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2016/03/12-14 (S-M) Middle of Nowhere Close to Everywhere

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2016/03/12 (S) J.A.P.

The temperature had only dropped into the mid-60’s last night and it was foggy when we got up this morning, but we knew the humidity was up because we could feel the dampness.  Speaking of dampness, the sprinklers came on last night around 3 AM.  We must have both been partly awake as we both heard the sound, which was unusual enough to get our attention.  The cats heard it too and were at the driver side bedroom window to check it out.  It got my attention because it sounded like rain and we had all three roof vents open, along with most of the windows.  Anything that sounds like water will wake me up.

Webster Flea Market and Sumter Co, Florida Farmers Market.

There was a breakfast in the clubhouse at 8 AM this morning, with food being served at 9, but we did not go.  It was $5 per person, but that’s a lot to pay for coffee.  Speaking of which, I opened new packs of our four coffee beans this morning, transferred them to the metal storage containers, and then brewed a pot of Sweet Seattle Dreams.

We talked over coffee about what to do today while we doodled on our iPads.  Linda had a list of six things we could do in Clermont and noted that there was a Farmers’ Market in Webster from 8 AM to 3 PM today.  We also had updates pending for our iPads and smartphones so she checked our Verizon data usage.  We had used 8 of our 12 GB with eight days left in our billing cycle, so we were on track to stay within our data plan as long as we used the resort Wi-Fi system to do our updates.

Linda served homemade granola with fresh blueberries for breakfast.  After breakfast she went for her morning walk and I dealt with a few e-mails.  When she returned from her walk we drove to the Walmart in/near Bushnell for a few things.  We were going to stop at the Farmers Market in Webster on the way back but there was only one small vendor there.  A little farther north on CR-471 we passed the Sumter County Fairgrounds.  None of the rides were operating, so we did not know if the fair was open.  We were thinking about driving over this evening to see everything lit up at night.

Back at FGMCR Linda made very nice salads for lunch which included asparagus and Cremini mushroom pieces that she cooked briefly.  Very tasty. After lunch we packed up our technology and went to the library in the clubhouse to download/install updates.

We each had four phone app updates, four iPad app updates, and one Windows 10 update.  I also had an update for the NVIDIA GPU in my computer so that made a total of 19 updates.  That was actually a small number compared to the 60+ we installed the other day.  Even so, at an average file size of 30 MB that was over 500 MB of data, so I figured we were over 0.5 GB but probably under 1.0 GB.  After the updates were done we spent a little time trying to configure our Windows 10 Start Menus.  We were annoyed to find that the Start menu configuration tab is missing from the “Task Bar and Start Menu Properties” dialog screen on both of our computers.  Arrrrgh.  I did, however, get a couple of icons to show up where I wanted them and we learned how to “turn off” the “live tiles” in the metro interface.  We wrapped up around 2:45 PM and went back to our rig.

After getting our tech tools peered up and connected to our network I took a nap while Linda stayed up and read.  Jasper (the cat) curled up with me on the bed and took a cat nap.  I got up at 4:30 PM and joined Linda outside where another beautiful day was in progress with cool breezes and perfect temperatures (in the shade).

For dinner, Linda made a salad with an arugula base, vegan Italian sausage, sun-dried tomatoes, garbanzo beans, onions, and yellow peppers.  After dinner we went for our evening stroll around the resort.  When we got back to our coach we each had a small glass of Moscato (Barefoot) and fresh strawberries for dessert.

A mobile ATM machine at the famous Webster Flea Market. Webster, FL.

The title of today’s post is not an ethnic slur or reference, it’s just an acknowledgment of our status here at Florida Grande Motor Coach Resort (FGMCR); “Just Another Prevost.”  Unlike our minor celebrity status at Big Tree Carefree RV Resort in Arcadia, where we were T.O.P. (“The Only Prevost”), there are quite a few Prevost motorcoach conversions at FGMCR, and most of them are newer, bigger, and nicer than ours.  And that is fine with us.

TV stations continued to be a challenge.  I moved the antennas to position 16, which is approximately the 8 o’clock position relative to the nose of the bus, and rescanned.  The front TV found over 70 signals and the rear TV found 56.  As with previous experiments, however, many of the signals were unusable and others were for stations from other directions that we should not even have been detecting.

What we need to do is to move both antennas to each of their 16 positions, rescan, and then check to see which channels are usable and write them down.  Signal patterns can be different at night than during the day, so we should repeat this procedure in the evening.  That would be 64 separate scans, but in an area such as where we are now, with stations in multiple, opposing directions, it would be the only sure fire way to know what stations are available and where point the antennas to tune them in.

2016/03/13 (N) Saving Daylight

We were being lazier than usual this morning and did get up until 8 o’clock.  During the overnight hours the nation switched from ‘standard’ to ‘daylight’ (savings) time.  There are a few places, most notably the State of Arizona, that do not change their clocks, but for the rest of us it was an hour later when we got up this morning than our clocks indicated.  Unless, of course, they happened to adjust automatically, like our smartphones, iPads, computers, Linda’s FitBit, or our GPS navigation devices.  These devices adjust the time based on an internal program, Internet connection, or GPS signal.

As much as I wanted to reset the other clocks in the rig (we have six that do not adjust automatically) Linda insisted that I make the coffee first.  I enjoyed most of my first cup while finishing yesterday’s blog post and then reset the manual clocks.  We have an analog RV clock (with hour, minute, and second hands) in the living room, the clock in the microwave oven, a digital alarm click in the house systems panel by the refrigerator, and an identical one in the systems panel on my side of the bed.  The Magnum 4024 ME-ARC remote has a clock in it, and there is a small digital clock/thermometer stuck on the dashboard.  (Which reminds me that I would like to install a round, gauge-style clock in the dashboard someday.)

Linda made a tofu scramble for breakfast with onions, mushrooms, garlic, sun-dried tomatoes, asparagus pieces, and turmeric.  She does not make this dish very often but it always a treat when she does.

Linda went for a walk after breakfast while I checked our driver side tag axle hub.  I called our mobile mechanic, Joe Cannarozzi, this past Thursday to discuss the high temperature alarm we got on the bus’s driver side tag tire while driving to Florida Grande Motor Coach Resort (FGMCR) from Big Tree Carefree RV Resort (BTCRVR) on Monday.  He suggested I check the back side of the wheel for oil leaks and pull the hub cap off to check the oil level of the axle hub.  I checked the back of the wheel the other night after it got dark but did not see any oil residue.  Pulling the hub cap was a daytime job, so I finally did that today.  What I found was that the oil level was just below the bottom of the fill hole, so the hub was properly lubricated and almost certainly not leaking.

As long as I was at it, I removed the TireTracker temperature/pressure sensor and checked the pressure in the tire with my gauge.  It was 85.0 PSI, which was reasonable, given that it was sitting in the sun (with the tire cover on) and I had set it a week ago to 82.5 PSI while it was cooler and in the shade.  It’s possible that the battery is almost depleted or that the sensor has malfunctioned, but I doubt it.  Since it is easier and cheaper to replace the battery we bought a couple of CR1632 3V batteries at Walmart the other day.  I unscrewed the cover, slid the old battery out, slid the new one in, and replaced the cover.  I put the sensor back on the valve stem and turned on the receiver but it did not pick up the sensor right away.  I will have to check the manual to see if I have to re-associate the sensor with the receiver.  I put the tire cover back on, put my tool boxes away, closed up the bays, and went inside to upload posts to the blog.

This guy was actually making ice cream with this old John Deere contraption. Webster Flea Market. Webster, FL.

While I was working, Linda returned part way through her walk to let me know that Nick’s R.V. Detailing & Pressure Washing was in the resort cleaning someone’s rig.  We agreed that we should hire them and she continued her walk in that direction.  When she returned she said that Nick had us on his schedule for Friday, March 18.  He has a regular job on Mondays through Thursdays and only works on RVs on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays.  We got a business card from him yesterday so I sent him an e-mail confirming the date and giving him our site number and my cell phone number.

Rather than rearrange our shower we went to the clubhouse and used the shower facilities there.  A music jam session was scheduled to start at 2 PM but there was also rain in the forecast for that same time.  We did not want to close up the coach so we decided to pass on the music jam for this week.

Back at our coach we had some orange and grapefruit segments, a few nuts, and a few pretzels with hummus for a lunch snack.  I was checking RVillage and saw that Curtis had posted several items to the RVillage Ambassadors group.  I commented on a couple of them and then private messaged him.  He and the team are very busy so I try not to bother him, but as often happens my message prompted a phone call.  Strangely, my phone did not ring and went straight to voice mail.  Perhaps it was because I had the Wi-Fi turned on, but I’m not sure.  I called him back and put the call on speaker so Linda could also participate.  There are a lot of interesting and exciting things happening with RVillage and we had a nice, long chat.

I had a text message back from Joe with instructions on how to check the driver side tag wheel for a dragging brake.  The procedure was simple and easily carried out because the tag axle is:  a) free wheeling, and b) can be lifted clear of the ground.  That means that all I have to do is start the engine, lift the tag axle, spin the wheels, and compared the drag on the two sides.  If the driver side does not spin as freely it means the brakes are rubbing more than they should.  (The disc brake pads are always lightly in touch with the surface of the brake rotor which keeps detritus from getting between the rotor and the pads, preheats the pads/rotor for more effective breaking, and shortens the reaction time before braking takes place once it is requested.)

The possibility of rain started rising at 1 PM as the clouds thickened and darkened.  It spritzed occasionally throughout the afternoon and into the early evening but never really rained.  I managed to upload blog posts for November 18 through 22.

For dinner, Linda made brown rice and broccoli with Dijon mustard.  It was simple but slightly creamy, which gave it a subtle quality.  It was very yummy.  After dinner we went for a walk around the resort.  The weather continued overcast with dramatic clouds to the north but all we got was a few raindrops and the temperature was very pleasant if a bit humid.  I suggested that we sit outside and have a small glass of wine but Linda informed me that the only wine we had onboard was a bottle of ice wine that we brought along for a special occasion.  Ice wines are very sweet and usually served as a dessert wine.  Every day is special for us, but this did not seem like the occasion to open a bottle of ice wine.  We doodled on our iPads while we watched reruns of a couple of TV programs and then went to bed.  There was a small chance of scattered rain showers overnight, but we left the roof vents open and two of the exhaust fans running.

2016/03/14 (M) Webster Flea & Farmers Markets

Linda was up early this morning (6AM) and decided to go for a walk at 7.  I got up closer to 8 AM and got dressed.  I did not make coffee and we did not eat breakfast.  On Friday Linda was reading about the Webster Flea Market and Sumter County Farmers’ Market.  The Flea Market is the oldest and largest in Florida which, along with the Farmers Market, occupies a 40 acre site on the west side of CR-471 in downtown Webster.  The website said it was one of the “top 10 attractions” in Florida.  They are only open on Mondays and they draw a large number of vendors and a very large number of shoppers.  Florida Grande Motor Coach Resort (FGMCR) is only a few miles from downtown Webster, and today was the only Monday we would be in the area, so of course we went to check out.

When we arrived at the market site around 8:30 AM there were already a lot of cars and people there.  We drove past numerous places selling parking space but we were able to find free parking on the flea market grounds not far from where the food vendors were set up at the Sumter County Farmers Market.  I strapped on my camera harness and Linda carried the small camera bag as we ventured forth into the crowd.

The sites on our side of the street looking south from our site at Florida Grande Motor Coach Resort near Webster, FL.

