Tag Archives: Sloppy Joes (WFPB)

2015/07/19 (N) Another Buddy Visit

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Linda was up at 6:30 AM to get showered before Madeline woke up at 7 AM.  Once Madeline was up they got busy right away making vegan blueberry pancakes.  I was up at 7:20 AM, got a quick shower, and was dressed and seated at the table just in time for breakfast.  The pancakes cooked especially well this morning although I would like to try them sometime without the blueberries cooked in.  After we were done eating I made coffee while Linda and Madeline prepared vegan sloppy Joe’s in the crock pot for lunch.

Mara has been getting up when she feels like it and eating breakfast by herself.  By 9 AM she was outside emptying the passenger side storage bays on her motorhome.  She spent the rest of the morning going through the stuff she had removed, deciding what to keep, organizing it, and putting it back.  I gathered up our laundry, sorted it, and started a load.

Aunt Meghan (our daughter) and Uncle Chris (her husband) arrived at 10 AM and I brewed another pot of coffee.  This was the second buddy visit of Madeline’s stay (the first was Cousin Katie on Friday).  Meghan provided a lot of child care during Madeline’s first 18 months and Madeline adores her “buddy.”  She took Meghan on a tour of the house showing her where various things, like snacks and kitty cats, were to be found.  It was a sure sign that Madeline is finally feeling very comfortable at our house.

Having other adults around gave Linda a break and some time to finish preparing lunch, although once Madeline realized Grandma Linda was at work in the kitchen she had to help.  I went out around 11:45 AM to fetch Mara.  We all sat down at noon and enjoyed a simple but delicious meal of vegan sloppy Joe’s (based on textured vegetable protein aka TVP), corn on the cob, raw baby carrots, and black grapes.

Madeline had very busy days yesterday and the day before and got up a little tired this morning so by 1 PM she was more than ready for her nap.  Meghan and Chris had things to do and took their leave.  Mara went back to work on her rig and Linda laid down for a nap.  I tended to the laundry and then went out to work on our bus and Mara’s motorhome.

I used the Speedout set to try and remove the screw with the stripped head from the stop block on the passenger side fixed glass frame.  I was not successful with this tool so I switched gears and worked on Mara’s cell phone booster system.  I climbed on the roof and she handed me the 12″ x 18″ thin galvanized sheet steel plate.  I took it to the front of the roof, set it down on the fore-aft centerline, and positioned the 4″ magnetic mount antenna in the center.  I dropped the coax over the edge by the driver’s side window and climbed back down from the roof.

Mara opened the sliding side window and screen by the driver’s seat and I passed the coax in to her.  Inside the rig we positioned the amplifier on the driver’s seat and started experimenting with various positions for the inside antenna.  We found one that worked well and left it for her to try.  I checked the laundry and then laid down for a nap.

I skipped dinner as I had a SLAARC meeting at 6:30 and had to leave before 6 PM which is when Madeline was having her evening meal.  Our ham radio club meetings start with social time from 6:30 to 7:00 PM.  The meeting was called to order at 7 PM by president Harvey (AC8NO) and I agreed to act as recording secretary.  Linda was not able to attend because she was taking care of Madeline so I gave the treasurer’s report in her absence.  The meeting adjourned at 7:10 PM.  We reconfigured the room for the program which was a presentation and debrief of our recent field day activity.  Larry (K8UT) reported on the N1MM Logger Plus networked computer logging software.  Steve (N8AR) reported on the radios and antennas and conducted the debriefing.

I got back home before 9 PM.  Madeline was asleep and the ladies were each enjoying a glass of Pinot Grigio on the back deck.  I poured one for myself and joined them.  The mosquitoes eventually appeared and we retreated indoors.  I reheated the bowtie pasta from the other night and finished it for dinner.  We said “good night” at 10 PM after which I checked e-mail and websites and then headed to bed.  I wrote for a while before turning out the lights.

