 AM to 7 PM Central Time, Monday through Friday. I called them a little after 8 AM EDT and talked to Aeleen. They had the mirror assembly in stock in New Jersey so I ordered it. It should be here on Wednesday or Thursday; 2-day shipping is almost always included in the price. She is also going to have the home office in Quebec mail me an updated CD with the CatBase Viewer program/database to install on my new laptop. This program/database has diagrams and parts lists for almost everything in the bus for all models back to the early 70’s. It filters the diagrams and parts lists to our VIN numbers and I have found it enormously helpful in figuring out what part I need before calling the Elgin parts center to place an order. Prevost also has an online ordering system and using it would save us 3%, but I often find that I am not quite clear on the part I need, or the part has been superseded by a new one that is not shown in (my version of) the CatBase Viewer. The telephone order desk folks are usually very helpful.

I had sent a text message to Chuck earlier and got a return phone call. We talked at length about bus projects, pole barns, and recent travels. Having gotten the bus mirror ordered and my password app installed/operating I was feeling like it was going to be a fairly productive day. As an “expert” on data I was aware that two data points do not establish a trend, and so it was that my winning streak came to a halt when I tried to install our HP LaserJet 3600n network printer and the Adobe CC Desktop App.

I had my laptop search for network printers and it found the 3600n. I downloaded and installed the Win 7/8/8.1 printer installation wizard and ran it. When I tried to install it I was taken to the list of manufacturers and models to select the appropriate driver. Alas, the LaserJet 3600n was not on the list and the wizard told me that our printer was not currently supported by the wizard. It seems that the printer wizard has something in common with the Wizard of Oz.

I tried Windows Update, but no luck there either. I went to the Win 8.1 “metro” screen and searched for “install printer” and “install network printer” which led me to various web pages on Microsoft’s and Hewlett-Packard’s websites. I eventually found a driver for Windows 8.1 USB, but I am not trying to connect to the printer through a USB cable, I am trying to use it through our Ethernet LAN. The odd thing is that Linda’s Windows 8.1 Samsung laptop prints to the LaserJet 3600n over our LAN just fine. Unfortunately I have no recollection of how we got her machine to do that at year ago. This took up at least an hour of my morning, without success, for what should have been a 3-minute task. Being retired does not make this waste of time any less frustrating.

In late December (2013) I subscribed to Adobe’s Creative Cloud (CC) Photography Program. For $10/month we get to download and use Lightroom (Lr) and Photoshop (Ps) on two computers, with updates whenever they are available, and access to training materials and forums. We can also add other Adobe products (apps/programs) to our subscription for an additional monthly cost. We installed Adobe Creative Cloud Desktop, Lightroom, and Photoshop on Linda’s Samsung laptop right away to make sure the subscription was set up correctly, but could not install these programs on my old 32-bit Win XP Pro machine (even though I specifically asked the pre-sale consultant if it would run on Windows XP and was told “yes”.) One of my main reasons for getting a new laptop (besides the end of support for Windows XP), and for selecting the one I did, was to be able to run these two programs. Alas, I was able to download the Adobe CC Desktop installer, but the installer was unable to install the Adobe CC Desktop App. The Desktop App is used to install and update the other programs, so my Adobe installation efforts ended for the day shortly after they started. Or should have; I plugged away at this several times before giving up. I did notice in a news feed that Adobe had a 24-hour outage recently, and on one attempt to download I got a screen saying the site was down for maintenance, so I am hopeful (but not optimistic) that the next time I try this it will work correctly. If not, I will find out how helpful Adobe Customer Service really is.

Linda got home around 5 PM, having spent almost 1.5 hours in rush hour traffic. She was tired from a long day and the effects of a cold and/or allergy, so dinner was a simple salad and vegan brats on a hotdog bun with the rest of the fresh fruit from last night. She headed off to bed and I returned to my ham shack/office where I responded to e-mails and updated three of my four WordPress sites. I then configured my e-mail accounts in Outlook on my new computer. I sent test messages for each account and got them all working after correcting a couple of typos.

To set up the e-mail accounts I copied all of the “.pst” files from my WinXP machine to a folder on our NAS. I copied the folder from the NAS to the ASUS in a place where I could find it easily. I then configured and tested each e-mail account using the corresponding pst file. Everything appeared to work except I did not have my address book. One of the pst files was named Outlook.pst, and that file was associated with the Personal Folders entry on my WinXP machine. That folder was moved to Outlook from Outlook Express where I only had one e-mail account, and that account went away last May after we moved. Since I was not setting up an e-mail account to go with this pst file, I decided to import it into Outlook. It showed up in my list of e-mail accounts and I appeared to have all of my contacts when I clicked on People at the bottom of the screen but I was not able to select them as recipients for a new e-mail. Ugh. So close and yet not right. I e-mailed Mike (W8XH) to see if he could assist me with this as he has in the past, and then went to bed.

20140418 (N) Taxi Turn Oops

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We complied with the Fairgrounds’ request that we not depart until today, but we wanted to be on the road by 9 AM. We were up at 7:30 AM and got busy right away with our departure routine. The 5th Wheel parked next to us decided to leave last night. They were from Alaska and the husband was an instructor for the RV Driving School. He had also been an “ice road trucker” at one time. I told him that I was not sure what the best technique was for exiting the infield over soft ground with freshly spread loose gravel. He suggested the following technique: 1) Pull up the tag axles to put more weight on the drive tires and to keep them from dragging on the ridges created by the space between the drive tires; 2) transmission in 1st gear (manual selection); 3) Keep the engine at 900 – 1,100 RPM (high-idle) and avoid quick changes in engine RPM to keep from spinning the drive tires; 4) keep moving; don’t stop.

We were ready to go by 8:00 AM and said our farewells to Butch and Fonda. We were anxious to get home and decided not to stop at the dump stations. Linda went ahead of me in the car to block any traffic from entering the infield through the gate. I made it through the soft part of the infield just fine using the technique as previously described. I got across the horse track without difficulty and then made a sharp turn onto an interior road where we could stop to hook up the car. As I came around the corner I clipped a sign with the driver side rear view mirror. In my defense I thought it was a cloth banner, but it wasn’t. The mirror was pulled loose from the motorized base and plastic parts were broken in the process. Butch and Fonda were pulling out behind us and stopped to see what the problem was. We used some of the Rescue Tape we keep on board to tape the mirror onto the base and adjusted it by hand as best we could. I had an adequate view down the driver’s side of the coach, allowing me to drive it safely. We hooked up the car and were on our way by 9:00 AM.

The rest of the trip was smooth sailing and without incident. We exited the fairgrounds onto Monroe Street east to County 29 north to IN-4 east to IN-13 north to US-20 east to I-69 north to I-96 east to MI-59 east to Hacker Rd south to our house. We had light traffic and pleasant weather for the whole drive. When we pulled up in front of our house (on the street) Linda got out to help position the coach in the driveway. Jasper immediately came out from under the passenger seat and got down in the stairwell to look out the lower window and I had the sense that he recognized we were home. As soon as we got parked, Linda took the cats inside and then took off for the grocery store while I plugged in the shore power, unhooked the car, and started unloading the bus.

I spent a little time getting a couple of blog posts uploaded to WordPress before John and Diane arrived around 5:00 PM. Linda made a very nice green salad with walnuts and dried cranberries and a bow-tie pasta dish with sun-dried tomatoes, mushrooms, garlic, and pesto for dinner. John and Diane brought a bottle of Barefoot Sweet Red wine which we had with the meal. We had fresh mixed berries with biscotti cookies for dessert. Tomorrow was a work day for everyone but me, so John and Diane took their leave around 8:30 PM and Linda headed off to bed shortly thereafter. Since I did not have to get up at Oh-Dark-Thirty I worked at my desk for a while before retiring for the night. Linda has not been feeling well for the last few days and cannot figure out if she has a cold or allergies or both. I’ve been tired too, but rallies can do that, especially when we are working.