We walked through the Farmers Market area first so Linda could get a sense of what was there.  The markets open at 5 AM and close at 3 PM so we were surprised that a lot of vendors were just setting up as we walked through.  I took a few pictures, but really interesting photos were few and far between.  We wandered through the grounds trying to get a sense of the layout of the place, the stuff for sale, and the people selling/buying it.  The Farmers Market was in the northeast corner.  Just south of that was a fenced area with vendors under long, open-sided pavilions.  Just south of that were long concrete block buildings with stalls secured by overhead garage doors.  A sign indicated that this was the area with stores selling antiques, and that there were 66 stalls.

To the west of all of this was the West Webster Market area on the other side of a fence with open gates.  This area had a few open-sided pavilions but it was mostly “trunk sales”, at least that’s what we call it at ham radio swap meets.  Vendors had a designated area in which to park their vehicle and sell their stuff, some of which was still in the trunk of a car or side door of a van.  Some was displayed on tables that the vendors brought, and some was laid out on the ground.  Throughout the venue there were lots of food vendors and occasional live music performers.

We are not flea market people and we did not see anything that we had to have.  We found a piece of Pyrex that we thought Meghan would like and Linda sent her a picture.  It was a 1959 Golden Branch Promotional Hospitality Round Casserole.  We did not hear back right away and decided to go ahead and buy it for $20.  We found out later that she thought it was worth $5.  That is just one of the many reasons we do not shop at flea markets.

We returned to the Farmers Market where Linda bought 1/2 flat of strawberries for $5 along with kale, Swiss chard, green beans, onions, mushrooms, and scallions, all for very good prices.  We like farmers markets.  We remembered how bad the traffic heading south out of Webster was last Monday at 2 PM as we were coming north so we returned to the car and left the grounds a little before noon.

We took one of the streets through town to have a look at the place.  Webster is a small, impoverished town where people appear to live with little or no self-respect or consideration for their neighbors.  It is one of the saddest looking places we have ever seen.  FGMCR is not actually in the city limits of Webster but has a Webster mailing address.  It is far enough away from the actual town, and surrounded by cattle fields, to be a quiet, peaceful place isolated from the poverty of Webster.  What makes it an acceptable location for an RV resort is that it is only 10 miles from the Walmart at I-75 in Bushnell, 17 miles to the Publix supermarket in Groveland, 23 miles to Clermont (lots of shopping and a few attractions), 25 miles to The Villages (lots of shopping, restaurants, and medical services), and 50 miles to Brooksville, Ocala, and Orlando.  A 90 to 100 mile radius takes in everyplace from Arcadia to Tampa St. Petersburg, up the “Sun Coast” through Weeki Wachi, Homosassa, and Crystal River, and then inland to Gainesville (including Williston) and over to Daytona, Cape Canaveral, and on down the Atlantic coast.  FGMCR’s motto is “…in the middle of nowhere, but close to everywhere” and it is a fitting one.

The forecast for the rest of the week is for daily high temperatures in the mid-to-upper 80’s with party cloudy skies and some humidity.  A good breeze was blowing from the south today but we judged it to be mild enough that we could deploy our awnings.  Linda closed all of the windows and I closed the roof vents and turned on the air-conditioners.  Linda got the three silver bubble wrap insulating panels out from under the bed and I installed them in the skylights.

Linda prepared some oranges and strawberries for lunch after which she settled in to work on taxes while I worked on this post.  The wind intensified, and less than hour after we put out the awnings we put them back in.  I spent the rest of the afternoon uploading the posts for November 23 through 30 (2015) to our blog.  That meant I was caught up to the point in time when we left Michigan and arrived in Florida for the winter and was now only 3-1/2 months behind on uploading my posts.

Linda took a short nap from 4:45 to 5 PM, and then started preparing dinner.  She made a nice collard greens salad with homemade croutons, homemade vegan “Parmesan” cheese, and a homemade lemon-juice dressing.  It was crisp, light, delicious, and ample along with a side of sautéed green beans and carrot rounds.  A glass of white wine would have been a nice accompaniment, but we still do not have any on board.

We ate dinner a little earlier than normal and, with the change to daylight savings time, there was still a couple of hours of daylight left before subset.  Large, puffy clouds, in shades from bright white to dark gray, dominated the sky and the low angle, early evening sunlight was brilliant, dramatic, and colorful.  We went for a walk around the resort and I took the camera along.  I paused often to capture images and we stopped occasionally to chat briefly with folks.  We were almost back to our coach when we stopped to talk to Dennis.

Dennis and his wife are part of the group of 59 property owners who have a free and clear title to their lot.  He knew quite a bit about the history, current status, and future development of the resort.  We had heard bits and pieces, so he filled in a few details and clarified a few others.

The hedges that separate and define the lots were all planted as part of the original development, as were the flower beds.  Each site has palm trees and they are planted in the very the same locations on each site except at corners and curves in the road where adjustments had to be made.  Owners have personalized their choice of flowers over time but the locations of the beds are tightly regulated by the deed restrictions and controlled by the POA architectural review board.

The villas are all identical on the outside and have to stay that way.  They are constructed in a large building at the back of the property, trucked to the site on a flatbed trailer, and set in place on their pad with a crane.  Once they are strapped down (hurricane code) and the utilities are connected the owners can finish the interiors however they want.

Linda sitting in the corner of the library in the clubhouse at Florida Grande Motor Coach Resort near Webster, FL.

Only recently have owners been allowed to add a pergola at the rear of their villa to shade the portion of the parking pad that wraps around behind the building.  The addition of the low stone border walls around the hedges and planting beds is also a recent change.  Each layout is unique but must use the same exact stones and the layout must be submitted to the POA architectural committee for approval.  Personally, I like the uniformity of materials but appreciate the uniqueness of each design.  There are only nine pergolas at this point (according to Dennis) and I estimate no more three dozen sites with stone walls (out of 249 sites) but they look very nice and the resort will look more and more “finished” and interesting as more owners add these personal touches.

As for future development, Dennis said that all of the problems from the past have been taken care of and the current developer (Mr. Smith) has told property owners that he has brought the park out of bankruptcy.  The reason that the “group of 99” property owners are going to have to pay $22K (each) to get their free/clear deeds is that they had liens on their lots when the project went into bankruptcy and Mr. Smith had to buy the liens as part of resolving the bankruptcy.  He has also told the current owners that he expects fully developing the resort to take 10 more years and that he plans to finish Phase 2 in sections rather than all at once.  Dennis seemed to think that was prudent and that Mr. Smith was both an honest and competent businessman.

The water and sewage systems are part of the 400 acre resort property and are sized to handle the eventual 499 sites.  Most of the infrastructure is in place for Phase 2 but not the sewage lift pumps or paved roads.  He will have the road paved, and the pumps installed and made operational, as he opens each section.  The water system is also sized to handle the irrigation and fire suppression needs of the park.  Every site has in-ground sprinklers that are activated on a rotating basis over the course of a week.  Indeed, all of the grounds maintenance is handled by the resort as part of the currently very modest $500/quarter POA fee, including grass mowing and hedge trimming.  The infrastructure here is very impressive.

Dennis was of the opinion that the risks of investing in this park, going forward, were minimal.  He also clarified that Mr. Smith’s stated plan is to commence with work on Phase 2 when 90% of the lots in Phase 1 are sold and that the resort is close to that point now.  He wasn’t trying to sell us anything, but thought that a few bargains remained if someone wanted to buy out one of the 99 properties, many of which have been for sale.  That group of (would be) owners apparently got hurt financially.  He also told us the same thing we have heard from others, that they like the quiet and solitude that comes with the resort’s relatively isolated location but access to a great deal within a one hour drive, and access to almost everything within a two hour driving radius.  (What he did not say, and no one else has either, is that this would not be a good location in which to have a serious medical emergency.)

Back at our rig we turned off the air-conditioners, opened up the coach, and settled in to watch our Monday evening TV programs on CBS.  I off-loaded the photos I took today to my computer and backed them up to the NAS.  Linda headed off to bed at 11 PM.  I stayed up to watch the news and weather and caught part of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert before turning in.

 

2015/10/05 (M) Pondering Wallpaper

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I woke up to stay at 7:20 AM, got up shortly thereafter, and got dressed to work.  Today was finally wallpapering day.  I fed the cats and refilled the reservoir on their recirculating water dish.  Linda was still sound asleep, and I suspected that she did not sleep well last night, so I closed the bedroom door while I ground the coffee beans so as not to disturb her.  She is still fighting off a cold and/or allergies and so am I.  I used the last of the Ethiopian Yirgacheffe beans plus a couple of scoops of the Kenya AA.  We are a day or two away from being out of coffee and will have to get some more when we go out this morning to buy wallpaper paste and tools.

Linda got up at 7:40.  Phil had not shown up yet nor called to update us on whether he would be here so we were left to guess that he was on his way to the other last minute job that he said he would probably have to take care of today and tomorrow.  The temperature at 8 AM was 55 degrees F with light fog.  It looked very wet outside but I could not tell if it had rained overnight or if it was just heavy dew.  The high was forecast to be 72, and we have the electric heaters on in the bus, so the walls should be warm enough for us to hang wallpaper today.

We left at 9:30 to go buy wallpaper paste and a few tools at Lowe’s in Howell.  We stopped at Teeko’s on the way and ordered three pounds of coffee beans.  We got one pound each of the following, roasted to order:  1) Sweet Seattle Dreams (1/2 Seattle Blend and 1/2 Sweet Dreams decaf blend); 2) Ethiopian Yirgacheffe half-caff; and 3) 1/2 Sumatra Manhelding with 1/2 Sumatra decaf.  At Lowe’s we bought a gallon jug of Roman GH-95 Wallpaper Paste for Kitchen and Bath.  It is supposed to be more suitable for high moisture environments and since we tend to use the bus with the windows open it can get humid inside.  We also got a smoothing tool, a 24″ paint shield to use for as a trimming guide, a 1/4″ nap 9″ long roller cover, and an inexpensive paint brush.  We stopped at Teeko’s on the way home and Roger had our coffee beans ready for pickup.

Back home I gathered up the tools we already had and took everything to the bus.  I got a scrap of underlayment to use as a small work surface for measuring and cutting off lengths of wallpaper.  We did not have room to set up a work surface in the bus that was big enough to roll out the wallpaper and apply paste to the back side so we decided to apply the paste to the walls using a roller and brush.

Before we got started installing the wallpaper Keith showed up around 10:45 AM to cut the grass.  I wasn’t sure he would come today due to the wet conditions, but he did not think it was wet enough to be a problem.  It’s been two weeks since the last grass cutting and it definitely needed to be mowed, at least in some places.  We also cut up and moved a couple of downed trees so he was finally able to mow the grass where they had been.

I had just finished chatting with Keith when Phil showed up around 11 AM to pick up his small excavator.  He had been at another job since 7 AM.  It was supposed to only involve “moving some stone around” so he only took his front loader to the site.  When he got there he was shown a much more extensive landscaping plan and a job site that included removing tree stumps and other digging operations.  Even with that his plan is to be back at our place on Wednesday.

My first task was to sand the primed walls.  I used the Porter-Cable palm sander, first with 120 grit sandpaper and then with 220 grit.  Linda then wiped down the walls with tack cloth while I put the sander away.  There is not a lot of room to work in the bus so we try to remove tools that we are not using.

We finished gathering our tools and materials, including two big buckets of water (one with mild soap) and spent an hour pondering the wallpaper installation.  Part of the pondering involved measuring the three wall areas that were ready for wallpaper and deciding where we would start and how we would proceed from there.  By the time we were ready to cut and paste wallpaper it was 12:30 PM so we took a break and had a sandwich and grapes for lunch.

