Turns
out Matt and family are here as well. Lucky us.
Everybody
but me in this one. Elise, Teigan, Brian, Becky, Arie, Judy, Austin,
Ayla, Lindsay, Matt, Kelly, Eli, and Elysia. Elise and Teigan go
together. Becky and Brian. Arie, Austin, Ayla, Lindsay, and
Matt. Lindsay’ sister Kelly, Eli, and Elysia.
…in Erie, Colorado.
Happy to be here.
Teigan
and Elise were already here. Conner came by to visit.
So
that means each day is getting shorter. But we’re going north, so not
only is each day getting shorter, it’s getting longer at the same time!
Trinidad
Lake State Park. No camping cabin. This one counts.
Cold
northern winters tend to be a little too cold so they move south. Now
that we’ve moved south, as we get older, the summer heat is getting to be a bit
much!
We’re
in Lubbock tonight. Triple digits. Still too hot to camp.
We’ve gotten out of that South Texas gulf coast humidity though. It feels
better. Tonight, we got a deluxe cabin.
It
has a bathroom. We get to shower without going outside!
After
two day’s drive, now we’re as far north as Southern California!
We went a little bit north
and stopped for the night in San Antonio. Way too hot to camp outside, so
here we are, in an air-conditioned KOA camping cabin!
Tomorrow, norther.
“Going
where the weather suits my clothes” is an old hobo saying from the early
1900s. Fred Neil, a singer songwriter, used the phrase in 1966 when he
wrote Everybody’s Talkin’. The Harry Nilsson version of Everybody’s
Talkin’ was a hit in 1969. It was an even bigger hit after it was
featured in Midnight Cowboy.
The
song is about not being able to connect with the busy bustling world and
wanting to go back home to a simpler time. The cool thing is, the guy who
wrote this song, Fred Neil, he made enough in royalties to do what he wrote
about. He moved back home to Florida and retired into obscurity.
Don’t
know where we’re going.
Don’t
know how long we’ll be gone.
We’re
going where the weather suits our clothes.
Sometimes
they live together in peace.
But
more often, they get snappy when they get crowded together.
They
raise the offside wing, for balance I suppose, then snap with the closer
wing. It makes a loud whack. It sounds dramatic but nobody gets
wounded. It’s a noisy slap-fight until somebody gives up and flies off.
It’s
still happening, but only intermittent showers now. There was more than 5
inches of rain from the storm here. Don’t have an exact count. Up
to 10 inches in places. And no Lake Sandpipers.
A
little street flooding on the 300 row, but that was gone the day after it
stopped raining. The grass in the field out in front of us stayed visible
the entire time. So far so good on the drainage!
This is what the interior
looked like at 8:00 am yesterday. Behind the driver’s compartment, ten
more seats.
We drove it over to
storage, removed each seat and put them inside. By noon, the interior
looked like this.
This is what it looked
like by 6:00.
Judy was very busy.
Now she has it almost completely packed!
Today
was our last doctor visit. Saw the cardiologist for a checkup. He
thinks I’m awesome. We haven’t picked a day to leave yet. We’re
waiting for a couple more deliveries from Amazon on Monday. As soon as it
feels like time, we’ll head north.
We’re going to take all
the seats out of the van and put in a nice sofa that converts into a bed in the
rear. The sofa bed is on order and won’t be shipped until late July
though. We’ve arranged with a shop in Colorado to install it. We’re
not going to wait here in the Valley until it’s ready. We’re going to hit
the road before then, gain a little altitude and lose a little humidity.
We’ll make sure we’re back in Colorado when it’s time for the sofa bed
installation. That means we’re going to have to go with a different kind
of bed in the meantime, and here it is. The floor bed.
It starts out as three
6-inch cushions folded up. 18 inches high. About the height of a
chair. That’s how it will ride during the day.
It folds out into a bed
for two at night. It has a width that will fit just right between the
wheel wells.
All set up with our nice
puffy down sleeping bags.
We slept on it to make
sure it was going to work. It did. This is totally doable.
Picked it up from the
dealer at noon.
Tropical Storm Alberto has
landed as well. No problem. We drove the van home from the dealer
in the storm and then kept on going for another hour, just checking it
out. Now it’s parked backed-in underneath the cover. We can get in
and out of it through the side and back doors without getting very wet.
We bought it loaded with pretty much everything. Plenty of features to
explore and plans to make. And now I can remove the blue tape outline of
the interior of a Transit Van from our back patio, and it will look less like a
crime scene back there.
The frogs have landed as
well. The torrential rain has unleashed all the different frogs we have
here from their dormant states. Standing out on the deck in the dark, it
is a joyful racket of a thousand frogs announcing their return.
Here
is something. Screened vents.
Custom
fit for Transit Vans. They will roll up in the tops of the front windows
in the van when we’re parked. On their own, they won’t do much for
airflow or a cross-breeze, but when the roof exhaust vent is installed in the
back, these will be where the air comes in that will get pulled through the
car, cooling us down to the ambient temperature outside. That will be
good airflow. No bugs. Good sleeping weather.
After all these days of a
hundred degrees and sunny, an area of low pressure that will affect us is
developing in the southern Gulf of Mexico next to the Yucatan Peninsula.
Now we have our first cone
of uncertainty of the year.
This disturbance is
projected to strengthen into a tropical depression or even a tropical storm in
the next couple of days. The center is expected to make landfall in
Mexico, but here in South Texas, we’re on the dirty side of the circulation.