 

2014/09/13 (S) Overnight Guest

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Linda’s sister, Sister Marilyn, called a couple of days ago to let us know she would be in the Detroit area on business this weekend.  She wanted to know if we could fetch her this afternoon and if she could spend the night at our house?  The answer was “of course,” of course.  Her flight out wasn’t until Sunday evening, so Linda put the gears in motion and arranged a brunch with the local family for 10 AM tomorrow.

Being Saturday, we went to our ham radio club breakfast in South Lyon.  Before leaving our neighborhood we drove to the other end of the street (dead end with turn-around) to see where the gas hookup crew left off yesterday.  We knew they were working down there today because we saw the trucks leave sometime between 5:30 and 6:00 PM last night.  There’s a chance they will be back today and we wanted to see how close they were to connecting our house to the main line.  It looked like they had quite a few houses to do ahead of ours, so we went to breakfast.

We got home around 10:30 AM to find a crew working in our yard trenching in the branch line to our house.  I was told yesterday they were going to bore it in, so something obviously did not get communicated.  Not only that, they were running a 5/8″ line, which was way too small for the 425 meter we are supposed to get.  I stopped the crew and the guy in charge pulled out his paperwork.  It had “425” written on it big letters, but the drawing showed a 5/8″ line.  He agreed that the 5/8″ line was way too small for that meter and that we should have 1.25″ line.  They pulled the little bit of line they had already run out of the ground, raked out some of the dirt they had already trenched, and moved their machine across the street to trench our neighbors yard.

We were lucky we got home when we did.  They had already cut through some tree roots that did not need to be disturbed and would have torn up a lot more of our yard unnecessarily if I had not interrupted their work.  They were nice about it, but I still found it troublesome that I had spoken to two different supervisors face-to-face about this, one as recently as yesterday, but this crew showed up and did something different than what I had been told, and agreed, would be done.

I was finally going to try to remove the fogged window from the bus today, but we had a lot of rain overnight and woke to overcast skies, temperatures in the upper 40’s, and a forecast high of 57 degrees F with a strong chance of rain through mid-afternoon.  That was not the sort of weather for removing a window from a vehicle parked outside.  Besides, with Marilyn arriving mid-late afternoon I did not want to work on anything messy and then have to get cleaned up.

Linda looked up the kitchen ranges we had been considering.  The GE 30″ 5-burner double-oven convention model (JGB870DEFWW) was on sale again at Lowe’s for $180 off MSRP and we would get another 5% off the sale price by using our Lowe’s credit card.  If we ordered it today delivery would be September 27, longer than I would like, but it is what it is.  We have to order this range because Linda wants a white one to match all of the other appliances in the kitchen and the appliance stores do not tend to stock white ranges with the features we want.  I called our local Lowe’s store and confirmed the free delivery and take away of our current range.  Installation is $20 plus a new flex gas line for $30.

I called TOMTEK HVAC and got hold of Tom.  He seemed put off by the fact that I have someone else doing HVAC work at the house and will have the natural gas already tied in when he comes to convert the main house furnace from propane to natural gas, but he said he would check with Weil-McLain on Monday about what parts he needs to do the conversion.  While on the phone with Tom he suggested that we try D. R. Electric Appliance Sales and Service in Howell for our new gas range.  We looked them up on the web and got their (incorrect) phone number and hours.  I got the correct number from 411 before I realized that it was also on their website.  They closed at 2 PM on Saturdays, so we didn’t make it there today, but I called and got an answering machine, left my name, number, and the reason for the call.  Curt called me back a short time later.  I gave him the model number and he said he would call G.E. on Monday.  He said he had been holding off ordering G.E. appliances waiting for Columbus Day sale pricing.  He figured he would have the range three days from ordering and could probably install it at the end of the week or early next.  They charge $25 for installation and haul away, and $25 for the new flex gas line if we need one, so it’s the same $50 as Lowe’s.  (Lowe’s assured me that they were REQUIRED to install a new flexible gas line.)  That all sounded good depending on the price of the range.  Getting it sooner has some dollar value to us, we’re just not sure how much.