2014/05/17 (S) Working While We Wait

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As soon as the fairgrounds and Escapade management had asked those of us parked on the horse track infield to delay our departure until Sunday (with a free night’s stay Saturday evening) we decided to comply with their request. Our friends, Butch and Fonda, are parked next to us and also decided to delay their departure. Butch and I hung out this morning while Linda worked with Fonda on their business accounting.

Butch and I were not having any luck solving all of the world’s problems so we decided to investigate our Aqua-Hot problem. The expansion reservoir had apparently overflowed again so I cleaned up the coolant as best I could. I turned on our Aqua-Hot so Butch could observe the smoke on startup and try to detect if it had an odor associated with it. The unit startup up on the first try and produced a lot of white smoke. The white smoke eventually disappeared, but it took quite a while. Neither of us detected the slightly sweet smell of combusted coolant.

I had hoped to have a definitive analysis of our Aqua-Hot situation, but I ended up with data that was inconclusive, at best, and inconsistent, at worst. Recent experiences with a failure to start, excessive white smoke on startup, needing to add coolant, and failure to hold pressure all suggested a coolant leak, possibly into the combustion chamber. On the other hand, it started fine today and the white smoke did eventually clear up. There were alternative explanations for some of the data and these always need to be considered. Jumping to conclusions about what is wrong with a bus/conversion can be unnecessarily expensive.

The loss of pressure may have been due to our inability to keep the pressure tube vertical because of the tight quarters. The pressure is released by pushing this tube to the side where it connects to the radiator fill spout. The loss of coolant could be due to the undersized expansion reservoir overflowing when the unit heats up. I know for a fact that it does this if I have too much coolant in the reservoir when the unit is cold. To pin down whether or not there is a coolant leak into the combustion chamber I will have to remove the burner assembly from the combustion chamber, pressurize the closed coolant system, and visually check for leaks. Even if I don’t find a leak there that will not rule out a leak somewhere. Ugh. Aqua-Hot units are expensive to replace and the model we have is not longer made, so our only direct replacement option is a rebuilt unit. The unit in the coach is a rebuilt one that was installed sometime between Sep 2009 and April 2010.

We quit working with the Aqua-Hot around 1:00 PM to have lunch before heading over to the Tri-Chapter Rally (TCR). A little before 2:00 PM we drove over to the AG Hall for the opening of the TCR. The TCR is an annual joint event of SKP Chapters 6 (Michigan – Great Lakes), 36 (Ohio – Erie Shores), and 51 (Indiana – Hoosier Neighbor). The TCR is usually held in late June on the same weekend as the ARRL Field Day ham radio operating event so we have never been able to attend. Because Escapade was in Goshen, Indiana the TCR was scheduled at the same fairgrounds immediately following the national rally.

We are members of Chapter 6 and Butch/Fonda are members of Chapter 51 but neither of us registered for the TCR because we had planned on leaving today. Since we were “stuck” here we figured we would make an appearance at the 2 PM opening of the rally and play it by ear from there. It turned out that 2:00 PM was the beginning of registration; the opening social was scheduled for 4:00 PM with dinner at 5:30 PM. The rally organizer said we could come to the social without registering, but wanted us to pay if we were staying for dinner. That seemed reasonable and we indicated that we would return at 4:00 PM to be sociable for an hour.

We never made it back. By the time 4 o’clock came around we were all tired and none of us felt like being sociable. We eventually got hungry and went to the South Side Soda Shop (SSSS). SSSS was featured in an episode of Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives (Triple-D). It was appropriately quaint, the wait staff was very friendly, and the food was good and plentiful; exactly what you would expect from a place featured on Triple-D. Linda and I had garden salads with a dressing we had never had before; oil and capers. It was delicious; a new favorite. We split a veggie sandwich, flat bread with pesto and hummus, and an order of curly fries. The fries alone would have been a meal!

Butch bought a WiFi Ranger Mobile and Go2 combo at the Escapade. Earlier in the day he attached the Mobile unit to a couple of pieces of PVC pipe which he used as a mast by securing them to the driver’s side mirror on their bus. He ran the coax in through a window and hooked it all together. After dinner I worked with him to get the WFR Mobile/Go2 configured while Fonda visited with Linda.

I have done a couple of posts this past week that brought up concepts from aviation because I used to fly airplanes and thought there were interesting analogies to be made. Well, here’s another one: RVing, much like flying, is weather dependent, and more so than you might realize. We have had to be pulled out of two different fairgrounds at the conclusion of week-long rallies where we were parked on grass and it rained (hard) most of the week. Unless you only stay at campgrounds with paved roads and sites this will eventually happen. When threatening weather is in your path, you ground yourself; a high profile vehicle with an amateur driver does not belong on the road in high winds, blinding rain, or icy conditions any more than a private pilot should be in the air under those conditions. An RV has no more business crossing a flooded road than a car or pedestrian does, and the reason you have a home that can be moved is so you can get it out of harm’s way; RVs are not designed to be driven into tornadic storms, hurricanes, or blizzards.

We really need to be on the road Sunday morning as we have company coming for dinner that evening, Linda has to go into the bakery on Monday and Tuesday, and someone is coming to the house on Wednesday to discuss our pole barn project. But just because we need to leave doesn’t mean we will be able to. That will be decided by Mother Nature. If we cannot get the bus out on Sunday Linda will take the car and return home and I will return with the bus (and the casts) when I can.

2014/05/13 (T) A Full Day

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The Escapees RV Club Escapade started yesterday afternoon and ends on Friday afternoon, so Wednesday evening is the middle of the event. Many attendees arrived on Sunday, and many others, including us, on Saturday. Most of the event staff, and many of the volunteers, arrived even before that so today probably felt like we were well into the event even though it just started yesterday.

Curtis Coleman, RVillage Founder and CEO.

Yesterday we crossed paths briefly with Curtis Coleman, the founder and CEO of RVillage, at one of the seminars. Although I had communicated with him in the past via RVillage messaging, e-mail, and telephone, it was the first time we had met in person. We were all on our way to somewhere else and agreed to meet up at the Paul Evert’s RV Country social at 4:00 PM.

Linda and I continued our work as volunteer event photographers while also trying to attend a couple of seminars that interested us. Kelly Hogan, founder/president of WiFi Ranger, gave an excellent talk on mobile connectivity. Chris and Jim Guld, better known as the Geeks On Tour, did a nice overview of technology tools for travelers.

Chris and Jim Guld, the Geeks On Tour, presenting a seminar.

We take a stroll through the vendor area and ordered a new regen tube and end caps for our portable water softener. We bought the softener from A-1 Water Treatment of Michigan at one of the RV rallies in Gillette, Wyoming last summer. The owner sold A-1 but retained the portable RV softener business and now operates as RV-Water-Treatment.

Nick and Terry Russell of the Gypsy Journal in the vendor booth.

We had hoped to meet up with Curtis at the Paul Evert’s RV Country social at 4:00 PM, but we had to leave for the Photography BOF social before he arrived. BOF stands for “Birds Of a Feather,” the name the Escapees RV Club uses for special interest groups. BOFs are distinct from Chapters which are geographic in scope. We had a dozen folks show up for the Photography social. Most of us had never met, so we spent some time sharing our photography background and interests. By the time the social ended the weather had turned.

The gathering storm. It’s been strange weather lately.

Dinner? What’s that? We went early to the evening entertainment to see the slide show Lou had put together from our previous day’s effort. Once again we failed to win a door prize. The Homestead Pickers, a bluegrass trio, gave an excellent, high energy performance. Linda wasn’t feeling quite right and left early. I stopped at Lou and Val’s 5th Wheel after the concert so Lou could transfer my photos from today to his computer for inclusion in an upcoming slide show. It doesn’t sound like much, but it was a long, full day.

The Homestead PIckers in concert.

