Tag Archives: Barry’s Breads (Q)

2015/02/24-28 (T-S) Bus Projects

2015/02/24 (T) Little Bus Projects

I went to bed early (for me) last night but slept in until almost 8 AM. It was cool in the coach and I had cats snuggled up with me enjoying the warmth of the electric heating pad. When I finally got up I tended to their needs—food, water, and litter—and then tended to mine; fruit juice, granola, coffee, and grapefruit. It is Tuesday, which is trash collection day, so I gathered up the trash from the kitchen and took it to the refuse container by the curb. We will only have one more trash collection while we are here and that will likely occur after we have pulled out on Tuesday March 3rd.

I finished up yesterday’s blog post, got dressed, and got to work on my bus projects. I started by wiping off the spotting on the windows and body from the recent rains. I thought the reason I spent 40 hours cleaning and waxing the body was so water would run off if it but apparently I was mistaken. I had also noticed that the wax on the passenger side of the bus had not been fully rubbed down. I started working on this but without using additional water it just made it look worse so I quit somewhat disgusted with the whole situation and got to work on other stuff.

First up was the dashboard instrument lighting. For the turbo boost gauge I made a 5 inch extension lead with red #14 wire and insulated female spade connectors on each end to connect to the +24VDC supply wire for the old gauge. I made a similar lead with black wire for the ground but only put a connector on one end to attach to the new gauge bulb holder. I used a crimp style speed connector to splice the free end into the existing ground wire which had a fork connector on the end that I did not want to cut off. I put one of the 24VDC wedge base bulbs in the holder and snapped it into the gauge.

I undid the retaining ring on the speedometer and pulled the instrument out the front of the dashboard. I thought I had wired the two light bulbs in series to use 12VDC bulbs on a 24VDC circuit but discovered that they were already wired in parallel. I pulled the two bulb holders out and the bulbs were discolored as if they had been too hot. I could not determine the voltage rating on the bulbs so I replaced them with 24V ones. I reinstalled the speedo into the dashboard and put the dashboard cover back on. I will test the lights the next time I connect the chassis batteries.

I next considered replacing the MAC valve that controls the air shutters for the two A-C compressor/condenser units in front. I looked at the existing valve and decided to hold off until I could talk to Butch. He and Fonda had taken off for the day, so that would have to wait. The valve has a diagram on it that indicates how it operates but I was not completely clear on how to read it. When I built the new air panel I used identical replacement valves and plumbed them the same as the old ones. I searched online for “pneumatic valve symbols” and got all kinds of sites. One of them had a 25 slide presentation on ANSI standard symbols and schematics so I downloaded and studied it. With my new knowledge I was able to verify that the valve was, in fact, installed correctly. I figured it was since it seemed to work correctly (until it failed) but it was nice to know for sure. I am not certain that the three control switches are wired correctly, however, but that is a different project for a different day.

I really did not want to change the entire valve. I bought the replacement valve from Hei/Tek in Phoenix so I called them for technical support. They confirmed what Butch suspected; the operator (solenoid) can be changed without replacing the entire valve. They had a defective valve and offered to take the solenoid off and mail it to me for no charge. Deal. I should have it tomorrow so I deferred any further work on this project until the part arrives.

By now it was time for lunch so I made a nice sandwich with toasted sourdough bread, vegan deli slices, Daiya havarti style vegan cheese with jalapeños, lettuce, onions, pickles, veganaise, and honey mustard.

Next up was mounting the turbo boost sensor. It was a beautiful, sunny day but rather cool so I put on one of my long-sleeve flannel work shirts. Hey, who said the desert in the winter was paradise? Oh yeah, I did. I knew this was going to be an annoying little project and it was.

The turbo boost (intake manifold pressure) sensor is a small rectangular part about 1″ wide by 2″ long by 1/2″ thick. It has a weatherproof 3-wire electrical connector and a 1/2″ long tube that the pressure hose from the intake manifold slips over. The sensor is mounted to a somewhat larger flat bracket with a slight bend in it. The bracket has an angled slot and is supposed to be secured to the back side (towards the front of the bus) of the engine computer mounting bracket by a single bolt that the slot slips over.

No doubt there is an easy (correct) way to mount the bracket, but it probably requires disassembling other stuff to create access. That was not going to happen, at least not today. One problem was that there was not a lot of space to get my hands in there to work. Another problem was that I was working “blind.” Even though I had a telescoping mirror I could not position it correctly in the available space and I needed both hands to install the bracket. But the real problem was that the retaining bolt had long ago disappeared and I had no idea what bolt was supposed to be used or if it threaded into a hole or required a nut.

I had looked this up in my engine manual some time ago so I knew where and how the bracket was supposed to mount, but the manual did not call out the diameter, thread pitch, or length of the mounting bolt. I tried several bolts that I had but none of them where right. I asked Barb to keep an eye on my tools and bus while I made a quick run to Herb’s Hardware where I bought an assortment of bolts. None of them fit.

One of my original bolts was “close” but a little loose. I decided to wrap it generously with Teflon tape to see if I could fatten it up enough to hold. I reattached the electrical harness, shortened the pressure hose, and reattached it as I would not be able to make these connections after the bracket was mounted. I finally managed to get the bracket installed and I think my taped bolt will hold it until we get home and I can figure out the correct bolt. Even if/when I do, there is no good way to get in there and tighten it. I ended up using a 7/16″ short socket with a swivel adapter and 6″ long drive extension that I turned by hand. At least it was mid-late afternoon on a beautiful day with abundant sunshine illuminating the west-facing engine bay.

I still have a half dozen projects to take care off over the next four days but it was good to have the dashboard and turbo boost sensor completed. During the course of the afternoon I discussed with Barb and Jim what I had found about the use of potassium bromide (KBr) to control seizures in dogs and cats. I really hope they will discuss this with their vet.

I made popcorn for a late afternoon snack and then checked my e-mail to see if Stacy had proofread my Quartzsite 2015 article and deal with any other correspondence from publisher Gary Hatt. She had called in sick again, so the proofreading was delayed yet another day. Linda had called while driving home but caught me in the middle of working on the turbo boost sensor mounting. I called her back around 6:30 PM my time (8:30 PM EST). She was really tired so we did not talk very long.

At 7:30 PM (MST) I called David Lambert. David currently lives in a group home in Olympia, Washington (PST). He has long been the adult best friend of J.C. Armbruster, my best friend from high school (besides Linda, of course). I met David on a visit to Washington State many, many years ago and we also became friends. I learned then that David had struggled with bi-polar affective disorder all of his life and it has not gotten better for him with time. He does not have much contact with people outside of the group home other than J.C., who has really come to his rescue over the last couple of years. David does not usually have much to say, but I try to let him know that I know he exists. Tonight, however, he was a bit more talkative and told me about recent visits with his sister Mary Kay from Everitt, Washington and his half-sister Soliel, who is moving to Sacramento, California. He also like to watch the TV program “Axe Men.” He is at least a 3rd generation native northwesterner and logging is part of his family heritage.

For dinner I heated up the “Soyrizo” we bought at Albertson’s supermarket. I diced garlic, shallot, sweet onion, carrot, green and jalapeño peppers and sautéed them is a little olive oil before adding the soy Chorizo and heating it thoroughly on high heat. It was a filling but tasty dish. After dinner I resumed working on the photos of Larry and Carol Hall’s GM bus conversion. By the time I got to bed and turned the lights out it was midnight.

2015/02/25 (W) Another “Little” Bus Project

I was up at 7:30 AM, which seems to be my norm when I’m in bed by midnight. The local Farmers Market operates on Wednesdays and this would be my last opportunity to buy a loaf of Barry’s Basic Bread. I skipped coffee and breakfast, got dressed, and counted out enough dimes and nickels from the cup where we store our change to cover the $3 cost of a loaf.

Once I got back to the coach I made coffee and had breakfast and then settled in to finish yesterday’s blog post, which needed a lot of work, and start on today’s post. Jasper sat on my lap purring and enjoying my attention for quite a long time before moving to the dinette. Juniper ate breakfast and then stretched out on the passenger seat as she does most mornings. The cockpit is the part of the bus that gets coldest at night but since we are parked facing east it is the first place to warm up in the morning. The sun is not coming up due east yet, of course; that doesn’t happen until March 21st, but it is rising more directly in front than it did in late December and much of January.

I still had a list of bus projects to work on, but first I checked my e-mail. I did not have a communique from Stacy or Gary so I logged in to our WordPress website/blog and replied to a comment Kate had recently posted. While I was logged in I updated three plug-ins, deleted 80 spam comments, and initiated a Wordfence scan. I repeated the update process for the FMCA Freethinker and Great Lakes Converted Coaches websites and the South Lyon Area Amateur Radio Club website. “In for dime, in for a dollar,” and “no time like the present” are phrases that came to mind.

I don’t seem to get started on bus projects much before noon, but that’s OK; nowhere is it written that I have be working on the bus at sun up. The bus projects still to be done include:

Replacing the solenoid operator on the air-conditioning shutters.
Replacing the solenoid on the pilot valve that controls the level low front axle.
Securing the wheel well body panel just forward of the PS drive axle.
Starting the generator and making sure it works by turning on all three A-C units + Starting the bus and making sure everything works, including repositioning the bus and re-leveling it to make sure the Level Low system is working.

Butch and Fonda were gone all morning so I did not know if my operator solenoid had arrived yet via the USPS. I don’t have time at the moment to sit in a holding pattern so I decided to work on the body panel. It was being held on by only two screws and a bolt without a nut, so I was able to remove it without too much difficulty. (When someone says “without too much” it means “with some.”). Once the body panel was off I could see clearly that it was supposed to be attached at six points plus the bolt that connected it to the next piece of wheel well trim. Two more things also became obvious:

that the missing screw I had set out to replace could not be reached without removing the splash guard panel in front of drive tires, and
I was going to have to slide under the bus in order to reach some of the screws.

Given that reality, I slid one of my stands under the chassis just aft of the passenger side rag axle. The chassis was about 1″ above the stand but I was reasonably confident it would keep the bus from falling on me if the passenger side air springs failed suddenly. I also pulled out one of my large sheets of plastic that make it a lot easier and more comfortable to slide under the bus, especially on gravel.

I had removed and replaced the two splash guards at Butch and Fonda’s house this past fall when we replaced the ride height linkages. Fonda helped me with that project so we both knew how obnoxious a job it was even with the bus sitting on four chassis stands so I could get under it easily and work safely and comfortably. But there was no way around it, so the splash panel came off. We put the body panel back in place but had trouble lining it up with the holes in the chassis. Where the front top corner attached we could see that an old fastener had rusted into the hole and sheared off, probably when someone tried to remove it.

Someone showed up to talk the Butch and Fonda about their work-camping job for next winter so I continued working alone. I eventually got the panel secured at all six points plus the bolt and got a nut on the bolt. I also got the splash guard back in place with the three retaining screws installed. The fourth mounting point, however, used a bolt with a spacer tube and a locknut and was in a location that made it impossible to install by myself without getting completely under the bus and sitting up by the transmission or pulling both drive wheels off, neither of which was going to happen. That meant I needed Fonda’s assistance again.

I started putting my tools away and cleaning up my worksite while I waited for Butch and Fonda’s visitor to leave. He eventually did and Fonda came over to help me with the last attachment point on the slash guard. Once that was done, again with some difficulty, I put my tool boxes away and locked up the bays and the car. It took a whole afternoon for what started out as a job to replace one missing screw. That’s often how it goes with buses.

I washed up (buses can be dirty work) and then worked on this post for a while. I called Linda a little after 5:45 PM my time (MST) figuring she would be close to being done working for the day. I figured correctly and we talked for about 15 minutes. The issue with the generator required a new pressure regulator and some new hoses. Natural gas operates at 1/2 to 1/3 the pressure of propane and, even though the generator engine is supposed to work on either just by changing an electrical connection, Bratcher Electric said they have seen this delayed failure quite a few times when switching from propane to natural gas. It is still programmed to self-test on Thursdays at 11AM EST, so we will see if it auto-starts tomorrow like it should.

For dinner I made a mixed greens salad with onion, carrot, green pepper, dried cranberries, honey roasted peanuts, Daiya pepper jack vegan cheese, and Tofurkey brand deli slices cut into thin strips, dressed with Newman’s Own Creamy Balsamic dressing, and a couple of grinds of fresh black pepper.

I was starting to run low on the lightly flavored/carbonated water that I enjoy and we were almost out of raisins which I use on my salads. I was also out of hummus and Snyder’s Sourdough Pretzel Nibblers both of which are unacceptable things to be without. I had checked the Road Runner Market here in town a couple of days ago but they did not have any of these products. Our supply of small paper bowls and plates was also getting low. The forty mile round trip to Albertson’s in Blythe, California would take 75 to 90 minutes and two gallons of gasoline, costing $5 to $6, but I decided to make the trip after sunset rather than work at my computer. The left side of my neck and left upper back were bothering me more than usual as a result both of long hours at the computer and working under the bus on the body panel today.

As long as I was at the store I picked up a few things that were not on my list including: Ken’s Steak House salad dressings, several different fruit preserves, another bottle of honey mustard (with real honey), another pack of Tofurkey peppered mock deli slices, some black grapes, extra chips, and two bottles of Goslings Ginger Beer. It was an easy run over and back, a nice drive over the small mountain range that separates this part of Arizona from California. We have not driven around much at night since we have been in the southwest and I discovered that both Blythe and Quartzsite sparkle like gems at night. On the drive from Blythe back to Q I could easily see all the way to the other side of the valley once I was clear of the pass. Not only were the lights of the city spread out before me, I-10 was a ribbon of white and red light snaking up the KOFA Mountains until it disappeared over the next pass. It was quite a sight.

Back at the coach I got all of the groceries moved from the car to the kitchen and put away. The plastic bags often end up with holes in the bottom because they are so thin so I sorted them according to whether they had holes or not and ended up with five of each. How convenient. I put one holy bag inside each unholy bag creating five ready-to-use double bags. Sometimes I amaze myself. But I can only bask in the glory of my accomplishments for so long and then I have to get back to the processes of daily life. Tonight that meant cleaning up the dishes from dinner and checking e-mail. I lose track of time when I am working and it was well after midnight by the time I turned off the lights.

2015/02/26 (R) LiveStream

For some reason I was awake at 7 AM. I can function on only six hours sleep but I do better on seven. By eight hours I am uncomfortable and need to get up whether I am rested or not. Even before I got up I heard engine noses and voices outside and looked to see what was going on. It took me a moment to recognize Larry and Sandy’s motorhome and then remember that they were taking it to Yuma for a long weekend. Larry had told me yesterday they were going to do that so they would be in a good position to watch an air show at Marine Corps Air Station Yuma.

It has been getting cool overnight, dropping into the upper 40’s, so I put on my sweat pants and shirt. We bought these not long after we got to Quartzsite so we would have something easy and comfortable to wear on mornings when it was cool in the coach.

I fed the cats, refreshed their water, cleaned their litter tray, bundled up the trash, ground up some Sweet Seattle Dreams coffee beans, and brewed a pot of coffee. I got out the two blue blankets and put one on the dinette seat and one on the passenger seat. Jasper immediately curled up on the dinette blanket and Juniper curled up on my lap while I sat on the coach working on my blog posts for yesterday and today and enjoyed my first cup of coffee.

I like the start of the day; it is one of my favorite times. I am usually rested and generally relaxed and have the comfort of my small morning routine. The whole day is in front of me and it is still possible to accomplish something, anything really, but not everything, and sometimes not much. The end of the day is always more variable.

I only have a few repair tasks left to do on the bus plus one or two on the car. Bus-wise, I need to:

Replace the solenoid operator on the air-conditioning shutters.
Replace the solenoid operator on the pilot valve that controls the level low front axle.
Replace one of the driver side headlights (it has a small hole in it).

Car-wise, I need to:

Replace the two auxiliary tail lights in the car.
Wash and wax the car.

Although I have most of the parts I need I was expecting another solenoid operator for the shutters to arrive in yesterday’s mail. It did not, so I hope it arrives today as I really do not want to replace the whole valve nor do I want to disassemble the new one, even though I’ve been told that it is OK to do so. I think the headlight can wait until I get home, but I need to see if I have one with me.

The other things I have to do are not maintenance/repairs, just routine checks to make sure that we, the car, and the bus are ready to roll on Tuesday. These include:

Starting the generator and making sure it works by turning on all three A-C units + some additional load(s). That will also verify that the air-conditioners work.
Starting the bus and making sure everything works, including repositioning the bus and re-leveling it to make sure the Level Low system is working.

The things that will wait until Monday include checking/setting all of the tire pressures, which I will do on Monday morning, and making sure the hitch and tie bar are ready to go.

While I was working on this post I got a call from Joe Cannarozzi, the mobile mechanic who has maintained our bus chassis, generator, and some aspects of our main engine for the last four years. He is still in Mississippi but starting to arrange his spring service calls enroute to his summer job in upstate New York. Unfortunately it looks like he will be in Michigan in early April and we will miss him this time around.

By the time I finished breakfast it had warmed up enough in the coach to take a shower. I then started a load of laundry and settled in to upload some blog posts from early January. I decided to keep doing consolidated posts and started pulling together the ones for January 1st through 7th. I selected nine photos from these dates and processed them. My work was frequently interrupted by the three loads of laundry I was doing and some necessary housekeeping.

The water level in our fresh water tank was indicating below 1/3rd so I checked it visually. It was at 1/4 so I filled it, which took about 90 gallons. I tested the water coming out of the softener for total hardness (TH) using a test strip from each bottle as I wanted to make sure the strips gave me the same reading. They did, and it was somewhere above 0.0 and below 1.5.

As the tank was nearly full I noticed water on the floor of the bay and determined that it was coming from the fresh water tank drain valve. I soaked up the water that was there and tried moving the valve quickly open and then closed to see if that might clear a small piece of debris or somehow “seat” the valve. The leak was not coming out the drain pipe onto the ground. It was seeping around the top of the valve housing but I could not determine if it was coming from a seam or around the metal rod that comes out the top and attaches to the knife blade inside. This is a 1-1/2″ diameter valve of the type used on smaller RV waste tanks, especially grey water tanks. I will check in the morning to see if it leaked overnight and probably make a trip to several of the RV stores here in town to see if I can locate a spare valve. I won’t be able to attempt a repair, however, until the tank is almost empty so I only have to dump (waste) a small amount of softened fresh water.

Interspersed with my blog work I had some pretzel nibblers and sun-dried tomato hummus and eventually ate a grapefruit. I did not feel like fixing anything fancier so that constituted lunch. Butch and Fonda left at 1:45 PM to check the P. O. Box and then go to a meeting of the Quartzsite Gem and Mineral Club. They stopped at the post office on the way hone but there was no package for me.

Linda called at 2:45 PM my time. She had wrapped up her year-end work at the bakery and was back at the house making a cup of tea before settling in for one more evening of tax return work. She was fairly confident that she would have everything wrapped up tonight or tomorrow morning. There was a tentative plan in place for her to babysit Madeline Friday evening so Brendan and Shawna could go out. Plans were also in the works to attend a women’s gymnastics competition at the University of Michigan on Saturday and then go to dinner. She did not mention whether Meghan would be joining them.

Sometime during the afternoon I got the last load of laundry out of the dryer and put away. I took a break from working at my computer around 6 PM to sit and chat with Butch and watch yet another gorgeous Quartzsite sunset. In spite of a cooler air mass the sun was very hot today, but once it started to set the air temperatures asserted their presence and we eventually retreated to our coaches for the evening.