When we unrolled the first double roll of wallpaper we noticed periodic faint horizontal “lines.”  These turned out to be slight impressions from the outside edge of the end of the roll which was very tightly wrapped in clear plastic.  We decided to cut four shorter pieces to go behind the desk and behind the sofa just in case the impressions did not smooth out and disappear.  We cut two more short pieces to continue forward under the windows on the passenger side.  We then cut longer pieces for the corner behind the desk and the wall at the kitchen end of the sofa.

The last time we hung wallpaper was 30 years ago.  It was all pre-pasted and required reverse rolling the piece to be hung, immersing it in a water tray to activate the glue, and then slowly pulling it out as it unrolled and drained.  We then slid it into position on the wall, smoothing it out and removing the air bubbles as we went, and finally trimming it.  The wallpapers we used were thinner than the stuff we have for the bus and we created seams by overlapping adjacent panels slightly and cutting through both pieces half way between the overlap.  The free edge pieces were both removed and we had perfect seams.

The wallpaper we bought for the coach is a heavier vinyl that is washable and scrubbable.  We got the paper from Delux Drapery & Shade Co. in Ann Arbor but it did not come with installation instructions other than to follow the adhesive manufacturer’s directions.  The associate at Lowe’s, however, was very helpful and told us specifically not to overlap and trim the seams the way we had years ago.  The appropriate technique for the heavier vinyl wallpapers is to butt the edges together and roll them flat.

You always reach a point in every project where there is nothing left to do but to do it.  We poured some of the paste into a paint tray (with a plastic liner for easier cleanup later).  I started on the passenger side of the bus in the corner behind the desk on the back side of the pantry.  I used the brush to cut in the corners where the wall met the adjacent woodwork and used the roller to fill in the field.  We butted the right edge of the panel into the corner along its full length and then smoothed it towards the left and top as best we could.  The wall curves in as it goes up but I got the top edge tucked and trimmed.  I made a relief cut at the bottom of the window surround on the left which allowed us to finish smoothing the bottom portion of the panel under the window and get the upper panel tucked in, where the wall meets the surround, and trim it.  I then trimmed around the window release mechanism and along the bottom of the panel.

Wallpaper tools in sofa (seat removed) and wallpaper on wall behind the sofa.

Wallpaper tools in sofa (seat removed) and wallpaper on wall behind the sofa.

The vinyl wallpaper did not trim easily even with a new, very sharp, break-off style blade.  It also did not want to stick to the wall and we ended up peeling it back in places and spreading more paste.  We had primed the walls with Zinser 1-2-3, a water-based acrylic primer, so they should not have been very absorbent.  We hung a total of eight pieces, five on the passenger side and three on the driver side, and stopped for the day.  The wall in the hallway was prepped for four additional pieces but we decided to defer those until to tomorrow.  We cleaned up all of the tools and then relaxed for a while in the living room.

Linda prepared dinner while I worked on this post.  I could not figure out from the odor what she was making but it sure smelled good.  It turned out to be a tofu scramble, a vegan interpretation of scrambled eggs, and she served it with toasted raisin bread.  Very tasty and very satisfying.  It’s the one breakfast dish that she makes that does equally well as a dinner meal.

I drove to O’Reilly’s Auto Parts to get some door edge trim/guard and stopped at the Meijer’s supermarket for tissues and laundry supplies.  The door edge trim is a plastic U-channel that I will use to cover the edge of a hole (or holes) I will cut in the passenger side HVAC duct for the Aqua-Hot heater hoses to base through into the desk bases without making any sharp turns.

We felt like being entertained and settled in to watch several TV shows.  In-between two of the shows I made popcorn, a rare treat for us but one we really enjoy.

 

2015/07/02 (R) 100,000 Radios

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We were tired and did not get up until almost 8 AM.  Linda prepared a tofu scramble for breakfast, as we were almost out of her homemade granola, and served it with some cinnamon raisin toast and fresh grapefruit.  It’s the closest thing we eat to scrambled eggs and she serves it as an occasional change of pace from our standard granola breakfast.

I had my annual appointment with my dermatologist this morning at 11 AM.  I needed to pick up a cable from Scott (AC8IL) at Adams Electronics, which was on my way to the Henry Ford Health System (HFHS) clinic, so I left the house a little after 9:30 AM.  The drive was fine initially and I had a nice QSO (chat) with Steve (N8AR) on the South Lyon 2m repeater.  As I was approaching Wixom Road, however, all lanes of eastbound I-96 were stopped.  I was able to exit at Wixom Road and headed north a short distance to West Road which I took east over to Beck Road where Scotty’s business is located a little north of West Road.  I had a brief chat with Scott about the antennas on my tower before I left.

Two miles north of Scott’s shop I turned east on Maple Road (15 Mile Road).  The HFHS has many clinics around the greater Metro Detroit area and my dermatologist is located at the intersection of Maple and Farmington Roads in West Bloomfield.  That should have been an easy trip but there was construction on Maple Road that had the road down to one lane with flaggers.  There were signs advising motorists to seek other routes but I did not heed the warning.  I patiently worked my way through and arrived for my appointment about seven minutes ahead of time.  Good thing I left as early as I did.

My exam was fairly routine and Dr. Nydorf wrote out a prescription for Doxycycline.  I will try taking it (again) three times a week and see if it helps.  I headed straight for home after my appointment but took a different route.  Once I was back at the house Linda went for a walk.  While she was walking I removed the license plate from her car, took the protective (anti-theft) cover off, and cleaned everything.  When it was dry I put the new registration sticker in the corner, reassembled the cover, and installed the plate back onto the car.  I then started working with the various pieces of the new Yaesu FTM-400DR/DE mobile radio.  When she got back from her walk she heated up a couple of tofu hotdogs for lunch.  These are such simple fare but so tasty (with mustard, onions, and relish) and so appropriate for a summertime lunch.  They are also a really easy lunch to get on the table.

After lunch Linda took her car to the Howell library to get some books and children’s DVDs and then stop at the Meijer’s supermarket to pick up a few grocery items for Madeline’s visit this weekend.  While she was running errands I assembled our new Diamond X-300NA antenna.  Once it was assembled it was over 10 feet long so I stored it by mounting it to the side of the tower.  I put it up as high as I could reach from the ground to get the three counterpoise (elevated ground plane) rods above eye level.  Moving it to the top of the tower as a replacement for the Diamond X-50NA will have to wait until next week or later.  The exact timing will depend on the weather, Mike’s (W8XH) availability, and whether I have acquired appropriate standoffs by then for the X-300 antenna and/or the cellular booster omnidirectional antenna.

With the antenna taken care of (for now) I disconnected the coaxial cable for the X-50 from the radio side of the lightning arrestor and positioned it so I could pull it back into the sump pump room.  From there I fed it into the ham shack, disconnected it from the radio, and coiled it up.  I uncoiled the new 20′ LMR-400 cable with the N-male connector end positioned so I could feed it through the corner of the ceiling in the ham shack (by the ground wire) and into the sump pump room.  From there I fed it through one of the 2″ conduits into the cable entry box.  Back outside I shaped the cable (LMR-400 cable is double shielded and stiff) and connected it to the radio side of the Morgan VHF/UHF lightning arrestor and closed the lid on the box.

Back in the ham shack I attached the PL-259 connector to the SO-239 socket on the back of the Icom IC-7000 GoBox.  I could have gotten away with a 16′ cable but the 20′ length gives me more flexibility with respect to equipment placement.  I turned on the IC-7000 but did not hear anyone on either the South Lyon 2m or the Novi 70cm repeaters so I turned it off.

I disconnected Mike’s Icom IC-2820H and set it aside to make space for the new Yaesu FTM-400DR/DE dual band mobile transceiver.  I moved the new coax to the new radio, powered it up, spent a few minutes configuring some basic things, and then listened to the South Lyon and Novi repeaters.  I tried calling them but was not triggering them so I knew the PL Tone was not set correctly.  I called Mike for assistance and left him a voice message.

Linda was back by this time so she came down to see the new radio.  We then went out to the bus to make our final decisions about upholstery fabric and window shade materials.  In the end we chose the Lambright Notion Linen fabric for all four chairs and the MCD B50 material for the dark out shades.  We brought all the samples back in the house and I e-mailed our choices to Josh at Coach Supply Direct.

I had an e-mail from Scott Neader (KA9FOX) at QTH.com requesting an admin login for the SLAARC WordPress website so I set that up and e-mailed him back.  I had the new radio on and was listening to a conversation on the Novi repeater.  It had just concluded when Mike returned my call.  He walked me through how to set up the PL Tone and Squelch Tone for both of the repeaters on the FTM-400.  We were then able to verify that the radio was working on both bands.

For dinner Linda made a salad and pan-grilled tofu with caramelized onions and barbecue sauce which she served open-faced on hamburger buns.  We had watermelon for dessert, which we have been doing a lot this summer.  I did not care for watermelon as a child but it has become a favorite summertime treat.  I had dropped a small lock washer while mounting the new antenna to the tower earlier so I went to Lowe’s to get a replacement and some spares.  On the drive there I got a call from XPO Delivery Service letting me know that the new refrigerator for the bus would be delivered to Chuck’s shop in Novi tomorrow between 6 and 8 PM.

At Lowe’s I picked up some 6mm x 1.0 Nylok nuts in addition to the lock washers.  I also got some grass seed patching mix, a few more bags of decorative broken brick pieces, and a hummingbird feeder with a red reservoir so Linda can use sugar water without red food coloring.  When I got home the odometer on my car read 100000 so I took a picture of it with my phone.  I then spread the patching mix over the bare dirt I had used to fill a hole and troughs left by the installation of the natural gas line to our house last September.  The rest of the evening Linda read and I worked on completing drafts of blog posts.

 

 

2015/05/25 (M) Memorial Day

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We spent the morning lounging around drinking coffee and enjoying the holiday.  Hey, even retired people need a day off.  Actually, we continued to research refrigerator, seating, and upholstery options for the bus, taking a break to have a tofu scramble and toast for breakfast.

We stumbled upon the Yale Appliance blog which proved to be very informative.  Yale is a very large appliance store in the Boston area and maintains a blog about appliances.  After reading what they had to say in some fairly recent postings we realized that we should probably not be looking for a “counter depth” refrigerator.  It also appeared that our best bet in terms of case dimensions and interior volume might be a standard top freezer design and our best bet in terms of both price and reliability might be a Frigidaire.

We went to the Frigidaire website and found that the FFHT1621QB might fit our needs perfectly.  It is a 16.3 cu. ft. top freezer design available in black, white, or stainless steel with doors that can be hinged left or right.  (We need a fridge with doors the hinge on the left.)  It is 28″ W x 30-1/8″ D x 64-3/8″ H and only needs 3/8″ clearance on the top and sides and 1″ in the rear.  The depth includes the doors and handles; the depth of the case alone is only is 26-5/8″.  Our refrigerator alcove is 33-3/4″ W x 29-1/2″ D x 66-3/4″ H so it will fit easily, recessing a bit more than our current 22.6 cu. ft. Jenn-Air and leaving 5″ to its left for a pull out pantry.  The pantry will have be custom built and measure approximately 5″ W x 28″ D x 66″ H including top and bottom mounted slides/guides.  Also of importance, we will not have to modify the cabinet above the refrigerator alcove.

In terms of seating we checked out Gilbreath Upholstery’s website but then concentrated on the Bradd & Hall website.  Bradd & Hall is a well-known RV (& marine) furniture supplier in Elkhart, Indiana.  They handle the Flexsteel RV and marine product lines and also sell the Lambright Comfort Chair product line, although the latter is available directly from Lambright in Shipshewana, Indiana.  We have sat in the Lambright Lazy Relaxor Lite swivel recliner (wall hugger) at RV rallies and found it nicely sized and very comfortable for us.  It is 24″ W x 33″ D x 38″ H and needs 2.4″ clearance from the wall.  It is normally a free-standing chair so we are unclear whether it can be secured to the floor or be used with seat belts.  We plan to visit Bradd & Hall on Monday, June 1 before we check into the GLAMARAMA rally and this is one of the things we will ask about.