2014/05/08(R) Toad Lights

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The spring peepers are in full voice this time of year, but they do not wear headlamps. In fact, they are frogs, not toads. In the world of RV’s a car that is towed behind a motorhome is often referred to as a “towed” (noun) or “toad.” Like anything being towed, the car has to have functioning tail lights, brake lights, and turn signals. The existing lights on the car are often used for this, but there can be issues with arrangement, especially on newer vehicles.

Our Honda Element came equipped with a second set of rear bulbs that are not tied into the cars lighting circuits. On the way home from Florida they quit working. Visual inspect had revealed that the 6-pin connector on the bus had a couple of damaged pins. As soon as we got home I picked up a new connector from a local RV store. With a forecast high temperature of 81 degrees F, and no rain, today was the day to install it; but not until I had taken care of another important chore.

Steve (N8AR) arrived a little after 10 AM pulling Bruce’s (W8RA) enclosed trailer. We took a few minutes to look at my proposed site for the communications tower and then headed over to Wayne’s (KD8H) place to pick up the tower sections and related components I had purchased on Monday. We got there right at 11AM. Wayne greeted us in the driveway and directed us around behind the house. We loaded the steel fold over mount, motor, rotator, and bearing plate in the front if the trailer and then drove back to where the tower sections were stored and loaded those in. The trailer had about 10 feet inside, front-to-rear, and we were able to get everything in and close/latch the doors. We were on our way back to my QTH by noon. By 1 PM we had unloaded everything, stacked the tower sections on the rear/lower deck, and stored the other components in the garage. I walked Steve through the proposed pole barn site and then he headed home to hang drywall.

I gathered up the tools I needed for the connector project and arrayed them at the rear of the bus. Simple projects never are, and this was no exception. I removed the two screws that hold the connector into the bumped fascia and the discovered that I could not pull it out more than a 1/4 inch. The connector housing has an insert with the pins on one side (facing out) and the wire connections on the side (facing in). The insert is retained by a small screw on the top of the housing. To work on this assembly you have to be able to pull the housing out far enough to remove the retaining screw. You then need to have enough loose wire behind the connector to allow the insert to come out the front of the housing far enough that you can get to the small machine screws that that hold the wires.

The problem was that I did not have the necessary amount of loose wire. There was plenty of wire, it just wasn’t loose. I had to clip about a half dozen zip ties in the engine compartment and along the underside of the rear bumper, and remove a cable clamp, but I eventually freed up enough wire to pull the connector housing out far enough to work on it.

The wire connections on the insert were not done in a standard way per the directions that came with the new connector, so I made a diagram of how they were done. (I should have rewired both the bus connector and the cable end to be standard, but I plan to replace this whole setup with an EZ*Connector system this summer.) I disconnected the wires, which freed the insert, and slid the old housing off the end of the wire bundle. I cleaned up the ends of the four wires, stripping away 1/4 inch of insulation and trimming off frayed strands. I slipped the new housing over the wires, made the connections to the back of the insert, slid the insert into the housing, and secured up it with the retaining screw. I slid the housing back into the bumper fascia and secured it with the two screws.

Before dressing all the wires I pulled the car behind the bus and connected the electrical cable between them to test the lights. I connected the bus chassis batteries (there are two switches for this) and turned on the left turn signal. All the lights on the bus were fine, but I still did not have lights on the car. 🙁 I had also had problems previously with the plug and socket on the car so I jiggled the connector and the lights started working. I verified that I had tail and turn lights but could not test the brake lights as that takes two people. (I could have turned the ignition on and that would have caused the brake lights to come on since the emergency/parking brakes were set.)

I suspected the problem was in the connector on the end of the cable, but it was sufficiently corroded that I could not get it apart. I decided to spray all of the old connectors (3) with De-Ox-It, including inside the cable ends. I then sprayed all if the connectors, including the new ones, with De-Ox-It Gold. I plugged the cable back in to the bus and the car and retested the lights. Everything was working, so I secured the wiring on the bus with new zip ties, put my tools away, and closed everything up.

Sometime during the afternoon I got a call from Bruce (W8RA) and took a break from the electrical work. He had a friend who had purchased a used full-size tractor to pull a large 5^th wheel. The tractor had a KVH Trac-Vision R5 in-motion satellite dish and the owner wanted Bruce to help him get it working. Bruce knew we had a motorhome and thought I might have some insight into how to do this. The only advice I could offer was based on the satellite dish and electronics that were on our bus when we bought it. In addition to the dish on the roof and the receiver in the coach there was a third box that went in-between the two. I suspected that the KVH had something similar, but I wasn’t sure.

Linda had been babysitting all day so we had an Amy’s Indian dish with a nice salad for dinner. It had been a warm, physical day so I started a load of laundry and we just relaxed after dinner.

2014/05/07 (W) Plumbing

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After breakfast Linda headed to Ann Arbor to babysit our younger grand-daughter. I had a long list of things to do at my computer today, and planned to spend the day inside at home doing them. I did not manage to do most of them as I ended up doing other things instead; so much for plans.

Wednesday is trash day (sorry, Prince Spaghetti), so I got the trash to the curb. (I know, I know, how have I managed to arrange such an interesting life?) A box of Bus Conversion Magazines arrived yesterday, so I opened it to check the contents and then e-mailed the publisher that all was well.

We do not have curbside recycling at the house the way we did in the previous one, so we have to take our recyclables to a drop-off center run by Recycle Livingston. The center is open Wednesdays and Saturdays. On her way out the door Linda reminded me that I had to take the recyclables to the center. We keep a set of cardboard boxes on the floor in the pantry and sort our recyclables as they become available. I loaded them in the car for later.

At some point in the past the shower diverter in the bathtub quit working, so that had been on my “to do” list for a while. Coincidentally, while we were in Florida I had seen an episode of “Ask This Old House” that dealt with this exact repair! I had to use a large pipe wrench to unscrew the old bathtub spout/diverter as the threads were corroded. With the old diverter off I now had a fairly good idea of what I needed in the way of a replacement part.

I had been putting off fixing the leaky dishwasher fresh water connection but today was finally the day to tackle that project. As I was thinking about heading to the recycle center, and then to Lowe’s for plumbing parts, I got a call from Steve at Village Landscape Development (VLD). He wanted to swing by and go over the front stairs and rear retaining wall projects again and get us on his schedule. We agreed on 1 PM. It was 11:30 AM, so I had just enough time to drop off the recyclables and get a new diverter from Lowe’s.

Steve (VLD) came by and we walked through the two projects. We were on the same page and settled on tentative start and completion dates, so we signed an agreement and I gave him a deposit. After he left, I called Wayne (KD8H), set up to get the tower tomorrow at 11:00 AM, and then e-mailed Steve (N8AR) to let him know the date/time. He had permission to use Bruce’s (W8RA) closed trailer to help me with the tower.

Back at the dishwasher I turned the water supply on and the connection didn’t just drip, it spurted. I redid the connection with pipe thread compound instead of Teflon tape but it did not help at all. I tried tightening it and it got worse. It was clearly time to rethink my approach.

I find that a good way to rethink my approach to a problem is to do something else, so I installed the new diverter for the bathtub/shower in the hall bathroom. It only needed to be threaded on hand tight as it is not a pressurized fitting. Water either flows out the spout into the tub or gets blocked and forced (diverted) up to the shower head; a pretty simple device, really. It was not quite the right length and left a 1/2 inch gap between the base and the wall tile. At least this way I could see if any water was leaking out the back end. 🙂 It wasn’t, so I let it go for now.

I returned to the dishwasher problem and took another look. It appeared that the rubber seal (O-ring) in the end of the hose may have gotten nicked or mis-shapen, perhaps from over tightening. There was no indication of a leak between the 90 degree elbow and the dishwasher inlet.

I headed back to Lowe’s for a new 8’ dishwasher connection hose. I could not purchase just the hose; it only came as a kit with the 90 degree elbow and another adapter, which turned out to be fortuitous. I noticed that the instructions did not call for Teflon tape or pipe thread compound and I verified that with the associate in plumbing. I also picked up a decorative filler plate for the diverter.