I continued working on my blog post, checking e-mails as they popped up. I had one from Gary with my Quartzsite 2015 article attached. Although Stacy had not made it into work she was feeling well enough to edit it at home. I had planned to view a live Technomadia chat on “Making Connections on the Road” at 7 PM but forgot to tune in. I realized my oversight around 7:30 PM and joined the event in progress, but first I had to create an account with the LiveStream service which involved the usual e-mail verification process. But it was quick and I got to see/hear the last 20 minutes of the event which was mostly Q&A. The whole thing was archived, however, so after it ended I nuked a vegan hot dog for dinner and then replayed the part I had missed.

I had not yet made the bed so I took care of that and then resumed working on my blog post. I finally uploaded the post sometime around 10:30 PM and by the time I uploaded and captioned the photos, created all of the tags, and clicked the “publish” button it was after midnight. Rather than wait until tomorrow, I went through Stacy’s edits of my article, accepted most of them, and rewrote a couple of awkward sentences. I uploaded it to the BCM folder in my Dropbox and then e-mailed Mike (editor) and Gary (publisher) that it was there along with all of the photos. I also e-mailed it back to Stacy and Gary so she could compare it to the one she sent me. I got to bed at 1:30 AM, later than I like but with some things accomplished.

2015/02/27 (F) Granola Express

In spite of going to bed so late last night (early this morning, actually) I was up at 7:45 AM. That was mostly because the cats do not care what time I went to bed. They have their routines and by 8 PM they figure breakfast and fresh water are way overdue.

Linda called around 9:15 AM my time to ask me about a bucket full of water in the furnace room. The double wall stainless steel flue pipe for the furnace runs horizontally under the floor joists through the furnace room and then through my office above a suspended ceiling and finally out the east side of the house. Moisture tends to condense inside the pipe and drip out of it at the joints between sections if they are not sealed. The bucket is there to catch the drips and it was full. It used to drip on the furnace but Tom from TOMTEK HVAC sealed that gap so now it drips somewhere else.

Linda checked the status of the UPS delivery of the “care” package Linda shipped to me. It was in Blythe, California at 5:15 AM this morning and scheduled for delivery by the end of the day. It will be nice to finally have my pillow and once again be able to enjoy Linda’s homemade granola.

After breakfast I checked my e-mail, updated my water usage spreadsheet, and finalized my FMCA Freethinkers 2014 financial statements. The statements are now ready for Linda to audit, which will take her all of 10 minutes (at most). I then took stock of my BCM articles that are “in-process” and decided to finish the one on the Turbo Boost Repair and move it to the proofreading stage. With that done, I started pulling together the next consolidated blog post for January 8 – 14, 2015.

For lunch I made a sandwich with sourdough bread, salad greens, vegan deli slices, vegan cheese, pickles, veganaise, and honey mustard.

The solenoid operator from Hei/Tek in Phoenix was not in today’s mail so something obviously went wrong. I called Hei/Tek and talked to Brie. She checked with her shipping department and called me back to let me know it got sent UPS ground to our P. O. Box. UPS does not deliver to P. O. Boxes so it was sitting in Blythe, California in an undeliverable status. I gave them our P. O. Box number because she told me on Tuesday they were going to mail it (USPS). Brie gave me the number for UPS, but it was a national 800 number. I looked up the local Blythe UPS center but it had the same national number listed. It also indicated their Will Call hours were M – F, 9 – 10 AM. I called the 800 number and Jose fielded my call. He changed the status to “hold for pickup” and we will have to drive to Blythe on Monday to get it.

Somewhat ironically I had a UPS delivery scheduled for today and it arrived around 4 PM. My part could have been on the truck had I done something about this on Wednesday or Thursday. The box contained an envelope for Butch and Fonda and a small envelope for me. My envelope contained license plate tabs and registration cards for both vehicles, and dues check for our FMCA Freethinkers Chapter. The box also contained my pillow, which I have missed, and four bags of Linda’s homemade granola, which I have really missed.

Since I could not get my part until Monday I decided to take the operator solenoid off of the new valve and put it on the old valve. This was certainly a faster, easier job than replacing the entire old value/operator with the new valve/operator. I put air to the shutters and used the low voltage control circuits to test the new operator solenoid and it worked as designed and built.

I settled in at my computer to work on the next consolidated blog post, stringing seven separate posts together and selecting/processing photographs. I worked on a detailed e-mail reply to Gary at BCM and then worked for a while on another article that has been “in-process” since January.

I was finally hungry around 9:30 PM and heated up an Amy’s frozen Sweet and Sour gluten free noodle dish. Much to my surprise it was not very good, which is unusual for Amy’s products. I needed to get up and adjust tire pressures first thing in the morning so I made sure I was in bed with the lights off by midnight.

2015/02/28 (S) Out With A Roar

I got up at 7 AM and debated whether to go ahead and adjust the tire pressures or make coffee and eat breakfast first. I was a short debate and I won. It was 8 AM by the time I finished my granola and my first cup of coffee. The sun was well above the horizon but partially obscured by clouds and the temperature was 57 degrees F. I put on my zip front work hoodie (sweatshirt jacket) and went out to take care of business.

I turned on the TireTraker Monitor and stuck it in my pocket. As I removed each sensor it triggered a brief alarm on the monitor. Most of the bus and car tires were close to correct according to my air pressure gauge, with some slightly over-inflated and some slightly under inflated, except the driver side steer tire on the bus which was four pounds low. When I put a sensor back on the valve stem it reestablished communication with the monitor. This is supposed to trigger a new/current reading on the monitor but it appeared to me that all of the displayed pressure values were off, reading high in most cases by 3 – 4 pounds. I am not convinced yet that this system works the way I was told it does.

With the tires taken care of I disconnected the air hose from the air-compressor and stored it in the tray over the driver side drive wheels along with the air pressure gauge and air chuck. I disconnected the power cord and rolled it back up on its reel and then put the air-compressor back in its travel compartment in the car. I then went back inside to have my second cup of coffee.

A wind advisory was in effect for today and through the overnight hours. Winds were forecast at 25-30 MPH with gusts over 40 MPH and that is what we got. The temperature barely reached 70 degrees F while the sun played peek-boo with partly cloudy skies all day. The combination made for a brisk day. The forecast for Sunday morning through Tuesday noon is for rain, with possibly an inch along and north of I-10, and a flash flood watch from 5 PM Sunday until 5 PM Monday. February was definitely going out with a roar.

I spent the central part of the day cleaning out the front bay of the bus and re-packing it. We acquired a few things while we here, most notably supplies for cleaning and waxing the bus, and they had to be stored someplace for travel. We had kept several cardboard boxes from UPS shipments and I used those to organize the new cleaning supplies and stow them in the back seat of the car.

Butch and Fonda put their mats away yesterday and I should have done the same but was busy with other things. Jim L. stopped by to use Joe and Connie’s WiFi DSL gateway. I gave him about 30 pounds of solar salt for his water softener and he helped me fold up our large patio mat. As I have written here, the solar salt is simply not effective in recharging our portable water softener. We could use it at home in our residential water softener but it is a heavy, bulky, and inexpensive commodity so it made more sense to leave it here with someone who could use it than to transport it over 2,200 miles.

Jim L. suggested that I pull out by pulling forward, cutting my front tires hard to the right, and angle out between a concrete pad and the Palo Verde tree (bush) by the light pole. The Palo Verde was hanging out far enough that I decided to trim a few branches so as to avoid any possibility of scratching the passenger side of the coach.

My one little repair project today was to try building a “retaining pond” on the floor of the water bay underneath the leaking fresh water tank drain. I used self-stick weather seal formed to circles, one inside the other. I had noticed that there is a small gap where the discharge pipe turns and goes through the floor. My solution was to contain the water that is seeping from the drain valve in the little retaining pond and give it a chance to flow down through the gap. We are going to pick up some inexpensive bath towels on Monday to soak up the water. We can ring them out, line dry them in the dry Arizona air and brilliant sun, and re-use them.

The only outside chores I have left to do to get us ready to leave are to:

dump the waste tanks.
clean and stow the dump hoses and fittings.
top up the fresh water tank.
recharge the water softener (maybe).
check the engine oil and top it up if needed.
check the hitch, tow bar, and cables.

Mid-afternoon I called J. C. and left a message. He called me back a short time later and we talked for almost two hours. J. C. was my best friend in high school (Linda had her own special status) and is one of the only people from that period in my life with whom I am still in contact. J. C. works at Boeing Aircraft as an inspector in the 737 production facility. He is only a few months younger than me but is looking at age 66 as his earliest possible retirement point.

I also had a call from Pat Lintner. Pat is the National Director for our FMCA GLCC chapter and is also the Senior VP of the FMCA GLAMA. He wanted to give me a heads up that Jane Roush, the GLAMA President, would be sending an e-mail later today to all of the GLAMA chapter presidents and national directors regarding a recommendation that the Midwest and Great Lakes areas be merged. The Great Lakes Area consists of Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, and Ontario and has 21 chapters, the smallest number of any FMCAA area. The Midwest Area is made up of Illinois, Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota, South Dakota, North Dakota, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan and has 24 chapters. All of the other nine areas have more chapters. I did, in fact, receive Jane’s e-mail a few hours later and forwarded it to all of the GLCC members for whom I have valid e-mail addresses along with a few additional comments.

The rest of the day was spent doing this and that. Linda called and brought me up to date on her day. She went with Brendan, Shawna, and Madeline to Crisler Arena at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor to watch part of a women’s gymnastics competition. Meghan and Chris met them back at the Fay-Lee house for dinner. I cleaned up the dishes, mostly silverware that had accumulated over the last few days. I checked and replied to e-mails, mostly from Gary at BCM. I worked on my consolidated blog post for the second week of January and had it ready to upload by 11 PM but was too tired to start the process at that hour.

2015/02/07-11 (S-W) In and Around Q

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2015/02/07 (S) Bouse, AZ

We got up around 8 AM, got cleaned up, and had coffee and granola. Linda then cut my hair, which seems to be a once every 4 to 6 weeks thing when we are traveling. Butch and Fonda went to Yuma to meet up with Bell, Bell’s daughter, and Bell’s three grand-daughters. Bell’s daughter was in Yuma with her Roller Derby team and the family came along. We wanted to get out and do some more sight-seeing and decided to drive to Bouse, Arizona.

Cholla “teddy bear” cacti at Quinn’s Pass on the road to Bouse, AZ.

Bouse is a small town located in the next valley to the east of Quartzsite, which sits in the La Paz valley. It is on AZ-72 at the eastern end of Plomosa Road. The western end of Plomosa Road is at AZ-95 seven miles north of the city limit of Quartzsite. The first three miles of Plomosa Road heading east from AZ-95 runs through the BLM Plomosa Road STVA. The road is paved its entire length and provided a fun and scenic drive out to Bouse and back. We stopped at Quinn Pass to read the historical marker and ended up going on a short hike. We have wanted to do this little trip ever since friends told us about it, but today provided an added incentive to finally go; the Parker 425.

The Parker 425 is an annual off-road race in the desert east of Parker, south of the Buckskin Mountains, and north of Bouse. The course is a little over 140 miles in length and the race consists of three loops for a total of 425 miles. It begins and ends at the Bluewater Resort and Casino in Parker. Last year’s winner completed the race in just over seven hours. That’s an average speed of 60 MPH, and there are plenty of curves and bumpy areas where it is not possible to go that fast, so the vehicles are really moving every place they can.

When we got to AZ-72 we crossed the highway, drove three short blocks, and made a left on Swansea. I could see from the GPS that it was a paved road that continued in a northeasterly direction. I had looked at a map yesterday and had a general sense that one of the spectator areas was out that way. We did not have to drive very far before we saw Jeeps and ATVs parked on top of a big hill all facing the same direction. We drove past the turnoff for that area and just around the hill was a large parking area full of cars and RVs. The dirt road was closed, the Fire Department was set up there, and there was a checkpoint for the race. I found a place to park and we got out to check out the action.

We stayed long enough to see a dozen different vehicles pass through the checkpoint and I shot photos from several different vantage points. There are different classes of vehicles, but the ones we saw were of two types: highly modified small pickup trucks, and custom built off-road racers known as “grasshoppers” because of their long shape and the suspensions allow them to “bounce” over bumps in the road.

View looking NW from the Quinn’s Pass area between Quartzsite and Bouse, AZ.

The air temperature was pleasant but the sun was very hot so we drove the short distance back to Bouse, stopped at AZ-72, and quickly scoped out the town. We spotted the Coachman Restaurant just northwest of the intersection and drove over there to have lunch. We each had a garden salad and iced tea, and I had French fries. We can pretty much count on lettuce and potatoes in any restaurant we visit.

Bouse was founded in 1908 as a mining camp but as a waypoint between Phoenix and Parker it now survives on tourism, agriculture, and retirees. Measuring 10.1 square miles at 947 feet ASL with 996 residents (2010 census) the area enjoys sunny skies year-round. We saw RVs of all types throughout town and in the dessert along Plomosa Road which is all BLM land. There were also quite a few RVs in the Bouse Community Park.

We drove back to Quartzsite the way we came, a distance of 30 miles, because the only other ways back were via Parker (64 miles) and Phoenix (at least 250 miles). Linda wanted to walk through the Tyson Wells market area one more time as this is the last weekend for the Craft Show. We bought a cute hand puppet that we think grand-daughter Madeline will find very interesting. We drove over to Barry’s Breads to get a loaf of his Barry’s Basic Bread but he was not open. In fact, it looked like he was done for the season. Activity really has slowed down here and he is presumably getting ready to move to his next venue.

We stopped at the Road Runner Market and bought a loaf of French bread and some red grapes. We then drove to the Quartzsite Cemetery to take photographs of Hadji Ali’s (Hi Jolly’s) gravesite, which is marked by a small pyramid with a silhouette of a camel on top. As long as we were there we wandered around the rest of the cemetery, which was an interesting and well-kept place.

Once we were back at the coach Linda sat outside and read while I transferred photo files from my camera to my computer and backed them up to our NAS. I then continued selecting and processing images from yesterday’s outing to KOFA NWR Palm Canyon. I was starting to work on the images from today when Linda cane in and started making dinner.

She decided to make “Mustard Greens and Beans” using Great Northern beans. In addition to the usual onion and garlic, it had vinegar, a little sugar, and honey mustard. It was very tasty and we agreed it was a keeper. She served sautéed green beans on the side, cut up some of the French bread, and poured a couple of glasses of Franzia Refreshing White wine. Sliced fresh strawberries and cookies for desert completed the meal.

Butch and Fonda got back from Yuma while Linda was cooking. I gave Butch a call after dinner to discuss our TireTraker systems. He needs to charge their monitor this evening and I asked him to check on the behavior of the LEDS on the 12/24VDC plug.

As we do most evenings, Linda read and played online word games while I worked on this post for a while and then resumed editing photos on my computer. I checked e-mail again and had several regarding the upcoming Freethinkers gathering at the Liar Peg Leg Smith Monument boondocking area near Borrego Springs, California. One of them posited the question of how often Friday the 13th occurs? I did a quick online search and the answer appeared to be 1 to 3 times per year and every 12/7 or 1.714 times per year, on average. That is 171.4 times per century or 1,714 times per millennium. I posted that back to the e-mail reflector and went to bed.

Rocks and flora at Quinn’s Pass, AZ.

2015/02/08 (N) Another Meetup

I was up at 7:30 AM this morning and got the coffee made right away. Linda did not sleep well last night but got up as soon as she smelled the coffee. Breakfast was toast and preserves. I was planning on putting in a long day at my computer and Linda was planning on doing laundry and some work for the bakery but our plans changed before we got started. When I checked my e-mail I had one from Lou and Donna Rice of our FMCA Freethinkers Chapter indicating that they were at Mile Marker 2 on Plomosa Road. We drove right past them twice yesterday on our visit to Bouse but had no idea they were there.

Plomosa Road is about seven miles north of Quartzsite on AZ-95. We left at 10 AM and were parked next to their Jeep before 10:15. We sat and talked for four hours before returning to our coach. As soon as we got back I took our TireTraker monitor and charger over to Butch’s coach. We tried our charger on his monitor and it worked fine. We then tried his charger on our monitor and it did not work. Between our four devices it was clearly our monitor that was defective. I will have to call Darryl Lawrence tomorrow and see what we can figure out.

We each had a pear, some red grapes, and something to drink. Linda gathered up laundry and I got to work editing consolidated blog posts. In between loads she sat outside and read.

Fonda had two Poblano peppers she got at the Farmers Market on Wednesday and gave them to Linda. Linda found a recipe for stuffed grilled poblanos. The stuffing was white rice, scallions, black beans, tomatoes, vegan sour cream and cheddar cheese, and cumin. It resembled Mexican rice but with a creamy/cheesy dimension. She cooked the stuffed peppers on Butch and Fonda’s little grill and cooked the extra stuffing on our cooktop. She served the dish with Clementine orange wedges and a glass of Franzia Refreshing White wine to make an outstanding meal.

After dinner we sat outside Butch and Fonda’s bus enjoying the cool desert night air and watching the lights of airplanes flying overhead. It eventually cooled off enough that we returned to our coach where I continued to work on blog posts and Linda worked on the bakery accounting. She eventually went off to bed and I uploaded survey items to the FMCA Education Committee folder in our Dropbox and sent an e-nail to the committee. We have a committee work session tomorrow at 4 PM EST (2 PM MST).

Vehicles positioned east of Bouse, AZ to watch the Parker 435 off-road race.

2015/02/09 (M) A Bright Idea

Butch called around 8:20 AM to let me know that our light bulb order was at the Post Office awaiting pickup. He and Fonda were headed to the Quartzsite Gem and Mineral Club for a day-long class on faceting, so he gave me the parcel slip so I could go pick up the package.

While we were eating breakfast it suddenly occurred to me that we should visit Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West while we are camped near Tucson next month. Linda went to the website and discovered that it is in Scottsdale which is a northern Suburb of Phoenix and is closer to Quartzsite than it us to Tucson. We selected a couple of possible dates and she went online to get tickets. The “Behind the Scenes” tours are only done on Monday, Thursday, and Saturday. She tried to get tickets for Monday February 16 but they only had one left. She called but they would not sell us two tickets. We waited way too long to think of this and painted ourselves into a corner so it may not happen on this trip to the southwest.

I drove to the Quartzsite Post Office after breakfast and retrieved the package, only my second trip to the Post Office to transact business since we arrived in Q. The first trip was to sign up for the P. O. Box. Linda usually takes care of the mail while she is out walking and Butch usually checks the P. O. Box, which is at a different location that is not quite as convenient a walk from our camp as the main building. We have not used the P. O. Box very much, but it has been invaluable when we have.

I worked most of the day on some of my blog posts for December 2014. I took a break around 12:30 for a bite of lunch and then called Daryl Lawrence and left a message regarding our TireTraker TT-400C monitor which appears to not be recharging.

The Parker 425 checkpoint east of Bouse, AZ. This race is a BIG deal with fire, EMS, and helicopter coverage.

Gaye Young called around 1:30 PM to make sure I was going to participate in the FMCA Education Committee work session at 2 PM. (Gaye is the chairperson of the committee.) There were only two items on the agenda and I had to give the status report on both of them. Our work sessions and meetings are conducted by telephone conference. They usually last an hour and today was not an exception. If committee members provide me with additional input this week regarding an education survey we are developing I will have some work to do the last two weeks of the month in addition to working on articles for Bus Conversion Magazine, completing some minor repairs on the bus, finishing the cleaning/waxing of the exterior of the bus, and cleaning/waxing the car.

