Author: canoepam@yahoo.com

No pictures today

I really should learn to take more pictures! We have been mostly hanging around the house waiting for Kevin’s knee to heal. The arthroscopic surgery went well a week ago, and they took out a bunch of torn meniscus. We both have what my family called “itchy feet” meaning the itch to travel, so on Saturday we headed to Snowbird ski resort for sightseeing and lunch. It is the last weekend most of the resorts will be open, so it was pretty busy. We like having lunch in the lodge, sitting next to the big windows opening onto the slopes. They were having a water competition where you ski or board down a slope then try to stay on top of a big pool of water at the end. It was hilarious watching folks in costumes try it. Some actually made it! This is why I should take pictures.

Yesterday we went to Park City and Tanger Outlets to look for Kevin a new winter coat. His last one finally gave up the ghost, and he needs something good below freezing. Sadly the Columbia store only had medium sizes in the ones he liked, and he isn’t a medium. I liked some vests, but again they only had mediums left in the women sizes too.

On the home front, I think I will finish the borders on my current quilt today. I will take a picture when I do. I am having a friend with a long arm do my basting with water soluble thread, then I will do the real quilting on my Sweet 16 sit down. I have no interest basting a queen sized quilt with a wool batting! Next project is a new king sized quilt for our bed. In the next couple of weeks I will get it cut out (I have the fabric and the pattern) so I can sew blocks while traveling.

I am getting anxious about our next trip. We are planning to go to Yosemite, but the Highway 120 entrance near our reservation site is closed due to a big landslide. I look at the road status every day, and I am getting nervous. If it wasn’t for the rain they would probably have it ready by now, but there has been a LOT of rain. Our backup plan is Yellowstone, so it won’t be a bust either way, but I have never been to Yosemite and the water falls will be incredible this year. I am crossing my fingers for luck.

New power converter, table, and other trailer mods

A travel trailer (or any RV) is always a work in progress. First there are the inevitable things that shake loose while traveling. For example, I need to recaulk the shower because the flex from traveling has loosened up a few pieces. Next comes the new and improved things. We call these “mods” in the RV world, and huge amounts of time are expended on discussing, planning, and then finally building them. Kevin loves to have a project going most of the time we are home, so we have lots of lovely mods. The latest is replacing the OEM power converter with a much higher quality unit. This will charge and maintain our batteries much better and make for a faster battery charge when we use the generator. It definitely took Kevin more time than he thought it would. The electrical center of our trailer is a modular system with breakers, switches, fans, and 110v/12v conversion. There are only a few things in the trailer that really run on native 110v – the microwave, the air conditioner, and the 110v outlets. Everything else actually runs on 12v power. The converter charges the batteries and converts the 110v power (when hooked up to “shore power”) to 12v so the rest of the electrical systems (lights, heater fan, etc) will operate. This is what he bought:

And here’s what got removed. Lots of cutting and resoldering connections.

A quick check with the power meter shows everything is working well!

Other mods include replacing our dinette table with a Gidgit brand sewing table. You can see the cutout in the middle that can be lowered when you want a sewing machine to sit level with the table cloth. You can also see the fitted tablecloth I made for it. This table is just a little bit smaller than the original making it easier to slide in and out of the dinette. I like it!

Some other mods I will show include taking out the incredibly uncomfortable jackknife sofa and replacing it with two recliners from IKEA. Kevin modified a small table (with under lid storage) to sit between them. Of course the cats must have a place to relax, so he adapted a purchased cat tree to fit behind the table. The cat tree is attached to the table so it doesn’t fall over while traveling.

Nice huh?

Enjoying springtime

Today is an absolutely lovely day. Blue sky, a few clouds, light breeze, and 72 degrees. We bought new chairs for our west facing front porch, my favorite spot outside. The view is nice even though I can’t see mountains on this side. My roses are fully green, though I still need to do some pruning. The serviceberry, partially pruned, is blooming nicely. 

One interesting thing I saw were jets from (probably) the local Air Force base.

That kind of formation flying has to be military. They were very high since I heard no noise at all.

I did finish the tablecloth for the trailer’s new table, and Kevin has been working most of the day on putting a new converter in. I will give both of those tasks their own post when everything is finished. For now, I am going to soak up some sun.