The flexible water line connects to the lower left front corner of the dishwasher, loops underneath the unit, goes through a hole in the adjacent cabinet at the lower left rear, goes through the other side of that cabinet into the space under the corner sink cabinet bottom, and finally emerges through a hole in the floor of the cabinet along with a water pipe. The only way to run the new flexible line, without removing the dishwasher and disassembling cabinets, was to attach one end of the new line to the dishwasher end of the old line and use the old line to pull it through. Zip ties have lots of uses, and this is one of them.

Before making any connections I read the instructions again. The connections at the end of the hose were to be “finger tight plus 1/4 turn.” Although “finger tight” is an incredibly imprecise term–some number of inch-pounds would be precise–these directions clearly indicated that over tightening was a bad thing to do. I connected the line at both ends following the directions as best I could and opened the supply valve a little. No more spurting but I still had a drip leak and shut off the water supply. I knew the hose was OK so it had to be the elbow. I had to pull the dishwasher part way out to get to the 90 degree elbow. (This why I installed an 8 foot hose.) After I got it out I examined it and did not see any obvious thread damage or cracks, but there was some pitting and one pit in particular looked like it might be a through pinhole. No matter, it was trash.

I installed the new elbow using pipe thread compound on the male NPT pipe threads that go into the female NPT fitting on the dishwasher. These kinds of fittings are always a bit tricky. They have to be tight enough to not leak, without overdoing it, and they have to be oriented a certain way to allow something else to connect to them; in this case the supply hose. I reattached the flexible hose, turned on the water supply, and voilà, no leaks! As long as I was on a roll I unscrewed the bathtub diverter, slipped the decorative spacer over the pipe, and screwed the diverter back on, lining it up carefully with the spacer and getting it snug but properly aligned. Even though it took most of the afternoon I had successfully completed two plumbing jobs in one day.

2014/05/05 (M) Towering Heights

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It dropped into the upper 30’s early this morning. Although I did not really want to go outside and work, it was the perfect time to adjust the pressures in the bus tires and reset the baseline pressures on the Pressure Pro TPMS. I had a 10 AM service appointment for my car and wanted to take care of the bus tires before the air temperature warmed up or some of the tires sat in the sun.

I took the Honda Element to Brighton Honda for the 85,000 mile service which consisted of an oil change and multi-point inspection. A quick trip to Best Buy to look for a case for my new ASUS laptop computer did not result in a usable case but I did discover a new Logitech mouse, the T630; very thin and stylish but unfortunately not in stock. They printed out a sheet for me to take along.

I called Wayne (KD8H) and arranged to go see the Heights Tower he had for sale at 2 PM. Mike (W8XH) came along to help me inspect it. Mike has a Heights Tower so he is very familiar with them. The tower was already down and disassembled into sections that were stored horizontally on saw horses. The fold-over mount (FOM) was made of steel rather than aluminum and was rusty but very substantial. Wayne had the motor for the FOM but no longer had the threaded rod. The top tower sections had the mounting plate for a Ham II rotator and the bearing plate for the rotating mast. He also had the Ham II rotator, and was willing to include that in the deal. I wrote him a check and arranged to come back later in the week with a truck or trailer to pick everything up. After I dropped Mike back at his QTH and returned home I e-mailed several SLAARC members to see if they might be have a truck and/or trailer and time to help me retrieve the tower parts.

I had been doing research on cases for the ASUS G750 series (ROG) laptop computer and found two on Amazon Prime from Everki that looked promising as they were designed to hold up to an 18.5 inch (diagonal) computer. The Advanced was a padded top-load zipper case with a slender front zipper pocket. The Lunar was also a padded top-load zipper case but had a larger zippered front pouch and a slender zipper pocket in front of that. It also had a slot across the back that allowed it to be placed over the extended handle of a roller case. The Lunar was 3x the price of the Advanced, but the Lunar looked like it would better accommodate the AC power adapter and other accessories I tend to haul around. I had checked the ASUS ROG forum (Republic of Gamers) previously and the general opinion was that these two cases were both of good quality and big enough to hold my computer and related stuff. I ordered one for delivery on Wednesday (2-day), no extra charge with Amazon Prime.

2014/05/04 (N) Northwest Winds

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The weather yesterday was mostly cloudy with occasional light rain and the winds came up strong starting in the afternoon. They tapered off by bedtime but resumed a hard blow this morning with low, puffy, white clouds streaming in from the northwest and making the trees dance. It was a brighter morning than we have had most of the week as the sun played hide-n-seek with the clouds. The temperature remained cool, making for a brisk day, but it was a nice change from the cool, overcast dreariness of the past week. Except for Thursday, when the high temperature is supposed to hit 80, the daily high temps will be around 60 all week.

Linda made her scrumptious blueberry pancakes for breakfast and then went for a walk. She had barely left the house when she returned, very excited, to tell me she had just seen a young albino deer running through our yard. By the time I got outside it had moved on to the woods west of our property. We often see the same deer day-after-day as they travel their circuit, so I also hope to see this one someday.

After checking in on the blogs I follow using the Feedly app on my iPad2 I made a couple of corrections to a recent blog post, approved a comment from our daughter-in-law (the first one has to be approved), and deleted the 59 spam comments that the Akismet plug-in/service trapped since last night. I put a load of laundry in the washer and then spent some time looking online for a padded case for my new laptop computer and a replacement for one of our APC SmartUPS units that has failed.

With the move to tablet computers, the choice of laptops is diminishing, especially those with larger screens, and along with that fewer choices for accessories such as cases. In the past 14 years I have always purchased larger roller cases, with separate cases for the computer that fit inside, as my laptop traveled with me every day everywhere I went. I had the most recent of these cases with us in Florida and, after getting the computer/case and accessories out of it, I stored it in a closet (where it tended to be in the way). The next time I touched it was when I unloaded it from the bus to bring back into the house.

It was clear from that experience that I do not need another roller case. I do, however, want something that will protect my new laptop computer. I think I have narrowed the choice down to the Everki Advanced or the Everki Lunar, both available through Amazon Prime. The Advanced is very reasonably priced at under $40 and has generally favorable reviews, mentioning the ASUS “Republic of Gamers” (ROG) models in particular. The Lunar has more storage space, and also has generally favorable reviews, but is over three times the price at just under $130. Posts on the ASUS ROG Forum seem to favor one of the Everki backpack models, but I do not want a backpack style case.

Our failed APC uninterruptible power supply is a Smart-UPS SUA1000. By trading it in on a SMT1000 we can save $75 off the retail price. I need to confirm that the discounted price includes return shipping; the SUA1000 weighs 48 pounds.

I revised the RVillage Quick Start doc I created for the GLCC, CCO, and FTH RV clubs, making it generic for use by Bus Conversion Magazine or anyone else. I then uploaded it to a new RVillage page on our website and revised a couple of other pages to link to the new one. I then uploaded blog posts for the last three days. I set up my new laptop in my office and installed seven more updates.

At breakfast yesterday I got a tip from Paul (N8BHT) on a used tower. He e-mailed me the owner’s contact information later. I called the owner, Wayne (KD8H), this afternoon and got a little more information about the tower. It is an aluminum Heights Tower, 80 feet, with Fold-Over Kit (FOK) including the drive motor, a rotator and antenna mounting plate. It is already on the ground and disassembled into sections. Wayne is retired and I will likely go look at the tower tomorrow afternoon. I e-mailed Paul (N8BHT), Mike (W8XH), and Steve (N8AR) to see if they were available to go with me.

Linda made lentil loaf for dinner with baked yams and fresh asparagus. After dinner I drove to South Lyon for the May meeting of the South Lyon Area Amateur Radio Club. SLAARC usually meets on the 2nd Sunday of the month but pulls the May meetings forward a week to avoid Mother’s Day. Our topic of discussion this evening was the upcoming ARRL Field Day operating event, which takes place the last full weekend in June. We had a couple of new hams at the meeting and afterwards several of the guys helped Christine, KD8VEA, get the PL tone set correctly on her radio so she was able to participate in a group QSO with Steve (N8AR), Mike (W8XH), Fred (AC8VL), and myself on the drive home. In spite of what many people think, including some older/former hams, amateur radio is alive and well in the North America and all over the world.

