Sunday September 1^st found us at our son and daughter-in-law’s house for a Labor Day family pot luck along with our daughter, son-in-law, and step-grand-daughter.  Grand-daughter Madeline handled the crowd pretty well, but still was still wary of Grandpa Bruce, so I had to be content with mutual admiration from a distance.  She is starting to crawl and pull herself up to a standing position, and is fascinated by books, especially ones she can try to eat.

We awoke Monday morning (Labor Day) to overcast skies and the threat of rain.  We had planned to drive to Middleton Berry Farm near Ortonville to pick raspberries and decided to go in spite of the weather.  Ed and Betty, our RV friends, were working/staying there and we had said we would try to stop by.  The rain never materialized and the overcast skies made the picking experience more pleasant.

Neither of us had ever picked raspberries, or anything else other than apples, pumpkins, and Christmas trees.  We enjoyed the experience, collecting 12 pints of fruit between us.  At $4.00/pint it seemed expensive until we checked raspberry prices at the grocery store and Door-to-Door Organics and saw them ranging from $5 – $6 for 6 ounces.  We didn’t weigh our pints, but Linda estimated that it would take three of the 6 ounce contains to match one of our pints.

It seemed appropriate that we were laboring on Labor Day, even though this is the one day of the year that labor typically doesn’t labor, but rather relaxes and celebrates importance those who labor and the work they do.  Although we have been sourcing fresh fruits and vegetables from local farmers markets when we can, it was very satisfying to personally harvest even a small portion of our own food from a living plant.  It also gave us an appreciation for those who do this kind of work for a living.  As we were checking out we also bought a fresh pepper and tomato.

When we got back to the house Linda washed, dried, and froze all put three of the pints of raspberries.  With that task initiated, we turned our attention to the pull-through driveway.  It had not rained for the past several days, and it was time for the BIG TEST.  We unplugged the electrical power from the bus, pulled the chocks, fired it up, and backed it out of the driveway and down the street, positioning it to drive in to the pull-through driveway.  Linda watched the tires as I drove in, and seeing nothing more than tread marks I brought in, across the pad, and out the other side, back on to the concrete driveway.  Success!!!

We inspected the pull-through driveway.  In some places there was no evidence that the bus had just been there, in others only tread marks, and in a few spots a slight channel of not more than 0.5 inches.  Phil had told me previously that compaction of up to 1 inch might be possible but would indicate that the driveway was finally locking together, so we were very pleased with the result.  I pulled the bus out and around again, but this time I tried to go back and forth over slightly different paths on the approach and then again on the parking pad area.  I did not pull the bus all the way this time, but got it lined up on the pad with Linda’s help and parked it with the entrance door opposite the front door of the house.

I e-mailed Phil Jarrell (Precision Grading) to give him the good news.  Phil has been an absolutely outstanding guy to work with, standing behind his work, and doing what was needed to fix what turned out to be a problem with the load of 21AA road gravel used in the project.  Besides building this pull-through driveway for us, he dug up and repaired our septic tanks and regarded an area in the back yard to help move water away from the area outside out basement doorwall.  We plan to eventually put up a bus barn to house the motorhome, and we plan to have Phil do the site prep, driveway(s), and final grading.

Linda spent Tuesday baby-sitting Madeline while I worked around the house, trying to clean up and arrange the ham shack/office and get all of the technology hooked up and working.  I made good progress, but I didn’t get it done.  It’s never done.  I took time out to have a long chat with my best friend from high school.  J. C. has lived in Olympia, Washington for years with his wife, Julie and their three girls, but we have managed to stay in touch.  He was my best man at our wedding and I was his best man at theirs.  In the early years we corresponded by letter with an occasional phone call, but that was in the days before cell phones and “unlimited local and long distance” plans.  Eventually it was by e-mail.  We tried instant messaging, but it doesn’t work well for me.  We’ve even Skyped once or twice, but it requires broadband to work well, and we don’t have that at the new house.  We’ve even had an occasional but all-too-rare face-to-face visit.  I drove to Ypsilanti to meet up with Linda and our good friend Kate de Fuccio for dinner.  Kate is a former colleague from my educational service agency days, the graphics designer for the agency and a very talented photographer.  She is also a kindred spirit traveler, excellent researcher, and perhaps the most considerate person I know.  We don’t see her enough.

Kate had suggested Nirmal Indian Cuisine in Ypsilanti and Linda had checked out their menu online, which has become standard practice for us.  Nirmal has several vegan dishes, and others that can be made vegan, so we agreed to give it a try.  They also serve chicken, but their specialty appears to be goat.  They place is a bit “preachy” about the health benefits of Indian food, but the way they do it is kind of innocently cute and we enjoyed that aspect of the place; it’s true after all, and we are sympathetic to the sentiment.  Most importantly, the food was excellent, and the staff was very attentive.  We had a leisurely dinner which was fine with us as it gave us lots of time to talk.  We adjourned to the Starbucks just up the street and continued our conversation.

Wednesday was errand day for us.  We picked out stain and paint colors for the rear deck, which Jim Pipoly is going to redo later this month.  Jim did all of the painting on our old house and new house.  He’s the only guy we use, and friends and family use him too.  When you find a good contractor you stick with them.  We dropped off old prescription and over-the-counter drugs at the Livingston County jail, where they have a special “no questions asked” collection barrel.  The Howell Recycling Center is only open on Wednesdays and Saturdays, so we stopped there.  We don’t have curbside recycling like we did in Farmington Hills.  We’ve been recycling for so long that it doesn’t feel right to throw things in the trash that can be recycled so we gladly paid the $22 annual membership fee.  We picked up some drawer cabinets for the office, a free-standing cabinet for the basement bathroom (which has no other storage), and unpacked the wine refrigerator and plugged it in.  We always seem to have just enough bottles of wine that they can’t all go in the regular refrigerator so they end up in the pantry where they take up space we need for other things.  They are not cooled, which is bad for storage, but even worse in terms of limiting our choices when we decide we want to open a bottle.  It’s one of those things I’ve always wanted and it just wasn’t that expensive.  I am now trying to figure out where the popcorn machine will go in the basement rec room.  After dinner Linda continued to work on finding an RV park/campground where we can meet up with her brother and his wife in October and I worked on configuring our e-mail SpamExperts and updating this blog.