We’ll get most of the moisture. We’re told to expect five inches of rain,
plus or minus. Some places might get a foot. It doesn’t look like
something we need to leave town to escape. We’ll sit here and see if our
intermittent Lake Sandpipers reappears… The park has installed a pump
system to drain our flooding into a nearby ditch. Even if the field out
in front of us is overwhelmed, it should dry out much faster now.
It’s
white now.
We
didn’t take this photo. Our friend Nancy who still walks by it sent the
shot to us. It looks like the natural grass has been restored. The
maple trees are still there, as is the pelican weathervane on the roof!
I
like it.
Thought
we might get the van today. There was a car carrier coming in to our
dealer from Houston with a Transit Van on it. Turned out to be someone
else’s Transit Van.
Happy
Birthday Henry! Fourteen years old today. Spa day. Freshly
groomed, he’s rocking it!
Grandson Tony
got that job with Amazon in Seattle about a month ago. Time for his own
apartment now. Furnishing it at Ikea. He gets the keys tomorrow.
Rocking
it!
A
dry toilet.
It
comes with leak-proof double bags. Don’t expect to need it, but we’ll
have that bad boy along in case it’s too far between rest stops.
We
carry an ice chest anyway. May as well make it a 12-volt ice chest.
…
and get to use the entire capacity for food, not half of it for ice and water.
It
plugs into the 12-volt outlet in the car and will hold any temperature we set.
We can keep it right at freezing if we want. Or it can be powered by the
1,000-watt power source we also carry. That will run it for days between
charges. No more wet food. A high-tech ice chest!
The
color changed on Jesse’s face. Her muzzle turned brown. I posted
pictures of that, and Jesse’s breeder responded immediately that she was
getting too much iron, which indirectly caused the stains, and we shouldn’t
feed her tap water anymore. We should switch to bottled water.
Great idea, but the dogs already get the finest bottled water. The tap
water here comes from the Rio Grande and is not very good, so we have a reverse
osmosis tap at the sink. That’s where the water comes from to fill their
water bowl. It is every bit as good as Dasani.
Oh.
And the fountain on the deck. All the dogs, residents and visitors alike,
love to drink out of the mountain stream (the fountain on the deck).
Whatever is in the water there concentrates. The fountain fills from the
unfiltered tap. Some of it the dogs drink. Some of it
evaporates. It refills. It cycles like that every day. None
of the dissolved solids or heavy metals escape.
If
the fountain water had that effect on Jesse, might it have had an effect on
Henry as well? It didn’t make his face brown. Well,
maybe a little, but not a lot. I googled “too much iron in drinking water
for dogs”. Google said it could be a problem. The symptoms:
diarrhea, vomiting, loss of appetite, and fatigue. Henry had diarrhea for
four months. He lost his appetite and couldn’t eat. If he did eat
anything he would go out onto the deck right after and throw it up. He
got so weak he could barely get up. Google just described Henry.
Every vet visit we made and every test they ran couldn’t figure out why he was
so sick, but maybe a google search just did. When Henry got that weak
(and couldn’t go out on the deck anymore), he quit getting worse and started to
get better. He started eating again and regained some strength.
When we saw this possible connection to drinking water, we immediately disabled
and disposed of the fountain. Don’t know if there is real cause and
effect here, Jesse’s face is still brown, but if there is a connection the
color may take time to fade. No reason to take any more chances with the
fountain water though. Since then, about a month ago, Henry has been
improving with no serious setbacks. He is still a skinny little old man
now, but he’s a loveable and happy presence. His appetite is steady, and
with no worries about him getting overweight, we’re letting him eat more than
he has ever eaten before. A month ago, we were talking to the vet,
arranging his cremation, and working out how it would go if he didn’t make it
through the weekend. We were planning a summer trip without him.
Now, Henry is a part of our summer plans.
Here
is his charming overgrown face.
It
would be trimmed, but the last time the groomer was here a month ago there
didn’t seem to be any point to it, so we pulled him out of the process.
Next Saturday, he and Jesse both have a date with the groomer.
That’s what the weatherman
says.
But does that make any
sense? It’s going to rain or it’s not going to rain. What we need
or want doesn’t have anything to do with it. It’s going to rain at any
particular place when it’s normal for it to rain there. That’s just the
weather in that particular place. And normally, some years will be
rainier or drier than others. Would we move to the desert, then say we
need more rain? We could move to a rain forest and claim we need less
rain. So when we’re in one place and say we need more rain, aren’t we
just saying we would rather that one place be more like some other place?
“Every
organization is perfectly designed to produce the results it produces.”
What
do they know?
They
stumble around making babbling baby noises, running into furniture, and falling
down. Next thing, they’re speaking a language. They don’t know
subjects and predicates or present tense and past tense. They don’t
study. They don’t know how to spell or even how to write. They just
listen and repeat and start talking until it sounds right. They don’t
have any idea how hard it is, or how long it takes, to learn a new
language. Live in a multi-lingual house? No problem, they just
learn two languages at once!
Kids.
Orange
Esperanza. I’ve been trimming and shaping, so not much to see for
flowers.
Texas
Lantana. Nothing I do slows this one down.
And
Texas Firebush. This is the one that looked stone dead all the way down
to the ground.
Pretty
soon they’re going to have to carry on for the rest of the summer without us
because we’ll be gone. They’ll be just fine though because they’re all
natives, accustomed to this climate.