2014/05/03 (S) Ham It Up

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Today started with breakfast out and felt like we were finally starting to get back into the flow. We drove to South Lyon for the Saturday morning breakfast gathering of our South Lyon Area Amateur Radio Club, as we do almost every Saturday morning when we at the house. Steve (N8AR) gave me a lead on someone who might be willing to build our pole barn. After breakfast we returned home and I walked Linda through the project I discussed yesterday with Steve for redoing the rear basement walkout retaining walls, drainage, and yard grading.

I worked on our blog and Linda worked on lunch preparations while we awaited the arrival of our daughter and son-in-law. They have had Linda’s Honda Civic Hybrid since December and were returning it, so they drove two cars. Linda got to visit with them in late February / early March, but I had not seen them since mid December. We had a nice lunch of mixed greens salad and vegan Sloppy Joe’s with sweet gherkin pickles on the side. Fresh strawberries and carrot cake cookies provided a sweet ending to the meal. We had a nice visit.

Steve from Village Landscaping Development stopped by with a brochure, business card, and the project proposal written up on a more official estimating form. We will take a few days to think about, but it’s a very good proposal and I am 99% certain we will hire him to do this work. It would be nice to get it done in late May to early June, between The SKP Escapade and the GLAMARAMA rallies, but it may not be dry enough by then. If not, it will have to wait until early July after we return from the installation ceremonies for Linda’s sister who is assuming one of the top leadership positions in the St. Louis Province of the Congregation (Sisters) of St. Joseph.

A little later Phil Jarrel, from Best Precision Grading, came by to take a second look at the site preparation and grading work for the pole barn. We walked the site and agreed that I could/should change the orientation of the building just a bit from where it is currently staked. We also discussed how to make sure the barn was located behind the front line of the house and talked through the permitting and construction process. He did not have any builders to recommend, but he did recommend a concrete contractor for the pit and floor.

We did quite a few construction projects at the previous house over the years but the pole barn involves elements that are new to me, and I now have to deal with a Township for a land use permit and the County for building and grading permits. I am fairly set on the size, location, and basic design/materials, but we not have settled on a builder or materials supplier. Consequently, we still do not have an accurate total cost estimate. Until everything is in place, and the cost is known, nothing can move forward. Meanwhile, the days keep flipping over on the calendar.

2014/05/02 (F) A Day At Home

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Linda went into the bakery today so she was up early and left at 6:30 AM to get ahead of the worst of the morning rush hour traffic headed into Detroit from the northwest. She took my new laptop to have some critical software installed. With the 17″ screen, the computer does not fit in any of our existing padded carry cases, so that is an accessory I will need to get. I also have my eye on an external BluRay/DVD/CD optical media drive (read/write). The BluRay disks will store anywhere from 25 to 45 GB of data which is more practical that CDs or DVDs for non-volatile /off-site storage of photographs and critical documents.

We only have one car at the moment, so I was stuck at home today (I don’t use the motorcoach to run errands). Being stuck at home on a chilly, overcast, rainy day is not necessarily a bad thing. After a light breakfast and my morning coffee I started a load of laundry and worked at my desk for a while.

I took a break from desk work and opened the front of one of our APC Smart UPS units that had died while we were away. I had replaced batteries in a couple of these units but could not recall if this was one of them. It was not. When I opened the batter compartment I found the batteries badly swollen and I was unable to remove them from the case. The tags on them indicated that they were from 2010. The only thing I can think of that would have caused this was a failure in the battery charging circuit which continued to charge the batteries after they were already fully charged. That would cause them to gas and swell as they are sealed AGM batteries. We were probably lucky they did not explode. Given this situation I will replace the whole UPS rather than put new batteries in it. APC usually offers a trade-in allowance (called Trade-Ups) for the same or larger UPS. Otherwise I have to dispose of the whole thing as electronic hazardous waste.

Steve Degenais of Village Landscape Development stopped by mid-morning to discuss two separate projects: 1) stairs to get from the pull-thru driveway to the front porch, and; 2) redoing the retaining walls on either side of the basement walkout.

When we bought the house last year it had a makeshift pull-thru driveway and no stairs or pathway to the front porch, which is the main entrance to the house. The previous owners used the Florida room, which is just an enclosed patio slab between the house and the garage, as an entry/breezeway. It was empty and they left it unlocked, entering the house through a door to the kitchen that locked. We use the Florida room as a library, so we do not leave it open. We also had the pull-thru driveway substantially improved last spring so we can park our bus with the entrance door opposite the front door of the house. Carrying things back and forth between the house and the bus on a steep grassy slope is an accident waiting to happen. There is a four foot drop in 18 feet from the front porch to the driveway and we need a proper set of stairs.

Although we have a walkout basement, the house is not set into the side of a hill. If you walk around the house it appears to sit on top of a mound. It appears that dirt was piled around the basement walls, except by the walkout, and graded away from house, more or less. In the back it slopes in towards the walkout. There are remnants of an old railroad tie retaining wall and it appears that sometime later someone tried to stabilize the two slopes with plastic held in place with small boulders, pieces of cinder block, used bricks, and whatever else was handy to throw in there. That apparently wasn’t working very well so they built two retaining walls, each about seven courses high (~3 ft), with blocks meant for decorative edging of plant beds. It’s also clear that they did not make any provision for water drainage behind the walls and yet two downspouts from the roof gutter system discharged into these areas before I used corrugated plastic pipe to carry the water away from the house. The pipes are still there, sitting on the surface right where I put them last spring. The earth behind the walls has obviously moved over time and the walls are buckling in places. Mud pushes through and around them. It’s not pretty on several levels.

Our sump pump runs quite a bit in the spring and we need to get rainwater away from the foundation as much as possible. Drainage and stabilization of the slopes are my primary concern but I always care about aesthetics. Steve and I discussed an approach using small boulders to make low retaining walls backed with fabric and drain pipes to capture and drain the water far out into the yard. The slopes would be re-graded to provide runoff away from the house, covered with landscape fabric, and then covered with small boulders and “egg rock.” The drain lines would all be buried and run to an exit point far out in the yard.

I spent much of the rest of the day working on our website and blog with the help of our cats, who were a bit needier than usual following their visit to the veterinarian yesterday. Sometime during the day a package arrived from Amazon. On Wednesday we ordered an Amped|Wireless SR20000G (wireless router/repeater/access point) to replace the one Mike (W8XH) gave us just before we left for Florida. The SR20000G worked very well for us in our bus and is now a permanent part of our on-board communications technology arsenal. We ordered it through Amazon Prime and had it in two days; no extra charge for shipping.

Linda picked up some groceries on her way home from the bakery and we had a simple dinner consisting of a very tasty spinach salad and an Amy’s Roasted Vegetable Pizza. After dinner she worked on food for tomorrow’s visit with our daughter and son-in-law. She made her fabulous vegan Sloppy Joe’s and carrot cake cookies while I worked with my new notebook computer. Updates were available and I had to “update and restart” the machine six times before there were no more updates to install. There were 24+5+20+4+8+10 = 71 updates in all. Allen, the computer sales associate at Best Buy, had alerted me to the fact that once I activated the machine there would be quite a few updates, so this was not unexpected.

2014/05/01 (R) A Month Behind

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This was our fourth day back at the house and it felt like I was already a month behind. That may be partly due to the fact that the change of seasons seems to be delayed by that much here in southeast Michigan. But it mostly had to do with the notepad sitting to my right that is filling up with things to do much faster than I am getting them done. Although that is to be expected it is still a bit disheartening. Some of them are short, simple tasks, but even things like calling or e-mailing someone are often open-ended exchanges. Others are major projects that I will be working on, and writing about, well into the fall.