I stayed home while Linda went to Meijer’s for groceries.  Finding the crew in our yard this morning doing work they were no supposed to be doing spooked me enough to not want to leave the house unattended the rest of the day.  As long as I was stuck at home, I called Bratcher Electric to give them a heads up that the gas connection to the house was imminent.  Being Saturday I got their answering machine and left a message.  I also called Darryll at DCM Heating & Cooling and left a message regarding the gas connection.  Once the meter is hung and connected everything else depends on Darryll getting his piece done first.

We checked the website for Country Squire Fireplace and Lighting in Howell and saw a 10% off coupon, so I printed that.  I wanted to go there today and buy a set of high-efficiency vent-free natural gas fire logs but it will probably be tomorrow afternoon instead.  These logs are more efficient than a typical kitchen range and are designed to be used with the fireplace flue closed, throwing most of the heat they produce into the room instead of up the chimney.  Darryll said he would hook it up for us and add a shutoff valve when he came back to tie in to the gas meter, so we need to have it here before he comes back next week.

Marilyn called and said their flights were running a little behind schedule and that Linda should pick her up around 3 PM rather than 2:30 PM as originally planned.  She called back again and said 3:15 PM would be better.  Linda got back from the grocery store and we had a quick lunch of leftover Sloppy Joe’s.

With overnight lows in the 40’s, highs only in the mid-50’s, and the connection of our natural gas somewhat imminent, we decided we could afford to use propane to heat the house.  We have been conscious of our propane use because we did not want to get in a position where we needed to have either of the tanks filled.  I turned the furnace on and set all the thermostats a few degrees above ambient to take the chill off.

While Linda drove over to Lake Orion, Michigan to fetch Marilyn I decided to work at my desk selecting photos for gallery posts on the garage/HVAC project and natural gas work, and worked a little bit on the websites for the FMCA Great Lakes Converted Coaches and Freethinkers chapters.  I really need to have the GLCC site usable in the next three weeks and the FTH site within a month of that. That sounds ambitious even as I write it down and I suspect it won’t happen.

Linda and Marilyn got to the house around 4:30 PM and after we got Marilyn settled in her bedroom we just sat and relaxed and talked for a while.  We thought she might appreciate a good home-cooked meal but we ended up taking her to LaMarsa for dinner.  She had the Koshary, which we had last night, and we split an order of garlic almond vegetable Ghallaba with green salad and crushed lentil soup.  We all ate way too much pita bread with garlic spread and were uncomfortably full by the time we finished our meal, but it was delicious and we did not have to prepare it or clean up afterwards.

These days twilight now comes around 7 PM and it was dark by the time we got home at 8 PM.  I made a pot of decaf coffee and we settled in the living room for a long chat.  I set the thermostats back before we turned in for the evening as all three of us prefer to sleep in a cool room.

 

2014/09/10 (W) A Functioning Landline

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The Ibuprofen/Tylenol mix did the trick and I slept comfortably through the night.  Twinges were just starting as we were waking up, so breakfast was two zucchini muffins, half of a banana, and 800 mg of Ibuprofen, washed down with orange/grapefruit juice.  Linda went for a walk after breakfast as it was supposed to be rainy most of the day.

I spent part of the morning selecting and re-sizing photographs from the Arcadia Bus Rally 2014, uploaded them to a folder in our Dropbox, and e-mailed the link to Brenda Phelan who runs the rally with her husband Bill.  She had put out a request on Facebook for photos if anyone had them.  I did an article for Bus Conversions Magazine on that rally shot over 700 photos, so yeah, I had a few.

I registered us for an RVillage Ambassador webinar later today on the new mobile app, and then came upstairs to have lunch.  We enjoyed the vegan Sloppy Joe’s Linda had made, along with some vegan baked beans (canned) and store bought apple sauce.  It had been raining lightly for a while and the intensity increased while we ate, but it fell straight down with little to no wind.  The radar loop on Wundermap (Weather Underground) showed that we were in the leading edge of a large fetch of moisture that would likely train over our location for several hours and that is, in fact, what happened.