Bradd & Hall also sells a Flexsteel Barrel Chair with a bolt down pedestal base that locks in different positions and includes a bar for attaching seat belts.  It is 26″ W x 30″ D x 34″ high and might be a better fit for our bus and what we are trying to accomplish with our remodeling project.  Last, but not least, they sell Flexsteel Captain’s Chairs (which Flexsteel calls “bucket seats” on its website).  We need a chair of this type to replace the oversized front passenger chair and possibly to replace the driver’s chair.  My hope, however, is to get an ISRI 6800 seat for the driver’s position.  These are the seats that are normally installed on tour buses.

An advantage to getting everything from Bradd & Hall, except for the ISRI driver’s seat, is that we can get the same fabric on the passenger Captain’s chair and living room chairs and buy additional materials to have the seat and back cushions made for the sofa that I will build (with storage underneath).  We will probably find a folding chair for the desk and can have the seat recovered in the same material so that everything is coordinated.

Linda called the J. C. Penney’s salon to see if Renee was working and had openings.  She was, and she did, so Linda booked a time, grabbed her car keys, and headed to Twelve Oaks Mall.  That seemed like an opportune time for me to head to the bus to double check measurements and ponder design solutions.  I checked the dimensions of our refrigerator alcove and the Frigidaire FFHT1621QB will definitely fit very nicely.  The front part of the passenger side of the bus has 13′ 3″ of flat floor space available for a desk and two chairs with a small dining table between them.  On the driver side of the bus the aft end of the sofa nook is 7′ 2″ from the entrance step.  If I can fit both chairs and the table in the first 7′ 2″ on the passenger side we will have room for a 6′ long desk that is 26-1/2″ deep.  That’s long enough to have a file drawer on one end and a printer shelf on the other end with plenty of room in between for a chair.

We have been planning on reusing the Corian top from the old dinette table so I decided to disassemble the top from its base.  I had never really looked at the construction before now and discovered that the Corian is glued to a wood panel that is secured to the two massive posts that are screwed to the base.  I was able to disconnect the base from the posts easily enough but there did not appear to be any way to separate the Corian from the support structure.  I took a few whacks at it with a pry bar and small sledge hammer and it was clearly not going to come loose.

The good news is that we can now select a new table top in whatever size, shape, and material suits us and use the same material for the desk top, which will double as additional kitchen counter space.  Our assumption has been that we will use Corian, but Corian is heavy so we will consider other options before making a final decision.  We discussed extending the desk top all the way down the wall to the front of the living room, although it would only be about 6″ deep at most, and building shallow cabinetry to go under it and fill in the space above the HVAC chase and below the window trim.  That space will essentially be wasted otherwise, and have to be finished in some way, so building small storage spaces is worth considering with or without the extended desk top.

What all of this comes down to is that we have to select the two chairs we want to use in conjunction with figuring out the table size and support system, and then finalize the design of the desk.  We plan to recondition all of the woodwork (with Touch of Oranges and Touch of Beeswax) and replace the refrigerator before we install the new floor, which has to go in before the furniture.  That’s the order in which decisions have to be made and the work has to be done.  Chairs and custom woodwork are potentially long lead items so we need to get them finalized and ordered, but they are the last things to get installed, so it should work out OK in the end.

It rained hard for a brief time mid-afternoon, after which Linda went for a long walk.  She was walking almost daily this winter in Quartzsite, Arizona but has not walked much since we got home.  That gave me time to work on this blog post.

Earlier in the day we snacked on nuts instead of having lunch.  Linda made whole wheat capellini for dinner using the Portobello mushrooms and some of the asparagus we bought yesterday at the Howell Farmers Market.  It was delicious.

I had intended to work at my computer most of the day but that obviously did not happen.  When I finally went to my office after dinner I had a long chat on the phone with Butch about hardware for the slide out pantry and other bus-related things and then checked a few websites that he suggested as good sources of specialized hardware.  I then e-mailed GLCC members about parking with the chapter and took care of some other e-mail.  In addition to computer-based work I need to keep working on the bus but I am also at the point where I need to order some things and then settle in and work on drawings for the desk, pantry, and sofa.

 

2015/04/21-25 (T-S) IN, MI, Home

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2015/04/21 (T) Back to Twelve Mile, IN

The outside air temperature dropped into the 30’s (F) last night and the air temperature in the coach fell to 60, so when I got up this morning I turned on the Aqua-Hot diesel-fired hydronic heating system to take the chill off.  We eventually got up, got dressed, and walked across to Small Town Brew to get a couple of cups of coffee and chat with owner Lisa Paul and her friend/neighbor, Ashley, who helps her run the coffee shop.  Both of them remembered both of us, which was nice.

It’s interesting sitting in a small town coffee shop, where everyone is a friend or relative, and just listening to the conversation.  We are outsiders her, of course, strangers to most of the folks who drop in, but everyone is nice to us.  Some are curious about who we are, and where we are from, but rarely ask why we are there, in this little coffee shop in this little town, surrounded by corn fields.  Of course, we usually mention that we are friends of Butch and Fonda, so that probably answers whatever questions they may have had.

We eventually returned to our coach and had breakfast.  We tried connecting our WiFiRanger to Butch and Fonda’s Wi-Fi router yesterday and it was able to connect and obtain an IP address but the data transfer rate was so slow that web pages would not load and e-mail would not download before timing out.  I turned our Verizon Mi-Fi on and we had a very weak but usable signal, so I connected the WFR to the Mi-Fi and we were able to do the few things we needed to do online.  We then went in the house to let Butch and Fonda know we were awake and see what they were up to.

Butch’s brother, John, and his nephew, Brock, showed up and helped Butch with the driver side front wheel assembly on Butch and Fonda’s MC-9 bus.  The tire/wheel was off when we arrived yesterday and I learned that Butch is replacing the hub bearings and seals, installing an automatic slack adjuster for the brake, and replacing the brake pads.  It looked like quite a job with some large, heavy parts, so I did my part by staying out of the way.  I also took a few pictures at Butch’s suggestion.  He does not want to write articles for Bus Conversion Magazine, but he has been interested in having me write articles about projects on his bus.

Linda spent some time working with Fonda’s new sewing machine that she got while they were in Quartzsite, Arizona.  It is a little smaller than a regular sewing machine, only weighs 13 pounds, and only cost about $130.  Linda gave her sewing machine to her sister many years ago but now that she is retired she is thinking that it might be nice to have one for mending tasks or projects, such as new privacy curtains for the bus.

Butch got a catalog recently from Crimp Supply in Royal Oak, Michigan, which is not at far from our house.  I glanced through it last night and it contains a lot of specialized parts that would be useful to a ham radio hobbyist or someone converting a bus into a motorhome.  I called and requested a catalog and had a nice chat with Debbie.  She was willing to provide me with additional catalogs that I can give to members of GLCC and CCO at the Back-to-the-Bricks and/or Surplus & Salvage per allies in August and September respectively.  She was also willing to show up in person and give a brief presentation on her company and hand out the catalogs.  Cool.

Brock had to leave after which Butch and John decided to go to the shooting range along with a third guy whose name I did not get.  I went along to see the range and watch what they were doing.  Butch had home-brewed some shotgun shells for his Ruger revolver and wanted to test them.  They caused the revolving chamber to jam so they will require some additional work.  John had a new semi-automatic pistol and wanted to see how it handled.  He also had ammunition he had loaded with bullets he had cast and wanted to test fire them.

I was offered the opportunity to shoot but declined.  I have never handled a pistol and it would have been a waste of good ammunition.  I did take a class in rifle marksmanship while I was at the University of Missouri – Columbia many years ago.  I was in the Air Force R.O.T.C. Program at the time and thought I should know something about how to handle a firearm.  Learning to handle a pistol correctly would have been more relevant, but I do not recall a course being offered for that.  I bought a Ruger 10-22 rifle at that time, and I still have it.  It’s a .22 caliber semi-automatic rifle designed to look like an M-1 carbine and features a 10-round rotary clip that is flush to the bottom of the stock when inserted.  I was only interested in shooting at paper targets so I added a scope to it.  It is safely tucked away with a trigger lock on it, but I have not fired it in many, many years.  I should probably bring it to Twelve Mile the next time we come down, let Butch inspect and clean it properly, and take it to the range just for grins and giggles.

John and the other guy went back to Logansport from the range.  When Butch and I got back to the house he continued working on the driver side front wheel of their bus.  I helped a little, but mostly by taking photographs for a possible future article.  After putting tools and parts away we sat and relaxed for a while and then all of us went to Logansport for dinner at Pizza Hut.  It was 8:45 PM by the time we got back so everyone said “good night” and turned in for the evening.

2015/04/22 (W) Chillin’ in Twelve Mile

Yesterday looked and felt more like winter than spring with gray, cloudy skies and blustery, cold winds.  The temperature overnight dropped into the mid-30s but we were toasty warm under blankets with our electric heating pad turned on.  I got up at 7:30 AM and turned on the thermostats.  The temperature in the kitchen was reading 63 degrees F but the temperature by the dashboard was only 53.  The Aqua-Hot has performed very well since I rebuilt the blower bearings and quickly brought the temperature in the coach up to 70 degrees F.

We put on our sweats and walked over to Small Town Brew for coffee and conversation with owner Lisa Paul and whomever else might be there.  Three local guys were enjoying their morning brew when we arrived.  They eventually left and were replaced by others.  Most of the patrons seemed to be retired or semi-retired farmers.  One fellow, Lee, chatted with us at length about a canvas covered hoop barn he put up.  It was constructed using laminated wood hoops rather than steel, was 30′ wide by 70′ long and cost about $4,000 15 years ago, although I was not clear whether that included the 4-foot high poured concrete walls.  He already owned concrete forms and the heavy equipment that one finds on farms, so he was able to do a lot of the work himself without renting equipment or hiring contractors.  Still, it has to be the lowest cost way to create a structure for getting our bus out of the weather and out of sight.  It is unknown, however, whether the Township and County would let us to put it up.

Butch left at 8:30 AM for medical appointments in Logansport and Fonda came over at 10:45 AM to gather up Linda for a girl’s day out.  Linda wanted to go to McClure’s Apple Orchard on US-31 between IN-16 and US-24.  Although it is very close to Twelve Mile Fonda had never been there.  They were then headed to Peru.  Although it is the same distance from Twelve Mile as Logansport and Rochester it is the city that Butch and Fonda visit the least.  Peru’s claim to fame is that it was the birthplace of Cole Porter and Emmet Kelly and was the winter home of several circuses many, many years ago.  I believe there is a circus museum there that Nick Russell wrote about in the Gypsy Journal.

With no bus project or social interactions I settled in to work on my blog and await everyone’s return.  It started out sunny this morning but by 11 AM was thickly clouded over and looking wintery with blustery winds.  The only bus project I had in mind to do today was to pull out the chassis batter tray, check the circuit breakers, disconnect the batteries, swap the upper 12 V pair with the lower 12 V pair and reconnect them.  It was not something I wanted to do alone and I did not have to do it today, especially under cool, windy, overcast conditions, so I ended up not doing it.

Linda and Fonda eventually returned, having first gone to the Walmart in Logansport.  Linda picked up some hummus and Snyder’s sourdough pretzels so we snacked on those for lunch.  Linda then hung out with Fonda while I continued to work in blog posts.  Butch finally returned from his medical appointments and busied himself with something.  Whatever it was, he was not outside working on their bus and neither was I.  I managed to get the post for April 1 – 3, 2015 uploaded to our blog.