Today’s big errand was taking our two cats, Jasper and Juniper, to the veterinarian for checkups and shots. They were due for these in February, but we were in Florida at the time and so were the cats. They saw Dr. Carron from Plaza Veterinary today. He and his staff have seen to the health needs of all of our pets for the last 30+ years.

We have not changed any of our professional service providers since moving last year. Doctors, dentist, optometrist, and veterinarian are now all located 30 – 60 miles away, but we have used these providers for many years and are comfortable with them. Since we typically see them at most twice a year we do not mind the additional driving distance and time as long as we can schedule appointments for nice times of the year and at nice times of the day. Why drive in rush hour and/or bad (snowy) weather, after all, if we do not have to? And we do not have to.

We do most of our shopping in Brighton and Howell, except for items we can only get from Whole Foods Market, and are having our two Honda automobiles serviced locally by the dealership in Brighton. While automotive service facilities are not necessarily interchangeable we have found Honda service departments generally provide competent service wherever they are located.

On the way back from the veterinarian we took the new Latson Road exit off of I-96 and headed north a short way to the intersection with Grand River Avenue where Teeko’s Coffee is located in the strip mall on the NE corner. Jeff had roasted four pounds of coffee for us on Tuesday for pickup today. I chatted with him while he divided up the batches into 1/2 pound amounts and vacuum sealed them. We try to order the coffee a couple of days ahead so he can let it “out-gas” before bagging it. He plans to get bags with one-way valves, like you find most packaged coffee, and that will eliminate the need to wait a day or so for the out-gassing to subside.

Back at the house Linda dove in to organizing household paperwork while I made calls to various contractors and then worked on computer/e-mail/website tasks, including an RVillage quick start guide for Bus Conversion Magazine. After dinner I unloaded the car so Linda could take it to the bakery tomorrow. Our daughter still has Linda’s car from the winter and we will get it back (temporarily) when we see them on Saturday.

2014/04/30 (W) MEF3 At The Park

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Here are 12 photos of our youngest grand-daughter at the park with her dad and grandma Linda. Click thumbnail to view entire image. Maximum dimension is 448 pixels. Enjoy!

: Loaded up and ready to go to the park.

: Madeline lives in a very nice neighborhood, walking (stroller) distance to the park.

: Sometimes Madeline likes to push her own stroller, just like the big people.

: Is there anything more fun than climbing stairs, especially if there is a slide at the top?

: Are you watching, grandpa Bruce?

: Dad or grandma Linda?

: Madeline considers whether grandma Linda will really catch her.

: Are you getting this?

: Grandma Linda assuring Madeline that she will help her down the slide.

: Little girls like to play with big trucks too. The sandbox at the park is full of toys.

: “Let’s go that way grandma Linda.” (Presumed; she’s not speaking words yet.)

: Stepping out and leading the way.

2014/04/29 (W) Normality?

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When we got home on Monday, the bus and I had been away from the house for 128 days (130 days including the day we left and the day we returned) spanning portions of five months. We moved into our new (to us) house on April 12th, 2013. From May 1st of last year through the end of April 2014 we were in our motorcoach 214 of those 365 days ( +/- a couple of days). Not bad for our first year as extended-time RVers and our first snowbird season.

Although we are still relative newbies at extended-time RVing this past year allowed us to develop a reasonable understanding of how to make it work for us. But now we are home and that entails a different pace and rhythm to which we have had to quickly adjust. First and foremost was letting folks know we were back and arranging visits with family and friends. After that we have to deal with dentist appointments, veterinary appointments, doctor appointments, car appointments, computer upgrades, WordPress websites, photo editing software, ham radio club breakfasts and meetings, a communications tower, ham radio antennas, an OTA TV antenna, a cell phone repeater system, landscaping projects, fruit trees (pruning), a pole barn, conversion of the house to natural gas, and a list of bus projects (of course). All by December 1st. Right.

Gus the cat. Look closely; he has the longest whiskers I have ever seen on a cat.

Gus the cat. He has the longest whiskers I have ever seen on a cat.

Today was dental appointments followed by a detour to Ann Arbor to visit with our younger grand-daughter and her parents. I’ve put some photos from that visit in a separate gallery post. We stopped at the Whole Foods market and picked up something for lunch as well as ingredients Linda needed for making granola. Madeline was napping when we arrived, so we got to visit with Brendan for a little while, but once she woke up she was ready to go. It was 70 degrees F outside so we put her in the stroller and took her to the park that is the centerpiece of their neighborhood. She spent a lot of time walking and running in the grass, up and down concrete ramps, but especially climbing the stairs for the slides and then sliding down. Not long after we got back to the house Shawna got home from work and Madeline got a lot of mommy interaction. By that point it was rush hour and we decided to stay for dinner.

No one was prepared to cook and rather than get carryout or delivery we decided to go to The Lunch Room, a relatively new vegan restaurant in Ann Arbor’s Kerrytown district. Linda had a vegan mac & cheese and I had a mock Rueben made with Tempeh and a cup of vegan tomato bisque soup. Everything was very good, including the vegan desserts: a grasshopper brownie for Linda and a no-flour chocolate cupcake with a Bourbon / Caramel / Pastry Cream frosting for me. All of the food was very good and reasonably priced, which is not always the case in Ann Arbor. By the time we got home and I took a phone call, there wasn’t much of the evening left.

So the new normal for us is not one or the other, it’s both/and; figuring out how to balance two very different ways of living and, in particular, how to flow back and forth between them as easily, smoothly, and quickly as possible. But that may be just the sort of challenge our brains need to remain agile as we begin our forth score of years.

2014/04/29 (T) A Family Visit

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Our son decided to bring his daughter to visit with us this morning. They arrived around 10 AM and left around 1:30 PM. This was the first time I have seen her since December 16th. Linda got to see her when she was back in Michigan in late February and early March. Madeline was one year old when I last saw her and was crawling. She is now 16 & 1/2 months and walking like she invented it. She seems to take great pleasure in her independent mobility for its own sake; pure joy. She also loves to go up and down stairs (with adult supervision, of course). She is curious about everything and took great delight in exploring the main floor of our house. It was an excellent visit.

I made a run to the post office and used my 2m mobile ham radio while in transit. Mike, W8XH, came back to my call and we had a nice QSO. It was good to finally be back on the air. I stopped at Teeko’s and ordered 2 lbs each of our two custom blend coffees for pickup on Thursday. These are half regular, half decaffeinated blends that Jeff roasts right in the store from his amazing assortment of green beans. Sweet Seattle Dreams is 1/2 Seattle Blend (reg) and 1/2 Sweet Dreams (decaf), and we were the first customers for whom Jeff ever made thus blend. It’s a blend of two blends, so it has at least four different coffee beans, maybe five or six. He told me once, but I have forgotten. The other blend is all Ethiopian Yirgacheffe. Both are excellent.

I did some research on laptop computers while Linda pulled together something for dinner. She got a Samsung ATIV Book 8 a year ago. It is a fabulous machine: 64-bit Intel Core i7 (Gen 3) microprocessor, Windows 8.1 (64-bit), a 15.6″ diagonal touch screen (16:9 aspect ratio), backlit keyboard, and lots of ports including USB3.0 and HDMI, but no internal optical media drive, so we bought an external one. She especially likes the touch screen as it makes the computer work more like her iPad2. I decided to get the Samsung ATIV Book 6 which had very similar specifications to the Book 8. After dinner we went to the Best Buy store in Brighton to see if they had either of these machines. When I went to the Samsung website and looked for a store near my location the only thing that came up in SE Michigan was the Best Buy chain.