I took a short nap.  I rarely do that, but I always enjoy it when I do.  I worked the rest of the afternoon at my computer editing blog posts and finally getting around to selecting and processing photos to go with some of them.  I had called Kerry Fear this morning regarding snowplowing this winter and he stopped by the house around 3:45 PM to meet with us.  He lives nearby and plows our neighbor’s driveway, which is how we got his name.  We agreed to hire him for the season on a handshake; no contract or pre-payment.  He will send us a bill every now and then and we will pay it.

Linda made creamed corn for dinner and served it alongside vegan Sloppy Joe sandwiches and fresh strawberries.  Again, a soft, easy on the teeth, meal that was very tasty.

The RVillage webinar started at 7 PM EDT and lasted 45 minutes.  They wanted feedback on this latest development by Friday so they can finalize it for general release.  I continued working on photographs for the blog and installed a set of updates on our Linux box before calling it quits for the evening.  Linda had started watching the first episode of Sherlock from last year so I watched most of it with her.  Much to our disappointment Doc Martin has disappeared from Amazon Instant Video as part of our Amazon Prime account.  We can still get it, but we would now have to pay extra.  As much as we like the series we are not going to pay extra to watch it.

It spite of the rain today, we made and received a number of phone calls on our AT&T landline and were online through our DSL connection quite a bit, including streaming the episode of Sherlock, all without noise or service interruptions to the best of our knowledge.  We are hopeful that our AT&T service is finally restored and will continue to operate reliably.

One of the calls was from Chuck letting me know that Matt at Bob’s Speedometer Service had tested his VDO bus speedometer and found it to be broken and not repairable.  Chuck ordered a new one through Matt, who will take care of programming the odometer with the current mileage.  Once it comes in and Chuck verifies that it works I will likely be ordering one for our bus since ours has failed in the same way as Chuck’s.  I could go ahead and remove ours and take it in, but I have lots of other things to work on a figured it made sense to wait and see how this works out for Chuck.

 

2014/06/27 (F) Family Finances

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Linda H. was up very early to go to work.  We would not have heard her get up and leave if not for the three dogs, which make quite a ruckus anytime someone comes or goes from the house.  Marilyn, Linda, and I got up a few hours later and had toast and coffee for breakfast.  I worked at my computer until 9:30 AM when we had to get ready to leave for an 11 AM appointment with our financial advisor.

We have worked with John Christensen for at least a decade.  We first met John at A. G. Edwards when my parents’ stockbroker decided to leave and John was assigned to handle their accounts.  We liked him right away and ended up moving all of accounts there, including accounts for our children.  My sister and Marilyn eventually opened accounts with John as well.  A. G. Edwards was an excellent local brokerage that unfortunately got absorbed by Wachovia.  Wachovia ultimately failed and the remnants were acquired by Wells Fargo Advisors.  John and his administrative assistant, Maggie Smith, had an opportunity to move to a new office being opened by Stifel-Nicholas in O’Fallon, Missouri and our family moved all of our business to S-N along with them.

We usually manage to make at least one trip to the St. Louis area each year, often around this time, and we always try to arrange a meeting with John if our schedules permit.  We arrived at 11AM, talked for an hour and then walked to Bristol’s for lunch.  Maggie joined us, which was great.  We have interacted with her for as long as we have worked with John, but do not know her as well on a personal level.  We got to know her a little better today.  Linda and I both had a grilled vegetable platter with asparagus, mushrooms, red and green bell peppers, and sliced green tomatoes.  They were some of the best restaurant vegetables we have ever had.

We returned to John’s office around 1:00 PM and spent another couple hours going over reports, plans, and projections before finely making a few decisions about our portfolio.  All told we were there for four hours.  I don’t know if that’s typical for financial advisors, but we appreciate that John has extensive reports prepared when we arrive, has already developed recommendations, and takes the time to go over everything with us.  Most of our financial interactions are easily handled by phone and secure e-mail during the year so having our financial advisor three states away is not a problem, especially as John and Maggie are real people with whom we have a real, face-to-face, relationship.

