Tag Archives: Itty Bitty Carrot Cake Cookies (WFPB)

2014/05/03 (S) Ham It Up

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

2014/04/06 (N) A Vegan Farewell

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Ali had this idea earlier in the week that a nice way to send us off would be with a pot luck dinner at their site.  The only catch was that all the dishes had to be vegan!  Our new friends have expressed some curiosity about the way we eat, and apologized for serving dishes at previous pot lucks that we could not eat, but I don’t think they anticipated actually having to eat any of it.  I think they were initially apprehensive about the vegan pot luck dinner but they were good sports about it and took it as something of a challenge.

At last count it looked like we might have 12 people there and half dozen dishes to choose from.  Linda decided to make the Sloppy Joe’s she served at our open house back in October.  The 60 people who showed up wiped them out, so we know they are something non-vegans will enjoy.  One of the reasons for her grocery run to Gainesville yesterday was to get the Textured Vegetable Protein (TVP) that serves as the hamburger substitute in this recipe.  She normally buys Bob’s Red Mill brand but Publix, in spite of having a large selection of BRM products, did not have the TVP.  That required an extra stop at the Earth Origins market where she found what she needed in the bulk food section.

Our major focus today, besides the pot luck dinner, was getting the coach (and us) ready for travel.  It had only been moved back and forth about 3 feet a few times since we pulled in to site 439 at WCRVR on January 1st, so the engine oil and tire pressures needed to be checked.  We also wanted to leave with all of our clothes clean, so my first chore of the day was doing the laundry while Linda made the Itty Bitty Carrot Cake Cookies.  The laundry takes an hour and 45 minutes to do.  The cookies took most of the morning.

The old adage “a place for everything and everything in its place” is more than a goal when living in an RV; it’s a necessity.  Still, over the last three months some things have come out of storage and stayed out because we used them on a regular basis.  It was now time to return them to their travel locations.  While Linda straightened up the interior of the coach I checked the engine oil and coolant and re-packed part of the front cargo bay.  When we pull out tomorrow everything has to be stowed and the dining table, counters, and end tables cleared as anything loose in the coach can slide and get broken or become a projectile in an accident.

With the housekeeping chores out of the way Linda turned her attention to preparing the Sloppy Joe’s.  The recipe is from the “Hell yes it’s vegan!” website and claims to be the original/authentic recipe with the exception of the TVP in place of the hamburger.  It uses ketchup instead of tomato sauce; sweet yet sharp from the vinegar.

John took the final reading on our electric meter this morning and turned it in to the office.  The Sloppy Joe’s were on their own for the next three hours so Linda walked over to pay our final electric bill and return the mailbox key.  Sometimes it’s the little things, like giving up a mailbox key, that most underscore the reality that your status somewhere has changed.

We have recently been unable to connect Linda’s computer to our network via WiFi, which meant she could not access the NAS where I store photographs and the files related to our website and blog.  We have had the same issue with our wireless network at home and got around it by using an Ethernet connection.  I was looking for a charging/data cable for my Palm Tungsten T-3 when I “discovered” that we had network cables on board.  We plugged her laptop into the Amped|Wireless router and voilà; there was the network and the NAS.  She was able to quickly back up files going back to mid-March.  I have been holding off deleting photographs from the Compact Flash cards until I had them on the NAS and on her computer.

By mid-afternoon the coach was in pretty good shape for travel and the Sloppy Joe’s were slowly cooking to perfection in Ali’s slow-cooker.  John escorted a trailer to the site on the other side of theirs, and Ali was already sitting outside, so we took that as an opportunity to give them a card and small gift; our way of saying “thank you” for being good neighbors, making our evenings at the fire pit memorable, and bringing us in contact with a larger circle of friends at the resort.

We had a chance to sit outside and read for a little while.  Around 3:30 PM Linda starting taking the various components of our contribution to the pot luck dinner next door to John and Ali’s site.  We took our four Zip Dee chairs and settled in with a couple of glasses of wine to chat for a few minutes before everyone else showed up around 4PM.  Jim (Sunny Fox) Rowley came down and had a drink with us but did not stay for dinner.  He and Janet had just returned from a week at Disney World and were very tired.  Everyone brought their own libations.  The mood was mellow, the conversation was good, and the food was spread out buffet style.

And what a spread we had!  Linda provided the Sloppy Joe’s and buns as well as the cookies.  Ali and John provided green salad, grilled bread with bruschetta topping, a citrus and strawberry fruit salad, and meatballs (for those who could not bear the thought of not having meat with their meal).  Jeff and Kathy brought a vinegar-style Cole slaw.  Charles and Sandy brought a couscous and black bean salad.  Doug and Paulette brought a potato and vegetable salad.  Jack and Silvia brought fresh cantaloupe with walnuts.  Every dish was outstanding and, being mostly cold dishes, perfect for a very warm spring afternoon.  The only other times we have had that kind of selection of vegan dishes was on our two Holistic Holiday At Sea cruises and at our open house last October.

As dusk set in the party broke up.  We lingered a while to chat with John and Ali, but the mosquitoes and other small insects were numerous and persistent, and we finally had to retreat to our respective RVs.

The very last task before we pull the coach out of the site tomorrow will be to drain the waste tanks, top off the fresh water tank, and stow the various hoses, electrical shoreline, and water softener.  Once we have the bus out of its parking place we will find an out-of-the-way spot, hook up the car, and be on our way.