New trailer goodies

The weather is warming up again, and we are continuing to get some goodies for camping. We bought a new 32″ Samsung TV and got it mounted. I also bought an Apple Lightening to HDMI connector that lets us watch videos I have downloaded to my Apple devices on the TV. That will be nice! I doubt we will be able to stream very often, but being able to view videos will help.

We also bought a new bug shelter, a Clam model. We also bought the wind screens for all 6 sides. It is advertised as a 45 second shelter, but I figure the 5 minutes it took us the second time will be more standard. I think this will be very useful this summer in the Midwest. We have a couple of weeks planned in Iowa in July and a week in Missouri in October. Both can be rainy and windy, and Iowa can be buggy in July. It is long, maybe 5-6 feet, and everything (including the wind screens) fits into a single bag. Kevin has already figured out where it fits in the trailer’s storage compartments. 

We have decided to use a small sewing table instead of the standard dinette table. The sewing table is a bit narrower, and I can use it for sewing too. It has a cutout that can be lowered so the machine is level with the table, and that helps my back and neck a lot. I am working on a tablecloth to be used when I am not sewing. I got it cut out and all the pieces serged, ready to be sewn together. We will need to take the dinette table when we want the grandkids to stay, but that is pretty rare.

Kevin is working hard to get all kinds of stuff done before his knee surgery next week. He is having arthroscopic surgery to clean up some meniscus tears. He has been in a lot of pain for a couple of months, but it just takes a long time to get diagnosed, connected with a surgeon, and pre-authorized for the surgery itself. Hopefully he will be much better in a couple of weeks.

Spring has definitely come

It has decided to rain and rain and rain here. We blew past the average rain for March, and there is a lot of snow in the mountains. Today is dry with puffy white clouds and a brilliant blue sky. It sets off the snow covered peaks in a very picturesque manner. My daffodils have decided to riot, the yard is a brilliant green (I bet we don’t need to water for at least a month!), and the mulch is fully down in the back yard flower beds. I still need to buy another 10-20 sacks for the front flower bed, but I will wait until tomorrow.

We have just been busy doing regular “stuff.” We ordered a new Samsung gas range/electric oven combo. Since we don’t have a gas line, we first had to find the right contractor for that job. Hopefully we will have both the gas line and the range installed in a couple of weeks. Kevin has been doing taxes, and it is a huge job. We have income from Utah, Oklahoma, and Kansas. Income from the pensions, farm, oil, and the wind mills do not have any state tax taken out before it comes to us so it is painful. This is also the first full year we have both been retired, and we discovered we hadn’t had enough federal withheld either. Sigh. We have corrected that so hopefully it won’t be so bad next time. I did get some embroidery done for my daughter/grandson. 

Isn’t that fox adorable? Everyone loves my burp cloths. I use high quality prefolded cloth diapers, and they are the most popular baby present I make. The fabric is cotton and the thread is polyester so they can be washed in hot water with bleach. I do not believe in giving impractical gifts!

I have also been informed I am now to make Clay’s baptism gown. My daughter picked out a tailored style with a romper and a detachable skirt. Poor baby is being baptized in July in Iowa – think HOT. The detachable skirt will only be used for the service, and then he can be a lot cooler. I will use some heirloom techniques on it, especially pintucks which I think are very appropriate for a boy. Probably a Victorian embroidery of trinity crosses and a lot of entredeaux too. It will be a blast. Here is a picture of the romper; I will just wing the long skirt. I am using the version shown in blue and white, but I won’t be adding the faux overall straps. Oh, and there might be some religious embroidery where the chest buttons are. I will decide that later. I am also making the entire outfit out of a white broadcloth.

I almost forgot the other thing I made. I altered some high quality queen bed sheets to be 6 inches shorter so they fit the “short queen” bed in the travel trailer. We had sheets we bought at an RV supply house, but they weren’t very nice sheets. We put the altered ones on the bed, and they fit great except that I need to make them narrower. I forgot the sheets are made to fit very deep mattresses, and ours is only 8″ tall. I should be able to get that done before we leave.