Linda and Fonda developed a plan for dinner.  Fonda made a nice salad and baked a loaf of par-baked bread that we got from Marilyn.  Linda made black beans and rice and prepared a mix of fresh blueberries and strawberries for dessert.  Linda and I each had a glass of Franzia Red Sangria.  After taking all of dirty serving containers back to our coach we returned to the house to visit a bit longer and finally returned to our coach just after 9 PM.  That left me enough time to pull together the posts for April 4 – 6 and upload it before turning in for the night.

2015/04/23 (R) Return to Michigan

I was awake at 6:30 AM and finally got up at 7 and put on my sweats.  The Aqua-Hot was already on so I turned up the thermostats and turned on the engine pre-heat loop.  I also turned on the Broan cube heater and pointed it into the cockpit as the temperature on the dashboard was only 50 degrees F.  I walked over to Small Town Brew, got a cup of coffee, and said “so long for now” to owner Lisa Paul.  Linda was still asleep when I got back so I fixed a couple slices of toast for my breakfast, turned on our Verizon Mi-Fi, and settled in to take care of a few e-mails.  Linda finally got up and, as I suspected, had not slept well last night.  She had some toast and orange juice but had no interest in coffee, a strong indicator of just how tired she was and not feeling completely well.

When she was done with the toaster I turned the cube heater off and turned the electric block heater on.  The overnight low temperature was forecast to drop into the upper 20’s and starting the big Detroit Diesel at that temperature is hard on the engine so I wanted it nice and warm before I cranked it over.

Butch had an appointment with an ophthalmologist in Indianapolis around noon and had some other things to do down that way as long as they were there so he and Fonda planned to leave by 9 AM.  He came to our bus just before 9 AM to let us know they were close to leaving and that he put an air hose out by the automotive bay so I could fill the front tires on the bus if needed.  Based on the readings from our TireTraker TPMS, however, no adjustment was needed.

We planned to leave sometime after they did but not later than 10 AM.  The main reason for not leaving sooner was to give us time to digest our breakfast, but the other reason was our relatively short drive today to Camp Turkeyville, an RV park on I-69 just north of I-94.  This will be the first time I have been in Michigan, which I certainly consider home, since we left on November 30, 2014.  Turkeyville is only 80 miles from our house, but we will have a full hookup site so we can dump our waste tanks tomorrow morning and not need to use them on the final short drive to the house.

We started getting ready to leave around 9:45 AM.  I shut off the block heater, put Butch’s air hose away, and then took care of the chassis batteries, auxiliary air, and shorepower.  The DD fired right up and I switched it to high idle while it built air pressure.  As soon as the chassis was at ride height and the air dryer purged I pulled onto IN-16 pointing eastbound and pulled into the curb/parking lane.  That was around 10 AM.  I left the engine idling while Linda pulled the car up behind the bus.  By the time we hooked up the car for towing, checked the lights, and pulled away it was closer to 10:20.  I noted that the time was 10:30 AM EDT as we pulled onto US-31 N from IN-16 E.

Traffic was light and we had an easy run up US-31 to US-20 except for the 15-20 MPH crosswind from the WNW.  I also had a very cold breeze blowing into the cockpit by my feet and had to turn the heat up to stay comfortable.  We were an hour into our trip when I finally realized that I had not opened the air supply valve for the shutters on the two front house air-conditioner condensers which are installed in what is normally the spare tire bay.  Those shutters are held open by a spring and held closed by air pressure.  When they are open air can easily find its way into the cockpit.  There is also a mechanical damper that is supposed to regulate fresh air flow to the cockpit, or cut it off completely, but the flexible actuator cable broke some time ago and the damper/cable are difficult to access so it has not been repaired.  Either the cable broke with the damper in the closed position or I taped some sort of cover over the air inlet once upon a time because once I closed the shutters for the A-C compressors I no longer had cold air coming in by my feet.

Traffic was heavier on US-20 eastbound but it always is as it runs just south of South Bend and Elkhart, Indiana, and a bit north of Goshen.  It is still a limited access highway until east of Elkhart, so it moved along up to that point.  There was one stretch between there and Middlebury where major construction was taking place, but we got through that easily enough.  After that it was a nice, rolling, 2-lane highway and we rolled along at 55 MPH except for the occasional town on intersection.  We always enjoy driving through this part of Indiana.

We turned off of US-20 onto I-69 N, crossed into Michigan at 12:53 PM EDT, and pulled into the Michigan Welcome Center five minutes later.  We only had 37 more miles to our destination but we both needed a short stretch break and I wanted to open the air valve for the A-C shutters, which is in the bay under the driver’s seat.  We resumed our trip and exited I-69 at exit 42 around 1:45 PM, crossed over the highway, and traveled the 500 yards to the Camp Turkeyville entrance.  We followed the long, wide, winding entrance road and stopped at the office where Linda got us registered.  They put us in a 50A full hookup pull-through site with easy access that was long enough for us to leave the car hooked up for towing.

We went through our usual arrival routine and then Linda fixed a light lunch of French Country Vegetable Soup and a tofu hotdog on pita bread with mustard and relish.  She also made a pot of coffee.  We connected our WiFiRanger to the RV Park Wi-Fi system but did not seem to be able to move any data so we turned on our Verizon Mi-Fi and connected the WFR to it.

Linda spent the afternoon reading a book on her iPad and I mostly worked on my blog post for April 7, 8, and 9.  I had 14 photos for that post but inserted them into the post rather than put them in a WP image gallery.  I logged into our personal WordPress site, installed WordPress 4.2, and then installed updates to plugins and themes.  Once that was done I uploaded the blog post and uploaded/captioned/inserted the photos and generated the tags.  I clicked the “Publish” button about 7:10 PM.

Linda put dinner on the table about 10 after I finished working.  She made a nice tofu scramble, a dish that vaguely resembles scrambled eggs, and served it with toast and jam, a small glass of juice, and black seedless grapes.

I thought about working on my blog post for April 10th, as it is the last one for which I have photos, but I was too tired to get involved in that tonight.  We pointed our front OTA TV towards Battle Creek and Kalamazoo, found the local CBS station, and watched a couple of episodes of The Big Bang Theory and whatever else was one.  We caught some local weather and decided to enable the diesel burner on the Aqua-Hot, turn the thermostats on, and set the temperatures for 60 degrees F.  The overnight low temperature was forecast to be 27 and it was already 29 when we went to bed.  Welcome to Michigan in late April.

2015/04/24 (F) Touchdown

I awoke at 6:30 AM to an outside temperature of 27 degrees F.  Our coach has several ways it can be heated if we are plugged into adequate electrical power, including three electric toe-kick heaters.  I turned on the Aqua-Hot diesel burner and electric heating element last night before going to bed and left the living room and bathroom thermostats turned on with the temperature dialed back to just under 60 degrees.  I also turned on the Broan cube heater, dialed back the thermostat, and set in on the step to blow into the cockpit.

I got up at 7:15 AM and put on my sweats. It was 60 degrees F on the kitchen counter, but the refrigerator adds some heat mid-coach.  The thermometer on the dashboard read 53.  I turned the thermostats up to 68 and turned on the Aqua-Hot engine preheat loop.  I also turned on the front electric toe-kick heater.  I made coffee and then turned on the electric block heater for the engine.  I checked e-mail and monitored our amperage while I waited for the coach to warm up and for Linda to get up.  We were drawing about 30 A on Leg 1 and 20 A on Leg 2.  On a true “50 A” RV electrical service with a main circuit breaker that functions correctly we can safely draw 40 Amps on each leg, so our usage was not going to trip any breakers.

By 10 AM the temperature was up to 40 degrees, the sun was shining, and it’s was delightfully cozy in the rig.  I got a call from Michele Henry at Phoenix Paint in response to an e-mail I sent her yesterday and talked to her for 15 minutes.  We had planned on a 10:30 AM departure but by the time I connected the sewer hose, dumped the waste tanks, and put the hose away it was 10:45.  We had the bus and car ready to travel by 11AM and pulled out of our site.  We had to wait for a few minutes until someone moved a 5th wheel which they had temporarily parked in the middle of a two-way road while waiting to get into their site.  We finally made our way out of Camp Turkeyville and pulled onto I-69 N at 11:13 AM.

We had an easy run to our house and our wheels “touched down” on our driveway at 12:45 PM.  Even the dirt roads for the last two miles of our trip were in reasonably good shape, which made for a nicer homecoming.  We opened the house, put the cats in their carriers, and took them inside.  I got the bus plugged in and the air shut off while Linda put the batteries back in the water softener and sanitizer and turned the well pump on.  I turned the gas back on for the kitchen and fireplace and then set all of the thermostats up to 65 degrees F.  We unloaded a few things from the bus and then had lunch, after which I sent text messages to both of our children and to Chuck Spera to let them know we were home.

After lunch we unhooked the car from the bus and continued unloading the bus but did not get everything taken off.  I was tired and took a long nap, only getting up when Linda told me it was time for dinner.  We had a Daiya Mushroom and Garlic pizza.  We have used Daiya vegan cheese for a while but did not know they made pizza products until we saw them at the Dierbergs Market in Edwardsville, Illinois.  It had a thin, crispy, rice flour crust (gluten-free), lots of garlic and cheese (of course), and was very tasty.  I wish we could buy them near our house.

After dinner I called Butch to let him know we made it home safe and without any new or reoccurring bus issues.  He had reassembled the driver side steer wheel and discovered that the new brake drums he got from MCI some time ago are the wrong ones, so he is going to have to track down the correct ones next week.

2015/04/25 (S) Return to Regular

Do you remember when OTA TV stations used to break in to programs with special news bulletins or emergency alert tests?  At the conclusion of such interruptions the announcer would say “we now return you to your regular programming.”  Having spent most of 61 years living in stationary dwellings we still consider being back at our house to be the baseline for our regular lives.  The last two years, however, we have spent half of the year, more or less, living in our converted motorcoach.  That fact, combined with the fact that we moved to a new-to-us house just before we started our extended traveling, has altered our perception of what constitutes “regular.”  All we know for sure is that living this dual lifestyle is our new normal and we like it.

Whether living at home or in the bus we have routines.  Part of our “at home” routine is Saturday morning breakfast with our friends from the South Lyon Area Amateur Radio Club (SLAARC) and that is how we started our day.  We took our usual route to South Lyon and were surprised by the extent of the construction work at the I-96 and US-23 interchange.  We knew this interchange was scheduled to be rebuilt starting this year but as of March 1st, when Linda last drove through there, work had not started.  A lot has happened since then, and from the look of things this is going to be a BIG project.

There were a LOT of people at breakfast, 24 by Linda’s count.  It was good to see our friends and ease back into ham radio talk.  The club president, Harvey Carter (AC8NO), had the personalized club jackets we ordered from Sunset Sportswear in South Lyon over the winter so we got those from him after we were all done eating.  The jackets are dark blue with fleece lining and yellow embroidery that looks very sharp.  The left breast says “South Lyon Area” on top and “Amateur Radio Club” underneath.  On the right breast is our first name (in script) on top and our call sign underneath in block letters.

We stopped at Barnes and Noble on the way home to pick up a gift for grand-daughter Katie and found two books that we thought would interest her.  One was on rocks and gems and the other was on snakes, both of which are interesting to Katie.  Both are also an integral part of the desert southwest where we spent the winter.

When we got home I set about the tasks of moving various pieces of technology from the entrance foyer to my basement ham shack/office, reconnecting it to power and our network, and starting it up.  I started up our Linux box but the video driver would not “catch” so I shut it down and restarted it in Windows 2000 Pro, updated the es|et nod32 anti-virus database, and installed three Microsoft updates.  I checked e-mail on my primary laptop, responded to a couple, and then installed updates on all of the websites I manage.  WordPress just released version 4.2 and each new release triggers a flurry of plug-in and theme updates.