Best Buy in Brighton has some people in their computer department who seem fairly knowledgeable. I asked about the differences between Win 8 and Win 8 Pro and got a fairly technical answer. The Best Buy chain also has small Samsung stores-within-a-store staffed by Samsung employees. The bottom line was this: Best Buy did not have, and could not order, the Book 6 and had one Book 8 in the store. It had the Gen 3 processor but the Gen 4 has been available for a while. It became clear from the discussion that Samsung has not released an updated laptop in a while and may be getting out of the laptop business. We also found out that Sony has sold off their computer line to someone, and that Dell has not released or announced new products in many months following a private equity buyout and their continued presence in the laptop market is highly questionable. I had Allen, the computer sales associate, show me what they had and it came down to a choice between a Lenovo (formerly IBM) and an ASUS. ASUS actually makes the own computers as well as the excellent Nexus tablets. I opted for the top-of-the-line model G750JM notebook computer. At least it was top-of-the-line in terms of what Best Buy carries in their stores.

The G750JM has a 17″ diagonal HD (1900 x 1080) matte finish screen. It is not a touch screen, which was fine with me. The size is big enough that I can work with spreadsheets and edit photographs. The matte finish screen means it will work well in the bus where there is a lot of light during the day and reflections can be a problem. While the newer 4K (retina type) displays are stunning, they are only available in the smaller 13″ screen size and are often packaged with smaller capacity, but much more expensive, solid state drives (SSD). The G750JM has a 1 TB HDD. The HDD includes a 16 GB SSD that is primarily used to buffer the OS. It has 8 GB of very fast RAM that is upgradable to 32 GB should I ever feel the need (and the price of 16 GB RAM modules comes way down). It was the only laptop in the store that could be upgraded to that much RAM. A maximum of 16 GB was the norm. The video/graphics is powered by an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 860M with 2 GB of VRAM. The computer has built in WiFi, of course, four USB 3.0 ports, an HDMI port, a LAN port, a bunch of other ports, and a built-in CD/DVD player/writer. Basically, this machine is aimed at high end gamers, but that also made it well-suited to the things I need to do with it, and it was only $50 more than the Samsung Book 8.

We unboxed the machine as soon as we got home and plugged in the battery and AC power adapter/charger to bring the battery up to full charge. Unlike older laptop computers the new ones do not require the battery to be installed in order to operate. I would never run it without the battery, however, as the battery provides a built in UPS in the event of a power glitch. We powered it up and it found our various home WiFi networks. We selected one and proceeded with the initial configuration, personalization, and registration steps. Part way into this process a fast moving storm front brought intense lightning, thunder, and high winds so we wrapped up what we were doing, shut down, and unplugged. Ditto for all of our sensitive (read data storage) devices.

Based on my limited exposure to the computer thus far I am very satisfied with the purchase. It will take me some time to get it fully configured and switch over to using it as my primary computer, but with the end of support for Windows XP I need to get it done sooner rather than later. Truthfully, setting up a new computer, especially one with a (radically) new operating system, is not at the top of my list of really fun things to do. It is inevitable, however, and always yields significant rewards once I get over the initial hump in the learning curve. It is also an opportunity to start clean and exercise moderation with the objective of having a more streamlined and efficient operating environment that allows me to focus on the things I really need to do.

2014/04/28 (M) Home Again

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The wind blew overnight, but the rains held off. We only had 80 miles to travel today so, other than wanting to break camp before the rain moved in, we were not in a hurry to leave Camp Turkeyville. We set our sights on a 10 AM departure and by 9:30 AM we were busy with our departure routine. It was trying to drizzle as I dumped the holding tanks but not really succeeding. We had the bus and car prepped for travel by 10 AM and pulled out of the RV park around 10:15.

From exit 42 on I-69 we headed northeast towards Lansing, Michigan 38 miles distant. We drove under overcast skies fighting strong, gusty winds, with just enough drizzle that I had to activate the wipers from time to time. The bus is heavy and drives well, but it also has a lot of surface area, and I am very aware of strong, gusty side winds.

At the southwest corner of the Lansing area we picked up I-96 eastbound which took us around the southern edge of the city and put us our final course for home. About 25 miles from our house we stopped at the Mobile Truck Stop at I-96 and M-52 and topped up the tank. I prefer to have the tank full when the bus is going to sit for more than a few days, especially when overnight lows are going to dip into the 40’s or lower.

We decided to take the Grand River exit off of I-96 in Brighton rather than the slightly shorter route over M-59. The Grand River route only had three stoplights, all within a short distance of the exit, and kept us on paved roads for all but the last mile of our drive. The M-59 route would have had many more stoplights and put us on dirt roads for 2.5 miles.

We pulled into our driveway a little past noon. We had stayed ahead of the rain, at least temporarily, and decided to unload as much of the coach as we could while the weather was in our favor. The forecast for the rest of the week was for rain so we wanted to take advantage of this window while we had it. It took a LOT of trips to get most of the stuff out if the house portion of the bus and into our fixed dwelling. First off, however, were the cats.

Jasper and Juniper seemed a bit weary at first but quickly realized that this was a familiar place and started getting reacquainted with all the nooks and crannies. Once we had most of our stuff inside the house we set about putting it away, or in the laundry room. We went through mail, checked phone messages, made a few phone calls, and started making lists of things that we needed to do. Although we will be here for the next half year or so we have quite a few major projects to work on and it already feels like we will be pressed for time to get them all done. It was interesting to note that our transition back to a fixed dwelling was fairly abrupt, just like our snowbird departure was in December.

Late afternoon we linked up with our son, daughter-in-law, and younger grand-daughter via Facetime on one of our iPads. There are advantages to being home and an Internet connection with lots of data is one of them. After dinner I got our home computer network up and running and sent a few e-mails letting friends know we were finally home.

2014/04/12 (S) More Hudson

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We stayed at Suncoast Designers until Sunday Morning as planned. Bill and Nancy, in the Newmar Essex next to us, decided on Friday to also have the large window in their entrance door repaired. Suncoast was willing to do the work but it would not be completed until sometime next week. We decided to keep them company while we figured out where we were going next and made the arrangements. We had struck up a fast friendship with them and enjoyed just sitting and talking. They are from Ottawa, Ontario but have had a mobile home in Ocala, Florida for 25 years. They have a customized 1938 Chevy and are active in the National Street Rod Association (NSRA). They have been RVing in various rigs for a long time, so we had lots to talk about.

Bill and Nancy went out for breakfast to a place nearby that Joe recommended. Breakfast has become our least favorite meal to eat out, unless we can find a Panera, as our menu choices are typically very limited. Linda had researched places to stay in the Florida panhandle and identified several possibilities. None of them were Florida State Parks, as the system was fully booked statewide, and none of them were right on the Gulf, as they were all dreadfully expensive. We selected Live Oak Landing near Freeport, Florida, an RVC Outdoor Destination park. Live Oak Landing was 15 miles south of I-10, which would give us access to everything between Tallahassee and Pensacola. It was 10 miles north of from US-98 which would give us ready access to a stretch of the Gulf Coast from Panama City to the east to Destin to the west. The website said they had openings but Linda called to confirm that and made the reservation.

I worked most of the day at my computer while Linda worked on her counted cross-stitch project. I took a break for a couple of hours mid-day to run some errands. The most important errand was to find the Tires Plus shop in Spring Hill, verify that they could/would fill our bus tires at 9:00 AM Sunday morning, and scope out any access issues. It’s a good thing I did.

Yes, they would be open at 9, and yes they would be glad to put air in our tires at no charge. Getting the bus into their parking lot would not be a problem, but getting out might be. The manager asked me to pull up alongside the end of the building so they could reach the tires with their air pressure hose. From that position I could then back around behind their service bays and pull out of the lot the way I came in; easy enough as long as the car was not in tow. The obvious solution was to have Linda drive the car separately and hook it up after the bus was backed around behind the building.

I stopped at the Publix across the street and the dollar store next door where I found a small bottle of Goo-Gone. Linda called as I was driving back with a short list of items for me to pick up at … Publix. I continued on and stopped at Walmart instead.

The tape that Suncoast Designers used to secure the openings after the windows were removed left a residual glue line on the body and adjacent windows. The Suncoast employees were pushing to get customers taken care of so I decided to just take care of this myself. Linda helped and it gave us something to do in the afternoon. The windows were easy to clean up with a safety razor blade, but getting the glue off of the paint required a solvent, and Goo-Gone is what they recommended. It contains petroleum distillates and citrus extracts, so after it removes the glue it has to be cleaned off the paint with soapy water which in turn has to be rinsed off and dried.