Comicon, family, flowers, and doctors

The Salt Lake Comicon had a Fan-X experience convention last weekend. My second son, Mark, and two of his long time friends (I will call them K and R) plus their baby (I will call her A) live in Bozeman, MT, and they decided to come to our house to attend plus do some sightseeing and shopping. What fun! The week started out great, but then we one by one were felled by a GI virus. It did put a damper on the trip, and they decided to leave on Friday afternoon instead of staying until Saturday. First to get sick was A, then R, then K, then my husband Kevin, and finally me. My son didn’t catch it, but he decided to leave so he wouldn’t he exposed any more. After they left we put all the linens in the washer on the “sanitize” setting, and I will warn the housekeepers to sanitize everything carefully.

After I finally recovered (it took until Sunday), we took advantage of the gorgeous weather we have been having to head to Antelope Island State Park for some sightseeing. We stayed for four hours, looking for bison calves, but the nursery herd was hiding out. You can’t beat northern Utah on a clear day with highs in the mid 70s!

Monday and Tuesday we laid mulch. Mark and R had helped lay some, but we needed another 40 bags. The garden looks so lovely now! I got everything in the back pruned up, though the roses in the front still need work.

Tuesday was also a big day for Kevin. He finally got into the orthopedic surgeon to schedule an arthroscopic meniscus removal in his knee. It is now planned for 3 weeks from now, and he should be fully recovered by our trip to Yosemite in mid May. Poor fellow is in quite a bit of pain and can’t sleep well at night, so we want it as soon as possible.

 

Home tasks

After relaxing a couple of days, I am almost finally recovered from the sinus infection from hell. Now I only cough my lungs out when I go to sleep, a big improvement over doing it pretty much constantly a week ago. We are just doing house stuff. Kevin is working on a new side table for the trailer and trying to figure out how to get 400 watts of solar set up. He also is doing some general maintenance to the trailer. Trailers get bounced and jiggled all over, and things are always coming loose. It is just one of the things that you have to do. It is a bit challenging because his knee is giving him fits. He had a MRI yesterday, and we hope to have a diagnosis soon. The he can figure out what he needs to do.

I have been sewing. I made two fitted sheets for the Pack n Play I have. I ended up taking a 34xWOF fabric with 4″ inch boxes in the corner. My Bernina serger (made by Juki) has a foot designed to apply elastic very efficiently, and it made the job much easier. I also made a fitted crib sheet for one of my daughter’s friends. It uses two yards with 9″ boxes. It is out of the cutest Harry Potter fabric. (Ignore the stray threads.) The fabric came from etsy, and I am pretty sure it is a Spoonflower fabric based on the way it was printed. I am a bit worried about all that black on a crib sheet, but it isn’t my sheet!

I have also been doing some quilting. I bought the most wonderful fabric panel when I was at the Home and Machine Quilting Show in Sandy, UT last year. I just fell in love with it. I decided to use a fusible batting so it would be stiffer and not shrink. It didn’t work perfectly, but it isn’t bad. I just outline quilted the rock art figures with MonoPoly thread from Superior Threads. It is a very fine invisible thread, and I used it because I wanted to emphasize the figures but not distract from them. I used brown SuperBob on the bottom to coordinate with the backing. The binding is just a nice black cotton. I am going to put it where it can be seen as people come in my front door.

We also spent some time today pruning the service berry and one of the roses. We filled up the trash can so we will have to finish up after trash day.

Home (and getting there)

After a nice Brueger’s bagel, we headed from Tucson to Payson, AZ and Houston Mesa campground. It is a Forest Service campground run by a concessionaire just north of the town and set in the pine trees. It is just gorgeous, and there were only a couple of other campers. The camp hosts were very nice, and obviously rather bored with the limited number of campers. They talked to us quite a while, and were helpful in identifying places to go. The only problem with the big pull through site was the road noise; there was a lot of it!

We ended up just spending the night and decided to head to Utah. We drove through a wonderful scenic area with a huge copper mine. I live in the town with the Kennicott mine, the biggest open pit copper mine in the world, and I was still impressed with this one. Oddly the tailings were very colorful and interesting – all the shades of tan, brown, gray, along with green and pinks.