By the time we left the afternoon rush hour was well under way.  St. Louis is a midwest city with east coast ties.  Normal business hours here are 8 AM to 4 PM which corresponds to 9 AM to 5 PM in New York.  Kansas City, Missouri, only 240 miles west of St. Louis on the Kansas border, is a decidedly more western city, and the southern part of the state, which borders Arkansas, Tennessee, and Kentucky, is decidedly southern.  We fought our way back to Illinois through stop-and-go traffic and by the time we got back to Glen Carbon Ron and Mary had arrived from Pennsylvania.  Linda H. got home from work not long after we arrived and Mike and Clayton arrived not long after that.  They live and work in St. Louis area.  Linda, Marilyn, and Ron are siblings and Mike is their nephew.  Their other nephew, Rick, was unable to attend.  Marilyn had spent the afternoon making vegan Sloppy Joe’s.  For dinner we had a nice summer meal of green salad, Sloppy Joe’s, and chips, followed by Linda’s vegan double chocolate torte, accompanied by white and red wines.

By the time we finished dinner, wine, and conversation we had all had a long day.  For us it was a day of family finances and family.  When we finally went to bed we did not even watch an episode of Doc Martin.  As an aside, today was the SLAARC pre-setup for the ARRL Field Day event.  The main setup will be tomorrow morning and the operating event begins at 2 PM EDT.  It is the single largest, and most public, amateur (ham) radio event of the year.  We are missing it for the second year in a row because family comes first.

 

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.

 

2014/04/07 (M) Big Wheels Keep On Turning

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The boots may have been made for walking, but the wheels were made for turning and it does not make much sense (to us) to own a motorhome and not use the motor to move the home around at least occasionally.  Checkout time at Williston Crossings RV Resort is nominally 11 AM.  We were planning to leave by then, but a call to Suncoast Designers at 9 AM caused us to push our departure time back.  They suggested we not arrive until about 4 PM to make sure we had a place to park with hookups.  That put our departure time target at 2 PM.  We walked up to the office to make sure this would be OK.  It was; we have been here a long time and been good residents, and no one was scheduled to go in to “our” site today.

Given some extra time we had not planned on, we went for one last, long walk around the RV resort.  How different it looked and felt.  The resort is turning over from long-term winter/seasonal use to short-term summer/vacation use and there were many empty sites.  Eighty-nine rigs left yesterday.  Many were Carriage 5th wheels that were part of the 70 rig Carriage Travel Club rally that was here all last week.  But some were winter seasonal residents who have been dribbling out since April 1st and will continue to do so into May.  We were not the only rig pulling out today.  Our other neighbor, Sharon, is leaving this coming Sunday.  A few rigs were pulling in, of course, but the departures currently exceed the arrivals on any given day.

When we returned from our walk I mixed up a batch of the concoction we use in the waste holding tanks (48 oz PineSol, 48 oz water, 1cup Calgon).  I dumped the black-water tank and back-flushed it, followed by dumping the grey-water waste tank.  I ran additional water through the drain hose and then disconnected the hoses and fittings and stowed them for travel.  I reconnected the water softener and filled the fresh-water tank.  Once that was done Linda helped me disconnect, clean, and stow the fresh water hoses and the water softener.

We tend to forego coffee and breakfast on travel days, but had a little of both this morning as we were not leaving right away.  Because of the delay in our departure we did not have lunch.  To pass the time I continued with travel preparations.  The last time I had the coach batteries connected I noticed that the Pressure Pro TPMS (tire pressure monitoring system) was not reading one of the sensors (PS outside drive tire).  We have a repeater for this system that I plan to install in the rear of the coach someday, but for now it gets attached to the rear view mirror of the car.  I took care of that task and then decided to move the car up onto the patio next to passenger side of the coach.  I left the ignition on to power the repeater and connected the coach batteries to power the TPMS receiver.  After a few minutes all of the tire sensors were active and the tire pressures were OK for travel.  I disconnected the coach batteries and put the car back in front of the coach.