I managed to upload consolidated blog posts, including some photographs, for December 5 – 8, 9 – 12, and 13 – 16, 2014. I did not take very many photos while we were traveling but once we got settled in Q I got the camera out and started using it.

I got a call back from Jeff at TireTraker support. I explained what the monitor was (not) doing and he agreed to mail me a new one along with a new charger. We will return the defective one to Daryl at Escapade next month.

Linda cooked up a couple of Tofurkey brand vegan Italian sausages with sweet onions and sweet red bell peppers and served some broccoli as a side dish. After dinner I removed my bulbs from the Bulbtown shipment and checked the quantities and prices against my spreadsheet. I then took the remaining bulbs over to Butch. He had ordered 10 #4003 bulbs to use in his bay fixtures and realized when he saw them that he should have ordered #4004s. Both are 24VDC bulbs but the #4003s have a single contact base whereas #4004s have a double contact base. I think my bay light fixtures may take #4003s. I will check tomorrow and if so I will buy them instead of Butch.

We sat outside with the lights off enjoying a glass of wine while watching the long lingering sunset backlight the mountains to our west. As the sunset faded we looked at the stars and watched aircraft lights moving east and west high over the desert. It still cools off here after the sun sets but not as quickly, nor as dramatically, as it did just a week ago.

I combined the blog posts for December 17 – 20, 2014. I had selected and processed photos for this post earlier so it was ready to upload at 11 PM but I did not want to go through the process at that late hour. I dealt with a couple of e-mails and then went to bed. A short time later Jasper threw up a large quantity of food so I had to get up and deal with that. It looked like it had some hair mixed in with it, but I don’t know if that was the root cause.

2015/02/10 (T) Deionized

We were planning on heading to the Peg Leg Monument boondocking area on Thursday, spending the night in Indio, California and visiting Joshua Tree National Park (JTNP) on Friday before driving home Friday evening. Ken Harrison from the FMCA Freethinkers indicated that he and Linda would not make it to Peg Leg until Friday. That prompted us to consider flipping our plans, doing JTNP on Thursday and Peg leg on Friday. Either way we will stay in Indio as we already have reservations at a motel.

The Polaris RZR (“razer”) was one of the most popular 4-wheel ATVs in and around Q.

We had another stay-at-home day relaxing while getting things done. Linda was going to drive to Blythe for groceries, but decided to go on Sunday as we will be away from camp all of Thursday and Friday and much of Saturday. She is going to see if the Farmers Market is still operating tomorrow morning. If not she will stop by the Road Runner Market.

As has been our pattern recently Linda went for a long walk (5 miles) while I continued to work on blog posts. We had a light lunch when she returned. I then called Teeko’s Coffee and Tea in Howell, Michigan and ordered six pounds of roasted coffee beans to be shipped to us here in Q. We are approaching the midpoint of our snowbird season and are almost out of the five pounds of coffee we started with. Jeff is going to roast two pounds each of Ethiopian Yirgacheffe half-caff, Sweet Seattle Dreams half-calf, and Cafe Europe Blend half-caff. He will let it out-gas for a couple of days and then vacuum seal it in one-pound portions and mail it to us in a USPS flat rate box that will go to our P. O. Box in Q. That should be enough to get us home even if we do not get there until late April.

Butch is always looking out for us and trying to help us spend our retirement dollars so he sent me a link to a portable two-tank water de-ionizing system that is available from RVupgrades.com. The system is intended for washing/finishing cars and RVs as de-ionized water has had all of the dissolved minerals removed and does not leave spots on surfaces when it dries. It is not, however, considered suitable for drinking. The two tanks are plumbed in series and use special resin beds that have to be replaced when exhausted rather than recharged. The first tank removes cations and the second removes anions, leaving the water completely deionized. The cations are the positively charged ones typically “removed” by water “softeners”, such as calcium, iron, and magnesium, through ion exchange with sodium. The anions are the negatively charged ones that water softeners typically do not remove, including fluoride and sodium. The dual tank system is about 33% more expensive than a single tank portable water softener, but given the time, expense, and frustration I am experiencing trying to clean and wax our motorcoach I am seriously considering ordering one tomorrow.

I uploaded two consolidated blog posts yesterday and another one this afternoon. I consolidated the posts for December 21 – 26, 2014, selected and processed the photos, and then took a break to sit outside and just enjoy the weather. No book, no iPad, no computer; just ahhhh. It was 78 degrees F with 19% relative humidity, a steady breeze from the northwest, and a hot sun shining through absolutely clear blue skies. Linda and I agreed that it was the most perfect weather day we have had so far this winter.

Linda had some seitan ‘mock’ beef in the freezer that she heated in a saucepan and served with basmati rice accented with soy sauce. Very simple but very tasty. After dinner I uploaded the December 21 – 26 consolidated blog post along with 12 photos, entered all of the tags, and published it.

I got an e-mail yesterday from Cherie Ve Ard of Technomadia asking if we would be interested in previewing/testing another new website. I said ‘yes’ and she responded with the URL for the development site. When I was done with our website I went to the new one and created an account. I got an activation e-mail, clicked the link, and was able to login. I spent an hour looking around the site and captured my impressions and suggestions in an e-mail back to the development team. I took a few minutes to investigate portable water deionizers but by then it was too late to get involved in any serious research so I went to bed.

2015/02/11 (W) Update This!

Hi Jolly’s (Hadji Ali’s) gravesite in the Quartzsite Cemetary; allegedly the most visited place in Q.

Linda’s cell phone rang just before 8 AM. It was Barb. She and Jim were up, dressed, and had the golf cart out and ready to go to the Farmers Market. When we mentioned it yesterday Barb said she wanted to go and Linda indicated that it was open from 8 AM to noon. Somehow that got translated into leaving at 8 AM to go to the market. Linda, being a good sport, got up, got dressed and walked over about 8:15 and said she was ready to go. No breakfast, no coffee, just the “git er done” spirit of the old west. I stayed behind and got the coffee ready to brew when she returned. I then got to work on computer stuff in the true “git er done” spirit of the new/virtual west.

They returned from the Farmers Market around 9:30 AM. Linda bought another Romanesco brocciflower, some Brussels sprouts, grapefruit, and oranges. To our delight Barry’s Breads was also there and had a few loaves of Barry’s Basic Bread. He told Linda he will be around, at least at the Wednesday Farmers Market, through the end of this month.

As much as I would like to have de-ionized water available for rinsing the coach as I wash it, I decided not to speed hundreds of dollars without first doing deeper research into the available technologies and their life cycle costs. I had enough other stuff to do today that I did not want to make time to dig into this new topic.

Linda saw a photographers vest at the Salvation Army resale store the other day but did not buy it as it was $15, pricey for the SA, and she wasn’t sure it would fit me. We drove over to the store to see if it was still there. It was, and it was too small for me. It also had a defective zipper. For a moment I thought we were going to have to buy it so I could take it home and cut it off. I managed instead to pull it off over my head like a t-shirt and Linda was then able to get the zipper undone and put it back on the rack. This was my first time in the store so while we were there I found two pairs of shorts for $2 each, a third pair for $0.50, and a lightweight, lined, waist-length London Fog jacket for $0.25. Linda found a white hand-held mixer with two beaters for $4. Deal.

When we got back Linda called the Prince of Tucson RV Park and made a reservation for the evening of Thursday, March 5th. Lou and Val Petkus will already be there and this will allow us to caravan into the SKP Escapade at the Pima County Fairgrounds first thing Friday morning. By coming in together we will be able to park together which will make our staff photography work more convenient.

My computer indicated that it had a large number of updates to install; 34, to be exact. It was a 334 MB download so I turned on our Verizon Mi-Fi and switched my computer over to it. The Mi-Fi is much faster than the Wi-Fi and I find that with large downloads the faster I get them done the more likely they are to complete successfully. When those were done downloading and installing I had to restart my computer to finish the installation. I also had an updated driver available for the NVIDIA GeForce graphics processor, so I downloaded and installed that.

I figured that if I had updates for my computer Linda would have them for hers. I switched her computer over to our Mi-Fi and checked for updates. She had 20 recommended and 4 optional. I selected all 24 and the download was 980 MB. That’s a lot of updates so I started it and let it run. As always, finishing the installation required the computer to be rebooted. When it restarted her computer the screen was once again functioning normally. Go figure. She also had an Adobe Creative Cloud update so I started that. It failed at the 29% point so closed it and restarted it. The second time it ran to completion.

Linda needed to work at her computer so we both sat at the dinette table and did our respective computer things. She brought our financial records up-to-date in Quicken and I compiled and then uploaded a consolidated blog post for the last six days of December 2014. I had e-mails going back and forth with some of our fellow FMCA Freethinkers regarding the Peg Leg gathering and ended up joining the Freedom From Religion Foundation. I’ve meant to do that for a while and the electrons finally aligned just right this afternoon.

Hi Jolly’s pyramid gravesite marker is a State Historical Site.

Somewhere during the course of the afternoon we had sandwiches for lunch and snacked on dried fruits and nuts. Kathi Slater called to check on Linda’s travel arrangements, after which I made popcorn. Linda borrowed a small cooler from Butch and Fonda for our 2-day trip to California and back. Fonda came over to go through the chores involved in caring for the cats while we are away and Linda gave her a set of keys to the bus.

I had seen a quick notification from the RV Internet Resource Center (Mobile Internet Aficionados membership website) that WiFiRanger had finally released their new firmware upgrade for the WiFiRanger Mobile. Using my iPad as the control panel I switched our WFR-MT from the Wi-Fi/DSL connection to our Verizon Mi-Fi. Again, I wanted to make sure this upgrade got downloaded as quickly as possible through the most reliable connection we have. The download was reasonably quick but the installation took quite a while. My iPad eventually lost contact with the WFR-MT and I just left it to finish and went over to visit with Butch and Fonda and Linda. We came back to our coach when their dinner was ready and the WFR-MT firmware upgrade had finished installing successfully. I switched the connection back to the Wi-Fi/DSL that we get to use as part of our “rent” while we are here. I switched our laptops back to our internal Wi-Fi network and then shut the Verizon Mi-Fi off to let it recharge.

Neither of us was very hungry after snacking late this afternoon so Linda sliced the remaining tofu and pan-seared it. She caramelized onions, added BBQ sauce, and served it open faced over the tofu. After dinner Linda made a list of things we needed to take tomorrow while I made a final check of e-mail. I e-mailed Lou Petkus to let him know that we were booked into the Prince of Tucson RV Park for March 5th. I sent a message to Curtis Coleman via RVillage to accept his invitation to boondock in his driveway and see if March 3 and 4 would work for him. He phoned back to confirm that it would be OK and then sent his address via TXT message. I also had an e-mail from Kate de Fuccio and replied to that. I checked for updates and my computer had several more to install so I started that process. I checked Linda’s computer but she did not have any updates pending. Although we got a lot of other things done today it felt like I had mostly dealt with computer updates. Update days are often like that and you cannot schedule them because you never know when Microsoft is going to drop a big ‘update bomb’ in your lap.

Linda went to bed around her usual time. I turned in shortly thereafter and much earlier than I have been. We plan to get up at 6 AM tomorrow, have a light breakfast, finish packing for our trip, and be on the road at 7 AM. We will stop at Albertson’s in Blythe, California for some water, ice, and other snack items to get us through the day to dinner at Native Foods in Palm Springs and give us something to eat on Friday while we are at the Peg Leg gathering. Albertson’s opens at 6 AM PST, which corresponds to our 7 AM MST departure time. We should arrive at the south entrance to Joshua Tree National Park around 7:30 AM PST which will give us a good, long day to explore the park.

2015/01/8-14 (R-W) Q 2015 W2

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2015/01/08 (R) Up On The Rooftop

A panorama from the roof of our bus. Left edge is NE, center is S, right edge is NW.

As forecast, we woke up to cloudy skies and milder temperatures. The clouds to the southwest looked like they might produce rain but the winds were blowing gently from the southeast so the rain would not be for us. This was the day we’ve been waiting for, the perfect kind of weather for washing a bus. But not first thing in the morning. Coffee and breakfast come first while we wait for slightly warmer temperatures.

The waste water tank level sensors are not accurate but our fresh water tank sensors are OK. The fresh water level gauge was showing less than 1/3 tank and the grey water tank gauge was showing full so it was probably time to dump and fill. When I checked the fresh water level visually we were at 1/6th tank. I dumped the black water tank and then the grey water tank, both of which were fairly full, and then filled the fresh water tank. I have the city water regulated to ~50 PSI (static) which drops to ~30 PSI when the fill valve is fully opened. At that pressure it takes about 40 minutes to fill the tank.

I last dumped the waste tanks on December 30th and added 25 gallons of (hard) fresh water. On December 31st I added another 30 gallons of (hard) fresh water. On January 2nd I recharged our water softener, drained about 1/6 tank (~20 gallons) of (hard) fresh water and filled the tank with 120 gallons of soft water. I checked the hardness of the water coming out of the softener after that fill and it was 1.5 grains/gallon (25 ppm). I checked it again after today’s fill and it was still 1.5 gpg. Since we are keeping a log of the dumps and fills I plan to check the hardness after each fill so can regenerate the water softener before it gets depleted and we end up with really hard water in our tank and system.

Butch happened to be at the Post Office Annex today checking the P. O. Box at exactly the same moment a postal worker was about to put something in the box and then stopped because of the forwarding tag. The “something” was our package of water hardness test strips from Bristol, Indiana and the worker was kind enough to give it to Butch to give to us. He also learned that they still have P. O. Boxes available so he went to the main post office to find out more about that. He came back with a form to fill out and it had room for all of our names so the six of us are going to share the box and the cost, which is $56 for six months, or just under $20 per couple.

While the fresh water tank was filling I started getting ready to clean the roof by getting out our Little Giant step/extension ladder and various cleaning supplies. The dump and fill was done by 11 AM and it was warm enough by then to start working. Swim trunks, a white T-shirt, and Kean sandals was the uniform of the day. I carried the hose sprayer up the ladder with me and then lowered it down to use as a hook and lift wash water bucket, scrub brush, and other paraphernalia up to the roof.

It turned out to be sunnier than I had hoped but I worked for about four hours, not including a lunch break, and scrubbed the entire roof. I used McGuire’s red automotive soap and rinsed thoroughly. I had already washed the roof once using Dawn dish soap (a big ‘no no’, apparently) and a long-handle soft brush. That washing had removed surface dirt and revealed the full extent of the dark “spotting” that gave the entire roof a mottled appearance. The roof looked a lot better after I scrubbed it but a lot of the spotting remained.

We are anxious to clean the sides of the bus but there is no point doing that until we are done with the roof. We want the roof “like new” clean so dirt doesn’t run off it onto the sides, but we also want it clean because we are seriously considering having Discount Solar (here in Quartzsite) install solar panels and a charge controller and do all the wiring. As long as we had the hose, brushes, and soap out we decided to wash the car. It was even filthier than the bus, if that’s possible, and it was nice to finally have it clean.

After cleaning up our equipment I got cleaned up and then sat and visited with Butch for a while. Linda came over and announced that she wanted me to take her to dinner. Butch and Fonda decided to go too so we went to Crazy Jerry’s, which is not to be confused with Silly Al’s. Silly Al’s is supposedly the #1 eatery in Q, at least for pizza, but they have karaoke every night starting at 7 PM. Thank you, no. Crazy Jerry’s also has pizza and we tried the vegetarian, hold the cheese. Very thin crust (the way we like it) and lots of topping. A couple of side salads and a side order of French fries. FWIW, we did not eat the entire pizza and brought home the leftovers.

Linda split a pair of Scrabble games with her brother, the first one he has won in quite some time. She had an e-mail reply from Mara. She is camped about 70 miles south of Q and is headed here in the near future and is going to camp with the WINs (Wandering Individuals Network). I checked e-mail, updated my BCM article spreadsheet with two more story ideas, played a few games, and worked on this post before turning in for the night. We will have been here a month as of Sunday.

The Hi Jolly Daze Parade. Quartzsite, AZ

2015/01/09 (F) The P. O. Box

I left the ladder setup yesterday so I could check the roof again this morning and determine what additional cleaning measures, if any, I might want to take. I also wanted to get back up on the roof and measure the space we have available for solar panels. I was expecting two packages via UPS; one from B&H Photo (Manfrotto nodal panoramic tripod head) and one from Sure Marine Service (Webasto repair parts). I had a nice view of the mountains surrounding Quartzsite from the roof of our bus and wanted to shoot some panoramas with the new head when it arrived.

Butch, Fonda, Jim, Barb, Linda, and I all went to the U. S. Post Office in Quartzsite this morning to sign up for our very own P. O. Box which means we finally have a way to receive USPS mail while we are here. Just in time, too, as Q has really filled up in the past week and there is more to come. I have an FMCA national education committee meeting on Monday and need to write a few items for a member survey and review other materials. Gary (from BCM) is also due to arrive on Monday, and both Curtis (from RVillage) and Mara Culp (HFH build acquaintance) may be headed this way as well. I believe Chris Dunphy and Cherie Ve Ard of Technomadia are already in the area. The big RV tent is up and those vendors are arriving and setting up.

Once we were done at the post office I went to Discount Solar to discuss a possible installation on our coach. The Kyocera panels are 26.5″ W x 59.0″ L. They are “12 V panels” but are rated at 140 Watts putting out 7.9 Amps. They cost $350 each. Those numbers compute to an output voltage of 17.5 VDC and $2.50/W. (If a 140 Watt panel was operating at 13.8 Volts it would produce just over 10 Amps.) Because we have a 24V battery system we would need to install the panels in series-connected pairs. The preferred installation for the rectangular panels is to have the long dimension lined up fore-n-aft to either side of the centerline of the roof. Tilt mounts are available ($45/panel) but we would probably not install them due to the difficulty of getting onto our roof to use them.

“12 volt” batteries typically charge at around 13.8 to 14.1 volts. Our “24V” system charges at 27.6 to 28.2 volts and a series-connected pair of panels produces 7.9 A at 35V (full sun) for 276.5 volt-amps, which is essentially “watts.” Two pairs would produce 15.8 A (553 V-A), and three pairs would produce 23.7 A (829.5 V-A). The higher voltage output of the panels is reduced and regulated by a solar charge controller before getting to the batteries. Discount Solar carries Blue Sky and Trimetric maximum power point tracking (MPPT) controllers and the Blue Sky Solar Boost 50 would handle three series-connected pairs for about $550. The MPPT controllers are DC-to-DC converters so they convert the excess voltage into additional current. With full sun this six panel system could supply up to 30 A of charging current at the proper voltage, which is why we would need an MPPT controller that can handle more than 30 A of charging current. We would also want room for expansion or replacement with higher wattage panels if they were available at some point in the future. One of the nice things about the solar system is that it would always be on and would “play nice” with our other charging systems. Another nice feature is that they are silent when operating. Ahhhh.

Because of the size of our house battery bank (400 A-Hr at 24 VDC) and the fact that we have a residential refrigerator, auxiliary air-compressor, and other AC loads, we would need/want at least six panels. (I have not included the four Group 31 wet cell batteries that are used to start the engine and power the chassis as part of the solar system.) If the batteries were discharged 50% (200A-Hr) it appears that it would take just under seven hours to bring them back to full charge based on the 30A charging current. In actuality it would take longer in a boondocking situation as the sky is not always clear, the sun is rarely directly overhead (perpendicular to the panels), there would be devices using some of the energy, and the amount of current the batteries can accept falls off as they get closer to being fully charged.