Our daughter, Meghan, had arranged for us to come over mid-afternoon to visit and have dinner without the bother and fuss of fixing a big meal.  Minn, the female cat, hid immediately but Inches, the male cat, hung around for a while.  Grand-daughter Katie is working at Pizza House in Ann Arbor where he dad, Chris, has been the general manager for a long time, but she got off work and arrived just after us followed by Chris, who had run out to pick up dinner at Seva.

Our son, Brendan, daughter-in-law Shawna, and grand-daughter Madeline showed up a little later, and Inches promptly disappeared.  Madeline is very sweet and interacts with her two kitties, Gus and Iggy, just fine but our cats, and Meghan’s/Chris’s cats, disappear whenever she comes to visit.  They are just not used to the size, motions, and sounds of a 28 month old.

Seva is a vegetarian restaurant that has been a staple of the Ann Arbor restaurant scene for many years but recently moved out of downtown to a location on the far west side of Ann Arbor.  While not just around the corner from Chris and Meghan’s house it is much closer, and easier to get to, than driving into downtown.  Many of their menu items are vegan, or can be made vegan, and that is mostly what they ordered.  We had a nice visit with excellent appetizers and main dishes, a dozen choices in all, and a nice Riesling wine from Washington State.

After appetizers we distributed the gifts we had picked up for everyone.  Besides Katie’s books Madeline got a “Dr. Seuss” book about deserts and a t-shirt from Marilyn with a design on the front that changes color in the sunlight. Both of our children, who kept an eye on our house for us over the winter and took in our mail, got the following:  A bottle of Red Chile Wine from St. Clair Winery in Deming, New Mexico; a bouquet of pequin chiles from Hatch Chile Sales in Hatch, New Mexico; a box of Prickly Pear Cactus jellied candies and a jar of Prickly Pear Cactus jelly from Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument in Arizona; a bag of Green Chile Pistachios from Eagle Ranch (Heart of the Desert) in Alamogordo, New Mexico; a two box set of olive oil and peach balsamic vinegar glaze from Queen Creek Olive Mill in Queen Creek, Arizona; and a non-stick grilling mat from the “Big Tent” RV Show in Quartzsite, Arizona.  We appreciate what they do when we are away which would be more complicated for us without their assistance.

We enjoy looking for gifts that are unique to the areas we visit and tend to limit ourselves to items that are consumable so no one has to find room to store or display something, at least not for very long.  We saw many wonderful art and craft objects this winter but they present a special challenge beyond simply getting them home.  We are no longer collecting “things,” as we already cannot display or store the stuff we have, and our children are in somewhat the same situation (which is why we still have a lot of stuff instead of them having it).

Then there is the matter of taste.  Both children have their own taste in art and have carefully arranged items for display on their walls and shelves.  As much as we might like something, and think someone else might like it, buying art for other people is fraught with peril because there is an implied expectation that it will be displayed.  If it is displayed but the recipient does do not like it then the gift is intrusive.  If it is not displayed the giver is disappointed and potentially offended.  Better to stay clear of all that by avoiding surprise gifts.  The exception is if we know they are looking for something in particular and we come across one.  In that case it is a simple matter to take a photo with one of our smartphones and message them to see if they want it, making it clear that “no” is an acceptable answer.

Madeline goes to bed at 8 PM so she left (with her parents) at 7 PM.  Both Minn and Inches came out shortly thereafter to have a bite to eat and get the attention they had missed for the last four hours,  We stuck around for another hour which gave us just enough time to get home before it got really dark.  Brendan and Shawna had kept/used Linda’s Honda Civic all winter. They came in two cars and went home in one so that Linda could get the Civic back to our house.  There is a chance that she will have to go into the bakery a day or two this week and I do not like be without transportation, especially when we have a lot going on.

We sat in the living room for an hour reading and relaxing with our favorite iPad apps/games but without the benefit of our natural gas fireplace logs.  I lit them when we got home and they operated for about 60 seconds and then shut off and would not relight.  I turned the pilot flame off and will deal with that tomorrow.  I went to bed, read for a while longer, and then went to sleep.

 

2014/12/13-16 (S-T) In Q

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2014/12/13 (S) Ahhhh

Linda was very tired last night and was asleep by 10 PM.  Although I was up until almost midnight we were both wide awake by 5:30 AM, so I got up and made a full pot of coffee.  We enjoyed our brew while watching the slow but inevitable progression of night to day.  It was very quiet last night; the only sounds I was aware of were the noises the coach makes (refrigerator and auxiliary air-compressor).  The rain last night was gentle and a somewhat rare event for this area at this time of year, so Linda got online with her iPad to check historical weather data and forecasts.

The average rainfall for Quartzsite in December is 0.07 inches, the maximum is 0.7 inches (10 times as much) and the minimum is zero.  The average high is in the mid-60s and the average low is in the low-40s.  On any given day the forecast is sunny with gentle winds and no fog or rain.  January is slightly cooler on average and February warms back up a tad.  You can see why people spend the winter months here.  Sunrise was at 7:32 AM.  We are ~20 miles from the California border, as far west as we can go without moving into the Pacific Time Zone, so sunrise and sunset are later here relative to the local time.

Linda made fresh blueberry vegan pancakes for breakfast with real maple syrup and they were excellent.  After breakfast we got out the vacuum cleaner hose and attachments and vacuumed the coach.  This terrified the cats, who have limited places to hide, but it had to be done.  Linda then mopped the tile floor.  She wanted to dust but I suggested the all the cleaning did not have to be done the first morning we were here.  She bundled up the trash and took it to the large garbage can and stopped to chat with Fonda and Connie (our landlady) on the way.

Our motorcoach set up in its winter home in Quartzsite, Arizona.

Our motorcoach set up in its winter home in Quartzsite, Arizona.

By 8:30 the sun was climbing in the southeastern sky and the coach was warming up a bit.  We are parked facing east so we decided to deploy the passenger side awnings (patio and bedroom) which shaded approximately 65% of the upper half of the south-facing side of the coach.  Linda then decided we should wash the front of the coach.

I got the step stool and Little Giant ladder out of the front bay while Linda got the collapsible water bucket.  We started with the front of the bus using water directly from the tap but it dried too quickly in the sun and left spots.  We switched to softened water from our fresh water tank and took a team approach with me scrubbing using a Microfiber sponge and Linda following right behind drying with Microfiber cloths.  That seemed to work better.

After we finished the front we moved to the rear.  The sun had not yet pulled around to west of south so we did not have direct sunlight on the rear cap.  We hooked up our longest hose to the other water softener outlet and then wet the surface, scrubbed the cap with our soft brush, and rinsed it off without using the Microfiber drying clothes.  We will clean the two sides of the coach over the coming week, doing a little bit each day.  We also deployed the awnings on the driver (north) side of bus just to unwind them and let them air out and dry.  We then set out our patio mat and welcome mat and our two bag chairs, completing our cleaning work for the day.

Butch spent some time emptying out their Suburban so we could explore Quartzsite in one vehicle.  We all had lunch and then headed off to explore our winter home town.  Fonda wanted to locate a church where she could attend services on Sunday mornings so we found one that looked like it might suit her.  We drove down Main Street and Kuehn Street checking out the vendors and ended up at Big Market on west Main Street where we bought some grocery items and postcards.

Back at the ranch we settled in for a while before dinner.  I worked at my computer and started checking up on e-mail, which I had not done in several days.  I had a few from Gary, the publisher of Bus Conversion Magazine, and replied to those.  I also spent a little time in RVillage and updated our profile.  Jim Liebherr (Joe’s brother) came around to collect the first month’s rent and clarified access to the laundry room.

View of our motorcoach looking NE from Lollipop Ln. There are mountains in the distance to right of the rig.

View of our motorcoach looking NE from Lollipop Ln. There are mountains in the distance to right of the rig.

For dinner Linda made a green salad using spinach, Mandarin oranges, and walnuts with a raspberry walnut vinaigrette dressing.  She then prepared a zoodle dish using a tool called a “SpiraLife” that spiral slices vegetables with or without cross-cutting them.  The cross-cut mode turns carrots, zucchini, etc. into long slender strips like flat pasta.  She spiral sliced a zucchini and used it instead of wheat pasta in an olive oil sauté with mushrooms, onions, garlic, spinach, and sun-dried tomatoes.  Some vegan “Parmesan” cheese on top, bread on the side, and a glass of Pinot Noir to wash it down made for a wonderful, healthy meal.

Linda found information online that suggested we should have anywhere from 11 to 21 over-the-air (OTA) TV channels.  The Huffington Post even had the complete programming schedule for Quartzsite by channel and time-of-day.  Our TV sets normally scan for standard OTA channels, both analog (very few left) and digital.  We used both the front and rear TV to repeatedly scan for signals, pointing our amplified directional antennas around an entire 360 degrees, but did not find a single station.

The TV sets can also scan for QAM (Quadrature Amplitude Modulation) signals.  We had to obtain an Access Code from the Westinghouse support website and enter it into the front TV to get it to scan for QAM signals, but it did not find any of those either.  I called Butch to see if they had tried tuning in any stations.  They had tried and got the same results as us.  It’s not a big deal, the only TV we watch at home is streamed over the Internet, but it was puzzling as we saw lots of TV antennas around town.  Most of them, however, where on top of tall poles.

The overnight low was forecast to be 41 degrees F and by 9 PM it had cooled off in the coach quite a bit.  I decided to shut my computer for the evening and head to bed where we have a dual control electric heating pad to keep each of us in our own comfort zone.  As sometimes happens, Microsoft decided that my computer needed to be updated.  This often turns out be a recursive experience and tonight was no exception.  Five updates were initially downloaded and installed, requiring a restart of the computer.  After it rebooted and finished starting up I tried to shut it off again and there were six more updates, requiring another restart.  I checked again after it rebooted and finished starting up and it appeared to be done, but I decided to leave it on overnight in case additional updates wanted to make their presence known.

I turned up the temperature on my side of the electric heating pad, got cozy under lots of covers, wrote for a while, and turned off the lights.  It was a good first full day in Q.

2014/12/14 (N) Parker, AZ

The temperature in our motorcoach dropped below 60 early in the morning and the Aqua-Hot bedroom zone pump and heat exchanger fans came on even though we did not have a heat source turned on.  That was because I had failed to turn the thermostat off before going to bed last night.  With a 50 Amp shorepower connection I would have turned the three electric toe-kick heaters on, but with our 30 Amp connection I turned on the diesel burner and the electric heating element.  Twenty minutes later the coach was warming up and I turned the electric element off so Linda could start cooking breakfast.

Linda made a tofu scramble using a different recipe that did not call for nutritional yeast as she forgot to pack any.  We had sourdough toast with strawberry jam to go with the scramble, grapefruit juice, and coffee.  Always coffee.  After breakfast Linda went for a walk while I stayed at the bus.  When she got back from her walk and Fonda got back from Church we discussed driving to the Wal-Mart in Parker, Arizona for groceries and sundry items.  Butch left seating for four people in their Suburban so after lunch, he drove all of us to Parker.

See the mountains? Quartzsite is surrounded by mountains!

See the mountains? Quartzsite is surrounded by mountains!

What we saw of Parker looked like a nice little town.  The Wal-Mart had a reasonable variety and quantity of fresh produce and we got most of the items on our shopping list.  We noticed when pulling out that there was a Safeway supermarket across the street with a CVS Pharmacy next door.  Parker is located on the Arizona side of the Colorado River and is the county seat for La Paz County which includes Quartzsite.  It is also the location of the tribal headquarters for the Colorado River Indian Tribes, a consortium of tribes with reservations along both sides of the Colorado River for many miles north and south of Parker.  The Bluewater Resort and Casino is one of the attractions in town.