At 1:30 PM we started our final travel preparations, clearing off the counters and moving stuff from the cockpit to the sofa, the bed, and the bedroom floor.  At 1:45 PM I shut off the 240/120 VAC electrical power to the coach, disconnected the shoreline, and stowed it in the slide-out tray over the DS drive tires.  I installed the screw-in cover for the utility port hole in the bay floor, and closed/locked the bay.  I then checked the Magnum 4024 to make sure it had switched to inverter mode, which it had.

Once the shore power is cut we seem to develop an increased sense of urgency about leaving.  I think this is due, in part, to the fact that I do not have the ZENA power generator operational yet, so our house batteries do not get charged while we are driving.  That’s OK, up to a point; the battery bank was designed to be large enough to run the inverter and power reasonable loads for a reasonable length of time.  But the sooner we leave, the sooner we arrive, and the sooner we arrive, the sooner we can plug back in to shore power.  We have an auxiliary power plant, of course, so we always have the option of using that if needed.  The other reason we are probably anxious to leave is more psychological.  Once we are completely disconnected (physically) we are become disconnected mentally, although not necessarily emotionally.  We are no longer “tethered” to that spot, and that means it is time to go.

I connected the chassis batteries, fired up the engine, and set the level low system to the driving position.  While Linda moved the car to street I drained the auxiliary air tank using the nice dry air from the main engine air compressor.  With John’s assistance we got the coach out of the site and lined up on the street.  Linda pulled the car up behind the coach and we went through our procedure for hooking it up to the tow bar.  We did our standard light check and found that the turn signals on the car were not working.  A quick check of the connectors on both ends of the cable revealed a socket on the car end of the cable that was corroded.  I used the awl on John’s Swiss Army Knife to clean it up.  A recheck of the lights indicated that everything was working.  After a final “goodbye” with John and Ali we were on our way.

Our departure delay meant we would be traveling SSW into the sun at the hottest part of the day.  The air temperature was 85 degrees F when we left, and the engine ran slightly hotter than usual, indicating just above 195 degrees F on the coolant temperature gauge, so I decided not to run the coach air conditioning.  The drive to Hudson was warm, but not unbearable.  A cold front was approaching the gulf coast of Florida so we had increasing cloud cover as we progressed south and west towards the coast, which helped keep the cockpit from getting too warm.

We had a nice run from Williston to Hudson.  We headed south out of Williston on US-41/US-27/FL-121.  US-27/FL-121 split off to the west a mile south of town, made a sweeping turn to the left and then followed a nice straight line SW for 17 miles to its southern terminus at US-19.  This stretch of FL-121 is straight but hilly.  With the cruise control set the engine is very sensitive to hills.  I always know we are on a grade, however slight, by the reaction of the turbo boost gauge and the pyrometers.

Most of the rest of trip was on US-19 except for the last three miles.  Traffic was light until we got to Crystal River, which had slower speed limits, lots of stop lights, and lots of vehicles on the road.  It opened up a bit after Homosassa Springs, but got congested as we approached Weeki Wachee where FL-50 ends at US-19.  From Weeki Wachee to just north of Hudson traffic remained slow and congested with increasingly dense commercial use on both sides of the road and stop lights every mile.  Just north of Hudson we turned east onto Little Road, which immediately swung south, and followed it for about two miles to New York Avenue, where we turned west and went another mile to Labor Place, the location of Suncoast Designers.

The coach ran fine, although the Check Engine Light came on almost immediately and was on more than it was off for the whole trip.  That did not surprise me as we had not done any work over the last couple of months to fix the fuel temperature sensor voltage problem that is apparently setting a fault code in the DDEC II.  I had hoped that the repairs we made in the dashboard wiring harness would fix the speedometer/odometer problem, but they did not; the gauge sat on zero for the whole trip.  The left pyrometer (exhaust gas temperature) gauge, however, was much more responsive and tracked the right pyrometer gauge much more closely than it ever had before.  It appears that the wires we repaired were for this gauge rather than the speedo/odo.