Installation is $90/hour plus mounts ($15/panel), wire, connecting blocks, and other parts, and would take 4 – 5 hours to complete. The owner assured me they would have it in and out in one day so we could be back in our parking spot before dark. The last three weeks of January are the busiest time of year for Discount Solar and since we are plugged-in to shorepower we do not need the solar system right away. If we have it installed in early February we would have a month to make sure it works and resolve any problems. The system would cost about $3,300 installed. We have at least a month to think about it.

When I returned to our coach Linda was out walking. When she got back I went up on the roof with a tape measure to see if/how the solar panels might fit. With a four-n-aft orientation we could put two towards the front outside edges, one just aft of the kitchen skylights on the driver side, and one aft of the hall skylight on the passenger side. We could put two more somewhere in the rear. The options for the rear appeared to be inline (almost touching) on the driver side starting just behind the bathroom skylight or putting one there and the other one sideways across the back just ahead of the dropped portion of the roof and aft of the bedroom vent fan. Placing the panels in these locations would leave the center of the roof open so I could climb up on the driver side front and walk all the way to the back.

Barb stopped by to let us know there was a mattress in the house (park model trailer) if we wanted to try it out. It had been in their rig for about two years until they removed it yesterday and replaced it with a thicker one they got from Connie. It is a regular queen size mattress about 6″ thick, so not one of the oversized behemoths that have become the norm. They also had a 1.5″ thick memory foam pad to go on top of it. We took a look at it and decided to give it a try.

We have been using our old Select Comfort adjustable air mattress in the RV since summer 2013. One side (mine) has a slow leak so I have to adjust it every other night. I could live with that indefinitely but what we really dislike about it, and have for a long time, is that we tend to roll into the center or off the edge. It also takes up valuable storage space under the bed for the pump, has wires and hoses to deal with, and has a controller for each side. We were definitely ready to try something else so we stripped the bed, disconnected the two air hoses, and carried the mattress out of the bus. It was surprisingly heavy and bulky for an air mattress and lacking in self-supporting structure, but that also made it easier to bend it around the front passenger seat, down the entry stairs, and out the door. We stored it in the bedroom of the house trailer pending a final decision about the replacement mattress.

We carried the new mattress in, which was definitely easier than getting the old one out, and got it positioned on the plywood bed platform. We put the memory foam pad on top and put our mattress topper over that which added another inch. We put our electric heating pad on and then the sheets and the blanket. We will try it out for a while and if we like it we will see if the Salvation Army wants the old one. If not, it may end up at the Quartzsite dump as we really do not have any way to get it home or a reason to do so. We will leave the pump, hoses, and controllers under the bed until we decide on its final disposition.

The suspension on the bus had settled slightly in the driver side rear since we parked and leveled it almost a month ago. It would not have been enough to require an adjustment except that our bed sits crosswise with the head on that side and I find that sleeping with my head even slightly downhill is not comfortable. Rather than start up the main engine we got the Dewalt portable air-compressor out of the car and connected it into the brake system fill port in the passenger side engine bay. I had to connect the chassis batteries and turn the ignition on (without starting the engine) in order to activate the leveling controls, but that allowed me to raise that corner up and get the coach level side-to-side. At some point we will re-position the bus, but not until I have completed some work on the turbo boost sensor mounting plate and hose and the level low system components for the front end.

We put the air-compressor back in its special storage divider in the car and decided to rearrange a few things so we could put the rear seat down. Starting next week we will need to be able to carry a passenger. We thought about heading down to the market area but remembered that we were expecting UPS deliveries. I started working on two more articles for BCM instead while Linda went for a walk. It was warmer today and so it was warmer in the coach and I ended up taking a nap.

Our UPS and FedEx shipments usually arrive late in the afternoon or early evening but had not shown up by dinner time. I had planned to disassemble the Aqua-Hot burner and replace the bearings, nozzle, and perhaps a few other small parts tomorrow but it now appears that will have to wait until Tuesday, assuming our shipments arrive on Monday. I will likely need to clean the unit as well, given that it has been running so rich, and that may include pulling the combustion chamber.

Linda made two cold salads for dinner; chickpea and wild rice Waldorf. Both are favorites of ours, especially in warmer weather. We had some Barry’s Basic Bread with our meal and another glass of Lamb’s Valley organic sweet white wine was a most agreeable accompaniment.

Yup, that’s a real, live camel in the Hi Jolly Daze Parade. These animals are strongly linked to the 19th century history of Quartzsite, AZ.

2015/01/10 (S) Hi Jolly Daze Parade

Today was the annual Hi Jolly Daze Parade. As first time winter visitors to Quartzsite there was no way we were going to miss this event. I was up at 7 AM to make coffee and we were done with breakfast by 8 AM. We checked the parade route online and figured we would go to the Quartzsite Improvement Association grounds as the parade ended in the parking lot there. It was scheduled to start at 10 AM so we snagged Fonda about 9:40 and headed that way in the car.

When we got to Central Avenue and Main Street the police had Main Street closed so we could not turn left to get to the QIA. I stayed on Central down to Kuehn Street and took it east over to the exit 19 overpass and back to Main Street. On the way we saw Lloyd DeGerald’s motorhome parked along Kuehn with a big banner advertising his Aqua-Hot technician services. I am hopeful that I will be able to repair both of our burners myself but if not Lloyd is the guy I would call, so I was glad to see that he is in town. But back to the parade.

The police had Main Street closed on that end too. We knew the parade started at Plymouth Avenue and Quail Trail so we headed in that direction and parked at the Quartzsite Library. We were surprised that no one else was parked there as it was a short walk from there to the start of the parade route which turned out to be an excellent spot from which to view the parade. What we realized after we got there was that the west side of Plymouth Avenue was lined with cars from the starting point all the way to Main Street. I suspect that Main Street was similarly lined with people, most likely in cars, but we were not able to observe that directly.

We had a few drops of rain leading up to the start of the parade. There were plenty of grey clouds around, but the sun was also shining and the parade did not get rained out. In fact, a full 160 degree rainbow formed behind the parade and lingered until most of the participants had passed us. The highlight of the parade was a live camel.

“Hi Jolly” was the Americanized pronunciation given to Hadji Ali, who came here in 1856 as part of an experiment by the U. S. Army in the use of camels. There are conflicting accounts of his exact place of origin but it seems clear that he came to the U. S. from the Middle East as one of the first, and the lead, camel driver. For a more complete account check the entry in Wikipedia for “Hi Jolly.”

The experiment did not work out as the Army’s horses, mules, and burrows were apparently terrified of the giant animals and would panic in their presence, but Hadji Ali remained in the U. S. and eventually ended up in Quartzsite where he died in 1902 and was buried in the local cemetery. We got the impression that he was something of a living legend in his own time and in the 1930’s the governor of Arizona had a monument erected at Hi Jolly’s gravesite. It is a small pyramid made of local stone with a metal plaque on one side and a metal profile of a camel on top. According to Wikipedia the monument is allegedly the most visited location in Q.

When the parade was over we returned to our coaches. Linda went for a walk and I wrote another article for Bus Conversion Magazine. This was another short one, less than two pages and only 11 photos, on the installation of the new speedometer in our bus. When Linda returned from her walk she made a broccoli-potato mash. In addition to the broccoli and the potato it had soy milk, vegan butter, salt, and pepper. The potatoes were not completely mashed and the dish was both tasty and had a nice mouth feel.

After lunch Linda made a shopping list. We headed to the Kuehn Street market area and stopped at Barry’s Breads but our timing was bad, again. We drove south on Central and found the entrance to the parking lot for “the big tent.” This is where the RV vendors will be in another week or so, but nothing was open yet, so we went over to the Tyson Wells area west of Central Avenue and found some miscellaneous items and a pair of Crocs for me. For all the shoes I brought I did not have something that was easy on, easy off. We are parked on gravel and I needed something I could slip on quickly and easily to step outside the coach.

Most of Linda’s list was groceries so we drove to Blythe, California to do our shopping. To vary our trip and see some new sights we stayed on Kuehn Street heading west past the edge of town where it became West Dome Rock Road. The road parallels I-10 on the south side for a long way through BLM land and eventually ends at an interchange with the Interstate. We saw lots of RVs, and a few tents, spread out on either side of the road, but not nearly as many as we thought we would. There are probably a lot more RVs here than we realize, but the desert is a vast place.

When we got to Blythe we took a few minutes to drive through town and get a feel for the place. It had a more developed, modern, and prosperous business district than Quartzsite and more houses, as opposed to park model trailers and mobile homes. The houses were not fancy but they were in decent condition. Schools and municipal buildings were also nice, and there is nothing in Q to compare to the two supermarkets and name brand stores like Auto Zone, NAPA Auto Parts, and K-Mart. We started at Albertson’s and got most of the items on our list. We then went across the street to Smart and Final Express and picked up a few things there. Once again we were not able to find the Silk brand Soy Coffee Creamer, which has us wondering if we last bought it at Wal-Mart in Parker.

When we got back to camp I unloaded the car and Linda put the food away. I wandered over to say high to Butch and Fonda and play with their dogs, Daffy and Rascal, for a few minutes. I then went over to say high to Jim and Barb’s dog, Roho, which brought them out of their motorhome and got me invited in. Linda eventually wandered over looking for me and the four of us had a nice chat. It was the first time since they got here that I had been inside their rig, a Country Coach Intrigue, and it was very nice. It has one slide on the front half of the driver’s side, and there is no doubt that it really opens up the interior. Before we bought our bus we were looking seriously at Country Coach motorhomes (but not their Prevost bus conversions) and the Tiffin Allegro Bus (which is a purpose-built motorhome, not a true bus). But in the end we were bitten by bus fever and we still have it.

We stopped to visit briefly with Butch and Fonda on the way back to our rig. Butch has always had an interest in metal detecting and has developed an interest in rocks since arriving in Quartzsite. If you had the slightest inclination towards rocks, gems, and minerals then being in Quartzsite during the winter would likely push you over the edge into a full-blown hobbyist. Sometime in the last couple of days Butch bought a used contraption that consists of a table saw, two grinding wheels with a water delivery system, and an electric motor. He and Fonda acquired a bucket of rocks, including a piece of petrified wood, and they are setting up an area outside their bus to work on their new hobby.

For dinner Linda made pan-grilled tofu slices with caramelized onions and bar-b-cue sauce, but with a twist. Instead of hamburger buns or slices of bread she heated 12″ tortillas and made wraps. Of the various ways she has served this simple, but delicious, dish this was definitely my favorite so far. As much as I like a nice, fresh bun the tortilla wrap kept all of the ingredients contained so that I got onion and BBQ sauce with each bite, and they did not end up all over my plate and all over me.

As we do most evenings, we relaxed, played games, worked puzzles, read, and wrote. We are always a bit surprised at how tired we are after dinner, but we are up and about during the day and the fresh air and sunshine just seem to wear us out.

The roof of our bus after cleaning looking SW as viewed from the driver side front corner. Quartzsite, AZ.

2015/01/11 (N) Swimsuit In January

I turned the lights off last night at 11 AM and was up at 7 AM this morning which seems to have become my current routine. Because of the new (to us) mattress I was able to get up without waking Linda up. I turned up the heat in the front of the coach but not the back as Linda does not sleep well in a warm room. I started getting the coffee ready but did not grind the beans because of the noise it makes. I worked at my computer on organizational tasks such as copying files to the NAS, copying blog posts from e-mail to Word, and backing up website and photo files to the NAS.

Linda got up around 8:30 AM and set the microwave convection oven to preheat in convection only mode. When it was ready she heated up the leftover cinnamon raisin rolls she took out of the freezer yesterday and put in the refrigerator. While the rolls were heating I finished making the coffee. Although they are not gigantic, one of these rolls would probably be plenty of calories for breakfast. Two rolls, however, made for a very satisfying meal. Still, they take about four hours to make fresh and about 25 minutes to reheat. She makes a batch of eight, so if we each had one for breakfast her efforts would cover four meals instead of two.

Today was another bus cleaning day, but first Linda went for her morning walk while I continued to organize photo files on our network attached storage device. It was forecast to be a cloudy but mild day and by late morning the clouds had moved in, so when Linda got back we got busy. Even with the cloud cover it was warm enough that I was able to wear my swimsuit and a T-shirt, my preferred outfit for working with water. We bought some CLR Mold & Mildew remover yesterday and I tried using it on the lower rear roof. It did not appear to have any effect so I abandoned any further roof cleaning and we got started on the sides.

The upper sides of our bus are not easy to clean. Even with our Little Giant extension/step ladder set up as a step ladder at its maximum height I cannot quite reach the top curve of the side walls. Knowing that was the case I cleaned all the way around the edge of the roof, where it meets the side walls and the front and rear caps, from the roof. Once I was done with that we took the Little Giant extension/step ladder and converted it from extension configuration to step ladder configuration.

We worked all afternoon until after 5 PM and managed to clean the front and the passenger side. We wanted to get the passenger side done because it faces south and we wanted to do this on a cloudy day. Working a section at a time we used McGuire’s red automotive soap, scrubbed with an automotive microfiber sponge, rinsed thoroughly (with Q’s incredibly hard water), and dried with microfiber clothes. We could not get all of the hard water stains off but it was a lot cleaner, and looked a lot better, than when we started.

The weather forecast for tonight was for heavy rain sometime between 9 and 11 PM with accumulations of up to 1/2″. For a place that typically only gets 4″ of rain a year that would be a lot of rain for one storm. We put our lawn chairs, mats, and other outdoor items in the carport for the night just to be safe. Shortly after 6 PM we had our first sprinkles.

For dinner we had chickpea salad and wild rice vegan Waldorf salad with strawberries and peach slices and some Barry’s Basic Bread with a small glass of Franzia Fruity Red Sangria. I responded to some e-mails after dinner and deferred work on possible survey questions for the FMCA national education committee until tomorrow.

Linda makes her selections at the Quartzsite Farmers Market.

2015/01/12 (M) E-mail Groups

It has stayed warm enough the last few nights that I have not needed the electric heating pad and we have been able to leave windows slightly open. We both sleep better in a cool room with fresh air. The deluge of rain that was forecast for last night did not develop but it was still mostly cloudy when we got up this morning. After breakfast, coffee, morning puzzles, and checking in with the world we got on with our chores.

My major tasks for the day revolved around preparations for, and participation in, a 2 PM FMCA National Education Committee work session. While I worked on that stuff Linda went for her morning walk, made an appointment to get her hair cut tomorrow, and made garlic naan (Indian bread) from scratch. When the phone meeting was over I transferred photographs from my camera to my computer and then joined Linda over at Butch and Fonda’s coach for a late afternoon visit.

Jim L. showed up while we were chatting, read the electric sub-meters, and figured out our bills. Linda had to write four separate checks to cover our site fee, electricity usage, laundry, and the rental for the apartment, which Jim gave to Barb to cover the cleaning before and after Marilyn’s upcoming visit. Butch placed an order with PartDeal.com for a VDO speedometer so I had him order a VDO Cockpit Series 0-30 PSI Boost Gauge for me. The UPS truck also showed up and had the two packages I have been waiting for. All too soon the sun dropped below the western mountains and it turned chilly so we retreated to our coach.

Linda made curried red lentils for dinner and served it along with the garlic naan bread she made earlier in the day. Warmed and energized by this fabulous meal I launched into my second major task of the day; the creation of an e-mail group in Microsoft Outlook for our FMCA Great Lakes Converted Coaches chapter. I got the latest roster from Linda, who is the treasurer, and was able to rearrange it, save it as a CSV file, import it into Outlook, and map it to the standard contact fields. It was then easy to create a Contact Group and select all of my new entries to go in it. Once I got the group set up I wrote an e-mail to the members, my first since being elected President of the chapter back in October. I was up much later than usual, but I got it done.

Escapees RV Club happy hour SE of Q in one of the BLM STVAs.

2015/01/13 (T) Geekiness

Today was a day for Geeks and geekiness. Chris and Jim Guld, AKA The Geeks On Tour, arrived in Quartzsite yesterday and are staying at an RV Park not far from our encampment. Butch knew they were headed this way and after he and I were unable to get EchoLink working on his computer yesterday he contacted Jim to see if he would be willing to stop by and take a look. Jim is a former network administrator and knows a lot more about stuff like networking, protocols, ports, port forwarding, and proxy servers than we do. But before he came over Linda and I had breakfast after which she walked over to the beauty parlor and got her hair cut while I worked on a seminar classification task for the FMCA National Education a Committee.

Jim G. arrived on his bicycle around 10:30 AM and stayed for a couple of hours. He re-checked the things Butch and I had already tried and tried some things we had not, but we could not get Butch’s system to let the EchoLink program connect successfully to the EchoLink servers. For the record, Butch’s system consists of a Windows Vista laptop that connects to the Internet one of two ways: 1) through a Verizon MiFi or, 2) through a WiFiRanger Go2 into a WiFiRanger Mobile into a DSL WiFi gateway of unknown make and model. Jim also tried connecting through the WiFi hotspot on his Android-based smartphone. Same result. Mixed in with work we had a great visit with Jim and hope to meet up with he and Chris at least once while they are in Q.

After Jim left Linda and I were headed in to have a bite of lunch when an unfamiliar car pulled into the lot. Barb was by the road and pointed the driver in our direction. We quickly realized that it was Mara. She had called Linda first but Linda did not hear the phone ring so it was a wonderful surprise when she showed up. We visited for a couple of hours while we snacked on hummus, pretzels, and red grapes.

Mara is camped on BLM land north of town with the WINs (Wandering Individuals Network) and has been traveling off and on with groups of WINs since we last saw her in Gillette, Wyoming in July 2013. Since that time she has also gotten a different motorhome, a 35′ Fleetwood Bounder, with which she is very pleased. She invited us to join a group of WINs on Sunday to go to The Desert Bar and I think we will. Linda checked it out online and it is a completely solar-powered, off-the-grid, place. You have to take dirt roads or ATVs to get there.

It appears that things are finally going to get busy for us. Gary, from BCM, is supposed to arrive tomorrow and Curtis, from RVillage, is supposed to arrive on Saturday. Forrest and Mary are already here as are Chris and Cherie of Technomadia. The Escapees RV Club has happy hours scheduled tomorrow and Thursday at one of the BLM areas east of town. Blythe, California has a bluegrass festival starting Friday and running through Sunday. We will probably go on Friday as there is also a Balloon Festival in Lake Havasu the same three days which we will probably attend on Saturday. Somewhere in there I need to repair our Aqua-Hot and I am thinking that it will probably be Thursday. The “Big Tent” Sports, Vacation, and RV Show starts on Saturday (17th) and runs through the Sunday the 25th. Marilyn arrives on the Thursday the 22nd and leaves on the Thursday the 29th. The last full week of January really is the peak of the winter season in Q.

After Mara left I used my macro lens to photograph the front and back of both of our amateur radio operator licenses. I post-processed the images to improve the readability and reduce the file size. Once I had the photos ready I downloaded and installed the EchoLink software on my Asus laptop. I went through the initial configuration for my license and tried the server connection test. As with Butch’s installation, two of the four UDP port tests failed. I ignored that for the moment and went ahead with the validation procedure for my ham license.

Anyone can download and install the EchoLink software but only licensed hams can legally use it. That is because it can, and often does, connect a computer to a ham radio repeater that is “on the air” and only licensed hams are allowed to transmit on those frequencies. Validation was a multi-step process. When first starting EchoLink I had to supply my FCC callsign, name, and (base station) location. That information was transmitted to a database on the EchoLink servers but the EchoLink organization needed to validate that I was actually the person to whom that callsign was issued. Through a separate process on the EchoLink.org website I had to upload JPEG image files of the front and back of my wallet license. Once someone examined the images and made sure the call was active in the FCC database they “flipped the switch” on the server side and I was finally able to connect to stations if I wanted to. I repeated the process later for Linda’s license.