I had sent a TXT MSG to Chuck that resulted in a call back. In the course of the conversation I mentioned that the engine ran a bit warmer than usual on the drive down from Williston. I thought I recalled him telling me that he had his radiator removed and cleaned or re-cored but that was not the case. What he had done was wash it with a garden hose from inside the engine bay. The radiator fan draws (relatively) cool air in from outside, so he figured it made sense to clean it with water sprayed in the opposite direction. He said that cleaning radiator had helped the engine run cooler.

His logic made sense to me, and Suncoast had very conveniently left a hose with a spray nozzle on a reel behind our coach. I sprayed the radiator as best I could from inside the bay and then sprayed it through the lovers from the outside. We would find out tomorrow whether it made any difference.

Early Saturday evening we circled up our chairs again with Bill and Nancy grabbed a cold beverage, and enjoyed a nice chat. Steve and Kathy stopped by for a while and another couple who had just arrived also stopped to chat. They were from eastern Ontario and were native French speakers, but their English was excellent.

2014/04/11 (F) Primitive Camping

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[Photos related to this post and the one from Apr 9 will appear in a separate gallery post.]

Definition of “primitive camping”: not being parked on a level concrete pad with 50A full hookups. It’s all relative, of course, and that certainly is not our definition. We are parked on gravel, which some RVers like better than concrete or asphalt, and we have 50A RV electrical service and fresh water at out “site.” There is a dump station here and we are only minutes from more places to shop than we could visit in a lifetime, with more things to buy than we could possibly ever need or want. So, no, this is not primitive camping. The rigs are parked fairly close together, closer than we typically experience at RV rallies, but this is an RV repair facility after all, not a campground. There is enough space for adjacent rigs to put out their slides and still be able to walk between them, and the “canyon (Venturi) effect” causes refreshing breezes to flow between the units. To me, primitive means more (or less) than just not having hookups. When I think of primitive camping, it conjures up an image of remoteness and wilderness. In spite of having a background in mathematics, statistics, and research methodology, I guess I’m just a romantic at heart.

Joe finished cleaning and caulking our four windows this morning. Kevin uncovered the openings and helped Joe reinstall the finished assemblies with assistance from Matt (on the outside) and me (on the inside). When all of the windows were reinstalled Matt cleaned them inside and out. Linda took photographs to document the work for the article I am writing for Bus Conversion Magazine. We left the four repaired windows latched shut but were once again able to open the other four. It will be nice to finally have windows open in the bedroom again. Joe (who is a very funny guy and a delight to work with) had us sign off on the work, after which Linda went to office and paid our bill. She also bought three cans of the Ardex Labs spray glass cleaner for $5 each. We found it online; $15.99 / can plus shipping. So much for Internet bargains.

We were pleasantly surprised to see that the cost for the repairs was only 57% of what we had been quoted. We did not ask why, but we suspect it was because they were able to remove and reinstall the awning frames from the body with the thermopane glass sandwiches in them, and do so fairly quickly. This allowed them to do most of the work inside. Another factor may have been the size of the windows; the glass in our awning windows is only about 28″ wide by 17″ tall. They told us when we made the appointment to expect 3 – 5 days for the work and it took 3.5 days.

The work on our coach was wrapped up by noon and we were free to go but being mid-day Friday we decided to stay. We have made friends with Bill and Nancy from Ottawa, Ontario Canada, in the Newmar Essex motorhome next to us (Bill is the guy who helped us back in when we arrived.) They decided yesterday to have the upper window in their door repaired and were going to have to stay until early next week for the work to be finished. We decided to stick around and keep them company as we have enjoyed talking with them. Besides, not knowing when the work would be done, we had not made a reservation yet for Sunday in the panhandle and will need to do that early on Saturday.

Our driver-side steer tire was reading about 5 PSI lower than the passenger-side tire when we left Williston on Monday afternoon, but both readings were above the minimum I like to run, so I chose not to deal with it there and then. Of course, it was 87 degrees F when I checked them. It’s been noticeably cooler here, especially first thing in the morning, and the driver-side steer tire looks like it could use a little extra air. One of the nice things about filling the tires in Michigan in Mid-December and then driving to Florida for the winter was that even with a very slow leak the cold pressure goes up along with the morning low temperature. But now that we are about to start our northward journey I would like to have all of the tire pressures reset enough above my normal cold pressure that they will still be OK when we get home.

I asked Joe if Suncoast had a shop compressor. He said they did but he did not think it was set to a high enough pressure to inflate our front tires, which normally carry 110 – 115 PSI cold. I was hoping we might find a mobile tire service like Carter Tire in Elkhart, Indiana but a Google search did not reveal anything promising. I asked Joe if he could recommend someplace nearby, preferably heading north from here, and he suggested Tires Plus in Spring Hill. His friend Dave works there and Joe thought it had plenty of room for us to get in and out and high enough air pressure to fill our front tires. It is also about 10 miles north on our intended route on the northbound side of the road, and is open on Sunday at 9:00 AM. I plan to drive up there tomorrow to verify the facts, but it sounds like exactly what we need. If we are there at 9 AM and get our tire pressures taken care of we can make it to the western panhandle by late afternoon.

I had a long list of things I wanted to get done at the computer today, but it was another lovely day and we ended up sitting in shade between our rig and Bill/Nancy’s rig all afternoon enjoying the breeze, and shooting it. We skipped lunch and were finally driven inside by hunger and the arrival of small, persistent, flying black bugs.

Because we skipped lunch we had an earlier dinner than usual. Linda improvised a dish made with ingredients she had on hand: quinoa, black beans, tomatoes, sweet and hot peppers, onions, and olive oil. The hot peppers were really hot so she used them sparingly, but the dish still had a serious kick. She has developed a good feel for how to combine these kinds of ingredients without a recipe. It was delicious and I asked her to capture the recipe on our website/blog.

The coach had warmed up a bit during the day so we set two of our chairs out in front after dinner to enjoy the cooler evening air. Bill and Nancy brought their chairs over and we enjoyed small glasses of the Barefoot Moscato while they enjoyed a couple of beers. We talked until it got dark and chilly and decided to call it a night around 8:30 PM. Sometime later we heard a very strange and loud sound, like an ATV, drive past the front of our coach. I heard it returning from the back parking lot and managed to get a glimpse as it went by. It was a pick-up truck with a fogger in the bed. Presumably they were spraying something for insect control. I have not seen anyone do that in quite some time.

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Category Archives: Family-Friends-Home

2014/06/06 (F) Chapter Business

20140605 (R) Apple Roku

2014/06/04 (W) Indian Street Food

2014/06/03 (T) Work-n-Play

2014/06/02 (M) Fire Pit Project

2014/06/01 (N) Farmer’s Market

2014/05/31 (S) End of May

2014/05/30 (F) Outlook Contacts

2014/05/26 (M) Memorial Day

2014/05/23 (F) Over And Out

2014/05/22 (R) Still Resting

2014/05/21 (W) A Twilight Zone

2014/05/20 (T) Software Redemption

2015/05/19 (M) Software Frustrations

20140418 (N) Taxi Turn Oops

2014/05/17 (S) Working While We Wait

2014/05/13 (T) A Full Day

2014/05/08(R) Toad Lights

2014/05/07 (W) Plumbing

2014/05/05 (M) Towering Heights

2014/05/04 (N) Northwest Winds

2014/05/03 (S) Ham It Up

2014/05/02 (F) A Day At Home

2014/05/01 (R) A Month Behind

2014/04/30 (W) MEF3 At The Park

2014/04/29 (W) Normality?

2014/04/29 (T) A Family Visit

2014/04/28 (M) Home Again

2014/04/12 (S) More Hudson

2014/04/11 (F) Primitive Camping