We spent our last night on the road at the Beaver KOA. Nice folks and only one other campsite occupied. It is a nice little place, very well kept and far enough off the highway to be very quiet. We took our time leaving, making sure the tanks were clean and empty before heading home. I even dusted! I still need to sweep the floor and wash the rugs, but it was pretty clean as we pulled it in the side yard. We started laundry (a never ending task) and cleaned out the refrigerator. Now the trailer will sleep for a few weeks.

We aren’t making any plans for April until we find out what is up with Kevin’s knee. It is very painful and makes these weird popping noises. He had this rather silly idea that he could wait until he went on Medicare in September, but it is just too sore. He saw our family practitioner today, and he has a MRI scheduled for Friday. By mid next week we will hopefully know what he has to do to be better since the PT and meds aren’t working. I am hoping it is a quick arthroscopic clean up of the tendon, but that is not based on any specific knowledge. If he can get better quickly, we may go to a high school get together in Oklahoma City on Easter weekend. If not, we will stay here (or at least close) until mid May when we have reservations for the Yosemite area.

Desert beauty

We decided to go to the Tucson area today. We are staying at the Pima County Fairgrounds, just south of Tucson proper. The site is fairly cheap, $25 for full hookups, but it is a crowded gravel parking lot. Of course it is just for an overnight stay so I don’t mind. We got in around 1:00 and chose a well-reviewed Thai restaurant for lunch. “Luckies” was wonderful. My green curry was loaded with good stuff, and just spicy enough to leave a tingle on my lips. It was deliciously warm today, upper 60s, so after lunch we took a trip to the Saguaro National Park’s east unit. It was glorious! I enjoy desert plants in general (such textures!), and I have a special fondness for the Sonoran desert flora. These are the types of plants I had in my yard in Albuquerque – yuccas, barrel cactus, chollas, sotols, etc. Here is a somewhat fuzzy picture of the area.
Saguaro National Park

I never had ocotillos in my yard since they need warmer weather. I do think they have the most wonderful shape though!

Ocotillo

The chollas looked like little fuzzy trees.

Cholla “tree”

And of course there were lots and lots of saguaros.

Saguaros

We keep heading gradually northwest. Where we stay tomorrow depends on when we get out of camp. There is a Brueger’s Bagel bakery not too far away, so we have to have breakfast there. They do real boiled then baked bagels, something I can’t get in SLC. I adore them!

A short and windy day

We were planning on making it somewhere just east of Tucson and doing some sightseeing, but the weather changed our minds. We knew there were wind and red flag warnings to the New Mexico border on I-10, but our trailer/truck combo handles wind very well. It does help to have an oversized truck! However New Mexico and Arizona closed I-10 west of Lordsburg, NM (I don’t remember where the Arizona closure began). They identified a detour using Highway 70, but that is a long way out of the way. We thought about it, but decided to stay in Lordsburg for the night. We had a choice between the Flying J parking lot or a KOA, and we chose the KOA. It was a good thing too! When we went to dinner (a nice little local place called “Ramona’s”), the line on 70 trying to get back on eastbound I-10 was miles long and moving at a crawl. There were city police, county sheriffs, and highway patrol trying to move the traffic along, but it was a mess. I am sure the westbound end was just as bad. You can’t take the traffic traveling on a high speed interstate and easily put it on a two lane state highway. I understand the issue west of Lordsburg is a large playa (dry lakebed) where the wind blown dust provides zero visibility.

The KOA is a decent place to spend the night, though the train does sound a whistle occasionally. I just slept through it all after having two glasses of Pastis, an anise flavored liquour introduced to me by my oldest son. Oh, and the truck picked up a nail in the tire driving into town. Everything was fine as we set  up, but by the time we went to dinner we had lost 1/4 of the air. No tire shop was open, but Kevin headed off to one this morning after airing up the tire (it was down to 20 pounds). We bought a high capacity air compressor just for this reason! The truck needs about 80 pounds in the rear tires to hold the trailer weight. Thank goodness for the TPMS that now comes standard in most vehicles. Having a tire blow out at 65 mph while pulling a trailer is not minor.

Today we continue generally north and west, heading back home.