While I was waiting to have my license validated I started trying to figure out how to get the EchoLink program to connect successfully to the EchoLink servers. When the communications test with the servers runs it identifies the IP address assigned to the computer. I went into the WiFiRanger Mobile and enabled UDB port forwarding for ports 5198 and 5199. The TCP test was successful so I did not set up TCP port forwarding for port 5200. Enabling port forwarding, however, was necessary but not sufficient.

What I ended up doing was switching the operating mode on the ESET Smart Security program from “Automatic” to “Interactive.” With that change, the program would pop up a message box every time another program had outbound or inbound traffic through a port and ask if I wanted to allow the communication and optionally create a rule for it. Several of those messages had to do with EchoLink and after clicking “Allow” to all of them the server/router tests were finally all successful and the program was fully functional except for the license validation.

Sometime in the late afternoon another motorhome showed up and backed in to the property with Jim L.’s help. It was Larry and Sandy, who normally stay at Jim L.’s RV Park near the QIA. Jim’s park is full so he put them over here in the spot by the laundry where Jack and Maria parked for a couple of nights a week or so ago.

We had leftover red lentil potato curry (thick soup) for dinner with the rest of the garlic naan and a glass of sangria and it was very good, again. I finished up my FMCA education committee task and e-mailed it off. I received an e-mail that my ham license had been validated so we played with the EchoLink program and User’s Guide for a while but did not try to connect to any stations.

While I was working on all of this I noticed that nine updates were pending for Windows 8.1 and there were four optional ones as well. Installing updates is often an iterative process and so it was again this evening. One of the optional updates was a roll up from November 2014 that was 723.9 MB. That’s a big update. I started downloading it at 23:52 MST and then went to bed. My hope was that fewer people would be trying to use the local DSL system to get online at that hour and the update might actually load and install successfully. But I would have to wait until tomorrow morning to find out.

L-to-R: Travis & Melanie Carr from the Escapees RV Club and Cherie Ve Ard & Chris Dunphy of Technomadia.

2015/01/14 (W) SKP Happy Hour

As soon as I got up this morning I checked the huge Windows 8.1 optional rollup update that I started last night. It had completed successfully except for restarting the computer, so that’s what I did. While the update finished installing I made coffee and got the juice ready and Linda prepared our cereal.

Once the update finished I checked e-mail and websites. Linda made white bean hummus to take to the SKP Happy Hour later today. She then remembered that the Farmers Market at Desert Gardens was this morning from 8 AM to noon so we drove over there. There was only one stand selling produce, but they were from Blythe, California only (20 miles away) so the produce was very local and very fresh. Linda bought an assortment of veggies and a grapefruit.

We had parked at the south end of the western parking area and from there we could see a road going back towards “Q” Mountain and a well-defined trail going up the western side. We drove back there and determined that we could park there when we decide to climb the mountain and do some panoramic photography.

We drove to Barry’s Breads and bought a loaf of Barry’s Basic Bread and then continued east on Kuehn Street to confirm Lloyd DeGerald’s location. We took Riggles Avenue back over I-10 to Main Street and headed back towards Central Avenue, stopping at the Road Runner Market for a few things. When we got back Jim and Barb were aggressively trimming the Palo Verde trees in the cactus garden.

As we often do most mornings, Linda went for a walk and I worked at my computer, installing three more optional updates and taking care of some e-mail. We gathered up chairs, food, and beverages at 12:45 PM and drove over to the SKP Happy Hour on East Dome Rock Road. There was already quite a crowd when we arrived and everyone was in a good mood. And why not. The sun was shining, the air temperature was pleasant, there were tables arrayed with food, people had beverages of their choice, Johnny Cockrum was performing, and lots of folks were meeting old and new friends. We had a thoroughly pleasant time, but we always do when we are with groups of Escapees.

On the way back to camp we spotted Lloyd DeGerald and his wife out walking their dog and stopped briefly to chat about our Aqua-Hot. We then stopped at the trailer for the Two Crazy Ladies and ordered engraved hang tags with our call signs and a sign asking emergency responders to rescue our cats.

When we got back to camp Linda went for another (short) walk and I sat down to work at my computer. We lost our Internet connection while we were away and the DSL gateway would not re-associate with our WiFiRanger Mobile so I had Barb open the house and I power cycled the gateway. I was then able reestablish the connection to our WFR-M. That is the second time this has happened since we arrived here but so far has not caused us any real difficulty.

Butch has been having problems with their Progressive Industries EMS cutting off their shorepower due to high voltage. We noticed during dinner that our PI-EMS was also showing a PE-3 (previous error – high voltage). I do not know if our Magnum inverter switches on “instantly” when outside power is lost or if there is a delay but I am now wondering if we lost our Internet connection due to loss of power to the WiFi Ranger Mobile after which it was not able to reconnect with the gateway. The next time this happens I may try powering the WFR-M off for 60 seconds and restarting it. It’s also possible that the high voltage is wreaking havoc on the DSL gateway.

After dinner I sent a TXT message to Gary at BCM inquiring if he had arrived in Q as planned. He called back and said they had just cleared Indio, California. I suggested they find someplace to stop and rest and finish the trip tomorrow morning in the daylight. They are headed to the Quartzsite Market Place dry camp area for the Eagles International bus gathering. I spent the rest of the evening working on five different articles for Bus Conversion Magazine before finally turning in around midnight.

2015/01/01-07 (R-W) Q 2015 W1

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2015/01/01 (R) Hola 2015

The salt restraining tube for the water filter housing. The slotted end (R) goes down and the o-rings sit in the other end.

Having stayed up later than usual last night to see the old year out and welcome the new year in we were in no hurry to get up this morning, especially given that the temperature outside was in the upper 20s. But Linda said she would make her yummy vegan cinnamon rolls for breakfast so I felt obligated to get up and eat them. Besides, it’s my job to make the coffee. The rolls took quite a while to make and we ended up having them for brunch, but they were worth the wait.

I spent much of the morning looking for new games in the iStore. I downloaded a dozen free ones and then started trying them in turn. Most of them immediately tried to sell me a full version or ran a full-screen advertisement each time I tried to start a new round of play. If they did that I immediately deleted the app. I cannot imagine what makes a game developer think someone with tolerate that more than once. At some point I realized that my AppleID was still associated with an old e-mail address so I initiated the process of changing it. The process was not as seamless as I thought it could/would/should be, but I eventually got it sorted out. Or as they say or Doc Martin, “sorted.” As it turned out my credit card information was also out of date so I updated that as well. Obviously I do not make iStore purchases very often.

I needed to regenerate our portable water softener even though it was 48 degrees F outside in the shade. It was, however, comfortable enough in the sun to be able to work. I started at noon cutting the plastic drain pipe that I bought at Herb’s Hardware the other day to a length of 10″ which is the length of a standard water filter. I cut eight 3/8″ slots in the bottom end of the tube and got an O-ring from Butch to fit in the swaged upper end. The purpose of the tube is to hold salt so that incoming water is required to pass through it to get to the softener but the salt crystals cannot actually wash into the softener.

Linda helped me transfer the contents of a 40 pound bag of solar salt to several two-gallon zip lock bags. I then put a small quantity of salt in a one-quart zip lock bag and gently smashed it with a two-pound sledgehammer, although as I write that it seems to be something of an oxymoron. I inserted the tube into the removable filter housing, slotted side down, and poured the salt around the outside of the tube. I smashed a second bag of salt and added it to the housing. I put the housing back on the filter head and slowly ran water through the softener for almost two hours. I got a water hardness test strip from Butch and tested the output of the softener. It was still showing 7 grains of hardness, exactly the same as two days ago. It appeared that the regeneration process had not had any effect. Bummer.

I discussed the situation with Butch and he suggested I back flush the softener. To do that I needed a hose with female hose fittings on each end. This is the kind of hose used to hook up a washing machine but neither one of us had one with us. Butch, however, had a female-female adapter which allowed me to connect a male hose end to a male fitting on the outlet of the water softener. (Backflushing literally means running water through the softener in the reverse direction to flush out any debris that may after gotten in through the normal inlet.)

The salt retaining tube in the filter housing with salt around the bottom outside and the o-ring visible at the top.

After backflushing the softener I tried regenerating it again. This time I used a 26 ounces of fine grain non-iodized table salt. With my homemade diverter tube still in place I added the salt around the outside and screwed the housing back on. I let the salt sit in the housing for 20 minutes to start to make a brine and then ran water through the softener until I got a very salty taste at the output. I then shut the outlet valve and let it sit for 20 minutes. When the time elapsed I ran water through the softener for another 15 seconds, checked it for saltiness, and shut the outlet valve. At the end of another 20 minutes I ran water through it at a very slow rate for 20 minutes and then checked it again for salty taste. It was still slightly salty and as it was getting close to sunset I decided to let it sit overnight. I will finish flushing it tomorrow and check the hardness again.

While I was fussing with our water softener Butch recharged theirs in about 30 minutes. When he tested the water at the end it indicated zero (0) grains of hardness; completely softened. Their softener is different from ours and the regeneration procedure is very straightforward and apparently works. For now I need to figure out a guaranteed procedure for regenerating ours, but long-term I need to figure out some other arrangement of just get a different softener.

The arrangement I am considering would be in conjunction with redoing the water bay. With a different arrangement of tanks I could create space in the bay for the softener, multiple filter housings, and associated plumbing. I could set up an arrangement that would divert the incoming water (after the first/sediment filter) through a clear filter housing into which I could put the salt. That clear housing/head would be permanently modified to force water through the salt and allow me to see when the salt was gone. It would also eliminate the need to remove and reinstall the filter the way I have to now. Alternatively I could put a tank between the filter housing and the softener (instead of the clear housing) and use it as a brine tank. If the tank was big enough to hold a 40 pound bag of solar salt it would work just like a home softening system. Water would sit in the tank with the salt for days so that the brine was ready to use when it was time to regenerate the softener. I could even rig up a separate pump just for pumping the brine into the softener. I’m going to give this a lot of thought before I start changing things around, but last winter in Florida and this winter in Quartzsite have made it very clear that hard water is a problem and we need a very effective and efficient way to deal with it.

While I worked with the water softener Linda began preparing a Tex-Mex bean soup for dinner and then went for a long walk. She finished making the soup when she got back while I took a short nap. It cooled off quickly as the sun set and nothing is quite as satisfying on a cool evening as hearty, hot soup. It also had a bit of red pepper heat which was a nice bonus. It was really good soup.

I had a few e-mails from Gary at BCM and a nice follow-up e-mail from Kathy at the Michigan Assessment Consortium. She attached a copy of their holiday letter so I attached a copy of ours in reply. I spent a little time browsing websites for OTA TV antennas and turbo boost gauges and finally went to bed without resolving what to do about either thing. I have a lot of nights that end like that.

2015/01/02 (F) Crazy Days In Q

Contact is established with our cat, Jasper.

The “show” at Desert Gardens officially opened yesterday and runs through the end of February, so Quartzsite is quickly be transformed into a crazy place. We were chatting with Butch, Fonda, Jim, and Barb after breakfast and Barb reminded us that starting now driving and parking “downtown”, and especially along Kuehn Street south of I-10, during the day will be difficult to impossible. She offered to drive us down in the golf cart and come pick us up if we did not want to walk. She also told us that many vendors will hold purchases for pickup at the end of the day. We exchanged cell phone numbers, which we had not yet done since they arrived. She suggested that if we wanted to eat out we should go early or right before closing as we might not be able to get seated/served otherwise. There’s no doubt that we have lucked out on our arrangements this winter, and the situation just keeps getting better.

Linda was browsing on her iPad and discovered an all vegan grocery store in Rancho Cucamonga, California; the largest all-vegan grocery store in the world. I looked up Rancho Cucamonga on Google Maps and it is located about half way between Los Angeles and San Bernardino. Based on the speeds I like to drive (often just below the speed limit or 68 MPH, whichever is less) it looks like a four hour drive one-way from Q. That’s obviously too far for a regular grocery run, but we might make a day trip in that direction sometime this winter and find the store while we are over there.

One of the things I did after climbing in bed last night was spend a little time looking at the Sure Marine Service website. SMS is a major supplier of repair parts for Webasto diesel-fired hydronic systems headquartered in Seattle, Washington. After studying their parts diagrams I became unclear (and concerned) as to whether the burner we removed from Butch’s old unit was a DBW2010 or a DBW2020. They are very similar but not identical. I am almost certain that our original burner is a DBW2010, but our AHU-xxx Aqua-Hot is so old that the model number is no longer referenced on the website and model specific documentation, like a service manual, is not available for download.

The reason I was looking at the parts diagrams was to identify the bearing kit for the blower as I wanted to order two of them today. What I could tell from the website was that the 2020 is a higher BTU output burner and so one of the differences is that the 2010 uses a 0.35 GPH nozzle while the 2020 uses a 0.60 GPH nozzle. That alone might account for why we seem to have poor combustion, although even money is still on bad bearings. The unresolved issues and the inability to investigate at midnight did not make for a good night’s sleep.

I have the Aqua-Hot service/repair manual for the unit I bought from Butch, both on paper and on my iPad, so I spent some time this morning looking at the iPad version. I could not tell if they used the same bearing parts so I did not order anything today and won’t until I can determine model numbers. I asked Butch if he knew which burner was in the Aqua-Hot I bought from him, but he did not. The service manual shows a Webasto label that identifies the burner model, but does not show where the label is located. More investigation was needed.

After I got dressed I e-mailed Bill Gerrie (RetiredBusNut) in Ontario, Canada with questions about gauges and sending units for our bus engine and transmission. I then started dealing with the water softener. Linda returned from her walk and started preparing lunch, so I emptied the filter housing of the little bit of salt that was still in the bottom, rinsed it clean, re-installed the filter, and let it run for 20 minutes to fully flush out any residual salt water.

Linda made a warm garbanzo bean and kale salad for lunch with lemon juice and garlic. It was the first time she had tried this recipe and we both agreed it was a keeper. After lunch I tested the hardness of the water coming out of the softener and it registered on the test strip between zero (completely soft) and 1.5 (definitely soft) so I dumped the remaining (hard) water in the fresh water tank and refilled it with 120 gallons of nice, soft water. After the tank was full I retested the water coming out of the softener and got the same reading as before. Finally, some good news on the water softener front.

With water softening taken care of (for now) I did an online search for a panoramic camera tripod head. I really like shooting panoramas and the Microsoft Image Composite Editor (MS-ICE) does a remarkable job stitching images together. Most of my panoramas have been handheld, which makes the performance of MS-ICE all the more impressive. I have shot a few panoramas using a tripod but without a nodal point (spherical) pan head, so that is what I was searching for online. B&H Photo had a Manfrotto on sale for $280, marked down from $600, but their order desk was closing for the day and I did not want to be rushed making this decision so I did not order it. They will reopen tomorrow, so I will think about it overnight and do some more research.

I got our old Webasto burner out of the front bay and found the label. It is, indeed, a DBW2010, specifically a DBW2010.75 with a 0.35 GPH nozzle rated at 45,000 BTU. Linda recorded the details, including the serial number, and then helped me rewrap it in bubble wrap so I could put back in its storage pail.

Linda then went to Parker, Arizona with Butch and Fonda to check out the Safeway grocery store and look for some things at Walmart. The Parker Safeway was supposed to carry Daiya vegan cheese products but they were nowhere to be found. It appears that our closest source will be Whole Foods. There are five of them in the greater Phoenix area but that is a two hour drive one way.

While the three amigos were gone I removed the cover from the Aqua-Hot in our coach and found its label. Much to my relief it is also a Webasto DBW2010.75, 45,000 BTU. It should also have a 0.35 GPH nozzle, and probably does, but I did not pull the burner out to check. I noticed some soot on the final fuel filter inside the housing and in other places so that gave me something new to be concerned about. I was pondering the situation when Jim and Barb and Roho came over to visit and we had a good long chat. When they went back to their motorhome I put the cover back on the Aqua-Hot and put all of my tools away.

My plan for tomorrow is to turn the Aqua-Hot off, let it cool down, and pull the burner to check the nozzle. It’s possible, though not likely, that I do not have the burner seated quite right and there’s a chance, though very small, that reinstalling it will fix, or least improve the performance. My money (literally) is still on the blower bearings. Hopefully it does not also need a new motor as everything on a Webasto is more expensive than seems reasonable. It’s another fine example of precision German engineering and manufacturing.

Even though I have quite a few e-mail addresses that I use to segregate electronic correspondence into manageable categories my inboxes still end up flooded with e-mails. Very few of them are spam—we have good spam filtering on all of the accounts—but some of the highest volume inbound traffic is notifications of things like failed login attempts on WordPress websites. Those e-mails do not get replies and often do not require any specific action on my part, but they sometimes obscure the presence of other e-mails that do require my attention.

Microsoft Outlook is able to deal with incoming (and outgoing) e-mails based on user-defined “rules” but I had never played with that feature until today. I used the online help system to read about the whys and wherefores of e-mail rules and then tried creating some. Once I understood what I was trying to accomplish it was mostly point and click to get it done, with a little typing thrown in. What I ended up doing was creating sender/subject subfolders under the inbox of certain accounts and then creating a rule for each subfolder that directs incoming e-mails matching the criteria to the correct folder. By keeping the sub folders under the inbox folder it will be clear to me that these are e-mails that I have received but not yet dealt with.

For dinner Linda made a cooked shredded Brussels’ Sprouts dish with tomatoes, dried cranberries, and pistachios and served it alongside the leftover Mexican rice with a glass of sangria. Ole! We agreed that both of these dishes were keepers and went well with the fruity wine. The rest of the evening was quiet. Linda read and played her online games while I finished up working on this post. I finally went to bed and started reading the service and repair manuals for the Aqua-Hot system and the Webasto burner. According to the long-term weather forecast tonight should be our last night with an overnight low temperature below freezing.

A few of the vendors at Desert Gardens, Quartzsite, AZ.

2015/01/03 (S) Hammer Stahl

I got up at 6:30 AM today. I had been awake for a while before that and had some things I needed/wanted to do on my computer. These were quiet tasks that I could do in the front of the coach, with the heat turned up, without disturbing Linda.

I always check my e-mail first. There was a group message from Hillary at RVillage to all of the Ambassadors regarding a new feature they will be rolling out soon and seeking our assistance. I mentioned this to Linda when she got up and we watched the two YouTube videos. We did not have time today but will work on it tomorrow in advance of a 5 PM (4 PM PST) web meeting.

My first project today was updating the spreadsheet I maintain for our FMCA Freethinkers Chapter, which I started working on last night. The chapter treasurer maintains our checking account but as the secretary I maintain the records including the roster and who has paid their dues for what years. Because I have all of those details I also generate the quarterly and annual financial statements. I entered the information for dues payments that had been received between November 1 and December 31. I then added the five worksheets for 2015 (four quarters and year), which tie together and link back to the 2014 statement, and updated the cumulative financial statement.

Linda got up so I put my work aside to make coffee while she made breakfast. We had a few bananas that were ripe so she made green smoothies for breakfast. We happen to like kale but if we didn’t, green smoothies would be an excellent way to get our daily dose along with several other healthy ingredients.

We talked about visiting the market area today and decided to go later when it was a bit warmer. The temperature a 9AM was still only 40 degrees F so Linda bundled up and went for her morning walk while I continued to work on my spreadsheet.