Back at our winter home base we unloaded our groceries and then sat outside to read, write, and surf the web.  It was cool in the shade and warm in sun.  We chatted with Connie for a while and then retreated to our coach as the outside air temperature dropped.  Linda had picked up a guide to the Lower Colorado River region while walking this morning so I settled in to read it.  As it got dark Linda assembled our dinner.  We had another nice salad, a bowl of the left-over curry, some bread, and finished the bottle of Pinot Noir.  We read for a while after dinner and then went to bed.

2014/12/15 (M) Hard Water

The outside temperature dropped to 38 degrees F overnight, colder than at our house back in Michigan, but the high there won’t make it past 50, which is above average for this time of year, while the high here will be in the low 60s, which is normal.  Add in the warmth of direct sunshine here and you typically have shirtsleeve weather.

I turned on the Aqua-Hot at 6:30 AM and went back to bed for half an hour while the coach warmed up.  When I got up I put on the new sweatshirt and sweatpants that we bought yesterday and made a pot of coffee.  We got the sweat clothing yesterday to wear in the coach while lounging around in the morning.  I only brought a lightweight robe from home, and Linda only brought a lightweight nightshirt, both of which proved to be inadequate against the morning chill.

After breakfast we took showers and then called the Escapees RV Club to register for the Escapade rally and clarify the process for ordering clothing.  I got transferred to Kim’s voice-mail and left my information.  Rather than hang around the coach waiting for a return phone call we walked to “downtown” Quartzsite.  Main Street is only 8/10ths of a mile straight south of our location and is only two miles long from Exit 19 to exit 17 of I-10.  The city is basically four square miles (2×2)—with most of it north of I-10—and is flat terrain, so it’s a compact, easy place to get around on foot or bicycle.

Our first stop was the post office so Linda could mail a few postcards.  There was quite a crowd there picking up and dropping off mail.  From what we understand mail does not get delivered to street addresses here so everyone has a P. O. Box.  UPS, however, does deliver to street addresses.  We went next door to the Chamber of Commerce trailer and picked up a couple more maps and some flyers and booklets on area attractions.  We also bought a pair of Quartzsite 2014-2015 Snowbird commemorative pins.  We then walked to the west end of Main Street and wandered through the Main Event warehouse building.  They sell all manner of inexpensive (cheap) Chinese tools but we did not buy anything on this visit.

Joe & Connie's park model trailer as viewed through the cactus garden by our coach.

Joe & Connie’s park model trailer as viewed through the cactus garden by our coach.

We crossed Main Street to the McDonalds, had some French fries, and used the restrooms.  We did not see any signs for “public” restrooms on our walk today, so the fast food places and truck stops were important pedestrian waypoints.  We headed back east on Main Street and stopped at Big Market to check out the hardware portion of the store.  Butch went through it the other day and said it was surprisingly good given its size.  Having now seen it for myself I have to agree with his assessment.

Most north-south roads in Q are Avenues while larger E-W roads are Streets.  Studying the map we got from the Chamber of Commerce it appears that Avenues and Streets connect to other roads at each end and/or at intermediate points.  Dead end roads are usually named Lanes, but a few are Roads, Drives, or Trails.   There are only four Avenues that run all the way from Main Street to the north end of town.  From east to west they are Plymouth Ave., Central Ave. (AZ-95), Moon Mtn. Ave., and Kofa Ave.  Tyson’s Wash runs north-south between Central Ave. and Moon Mtn. Ave.  Perhaps because of the wash, or perhaps for other reasons, there are only three streets that run all the way through from east to west.  Tyson St. is essentially the north edge of town while Main St. and Kuehn St. parallel I-10 on the north and south side respectively.

We got back to our coach a little after 1 PM.  Cool air temperatures and cloudy skies made it a less comfortable day to sit outside so we gathered up our soiled clothes and Linda took them over to the laundry room.  Because this is private property, not a large commercial RV park, the laundry room is just that, a room with a standard residential washer and dryer.  They are not coin operated so usage is on the honor system; $2 per load (washed and dried).  We are keeping a log of the loads we do and will add the corresponding cost to our rent or electrical bill next month.

Linda sliced an apple, got out the hummus, and put out some baby carrots, pieces of cauliflower, and broccoli along with pita chips.  As we finished our late lunch/snack I noticed that Butch was working in his engine bay.  That meant he was probably doing something with the air-compressor so I went over to find out exactly what he was up to and see if I could be of any assistance.  He was unbolting the compressor from the engine block so he could pull it away from the back of the engine and check the drive gears and spline.  It turned out that I had several socket wrench related tools with me that he needed, so that was my contribution to the process.

Once he had the compressor unbolted and pulled away from the block he was able to determine that there wasn’t anything wrong with the drive gear on the end of the camshaft or with the free-floating spline.  The Bakelite gear was also still intact and the compressor was not seized.  Based on a conversation he had with Bill at U. S. Coach the only thing that appeared to be amiss was a missing spring.  The purpose of the spring is to keep the Bakelite gear engaged with the spline.  Lots of grease packed behind the Bakelite gear can have the same effect as the spring, at least for a while.  Since Butch had already done some of the hardest work required to remove the compressor he was still leaning towards buying a rebuilt unit and installing it.  The “engine” in their bus was newly rebuilt when they bought it, but all of the accessories that attach to it, including the air-compressor, were not.

We did not fill our fresh water tank when we dumped our waste water at the Dream Catcher SKP RV Park on Thursday morning.  After five days of heavier use, including showers, it was nearing empty and needed to be refilled.  We try to fill it with softened water whenever possible and then use the water from the tank.  On the road it is via our portable water softener.  This approach keeps the water in the tank from going stale and also allows us to track how many times we have run a tank’s worth of water (100 – 125 gallons) through the softener.  The number of gallons we can soften depends on the hardness of the water.  We tested the city water in Q when we got here and it is very hard.  It probably comes from very deep wells.

I borrowed a test strip from Butch to check the hardness of the water coming out of our softener.  To my dismay, it was the same as the water going in.  In other words, the softener wasn’t doing anything.  That meant I had to recharge (regenerate) it before I could use it to fill the fresh water tank.  It was near sunset, which meant most this work was done the dark.  Bad planning on my part, but there it is.

I like our little portable softener but have never been satisfied with the recharge procedure.  I followed the directions but without much success and with what I thought was way too much wasted water.  After unscrewing the filter housing on the softener inlet and removing the filter I filled the housing ~3/4s full with non-iodized table salt.  I inserted the special plastic tube onto the outflow port inside the head and then worked the housing up and screwed it into place.  I tried using a trickle flow and also full inlet water pressure with a constricted outlet flow.  I checked every half hour for two hours, but most of the salt was still there.

The view to the SW from our patio.

The view to the SW from our patio.  Just over those mountains is California!

The problem was obvious to me.  When a filter is installed in the housing it is sealed at the top and bottom by a post (bottom) and the outlet port (top).  Water flows into the housing around the outside of the filter, through the filter media, and up the hollow center of the filter and out the port.  What I needed was a tube that was exactly the same inside diameter and length as a standard filter, so it would seal on both ends, but with holes near the bottom.  This would force water, under pressure, to flow down through the salt, through the holes, and up through the tube and into the softener where it could restore the ion exchange capability of the resin media.  I jury-rigged just such a solution by taking the old filter and drilling 1/4″ holes around the bottom.  Not my best piece of work, but it finally got the job done.  I plan to make a better, more permanent, version of this solution sometime soon.

When all of the salt had finally been dissolved and run through the softener I removed the modified filter from the housing, rinsed it out, and installed a new 5 micron filter cartridge.  The housing was leaking and I thought it was the plastic NPT nipple so I released any residual pressures and unscrewed the filter head from the threaded pipe.  I cleaned the old Teflon tape out of the threads, wrapped new tape around them, and screwed the filter housing head back on the nipple.  Fonda had wandered over by this time and was holding the flashlight which was a great help.  It turned out that the problem was a missing O-ring; it fell out of the housing when I dumped it out.  By chance I was walking around the back of the bus (with a flashlight), where I had dumped out the housing, and spotted it on the ground.  I cleaned it off, put it back in, re-installed the new 5 micron filter element into the housing, and screwed it back onto the head.  Valves open; pressure good; no leaks; good to go.

I opened the valve to fill the fresh water tank and went inside for a while.  It took about 30 minutes to fill the main tank because the 5 micron filter does not pass water as quickly as the 20 micron that was in there.  There is also a “whole house” filter housing installed in the water bay.  As best I can tell, all of the water entering the coach goes through that filter, whether directly to the plumbing or into the fresh water tank (which is filled by opening a valve plumbed into the main supply line to the house).  What I need to do now is replace that filter cartridge with a carbon element that removes chlorine and other such things.  We also have a 1 micron drinking/cooking water filter under the kitchen sink that removes five or six different things.  By the time I turned off the water, closed all of the supply valves, and went inside it was 9:45 PM so I grabbed my iPad and headed to bed.

2014/12/16 (T) Shopping In Q

Connie asked me last night if we would help her load her car today and of course we agreed.  Our “landlady” for the winter is a truly delightful person.  She has limited mobility but gets around without complaint.  She’s picking Joe up from the care facility on Wednesday afternoon and bringing him here so we will finally get to meet him in person.  Their sons are driving down from their homes in Nevada on Friday after work and taking the whole family back on Saturday.

Linda went for her morning power walk and I started working on cleaning up my e-mail inboxes.  While Linda was gone Connie indicated that she was ready to start loading her car so I took care of that task.  It was not a big or heavy job, but was more than Connie could do.  I was close to being done when Linda returned and Butch/Fonda emerged from their bus.  We all stood around chatting for a while and Connie invited us in to see the park model trailer she and Joe live in when they are here.  It was not large but was more spacious than either of our buses.

Butch and I headed into town while Fonda and Linda stayed in camp.  Linda wanted to work on her cross-stitch project and Fonda had things to do.  We stopped at the Tool Mart at the Main Event on the west end of Main Street and each picked up some odds and ends tools.  We then drove across to the south side of I-10 and headed west in search of the home where Fonda wants to attend a women’s bible study group on Wednesdays.  The house we were looking for was in a development on the other side of the first ridge of mountains that lie SW of Quartzite.  We found the development and the house without difficulty.  Both were nice but the location was a bit surreal; I mean this development was in the middle of nowhere surrounded by low mountains.  Butch captured the location in his GPS so that Fonda could find her way here and back tomorrow.

We drove back into Q, staying on the south side of I-10, and checked out the various vendors.  We spotted the M & T Enterprises RV water filter store and pulled in to park.  We spent some time there talking to the owner.  They were one of the vendors selling an OTA TV antenna and had one set up on top of a 20 foot pole.  The unit had a built-in rotator, and they claimed they were able to get 21 channels, but they said all of the signals were coming from the NNE to NE.  Other folks have told us that the only signals in town are from Yuma, 85 miles away in a S to SSW direction.  That seems unlikely given the terrain.

We walked down a few booths to the east to K & B Tool.  Among many other things they sell the aluminum tent poles that are being used to get the aforementioned TV antennas up in the air.  Our final stop was at Discount Solar at the NE corner of Main Street and Plymouth Ave.  Butch bought all of their solar equipment from Discount Solar some years ago and thinks highly of the owners and staff.  We were treated most cordially and they took time to talk to both of us.  Butch is considering buying some Full River AGM batteries from them and I was just curious about what they had.