Once we pulled in to Suncoast Designers we pulled to the side of the road, so as not to block traffic, and unhooked the car.  While Linda parked the car I found the office and checked on parking arrangements.  Suncoast Designers has at least a dozen RV sites with water and 50 A electric hookups.  The only one open was a somewhat tight spot between two other large Class A motorhomes that required me to back in.  The maneuver was made more difficult by the fact that the road in front of the sites had a curb on the far side and was not wide enough to allow me to swing the front end without scrubbing the front tires.  I repositioned the coach so that I was turning in from the driver’s side, but Linda and I could not figure out how to get the coach into the site.  The guy next to us on the driver’s side offered to help.  A former truck driver, he knew exactly what to have me do.  Unlike some RVers, our pride is not injured by not knowing how to do something, and we gladly accepted his help.

I pulled past the site close to the front of his rig and then turned out to the passenger side, putting the coach at an angle to the open site.  He had me back part way into the front of the site at that angle and then turn the steer tires full left to start to bring the coach around.  He had me stop and then turn the steer tires full right and pull forward.  Steer tires full left again and back up some more, then full right and pull forward. We repeated this one more time and finally had the coach lined up straight and centered between the coaches on either side without having hit either one!  Linda was keeping an eye on the back of the coach the whole time (to make sure I did not hit anything) and guided me into our final position.  We then leveled the coach and shut the engine down.

The outside air temperature was only in the upper 70’s, but it was 90 degrees F in the coach and the outside humidity was high.  In spite of having nine windows that open, the three ceiling vent fans are not very effective at cooling down the interior under such circumstances.  In theory we can run all three air conditioners on a “50 A” shore service, but we have tripped breakers before when doing that.  (The issue is that circuit breakers are commonly designed to only carry 80% of their rated current on a continuous basis, so two of our A/C units plus a little bit of miscellaneous load can exceed 40 A on one of the legs.)  Besides, as soon as I plugged in the Magnum 4024 was going to switch to charger mode and start recharging the house batteries.

I got the shore power connected and checked the Magnum 4024.  It went into bulk charging mode and started charging the house batteries at 86 Amps. Since it is a 24 VDC charger, it was drawing ~1/5 that much AC current, or ~17 A, the equivalent of one of our air conditioners.  The front (living room) and center (kitchen) A/C’s are on separate legs of the 240/120 VAC power supply, so we can run them at the same time.  The bedroom A/C is on the same leg as the front A/C and the Magnum is on the other leg.  We ran the front and center A/C’s along with Magnum and let the bedroom stay warm for the time being.

Suncoast Designers provides free WiFi for customers camped at their facility, but the signal we thought was theirs indicated it was “filtered” and we had not obtained the login information from the office before it closed.  We used our Verizon MiFi instead and had a good, strong signal.  I had a chance to ask our neighbor (helpful truck driver guy) later, and he said the open signal was the one they were using.  Although it was a weak (one bar) “g” signal, our WiFi Ranger latched on to it without difficulty.

Linda needed a few grocery items and located a Publix grocery store on Little Road less than three miles from Suncoast Designer’s.  As evening settled in we switched off the front A/C and turned on the bedroom unit.  Linda reheated some of the leftover Sloppy Joe’s from the pot luck dinner the night before, and we had that on the skinny buns we have started using, along with a simple spinach salad and a few Fritos corn chips.

After dinner Linda sent e-mails to several of our new friends from WCRVR while I checked in to RVillage and took care of a few e-mails of my own.  The overnight temperature was forecast to only drop into the upper 60’s with high humidity, and with rain starting before sunrise, so we decided to leave the rig closed up and the kitchen and bedroom A/C’s on all night.  We rarely do this because of the noise and because we prefer fresh air, except when it is too warm and/or too humid.  Considering that we had traveled less than 100 miles and been on the road just under two hours today, we both felt like it had been a very long day.  As much as we enjoyed the social life at WCRVR, it was nice to not have anything to do but go to bed and get some rest.

 

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.