Once I finished the spreadsheet I worked outside for a bit. I removed the cover from the burner end of the Aqua-Hot while it was running to check for an exhaust leak (sight, smell, touch) but I could not detect one. When the cycle finished I turned the burner off. My plan was to let the unit cool off and then remove the burner to check the nozzle size and do a general inspection of the combustion chamber and visible parts, but that did not happen today.

What I did instead was return to my computer and start putting Webasto repair parts in my shopping cart on the Sure Marine Service website. The bearings on the installed burner are definitely whining and need to be replaced. They are supposed to be replaced regularly anyway, so I put two sets in the cart. It is very likely that they are causing the motor to run slow which means insufficient combustion air, and possibly lower fuel pressure, leading to the dark smoky exhaust. I also put a fuel solenoid valve in the cart. There is a good chance that the valve and/or the solenoid are not working on the other burner. There’s also a chance that the ignition coil has failed, but the solenoid valve costs 1/2 as much as the coil, so I’m hoping it’s the valve. I got the order submitted with UPS ground shipping and used PayPal to make the payment.

Once I completed the SMS order I loaded the B&H Photo app onto my iPad and spent quite a bit of time going between their website and the Sony online store trying to figure out if I should order a panoramic tripod head and/or new camera, possibly with a lens and flash unit. Sony has the Alpha 99 FF body marked down from $2,800 to $1,900 with the vertical grip and an extra battery thrown into the deal, an additional $500+ value. They will also bundle in the SAM 28-75mm f/2.8 lens for $400. The lens by itself is normally $900, so that’s another $500 savings.

So for $2,500 I could get $4,200 worth of Sony’s top-of-the-line “flagship” DSLR (DSLT, actually) equipment, except for one thing; it was all on back order with an ESTIMATED ship date of February 4, 2015. That’s my birthday, so if it actually shipped on that date it would be quite the birthday present, but if it was delayed very much there would be the very real possibility of it arriving at our location in Q after we had left. Not good.

So what about B&H Photo? It turns out that they (claim to) have all of these pieces in stock and they are selling the body with the added pieces for the same price as Sony, but they are not offering the lens at the bundled price. That was the deal breaker that saved me spending a lot of money today. Besides, I have been waiting a long time for Sony to officially announce and the ship the new (rumored) flagship alpha a99-II with its 36MP FF 35mm sensor and long list of awesome features. To decide now to by prior generation technology it would have to be a very attractive deal, much better than what I was seeing online.

I ended up ordering a Manfrotto Nodal Point Pro panoramic tripod mount from B&H. It should be here by the end of the week. When it arrives I think we will hike up to the top of “Q Mountain” and try to capture the true essence of Quartzsite in the winter, which is RVs from horizon to horizon.

We headed down to the market area on Kuehn Street with Butch and Fonda and walked around for a couple of hours in the Tyson Wells Show grounds north of Kuehn Street and west of Central Avenue (US-95). This particular market area had really filled up with vendors in the last few days. Linda bought a nice white apron and really nice Hammer Stahl 5.5″ Santoku knife. She checked online when we got back and she paid about 55% of the MSRP on the HS website. She bought it from Cutlery by LeClaire, which also has a website, and has it on sale for $20 more than the price on the HS website, marked down $20 from their “regular” price. The point is, she got it for what appears to be a good price of $59 and it came in a nice box with a ceramic sharpener thrown into the deal.

We drove farther west on Kuehn Street and pulled into the Desert Gardens show grounds. It was getting near sunset, so we did not stay long, but Linda and I walked enough of it to get a feeling for the place. It was a “rougher” setup than Tyson Wells and many of the booths were selling large, rough rocks and gemstones. The vendors also had a lot more equipment set up and were using it to process materials. We’ll be back, probably more than once, and earlier in the day so we can spend more time.

When we got back to our motorcoaches Fonda came over and worked with Linda for a little while on their business records. We then had a nice salad and some of the spicy bean and pasta soup (that Linda made the other day) with crackers and sangria. I spent more time after dinner researching stuff on my iPad and working on this post.

We appear to be in one of the few places in the country that is not getting clobbered by bad weather. The temperature is not even supposed to drop below freezing overnight. It will still be cool tomorrow, however, and we did make specific plans before going to bed.

A view of “Q” Mountain from the Desert Gardens Show area.

2015/01/04 (N) Our Village

We had vegan pancakes for breakfast which prompted me to suggest that Linda invent some recipes, even if they are interesting and successful variations on existing ones, and feed them to our grand-daughter. Linda could put them on our website using the WP Ultimate Recipe plug-in and, if they met with her approval, name they after “Bitty” (youngest grand-daughter’s latest nickname, although I think I will always prefer “Schmoo”). Perhaps Pancakes Madeline; Sautéed greens a la Madeline; Pasta Madeline; or Madeline’s vegan mac and cheese. Being retired gives me a lot of time to think.

Joe’s brother, Jim L., finally returned from Nevada today and was able to get the park model trailer unlocked. Barb has been wanting to get in and clean it since she and Jim (different Jim) arrived. Barb is a keep busy kind of gal. She is responsible for maintaining the apartment and laundry room while she is here and told Connie she would also do some deep cleaning on their house trailer, so it’s been bugging her that she could not get in to do it. As for my part, all I did was lock the door on the trailer the way Connie asked me to. Barb and Jim (husband) had lots of keys but could not get any of them to work.

Today was shower day. This is always more of a production than we would like because we keep the cats’ litter tray in the shower. Most of the time that works really well—it is out of the way and contains any mess they might make—but it is inconvenient when we want to use the shower for its intended purpose. Besides pulling the tray out into the hall by the bathroom door we have to clean up any stray litter in the shower to make sure it does not end up in the gray water waste tank. Litter tray or not we still have to spray the shower walls when we are done, squeegee off the glass door, let everything dry, and then reassemble it as a giant cat litter box. But it works and it’s one of the compromises we willingly make to live with our cats in so few square feet.

Once I was dressed I went outside to chat with Jim L. (Joe’s brother) and we discussed the possibility of upgrading the electrical service at our site to “50 Amp” (240VAC, 50A, 4-wire, the equivalent of a 120VAC, 100A residential service). It’s not an issue for us right now as the cool weather has us burning diesel fuel to make space heat, but once the weather turns warm we may need our air-conditioners. We have three but can only run one on a “30A” service and still have enough power to run other things. A 30A service is just what it says; 30A of current at 120VAC. A “50A” RV service is slightly more than three times that amount of power.

The electrical hookups here are very interesting. Perhaps all RV park power pedestals work the same way, but I have never looked inside one so I don’t know. The meter is at the top and the area below it has a top-hinged cover. Under the cover are three panels about 3″ wide and 15″ tall. The panels have an outlet towards the bottom and a circuit breaker near the midpoint. Behind the panels are busses for the hot, neutral and ground with male blade connectors. The panels have female blade connectors that engage their male counterparts when the panel is slipped and then hinged into place. It is secured with a single screw. If Jim L. can find a 50A panel all we will have to do is unscrew and remove the 30A panel and plug in the new one, once we verify that 240 VAC (L1& L2) are present in the box and wired to the distribution busses.

Instead of her usual morning walk Linda setup her laptop on the dinette table and worked on accounting and tax issues for Butch and Fonda. I set my laptop there as well to work on the roster for our FMCA Freethinkers Chapter and Jasper got in between us, so we had a nice, cozy computing session. When I placed my order with B&H Photo yesterday I checked a box to receive shipping status information via TXT message. I got one this morning letting me know that my package had shipped from NYC. Cool.

With accounting chores done for now Linda prepared vegan hot dogs with mustard, onion, and relish for lunch. She then went for a long walk while I stayed at the coach and worked with a new feature on the RVillage website. I was posting a lot of suggestions to the topic thread on the Ambassador forum and got a phone call from Curtis, the founder/CEO of RVillage. We had a long chat and I was still on the phone with him when Linda got back. I worked with the website some more and at 5:00 PM we connected to an Ambassador meeting using GoToMeeting on my computer. This is a very exciting new feature and I think RVillagers and RV-related businesses are really going to like it once they know about it and see how it works.

Linda made mock (vegan) stroganoff for dinner. She normally uses Basmati but the only rice she had enough of was Texmati so she used that. Although I did not care for the texture of the Texmati in this dish (a bit crunchy), the taste was still very good. This dish requires real cooking, which means it makes a real mess. By the time everything was cleaned up and put away it was 8 PM and we were both tired. I continued to research engine and transmission gauges while Linda read and played word games. I also revisited the SonyAlphaRumors website but there was absolutely NO new information on the a99-II. I went to bed wondering if this camera will ever actually exist. Based on the comments I see online I am not the only one wondering if this camera will ever be a reality.

One of the hundreds of vendors at the Tyson Wells market area in Q.

2015/01/05 (M) VSWR 1.0

Yesterday we finished up the coffees we have been using since we left Michigan at the end of November so this morning I had to open new bags and transfer the contents from their vacuum sealed bags to our metal storage canisters. I had Teeko’s roast Ethiopian Yirgacheffe regular and decaffeinated separately, so I opened 1/2 pound bags of each. I also opened a 1/2 pound bag of our special Sweet Seattle Dreams, which is 1/2 Sweet Dreams (decaf) and 1/2 Seattle Blend (regular). I then made a pot of Ethiopian Yirgacheffe 1/2-n-1/2 while Linda prepared our granola with fresh bananas and fresh blueberries.

Linda went for her morning walk while I continued to do online research regarding the enigma known as the Sony a99-II DSLT camera and the supposedly discontinued, but apparently still very much available, Sony alpha a99. If I did not already have a nice assortment of compatible Minolta A-mount lenses and flash equipment I think I would stop wasting my time with Sony cameras. But I do, and so I continue to wait and be frustrated along with thousands of other “enthusiast” (sub-professional) photographers. Because Sony builds the image stabilization (anti-shake) feature into the alpha bodies instead of the A-mount lenses the feature is available even with older Minolta lenses and the new lenses are slightly less complicated and less expensive than the Nikon and Canon lenses, which have the image stabilization built into each lens. I think this was one of Sony’s best innovations.

I also continued to look at automotive gauges and sending units and decided to call Bill Gerrie (in Ontario, Canada) to follow up on his reply to an e-mail I sent a few days ago. We had a great chat and he was able to clarify some things and add quite a bit of specificity to his written reply. As a result I have a pretty good idea of what I am looking for; now it’s just a matter of finding it and deciding to place the order.

I was starting to work at my computer when Linda returned from her walk. She eventually fixed a couple of vegan hot dogs wrapped up in tortillas with mustard, onions, and relish. As I was finishing my meal I got a call from Gary Hatt at BCM. He recently acquired an Eagle bus conversion and had some questions about the air-conditioners and the Aqua-Hot. He plans to be in Quartzsite next to week and we are looking forward to finally meeting in person since I have been writing articles for the magazine for almost two years.

Linda has been having a problem with the brightness (or lack thereof) of the touch screen on her 19 month old Windows 8.1 Samsung laptop. It will go very dim for no apparent reason and cannot be adjusted. There was a driver update available for the Intel HD Graphics processor so we downloaded it, installed it, and re-started her computer. The screen was now bright, which was more useful than dim, but still not adjustable. That could be a coincidence or a fix, we will have to wait and see. Even though it was working (for now) I drove to the local Family Dollar and bought an HDMI cable and some lightly carbonated water. (The water had nothing to do with Linda’s laptop computer display, we were just low on sparkling water.) The cable will allow us to connect her computer to one of our two flat panel LCD (LED) TV/monitors if needed. (We did that after dinner and it worked, mirroring the built-in display to the monitor and setting the resolution to match the monitor’s 1900x1080p native mode. But it also caused the built-in monitor to dim, although not as much as before. When we turned off the monitor and unplugged it the built-in display did not return to full brightness.)

Mid-afternoon I saw Butch working on his Tarheel screwdriver antenna so I inquired as to what he was doing. He had connected his MFJ VSWR meter to it through a six foot length of coax. He had also unplugged the control harness for the tuning motor and rigged up a temporary switch to extend and retract the antenna. He had done this because he was getting meter readings when connected through the installed coax that indicated the antenna was not resonant at any frequency or that the meter was not working correctly. I climbed up on his ladder to have a look and saw VSWRs that were often greater than 31:1, and never fell below 10:1, with complex impedances that were rarely 50 ohms and with both resistance and reactance values that were all over the place. Clearly something was not right. It was not his installed coax and I was fairly certain I was not his meter, which I had used back at their house to check the VSWR on his CB and 2m ham antennas.

I climbed onto the roof of their bus so it would be easier to reach things and I could work sitting down. We tried adding a ground strap as a counterpoise but it didn’t help. Butch then grounded the strap to the chassis at the motor but that did not help either. Our concern was that the antenna was not sufficiently bonded (grounded) to the roof but nothing we tried made any difference. I decided to set the antenna to its shortest length (highest operating frequency), set the meter to a lower frequency, and then slowly lengthen the antenna, thereby lowering the operating frequency, while looking for some sort of response on the meter.

I got no change on the meter and finally realized that the antenna (via the meter) was behaving as though it was not grounded. I noticed what looked like a thick washer between the SO-239 antenna connector and the base mounting plate of the antenna. The mounting plate is the ground reference for the antenna and is connected to the base of the antenna through a coil of insulated wire (an inductor) known as a base loading coil. The spacer was a plastic insulator that was, indeed, preventing the case of the SO-239 antenna socket from making contact with the mounting plate. As a result the antenna was not grounded through the coax cable shield, preventing the meter from obtaining meaningful readings.

We removed the antenna connector, removed the insulated spacer, reassembled the connector to the antenna, reattached the coax and meter, and took additional measurements. This time we got excellent readings that made very good sense. We checked the upper bound, lower bound, and the midpoint of most of the high frequency (HF) ham bands and were always able to obtain VSWRs of 1.3:1 or less, which was excellent. Butch had been considering redoing the mounting of the large motorized fold-over base so it was a good thing we figured this out as it saved him a lot of unnecessary work. If I can solve one problem without creating others I figure it’s a good day. BTW: VSWR stands for Voltage Standing Wave Ratio and 1.0 is not a beta version, it is shorthand for a ratio of one-to-one (1:1), which is the best SWR you can have. Anything below 1.5:1 is considered excellent, below 2.0:1 good, and below 3.0:1 usable if that’s the best you can do.

Chayote is a fruit that is a member of the squash family and is related to other gourds such as melons and cucumbers. Linda bought one last week when we went to Albertson’s grocery store in Blythe, California and decided to prepare it for dinner tonight. She sliced it into long thin broad strips and sautéed them with onions, oregano, salt, and pepper. She served it alongside the leftover mock (vegan) stroganoff with a glass of sangria. Our wine friends can cringe all they want; we find the Vella and Franzia boxed wines generally agreeable and the sangrias go surprisingly well with a variety of dishes. And it has me drinking red wine, so it’s healthy too!

We lost our WiFi connection this evening. Not sure why. The wireless gateway still shows up in the WFR list but won’t associate with the WFR. Butch had the same problem at the same time so something obviously changed. We will ask Barb to open the trailer tomorrow, or get Jim to do it if she is not comfortable, so we can reset the gateway. Hopefully that will do the trick.

The sunsets in Quartzsite are amazing almost every night. This shot was taken from our campsite in Q.

2015/01/06 (T) You’ve Got Mail (Maybe)

Our mail situation here is interesting. Remember that, per our Jamaican tour guide, we do not have problems, only situations, and situations are easier to deal with if I regard them as interesting rather than annoying. With regards to receiving mail, the “situation” is as follows. Although every structure in town has a street address—necessary for police, fire, EMS, trash collection, and other municipal services—the Quartzsite post office does not deliver mail to said locations. They have an annex building on the northeast side of town that is nothing but P. O. boxes and all of the locals, and a lot of seasonal residents (including Joe and Connie, who own the property where we are staying) have a P. O. Box.

Where things get interesting is that the main post office and the street addresses are associated with one ZIP code but the P. O. boxes have a different ZIP code. If something is coming to us via UPS or FEDEX we have to use the street address and associated ZIP code, but if it is being mailed to us USPS we have to use the P. O. Box number and associated ZIP code, or have it sent c/o General Delivery using the main ZIP code. To confuse matters further, Joe and Connie had to return to Nevada because of Joe’s health and are having their Quartzsite mail forwarded back to their home, so we cannot have mail sent to us “care of” them as we originally planned as it just gets forwarded to Nevada. Outbound mail does not appear to be a problem, but then why would it be?

The other situation that developed yesterday was that our WiFiRanger Mobile Ti disconnected from Joe and Connie’s WiFi (DSL) gateway and would not reconnect. The WFR is telling us that the WPA password may be incorrect, but that is unlikely as we have been using it since we arrived last month, as have Butch and Fonda who also lost their connection yesterday and could not reestablish it. The evidence suggests that the gateway needs to be reset. Why? Who knows? DSL gremlins perhaps. Or mischievous Internet fairies. Or a problem with the local DSL service? Or perhaps Butch keyed up his 600 Watt linear HF ham radio amplifier and blew out every wireless DSL router within a quarter mile? Whatever the cause, once we can get Barb or (brother) Jim to open the trailer we will power cycle the gateway and see if that restores our ability to connect to it.

In the meantime, in order to get online last night and again this morning, we turned on our Verizon MiFi. The Verizon signal here is strong and steady, and the data rate is much faster than the DSL/WiFi connection, but we only have a 4 GB data plan so we tend to use WiFi when available. It is not always available, of course, especially while traveling (and especially if we are boondocking at Wally World or other such locations) and when it is available it is not always reliable or is so slow as to be useless. This can be the situation, for instance, at larger RV rallies and even some RV parks.

So we logged into our Verizon Wireless account, looked at our current plan, and saw that for a mere $10 more per month we could increase our data plan from 4 GB to 10 GB. The cost for exceeding your monthly data plan limit is $15/GB, so the extra $10/month was a no-brainer. And VZW made it soooo easy to change our plan (once we were logged in); just click the data plan we want, review changes to our account, and click “Apply Changes.” Done; they have our money and we have more data allocation. Interestingly, they upped our data allocation immediately for the current billing cycle, which is Dec 20 – Jan 19, and added the $10 to the bill we will receive for that cycle. No pro-rating going on here, but then we can use the whole 10 GB if we want/need to.

Interestingly the cost to go from 10 GB to 15 GB was an additional $20/month, so the 10 GB plan seems to be a sweet spot after which you pay a premium for additional access. On the one hand Verizon wants to sell you data bandwidth but on the other hand there is a finite amount of data they can move through their network, so if you want to use a larger chunk of their capacity it figures that it would come with premium pricing.

Until a few months ago Millenicom was reselling 20 GB MiFi plans (on Verizon’s network) for $70. It was the best deal around; a sufficient amount of data for the same price we were paying Verizon for only 4 GB. Kind of unfair, when I think about it. Well, Verizon decided to stop selling bulk capacity to Millenicom (and other MVNAs?), took all of the accounts in-house, and Millenicom went out of business. Not really a big surprise when you think about it. Verizon also notified those customers (as I understand the situation) of their “options” which were not, apparently, as attractive as the deal they had with Millenicom. Not really a big surprise when you think about it.

Anyway, we will see how we do with 10 GB/month while we are on the road. We can change back to our 4GB plan when we get home, but I doubt that we will, and we can increase it to 15, 20, or even more GB per billing cycle if we need to, but that is unlikely. We have an AT&T landline at home with DSL service that provides an “always on” Internet connection (when it works). It has a 150 GB/month data allowance and allows us to monitor and control our whole house generator and WiFi thermostat. We have discussed adding a security system and a personal weather station linked in to Weather Underground’s Wundermap when we get home. I don’t think our DSL connection is fast enough, however, that we could use 150 GB in a month if we tried.