We have two humingbird feeders in the cactus garden by our coach. Look carefully to the right of the feeder.

We have two humingbird feeders in the cactus garden by our coach. Look carefully to the right of the feeder.

When we got back to camp I had some of the leftover curry for lunch with some hot tea to help me warm up.  Heavy clouds set in over the course of the afternoon and the air temperature was cool enough that I got slightly chilled.  In spite of the chill, Linda went outside to continue working on her cross-stitch project.  Butch set up their two-burner propane stove and made candy as he wanted to give some to Joe and Connie as a gift before they left on Saturday.  With all that work going on around me I decided to take a nap.

Linda made a black beans and rice dish for dinner along with a green salad, both of which were very tasty.  We bought a box of Franzia Sangria at Big Market the other day and finally tried it this evening.  As with most of the Franzia wines it was not outstanding but also not offensive.  Among inexpensive wines the Red Guitar Sangria is much fruitier and I like it better.  While I would prefer a better wine, the Franzia boxed wines are around $13 for 5 liters, fit nicely in the refrigerator, can be consumed over a long time (at least eight weeks), and minimize garbage and recycling.  All of those are positive attributes when living in the motorhome.  We had fresh strawberries later for dessert, which are always a treat.

Our son (Brendan) sent a TXT message with a picture of our grand-daughter (Madeline) and the ornaments she had hung on their Christmas tree.  She put five of them in a group at her eye level.  She will be two years old in two more days and is fully aware that special things are happening and that she is a full participant in them, if not the center of attention.  After dinner I resumed the task of cleaning up e-mails.  I always promise myself that I will do better at managing my e-mails, but I never do.

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

2014/03/22 (S) WiFi Ants

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No, not WiFi Antennas; WiFi and ants, which I will get to later.

Saturday morning the refrigerator temperature was 40 degrees F.  I moved the remote wireless thermometer to the freezer compartment and left it until it settled in around 5 degrees F.  The refrigeration system, including the controls, appeared to be working.  Linda retrieved most of our frozen food and a few fresh things.  We partially restocked the fridge and I set the thermostat a bit lower.  Linda made a tofu scramble to use up some of the fresh ingredients, in case the problem returned.  Yum.

I checked my e-mail and found several dozen post replies and a few messages from RVillage.  We both played with RVillage for a while and I reported another bug.  I also had a message from the WiFi Ranger technical support team indicating that they had successfully uploaded a patch to our WFR MobileTi and switched it to a PRO feature set.  They wanted me to try logging in to the resort WiFi system and let them know if it worked.  I followed their instructions, and it did!  Finally, success!!!  I got back on their support forum to let them know and thanked them for their persistence in identifying and correcting the problem.

As best I understand it, the problem was not a bug in their firmware but rather a design assumption they made that an RV park WiFi system would never be a class 2 network.  Based on that assumption they were doing using IP addresses to connect to other WFR devices (WFR Go) in a way that conflicted with the class 2 network operating in our RV resort. WiFi Ranger thinks the chance of us running into this again is very small (unless we come back here, in which case it’s 100%).  This may, in fact, be the only RV park where we will ever encounter this.

I do not understand all of the details, but essentially a class 2 network has 2^16 (65,536) available IP addresses. That’s a LOT of IP addresses and made me wonder if the resort WiFi system is actually part of a much larger network, perhaps for the city of Williston or even for all of Levy County.  The “explanation” the network technician gave me some weeks ago was that our WiFi Ranger, being a repeater/router, was simply “not a supported device” as a matter of park policy and he was unable (unwilling) to give me any assistance with it even though he admitted knowing what it was and having  set them up before.  He could have just told me they were running a class 2 network and that it might have something to do with my problem, but he withheld that information.

The “logic” behind his explanation of the park policy was that we could “hide” data-intensive devices behind our system, such as streaming-video, gaming consoles, or even a web-server.  That was nonsense, of course.  If the concern was data-transfer, the network could simply monitor and control that at an IP address level.  When I indicated that one of the reasons for our router was to put our devices (and data transfers) behind an encrypted hardware firewall, he told me the WiFi system connection to the Internet was encrypted, as if that was somehow equivalent.  It’s not.  The connection between the resort WiFi system and the WiFi client devices is NOT encrypted, and thus open and viewable to someone intent on doing so.  Unless people are using secure applications, such as most banking software, their WiFi connection is vulnerable.  This is true of any system that does not require you to enter a WPA or other “key,” including the free WiFi at places like Panera Bread.

We have had good Verizon 4G/LTE service here, so getting online has not been a problem, but if that had not been the case we would have been in a really bad situation.  I was anxious to get this resolved while we were still here so they could test possible solutions on a network known to have this problem.

With computer tasks taken care of, we turned our attention to fixing the roof leak.  As we were setting up the Little Giant folding step/extension ladder we noticed ants traveling up and down the cable TV wire.  Yikes!  The cable runs into the bus through a small window by the driver’s seat.  We had used Frog Tape to seal up the opening against the weather, but it was not ant proof.  We checked inside but did not see any ants where the cable came in.  Closer inspection outside revealed them moving up and down along a body seam and horizontally along the floor line just above the bay doors on the driver side of the coach.  We quickly disconnected the TV cable (we don’t use it anyway because the analog signal in the park is not very good) and closed the little window.  Dealing with the ants, however, would have to wait.

Linda packed all of the tools and supplies I needed for the roof repair into a bag that I carried up with me.  The repair was simple enough; use the small caulk gun to apply Dicor self-leveling lap sealant around and up onto all four sides of the Fan-Tastic vent fan base.  This Dicor product is universally used in the RV industry for just this purpose.  It is not “runny” like water but it does flow, especially when warm, just enough to do what its name suggests, flowing into cracks, crevices, and small holes as it smooths out.  It eventually sets up and forms a skin, but remain pliable.  Rain is forecast starting late Sunday and running through the coming week, so we will find out then if I have fixed the problem.  The real problem, of course, is that the fan base is probably not installed properly.  The correct fix would be to remove it and reinstall it, but that was not going to happen sitting here in the RV resort.

Now for the Ants!  These were, thankfully, small black ants and not fire ants, which are a widespread and serious problem here in Florida.  We hooked up a spray nozzle and tried to flush as many of them away as we could.  It’s not that we wanted to harm even these tiny creatures, but we are not willing to share our home on wheels with them.  They are tenacious, and hung on tight or hunkered down in the nearest available crack.  Linda walked to the Grocery Depot and bought a can of ant spray that I applied to the concrete pad around the bus tires as best I could and on/around the electrical and water shorelines and the waste water drain hose.  Later I went to ACE Hardware, bought a couple of boxes of Borax, and used them to establish a defensive perimeter around the coach.  This is a treatment for ants that we have come across in numerous different forums.  The coming rains will wash it away so it will have to be reapplied.

We had a light/early dinner of hummus and pita chips, went for a walk, and then eventually headed to the fire pit with our customary glasses of wine.  John played the guitar and sang for hours, often joined by the group that had gathered.  We were they again until quiet time at 10 PM, at which time John stopped playing and we turned off the lights.  We still had a small fire and I continued to coax flames out of it for a while longer.  Kevin builds the initial fire and lights it, and John was the backup fire tender, but since he is usually playing his guitar I have assumed responsibility for tending the fire.

 

2014/02/14 (F) Valentine’s Day

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“Hallmark Holidays” have never been a big deal for us, and Valentine’s Day is no exception.  However, we had no plans to visit state parks today, had been looking for a day to visit the Florida Museum of Natural History at the University of Florida in Gainesville, needed to make a visit to Walmart, and wanted to try one of the vegan-friendly restaurants in Gainesville, so Valentine’s Day provided the needed excuse to do all of that in the same trip.  Before I go on, I am including a picture of us taken by Marian Hagan on our outing with her and John to the two Crystal River state parks last Sunday.

Us at Crystal River Buffer Preserve State Park. (Photo by Marian Hagan.)

Us at Crystal River Buffer Preserve State Park. (Photo by Marian Hagan.)

We selected The Jones Eastside which was open all day serving breakfast and lunch, and was staying open for dinner.  We can usually find acceptable food for lunch and dinner if we are thoughtful about our choice of restaurant, but breakfast is often limited to dry toast with jam and/or fresh fruit.  Nothing wrong with that, of course, but also nothing special about it.  At The Jones Eastside, however, we were able to order a tofu scramble with sides of potatoes and fruit and a stack of vegan flax seed pancakes with fresh blueberries and real maple syrup.  We split each dish in half and had a really nice breakfast.  The Jones Eastside was highly recommended on both HappyCow.com and Yelp.com, and deservedly so.  It’s a quaint little place using organic ingredients and providing attentive service; you go for the food, not for an upscale setting.

From The Jones Eastside we drove through the heart of downtown Gainesville to where we thought the Florida Museum of Natural History was located.  We enjoyed seeing the non-university part of town, and parts of the UF central campus, but the museum was not where I thought it was.  Our Garmin 465T GPS did, however, and we followed its directions into a major traffic jam.  We had been to Gainesville several times, but had not seen traffic like this before.

We found the museum, paid $4 to park, and went in.  Admission was free except for the Butterfly Rainforest and special exhibits.  We spent a couple of hours exploring the free exhibits and plan to return for the Butterflies and a special exhibit titled “Wolf to Woof” on the evolution of the domestic dog.  Like most serious museums, you could spend days here depending on the level of detail you wanted to absorb.

By the time we were done at the museum it was 4 PM.  Our Valentine’s Day still needed something “sweet” so we headed to Karma Cream for vegan ice cream.  We fought our way (slowly) through more terrible traffic, but it was worth it.  🙂

“GPS, find us a Walmart, please.”  It showed two in Gainesville so I picked the closer one just up the street.  It was closed, the building vacant.  🙁  So I selected the other one on SW Archer (US-24).  We routed ourselves over to FL-121 southbound which intersects Archer close to the Walmart.  YOU DO NOT WANT TO BE ON THIS ROAD DURING AFTERNOON RUSH HOUR, which is actually “hope you’re not in a rush” hour.  Truthfully, you do not want to be in Gainesville during the evening rush hour.  Period.  End of story.  Total gridlock.  Fortunately we were not in a rush to be anywhere in particular by any certain time so we only had to deal with our self-imposed frustration at being stuck in traffic.  It won’t happen again, at least not in Gainesville.

We eventually got to the Walmart (thank goodness they are open 24/7).  We do not go out of way to shop there, but it’s the only place locally where we can find Calgon Bath Beads which we mix with water and Pine Sol and add to our holding tanks.  It is also where we bought our microwave popcorn popper and have to get the disposable cardboard heating discs that go in the bottom.

Shopping done, we had no choice but to venture back out into traffic.  OK, we had a choice; we could have sat there for a couple of hours until traffic thinned.  If we had been the least bit hungry we could have gotten something to eat while we waited, but having just had ice cream our appetites were satisfied.  Fortunately we were close to the SW corner of Gainesville by now where FL-121 turns SSW and heads through the country to Williston.  We arrived back at the RV resort after 6 PM, but there was no fire going in the fire pit.

WCRVR was having a Valentine’s Day dinner/dance starting at 5 PM so the Friday night fire had not been built by Kevin at its usual time as he and his wife had gone to the dinner/dance.  But a short time later I noticed a flickering flame and went to investigate.  Next door neighbors John and Ali had not gone to the dinner/dance either and John, being the backup fire guy, was getting one going.  We opened our bottle of sparkling pink moscato, bundled up a bit against the cool evening air, and went over.  Ali brought John’s guitar, the rocking chairs slowly filled up (~16 people), and we sang along when we knew the words.  It was a lovely capstone to a very nice Valentine’s Day (traffic notwithstanding).