Linda went for her morning walk and I made a quick run to Barry’s Breads. Barry is a really nice older gentleman who has a small bakery stand on the north side of Kuehn Street east of Central Avenue. Just behind the stand, however, is a larger trailer in which he bakes all of his products. Those products include breads, rolls, savory items, and sweet goods. Most of his products use butter, cream cheese, cheddar cheese, or ranch dressing, but his Basic Bread is just that, flour, water, sugar, salt, and yeast. I have had some difficulty figuring out what time of day to stop by but this morning he finally had loaves of bread, and some hamburger buns made from the same recipe, so I bought a loaf and a pack of four buns.

When I got back I started working on another article for Bus Conversion Magazine. A little over a year ago I installed an RV-Critter Guard to seal around the shorepower cord and water hose where they enter the utility bay through the floor. I took a few pictures during the installation and have had the article on my “future” list ever since. By the time Linda got back from her walk I had the article mostly finished and was starting to look at the photographs.

She had stopped at the Salvation Army store, which was open, to use their facilities and ended up buying a grocery bag full of clothes for $1. Not $1/item, $1 for the entire bag. Most of the items were tagged with color codes indicating prices of one or more dollars each but they had too much inventory and needed to move some product. They told Linda that when that happens they have their $1 bag sale. Deal. She called Butch and Fonda to let them know and I think they headed there before going to check the post office box and then stop at the post office if needed.

Linda cooked a couple of our Boca vegan mock hamburger patties and served them with fresh sliced onion, lettuce, and pickles on two of the buns I had just purchased. Not an entirely WFPB meal, but very few of our meals are. Still, we try to get as much plant-based whole foods as we can every day.

Linda went for a second walk after lunch and headed down Central Avenue towards the Kuehn Street markets. She is so fond of her 5.5″ Hammer Stahl Santoku knife that she wanted to buy the 3.5″ paring knife if Cutlery by LeClaire had it for sale as an individual item.

While Linda was gone I finished working on the photos for my RV-Critter Guard article. When she returned from her walk she had both the Hammer Stahl 3.5″ Paring Knife AND the 3.0″ Birdsbeak Paring Knife. As we learned the other day from an Alton Brown video paring is actually a technique in which food is held in one hand and a knife in the other; no cutting board is involved. Paring knives are generally smaller with a shorter blade and most of the weight is in the handle, allowing very fine control of the cutting edge and tip.

The Birdsbeak is a particularly interesting and unusual knife. The bottom/cutting edge is slightly concave rather than convex like the classic chef knife. The bottom edge joins the top edge in a point with a shape that resembles certain types of curved bird beaks. In use, the knife is often held stationary and the food is pressed or turned into it, such as decorative peeling, pitting of fruit, or slicing strawberries. Linda is often reluctant to spend money on herself so I think it’s nice that she found something she wanted and made the decision to buy it. Like any high quality tool it will make the work it is designed to do easier and more enjoyable.

While I was uploading my article to our Dropbox Linda went outside to sit. Barb wandered over and I mentioned that the DSL wireless Internet gateway had quit working. She let me in the trailer where I found it sitting on the dining room table. I powered it off, waited 60 seconds, and powered it back on. All of the status lights came back on in the expected sequence and I was once again able to connect our WiFiRanger Mobile Ti to it. We ended up standing by their Country Coach Intrigue motorhome and having a long chat.

Butch and Fonda were gone for most of the afternoon so we only got to chat for a little while when they returned before the sun dropped behind the southwestern mountains and the temperature dropped along with it. Linda and I talked about going out to dinner, which we have only done once since we got here, but she remembered that we had a FedEx package scheduled for delivery today and that it might arrive as late as 8 PM. So we had leftover soup with crackers and sangria. This was the third and final meal we got out of this pot of soup and it was good to the last drop. It was a packaged mix but Linda thinks she can recreate it; getting the spices right will be the tricky part.

After dinner I read DSLR reviews on the Digital Photography Reviews website and continued to look at gauges and sending units for the bus. Around 8:30 PM I was having trouble staying awake but by 9 PM I had gotten my second wind and decided to write another short article for BCM. This one was on the failure of Butch and Fonda’s main engine air-compressor on the drive down, how he dealt with it on the road, and eventually ended up installing a rebuilt one here at our campsite in Quartzsite. I had the article written by 11 PM and decided to work on the photos tomorrow.

Sunset envelopes our coach as Linda prepares dinner.

2015/01/07 (W) Catch 22

My main pair of reading glasses broke yesterday; not the lenses or the frame, but one of the nose pads. Well, not the actual pad, but the small plate and mounting loop, specifically the mounting loop. I was cleaning them and the whole assembly fell out. The loop was split and had opened up. The loop was a very small and delicate piece of ductile metal so I squeezed it back into a circle. I removed the very tiny retaining screw, reinserted the mounting loop, and put the screw back in. I was able to do this using only the tools available on my Leatherman. The repair did not hold and it fell out again last night. This time a piece of the loop broke off so the only repair will be a new mounting pad if I can find one. There is a Wal-Mart in Parker that probably has an optical shop but I don’t know how universal this mounting system is.

I checked the level of the floor and counter in the kitchen last night and the coach appears to have settled slightly on the driver side. Not a lot, but enough that I can feel it and it registers on the level. I generally have to start the main engine and build up full air pressure in order to level the coach but I thought today would be a good day to finally pull the portable air compressor out of the car and see if the leveling system will work without the main engine running. As it turned out that did not happen today because we ended up driving to Parker, Arizona.

Our destination in Parker was the Wal-Mart. The store did not have an optical department but we found an eyeglass repair kit in the pharmacy area with a pair of screw-in pads and a pair of snap-in pads. They also had a repair kit with a tiny screwdriver, spare screws, and other parts. Between the two kits I was able to install a new pad in the car to replace the broken one. That saved us a trip the optical shop in town.

Parker sits on the Arizona side of the Colorado River which is the boundary with California. We decided to drive across and then take CA-62 over to US-95, follow it south along the River back down to Blythe, and then take I-10 back to Quartzsite. Butch called while we were in Parker to let us know that there was a Farmer’s market at Desert Gardens. It operates on Wednesdays from 8 AM to noon so we did not make it back in time but resolved to go in future weeks.

I worked on my “roadside repair” article for BCM while Linda went for a walk. Jim and Barb had gone to Blythe to buy a new faucet and Jim L. stopped by and helped Jim B. install it. They borrowed a caulk gun from us (we carry two in the bay) but had to go buy caulk. UPS showed up with yet another package for us, after which we had a long conversation about the inadequacies (incompetence) of the U. S. Post Office in Quartzsite. (The UPS driver told me that both UPS and FedEx have extra drivers and trucks delivering into Quartzsite during the peak season. What a novel idea.)

Back to the post office. We are waiting for a shipment of two bottles of water hardness test strips that we ordered through Amazon but were shipped via USPS by a swimming pool supply company in Elkhart, Indiana. I gave them the P. O. Box here in Q since the post office does not deliver mail to street addresses and it appears that they will likely get returned to the sender rather than delivered to us. The root cause of the problem (and it is a problem) is that Joe and Connie are having their mail forwarded to their home in Nevada. If their names are not on the mail the post office won’t put it in the box, but if their names are on the mail it still does not get put in the box, it gets sent to Nevada. So as of now the box is sitting there but cannot be used; a genuine “catch 22.”

Fine, we will just use General Delivery. The problem with that (and it is a problem) is that you can only pick up the GD Mail at the Quartzsite post office between 11AM and 1 PM, and there are untold numbers of people trying to do the same thing. That means ridiculously long lines and ridiculously long waits. Considering that the influx of seasonal “residents” to Quartzsite has been going on for over 30 years the postal “service” has had ample time to figure out how to handle the situation. I mean, Amazon practically runs its holiday operations with seasonal employees, many of whom are RVers. Gee, I wonder if there are any RVers around Quartzsite this time of year. While the post office is trying to figure out how to not deliver our mail we have two more UPS shipments scheduled to arrive on Friday.

Linda made a zoodle dish for dinner. She used her SpiraLife to turn a zucchini into long thin strips which she cut into 6″ lengths and then used like spaghetti in the dish. The other ingredients were onions, garlic, mushrooms, asparagus, and green beans. Everything got sautéed in a pan with a little olive oil, salt, and pepper. We had a glass of Lamb’s Valley Organic Sweet White wine and it was a lovely meal.

After dinner I put the finishing touches on my BCM air-compressor repair article and e-mailed it to Butch to proof-read. The only thing worse than writing an article that makes me look stupid is writing one that makes someone else look stupid, especially a friend.

I had an e-mail from Gary, the publisher of BCM, letting me know that the December 2014 issue was finally available online. I downloaded both the SD and the HD versions. I then clipped the cover from the SD version, pasted it into MS Paint, and saved it as a JPEG file. I opened it in Faststone Image Viewer, resized it to a thumbnail, and sharpened it. I then edited the BCM page on our website, adding the thumbnail image, the title of my article, and a brief description. I have a similar entry on that page for every issue in which I gave had an article, starting with the February 2013 issue. The December 2014 article was my 14th in 23 months.

The last glow of this sunset reflects off the passenger side of our motorcoach in Quartzsite, AZ.

2014/12/21-25 (N-R) The Holidays Arrive

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2014/12/21 (N) Winter Solstice

Linda was reading an interesting tidbit online this morning about the winter solstice, which occurs today in the northern hemisphere. It usually occurs on the 21st, like today, but occasionally slips into the 22nd. While it is the day of the year with the least hours of sunlight (between sun up to sun down) it is not the day with the latest sunrise (which occurred a couple of weeks ago) or the earliest sunset (which does not occur for a couple of more weeks). Why is that? Axial tilt, elliptical orbits, and a “day” that is not exactly 24 hours. Science is fun.

Today was a stay-at-home / stay-in-town day for us. Linda vacuumed the coach and mopped the floor tiles. She says she likes to do this once a week to keep the cat hair under control. By “likes” I think she means “needs.” She also decided to do the laundry. When we are at our house the laundry is usually my chore but for some reason, to which I am not privy, she takes over this chore when we are living in the RV, at least initially. The same thing happened last year at Williston Crossings RV Resort, although we eventually both did laundry until I was able to win back my rightful chore. So far again this year it has been her self-selected task here at Quartzsite and I have not gone out of my way to reclaim my rightful place as master of the laundry.

What I did instead of laundry was spend the morning finishing our 2014 Year-in-Review holiday letter. Linda proof read it and then I converted it to PDF and did a final check of the layout to make sure the text and photos had not shifted or been clipped. I copied it to a flash drive so we can take it someplace in Blythe tomorrow and have it printed.

The other day I noticed that the manifold pressure sensor (turbo boost) on Butch and Fonda’s 6v92 was mounted vertically on the front passenger side of the ECM. I could not see exactly how it was mounted, however, so today I finally looked it up in the DD 92 Series manual. I did not attempt to reattach our sensor module today but I was curious to see what would be involved. I also continued to interact with other Prevost owners on the Prevost Community forum regarding the turbo boost issues and the dashboard gauge, which does not have the correct scale for our engine. That thread has led to a dialogue about the SilverLeaf systems, including the VMSpc that we have, and an alternative system from RV Tech Tools that uses an iPad app named “RV Dash” and a wireless (WiFi) interface named “CANpod” from Cubix Labs.

With our various chores done we had a light lunch of chickpea salad on a bed of mixed greens and then went for a long walk. The walk took us down Washington Ave. and then over to Kitsap Ave. to see a gorgeous Adobe house that Linda had discovered on a previous walk. That led us to the backside of the west-central “vendor” (flea market) area on the north side of Main St. We are not collectors, and we are not into antiques, guns, rocks, jewelry, or junk, so we saw very little that interested us. We did see a few pieces of Pyrex, which our daughter and son-in-law were collecting at one time, and I am always on the lookout for a good deal on a tool I can’t live without, but mostly we saw endless quantities of stuff that we could not fathom anyone buying.

We crossed Main Street and visited the Tyson’s Well Stagecoach Stop Museum. The grounds and building were open, admission was free, and it was unattended. There were items for sale and if we had wanted something we would have put the money in the collection box. That’s small town.

We headed east on Main Street and crossed back to the north side using the crosswalk at AZ-95 (Central Ave.). We then continued east and stopped at the Road Runner Market. We were pleased to find that they had a small but good selection of fresh produce. On our way out the door the florist gave Linda a red and white carnation. We will definitely be doing some of our local grocery shopping there. We knew there was a restaurant/bakery on the far east end of Main Street so we kept on walking. Sweet Darlene’s looked like a nice local place for a home-cooked style meal, but did not have anything on the menu we could eat. The bakery turned out to be a small display case with pies and sweet rolls, but they did not make their own bread, so we won’t have any reason to come back.

By this time it was getting to be late afternoon, the cloud layer had thickened, and it was getting a bit chilly so we headed back towards Central Avenue. We counted laundromats along the way, and passed at least four before getting back to our coach. Not that we need a laundromat—we have a laundry where we are staying—but with all of the boondockers in and around Q it is a matter of some curiosity to us how/where they take care of things like this. By the time we got back to our coach we had walked just over five miles.

Sunset over the Dome Rock Mountains due west of our encampment.

By 5:15 PM the sun had slipped just below the mountains to our southwest and the sky started to glow pink for 360 degrees around us. The sunset went on for over 30 minutes, the pinks deepening to reds. And then, just like that, the color was gone and darkness enveloped the valley.

For dinner Linda made a simple green salad with raisins and peanuts. She then heated up some vegan re-fried beans, pan-grilled a package of fajita vegetables she got from Connie before they left, and then heated two tortillas. We each made a tasty roll up, adding some salsa and vegan sour cream. She washed some black seedless grapes and set them out for desert. They were very refreshing after the somewhat heavier and spicy main course.

2024/12/22 (M) Compressed

We had planned on driving to Blythe, California today but those plans changed fairly early in the morning. Butch got an update that his air-compressor was on a UPS truck in Blythe and scheduled for delivery today. I had promised to help him with the installation and provide a few tools he did not have with him so we decided to stick around camp. We were also waiting for Connie’s realtor, Carolyn, to come by and pick up two yellow Post Office slips.

Linda took her morning walk after breakfast while I downloaded the October and November issues of Bus Conversion Magazine in both standard- and high-definition. I was really glad to finally see these issues. The October issue included my article on our T. F. Hudgins Spinner II Centrifugal By-pass Oil Cleaner project. That was my one remaining article waiting to be published. I have at least a half dozen in process, at least that many more for which I have taken photos (and written blog posts), and a very long list of future projects, so it’s time to get the next batch of articles ready to submit.

When Linda got back I drove to the print/copy/fax/pack/ship/etc. store on east Main Street to see if they could print our holiday letter. They had plain 8.5×14 white paper, and the photos looked OK, but it was going to cost $4 per letter ($2/side) so I paid for the one copy and left. They suggested that I try Weeks Printing in Blythe (20 miles west) or Staples in Lake Havasu City (70+ miles north). Since we will likely head to Blythe tomorrow we will check out Weeks first.

As long as I was out I stopped at Barry’s Breads and bought a couple of fresh “rolls” which were really small loaves of bread. Barry runs a little seasonal bakery out of a temporary vendor stand on the northeast corner of Central Avenue (US-95) and Kuehn Street. Most of his products have butter or cream cheese as ingredients—his Danish pastries are as big around as a dinner plate—but he does make just plain bread and everything is made fresh daily. Back in camp Linda called Weeks Printing and they quoted $1.25 for each 2-sided letter. Much better. We will check them out when we make it to Blythe; probably tomorrow.

For lunch Linda made a batch of her scrumptious chickpea salad/spread and served it on one of the rolls I bought at Barry’s. After a week of cloudy skies, cool temperatures, and a little rain we finally had a day with clear, sunny skies and the high temperature up into the 70s. Butch decided to remove his defective air-compressor and there wasn’t anything we could do to help (or stop him) so we decided to clean some more of our coach exterior. I wanted to work from the top down, which meant starting with the roof. That, in turn, meant getting out the Little Giant convertible extension/step ladder and setting it up as a 14 foot extension ladder. In this configuration it extends beyond the top edge of the roof at the front, making it safer for me to get up on the lower roof area from the driver’s side.

Rinsing down the roof of the coach (photo by Linda).

The roof was very dirty and it appeared that we might have more than just embedded dirt to deal with. The roof has a sprayed-on ceramic-infused white coating with a surface akin to medium grit sandpaper. It reflects sunlight and provides a nice nap for walking on, but also traps dirt. The last time the roof was cleaned was in early April, just before we left Williston Crossings RV Resort. I had been on the roof subsequent to that, in our pull-through driveway at home, using it as a platform for trimming tree limbs. I do not recall it being unusually dirty at that time, but I was focused on other things. If it had been, I probably would have washed it, but maybe not; I was focused on other things.

I used a little bit of Dawn dish soap in several gallons of water and our soft, long handle, brush to try and scrub it clean and then rinsed it with softened water. It was better by the time I was done but far from 100% clean. I also scrubbed all of the metal awning covers and then hosed them off and rinsed the awning fabric. When I was done on the roof I sprayed off all four sides of the bus, but even with the softened water it left spots and streaks. Another unfortunate side effect of this work is that it frightened our male cat, Jasper, who ended up hiding behind the steering column in an attempt to escape the sights and sounds of a ‘monster’ on the roof.

We would like to get the body clean but there’s no point doing anything until I get the roof finished (Linda does not climb ladders and she does not get on the roof of the bus.) At a minimum I am going to have to use a stiff scrub brush and a stronger solution of Dawn dish soap, or perhaps a commercial cleaner that can treat mold/mildew along with just plain dirt. We will then have to do the vertical surfaces in small sections, scrubbing, rinsing, and drying as we go. We have a sprayer for our hose that has a small bottle for additives and one of the reasons I bought it was to try using a dishwasher rinse aid, like Jet Dry, to see if it would eliminate spotting. To-date, however, I have not tried that.

The old Bendix Tu-Flo 700 air-compressor out of Butch & Fonda’s MC-9. The governor is the silver thing on the left. The open port on top is the air discharge where the unloader valves are located.

Once Butch had the old air-compressor out of their bus he turned the input shaft and noted that the pistons were not pumping air. This confirmed that something had failed internally and ordering a replacement was the right thing to do. There wasn’t much else to do so we all sat around in the warm sun and waited for the UPS truck to show up, which it finally did around 3:45 PM. We (me, Linda, and Fonda) suggested that Butch wait until tomorrow to start installing it, but we knew that was not going to happen. The compressor was a significant road failure that had bugged him since it happened and he was anxious to get it fixed.

The new (re-built) Bendix Tu-Flo 700 air-compressor with the old spline and new port plugs.

The Bendix Tu-Flo 700 he received is designed specifically for mounting on Detroit Diesel 92 series 2-stroke engines but has more ports on it than are typically used in this application. Making sure to match the configuration of the old compressor, Butch installed new plugs in the unneeded ports. He then removed the fittings from the old unit one at a time and installed them in the new one, being careful to line them up exactly the same way. I helped by holding the compressor on a work table while Butch tightened the pipe threads. This was the easy part of the project as we were standing at a tall bench with plenty of room to work and good light.

The new air-compressor with fittings. Note the alignment marks for orienting the fittings correctly. The spline is in the upper left of the photo.

The hard part was getting the air-compressor re-installed. Butch eventually got it onto two of the four mounting studs, which then took the weight. We discovered a clearance issue with one of the port plugs and he had to pull the compressor back out. He removed a plug from the old compressor, which did not stick out as far, and reused it in the new compressor. With the compressor back on the studs it now lined up better but the spline would not engage the drive gear on the end of the engine camshaft. He put a wrench on the crankshaft pulley nut and turned the engine slightly by standing on the end of it while I jiggled the air-compressor.

The “governor” mounted on the new compressor.

The spline eventually engaged the engine gear and the air-compressor gear enough that Butch was able to fully seat the flange and insert/tighten the four mounting studs, lock washers, and nuts. Per the instructions, he reconnected all of the lines except for the air discharge and called it a night. The coolant goes back in tomorrow and Butch will then start the main engine to make sure the compressor works, check for leaks, and let any contaminants get blown out the discharge fitting. If everything looks good he will attach the discharge line, which connects the outlet port of the air-compressor to the coach air system, and air up the bus.

The new air-compressor (blue) mounted on the rear of the engine block (towards the front of the bus).

The new air-compressor (blue) mounted on the rear of the DD6V92TA engine block (towards the front of the bus) in Butch and Fonda’s MCI MC-9B NJT.

At least we were successful in convincing Butch to wait until tomorrow to put the coolant back in the engine. By the time we finished working, put our tools away, and got cleaned up it was 7:30 PM and had been dark for two hours. Linda reheated the leftover fajita fixings and we had open-faced tortillas with Fritos corn chips, salsa, black grapes, and Sangria. We were both tired so we relaxed for a while after dinner and then went to bed.

2024/12/23 (T) Blythe, CA

We got a call from Connie right after breakfast letting us know that the two packages Carolyn picked up yesterday were for us and Butch. We needed to pick them up before 11AM as Carolyn had an appointment at that time. Linda was headed out for her morning walk anyway so she walked to Rock Reality, near the post office and uptown drugs, to get the packages from Carolyn. (Carolyn is Joe and Connie’s realtor.) She dropped off the two P. O. Box – Mail Pickup Notice cards at the post office while she was there.

Our package was from Madeline (Brendan and Shawna), to be opened on Christmas Day. Butch’s package was the unloader valve kits for our Bendix Tu-Flo 700 air-compressors. He ordered them while we were in Forest City, Arkansas for delivery to Amarillo, Texas but they did not arrive in time so his friend forwarded them to our Quartzsite location.

Butch and Fonda used most of the morning to put the coolant back into the engine. Our buses, which still have their over-the-road heating systems, hold a lot of coolant. Ours requires 34 gallons. The buses are not identical, but I suspect theirs requires at least 30 gallons. And it is very important that the cooling system is filled to capacity and has had all of the air purged out of it. It’s a big, messy job.

They got as much in as they could by standing on a ladder and pouring it through a funnel into the filler tube for the surge tank. The radiators on the MCI MC-9 are located above the engine, one on each side wall at the rear of the bus, and the surge tank is located above them, so the filler tube is approximately 9 feet from the ground. Butch started the engine to warm it up enough for the thermostat to open and to circulate the coolant and opened a couple of bleeder valves to let air out. He also checked the outlet fitting on the new air-compressor to verify that it was pumping air. It was (hurray!), so he shut the engine off, attached the air line to the outlet fitting, and started it back up. The chassis air system (suspension and brakes) came up to pressure and the air-dryer “sneezed” (momentarily opened its purge valve) so the system was fully operational.

We planned to go to Blythe, California today and Butch and Fonda wanted to go too, so he shut off the engine and they cleaned up their campsite. We were sitting in our coach when the winds came up rather strong. Linda checked the weather and the winds were out of the north at 20 MPH and forecast at 22-25 MPH until 6 PM. That was strong enough for us to retract our awnings, close our roof vents, collapse our folding chairs, and stow our patio mat. Butch and Fonda also retracted their patio awning and stored all of their outdoor equipment and furniture. We had the old patio awning on our Itasca Sunrise torn off by strong (thunderstorm) winds while we were away from the motorhome and have been extra careful about awnings and wind ever since.

With all of that done we headed to Blythe in their Chevy Suburban. From 879 feet ASL in Q we climbed to about 1200 feet ASL over the low mountain range that separates the two valleys, and then descended to 240 feet ASL as we crossed the Colorado River and entered California. A few miles later we took the 7th Street exit and we were there. The 20 mile drive was only five more miles than the trip we made from Williston Crossings RV Resort to the Publix grocery store (at the southwest corner of Gainesville, Florida) last winter, so it did not feel like a long way to go for groceries. At home we have supermarkets about five miles away in three different directions. Butch and Fonda typically drive into Logansport for their groceries, a distance of 12 miles, so we are all used to traveling some distance to purchase our food.

The Smart & Final Extra and the Albertson’s were on the NW and SE corners of 7th and Hobsonway, just north of I-10, making them especially convenient for us, so this is where we will likely shop every other week or so. But our first destination was a few blocks farther west on S. Main St. where we found Weeks Printing. They were eventually able to access our flash drive and open the PDF of our holiday letter. They had a high quality paper in 8.5”x14” size, and were able to print our letter 2-sided on a good quality color laser printer for a very reasonable price of $1.25 per letter ($0.625 per side). They did not take credit cards so we paid cash, but it saved us a 73 mile trip (one way) to Staples in Lake Havasu City.

Self-portrait of the blogger. I am merely a reflection of my former self.

At the Smart & Final Extra we bought fresh produce, soy milk, and some bulk, canned, and packaged items. They did not carry the Silk brand soy coffee creamer that I like, and there were a few items Butch and Fonda needed that the store did not have, so we drove across the street to Albertson’s and got those items. I stayed in the car with the groceries, but I already knew that the Albertson’s would be a nice store based on our experience with the chain in Sheridan, Wyoming during summer 2013. With our shopping done we returned to Quartzsite.

I carried the groceries from the car to the bus and Linda stored them, discovering that she had an empty tub available in the cabinet above the refrigerator. By the time she was done it was approaching 4 PM so she prepared chickpea salad sandwiches as a quick, light lunch and then announced that we should go for a walk before it got dark. She let me chose the route so we crossed Central Avenue (AZ-95) and walked to the city park, which has a very nice baseball field with lights and the only grass we have seen in Quartzsite. There was also a skateboard facility, a football field, and two F4 Phantom jets (minus the engines and other equipment). The Quartzsite Metal Detecting Club (QMDC) has a practice field adjacent to the park. The park is located near the following municipal facilities: Community Center and Library, County Court, Police Station, and Post Office Annex (where most of the P. O. Boxes are located). The Fire Department is a little farther north on Tyson Wells Street just east of Central Avenue.

The sun was getting near the tops of the mountains to our southwest so we headed pack to our coach and settled in for the evening. For dinner Linda made a barley risotto with garlic, shallots, mushrooms, sun-dried tomatoes, vegetable both, and seasonings. While she was cooking I got a call from my dad and got him caught up on our whereabouts and activities. The risotto was excellent and we each enjoyed a glass of sangria with our meal.

I don’t know if we are just relaxed, or really tired after a hard summer and fall, but we have both been going to bed earlier and waking up later than usual. Or perhaps it is just the effect of fresh air and sunshine. Whatever the reason, it’s nice to be able to just sleep when that is what we feel like doing and get up when we are read.

We have an excellent Verizon signal here in Q. Linda often likes to pace up and down Lollipop Lane while talking on the phone. If you lived on Lollipop Lane you would too.

2014/12/24 (W) Christmas Eve

It’s Christmas Eve and we woke to a temperature of 37 degrees, clear skies, light winds, and no snow. The forecast high for today was 66, with no snow. Do I miss snow at the holidays? Not really. At one time (high school) I considered myself something of a “romantic” in the sense that I liked the classical music of the romantic era, but I am not particularly nostalgia. If I was, we would own a restored 1957 Chevy; red, of course. No, we had snow at home before we left and as a harbinger of things to come we took it as a sign that our departure was overdue. Christmas in the desert will be a new experience for us, but so far it looks very agreeable. We will miss being with family, of course, but we are not alone here and technology keeps all of us much more connected than it once did.

Having been to Blythe yesterday we did not have any last minute shopping to do today. The desert was there yesterday and will be there tomorrow (I presume) so we did not have to see it today. With the holidays upon us I did not feel like working on bus projects. Linda started addressing the envelopes for our Year-In-Review Holiday Letter and then worked on food preparations for tomorrow’s dinner with Butch and Fonda. It seemed like a good day for me to finally start catching up on some things that I have not had time for in a while. For instance, I need to work on articles for Bus Conversions Magazine, update our bus project list/status, update our website, upload some blog posts (OK, a LOT of blog posts), and catch up on the blogs I follow using the Feedly app on my iPad. I am way behind on all of these tasks and starting to feel some pressure about it, albeit self-imposed. I do not have to do any of these things if I don’t want to, of course, but they are activities that I enjoy and want to do. Still, being way behind takes some of the fun out of it and makes it a bit more like work. I won’t get caught up in one day or one week or even one month; it will take many weeks of persistent effort.

After checking e-mail, I settled in to work on my article about the exterior renovation of our motorcoach. Michele Henry of Phoenix Paint helped me finish the article in early October but I still needed to select and caption all of the photos. While I worked on that Linda walked to the Road Runner Market and managed to snag the last 3-pack of yeast. When she got back she made her orange cranberry relish for tomorrow’s dinner.

We took a break for lunch and then Linda headed out for her daily power walk. When she got back she continued addressing envelopes for our holiday letter. Just as I was feeling like I needed a break, Butch knocked on the door to let me know he was working on a small project that might interest me. He had already burped the coolant lines that supply heat to the living area of their bus when driving and gotten the last of the coolant into the system. His new project was getting an alternator driven tachometer connected and calibrated.

It turned out that he needed positive DC power to the tachometer in addition to the ground and RPM signal. He was able to temporarily pick up 24VDC from the positive terminal of the starter, found a convenient ground point, and picked up the rotational speed from the stator terminal on the back of the alternator. With the engine running at low idle he measured the RPM of the main crankshaft pulley using an optical sensor instrument. It was just over 600 RPMs so he adjusted the tach via a set screw on the rear to match the reading. He kicked it into high idle and measured the rotational speed as 950 RPM. That is what the tach displayed within the precision of the markings. He already has a signal wire run from the engine compartment to the cockpit but needs to mount the tachometer in a separate bullet housing, connect the wire on both ends, and provide positive and negative (ground) DC to the instrument. He decided not to take on that project today.

(Note: RPM is universally understood to be an abbreviation for “Revolutions Per Minute” but that is not necessarily correct. An object such as the pulley on the end of an engine crankshaft rotates about its own axis, just as the earth does, and has angular velocity which is properly measured in rotations per some unit of time or angular displacement per some unit of time. The abbreviation is, of course, still RPM. In the case of the pulley, however, Butch put a small piece of white tape on the face of the pulley at the outside edge to act as a target for his optical sensor. If we consider the piece of tape as a separate object then it does, indeed, revolve around the center axis of the pulley, just as the earth revolves around the sun. Viewed thus way, revolutions per minute is technically correct. As with many things in physics, it depends on your frame of reference. So much for today’s physics lesson.)

This building houses (L-2-R) the laundry room, the apartment, and a small workshop at our compound.

As long as I was outside I borrowed Butch’s metal detector and went in search of a couple of tie downs that Joe told us were buried somewhere near the outer edge of our patio awning. I knew they were lined up with a reference mark on one of the concrete patio slabs and it did not take long to locate and uncover them. We put a couple of medium-sized rocks on top of them so we could relocate them easily.

We got several multimedia messages from our son today with pictures of our grand-daughter at our daughter’s house helping make cookies. Brendan, Shawna, and Madeline are spending the night and Katie is joining them tomorrow. Butch and Fonda will spend most of the day at the local church Fonda selected, including a carry-in (pot luck) luncheon, but will have dinner with us around 6:30 PM.

I finally returned to our coach and worked on my article about the Zena power generating system I installed to charge our house batteries while driving. Again, the article was mostly finished a long time ago, but I could not submit it until I completed the installation, got the system operational, and took a few more photos. All of that happened in October and November but I was too busy with other projects and preparations to pull it all together at that time. I had a couple of e-mails today from Gary, the publisher of Bus Conversion Magazine, indicating that the December 2014 issue might not be out until early January 2015, and wondering if I might have a finished article they could use.

For dinner Linda made a salad of dark mixed greens with raisins, nuts, and pear slices drizzled with raspberry walnut vinaigrette dressing followed by pan-seared tofu slices with caramelized onions and bar-b-que sauce served open-faced on hamburger buns. We split a Sam Adams Pumpkin Spice Ale. I am not a big fan of ales or pumpkin but beer seemed like the right beverage for this dish. It was OK, but I would have enjoyed a Yingling or Shiner Bock more.

I made good progress on both articles today. I got an e-mail from Mike, the editor of BCM, wondering if I had a finished article. The ZENA article was close enough that I decided to finish it and upload it to our Dropbox before going to bed. I e-mailed Mike back to let him known it was there and offered to finish the other one by the end of the weekend.

Earlier in the day I updated our personal WordPress site to the just released version 4.1 and updated several plug-ins and themes. My last task before turning in for the night was to replicate the update process on the other three sites I manage. By the time I got to bed it was Christmas Day.

2014/12/25 (R) Christmas in Q

The wind came up strongly overnight and we were awakened by the rattling of the vent fan domes. From our north facing bedroom window we could see flags and the tops of trees blowing briskly in the wind. We could also hear and see the awnings on the south/passenger side of the coach flapping. Linda checked the weather channel app on her iPad and it reported winds at 20 MPH. We were not expecting winds that strong until the daytime and they were strong enough for us to be concerned about our awnings. By that point we were wide awake so we put on our sweatpants and shirts, slipped on some shoes, found a set of keys, got the step-stool out of the front bay and the awning rod out of the folding chair bay, retracted the two awnings, returned the rod and step-stool to their respective storage compartments, and finally went back to bed.

Linda got up at 6:30 AM in order to start making cinnamon rolls from scratch. I usually get up first and make a pot of coffee but I was up past midnight working, so I slept in for another hour. The yeast she bought yesterday wasn’t cooperating so we turned on one of the Broan ceramic cube heaters to try and create a warmer and more consistent environment to get the dough to rise.

We borrowed Butch and Fonda’s Verizon MiFi (unlimited data plan) so we could Facetime with our children and their families, who were gathered at our daughter and son-in-law’s house. We got to watch all of them open the presents we left for them when we were there on Thanksgiving and they got to watch us open the gifts they sent with us or shipped to us here in Quartzsite.

Brendan, Shawna, and Madeline (son, daughter-in-law, and grand-daughter) sent a 2015 Shutterfly Calendar with photographs of all the different family members placed on the dates for birthdays, anniversaries, and such. We do not need much at this point in our lives, but a collection of photographs that also reminds us of the people and dates that are most important to us is something we appreciate and treasure. Meghan and Chris (daughter and son-in-law) bought us each a genuine Tilley hat. I have known about these hats for a while but never bought one. Given our outdoor oriented RV lifestyle, these were excellent gifts.

After we were done with our Facetime session Linda took the cinnamon rolls over to the apartment to bake since it has a range with an oven. She will finish cooking dinner there later and the four of us will eat there this evening as it has a table that will seat four people.

The apartment bedroom.

In spite of early indications to the contrary the cinnamon rolls rose and baked just fine. The dough used flour, salt, vegan butter, yeast, and flax meal with water (egg substitute) and a little sugar. The filling was made with brown sugar, vegan butter, cinnamon, and maple syrup. The topping was a glaze of sugar, water, and vanilla with raisins and chopped walnuts. Linda took two of them over to Butch and Fonda and we had some for breakfast still warm from the oven. It’s a good thing that these are as much work to make as they are or I might want them for breakfast every day. 🙂

Linda had a call and TXT message from her sister (Marilyn) and sent a reply. She was on her way to her housemate’s family gathering and they agreed they would talk later today. She also sent merry Christmas TXT messages to her sister-in-law, Mary, and good friend, Diane. At noon our time (1 PM CST, UTC-6) I called my sister to wish her a happy holiday. Her daughter, grand-daughter, and future son-in-law had already been there in the morning as Ryan had to work that afternoon.

I made a second pot of coffee, which is unusual for us, but we planned to spend the day lounging around the coach cooking (Linda) and working on the computer (me). Linda cleaned up the breakfast cookware, poured another cup of coffee, and started working on the chocolate cake for tonight’s dessert. With the cake prepared and in the apartment oven she turned her attention to making the candied yams. Once those were done the only thing left to do was bake the Tofurkey, roast the asparagus, and heat the gravy. It was a lot work for her but it was spread out over two days and she enjoyed, and did it, willingly. We could have gone out for dinner if she wanted, even though we would not have found much we could eat, but I am glad she preferred to cook.

Once I wrapped up the conversation with my sister I got back to work on the Outside Makeover (Exterior Renovation) article. Although I thought I was done writing I made a few more edits and selected additional photos. By 5 PM I had 74 photos selected and placed in sequence to match the flow of the article. I had also done as much of that work as I cared to for the day.

We were down to 1/4 tank of fresh water so I decided to refill it. About that same time Linda decided it was chilly enough in the apartment that she wanted the propane space heater turned on so I shut off the water and took care of that. The heater had a hose that went through the wall at floor level to the outside with a regulator and POL fitting on the end of it. I found a couple of 20 lb. propane tanks in the workshop and connected one of them to the regulator. It took a while but I eventually got the pilot flame to light and then got the heater to ignite. I then went back and finished filling our water tank.

The little apartment is very cute with three rooms: a bathroom on the east end, a bedroom on the west end, and a kitchen/dining/living room in the middle. It has a shower, a 4-burner electric range with an oven, a refrigerator/freezer, a small microwave oven, the aforementioned space heater, a small window air-conditioner, a small TV/monitor with a satellite receiver, two easy chairs, a small dining table with four chairs, and a queen sized bed. Marilyn is seriously considering coming for a visit the last week of January and if she does she will stay in the apartment and get to experience Quartzsite.

Linda starting to set the table in the apartment for Christmas dinner. No pictures of Butch & Fonda (they are camera shy).

We bought a bottle of Sternthaler Nurnberger Christkindles Gluhwein spiced red holiday wine at Central Market in Fort Worth, Texas to serve with our Christmas dinner. It is a mulled wine that is supposed to be gently heated before serving, but we found it quite agreeable straight from the refrigerator. About 20 minutes before dinner time we set it out on the counter to warm up slightly, the space heater doing a very effective job heating the small apartment even on its lowest setting.

Linda and Fonda both contributed dishes to the meal and Fonda made a couple of things that we could eat. They brought chicken and traditional mashed potatoes for themselves but also tried some of the Tofurkey roast. Linda made a vegan chocolate cake for dessert and whipped refrigerated coconut milk solids to use as a whipped cream substitute. Our daughter did this for the Thanksgiving meal and we really liked it.

We sat in the apartment for a long time after dinner and just talked until we were all tired. Linda and Fonda had already cleaned the dishes so we turned off the propane space heater and carried all of our stuff back to our coaches. Linda put the leftovers away while I did a final check of my e-mail for the night. I then shut my computer off and we headed to bed. Like so many things in our retirement RV lifestyle, this Christmas holiday was a new and good experience.

The Phase Place

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Tag Archives: Barry’s Breads (Q)

2015/02/24-28 (T-S) Bus Projects

2015/02/07-11 (S-W) In and Around Q

2015/01/8-14 (R-W) Q 2015 W2

2015/01/01-07 (R-W) Q 2015 W1

2014/12/21-25 (N-R) The Holidays Arrive