Sunday, August 31, 2014

Our friends and neighbors, The Robinsons, have an empty nest. Daughter Jonecca has gone off to college.

“Her room is so cute this year!” Steph told me. “It’s done up in a beach theme. Would you make her some sun catchers for her windows?”

“Absolutely!” I told her. Then I was on line looking for beach themed sun catchers. When I had a collection of a dozen or so, I called Steph to have her come and pick out the ones she wanted me to make.

“I’ll come after work today,” she told me.

Mike and I were on our patio when Steph pulled in. After greetings all around, she followed me into the living area of the mill that Mike has affectionately dubbed, The Sh** Hole. Maybe not so affectionately.

I sat down at the table in front of my computer, opened the lid and woke my computer up as Steph was chatting. She pulled a chair away from the table and as she sat down, I said, “You are not going to like my new desktop photo.”

“Why not?” she asked.

“Because it’s kind of gross and I don’t like it,” I answered.

I know, I know! I hear you. “If you don’t like it, what’s it doing up as a desktop photo?”

Well, I actually like the photo, it’s the content.

“What is that?” Steph asked when she saw it and frankly, she didn’t seem all that grossed out.

“I think it’s a deer skull.”

“That doesn’t look like a deer skull.” Steph kind of squinted her eyes and cocked her head sideways. “Where was it?” she asked.

And I’ll tell you what I told her. “Someone set the skull up on the bridge abutment that crosses our little creek and you can’t really see it from the road.” Then I went into my photos file and we looked at a couple of other views of it and we decided that it is a deer skull, it’s just the angle of my photo that makes it look so weird.

Steph picked out some sun catchers, then we went out to my glass shop and picked out the glass and I guess I have a project waiting for me when I have a few minutes.

Now speaking of gross, guess what I found on the floor of the cat room this morning?

Rabbit! Squirrel! Frog!

Wait, wait. Don’t guess. Although once I did find a frog with his back legs chewed off-and he was still alive! But that was when we had kittens and mama was bringing her babies food. And yeah, I know that was pretty gross too.

I was taking scraps out to the wild cats and as I glanced through the glass of the door I see something laying right smack in the middle of the floor.

“What is that?” I wonder. I opened the door and gingerly step in. It was gray and slick and an image of a baby otter sprung to my mind, but I didn’t believe it was that for a second. Okay, maybe just one second. A few steps later I realize it was a newborn kitten still in it’s birth sac. The mama just dropped it and went on.

“Maybe there was something wrong with it,” Steph said when I called and told her what I found. Bless her heart, she always tries to make me feel better.

I got a shovel and a rake, picked up the dead kitten, took it out to the weeds and unceremoniously tossed it.

“Chances are, it was born dead and the mama cat knew it. She wouldn’t even fool with it then,” Momma said when I told her.

“Peg, I could have lived the rest of my life and been perfectly happy to have not heard that story!” you say.

Yeah? Well guess what? When stuff bothers me, you get to hear about it!

“Why does it bother you?” you wonder.

Well it bothers me because there was no nest. The kitten was birthed and left right in the middle of the floor. A cat will normally find a hideaway and make a nest to have her kittens in.

“Some people just aren’t meant to be mothers,” son Kevin said to me on the phone yesterday. Granted, we were talking about something else at the time, but I think the same thing can be true in the animal world too.

This has been quite a week! Let me tell you what happened!

We needed to have some work done on the braking system on the RV. Mike found a Camping World in Bath, New York that could do the work and he set an appointment for the following week.

In the meantime, Mike decides it would be better and safer to install a 30 amp plug where we park the RV when we stay here rather than run an extension cord. I can’t tell you how many places we went into looking for the right plug! We went to electric supply houses, hardware stores, farm stores and guess where we finally found it? A car lot that sells RV’s! I know, right! Imagine that! In our defense though, we didn’t realize they sold RV parts. We thought they just sold cars and RV’s.

So we finally had everything we needed to do this job. We laid out and straightened out some really heavy gauge wire, I climbed up into the dusty, dirty parts of the mill and helped run it. Then my job was to fetch and hold tools while Mike made the connections on both ends.

“There!” Mike says when it was done. “Let’s plug it in.”

As soon as the connection was made, things started popping and crackling inside the RV! I ran to the door and when I opened it and looked in, I see smoke pouring from the vents under the refrigerator. “It’s on fire! Unplug it!” I yelled.

Mike had pulled the plug just as soon as he realized something was wrong, aka we heard the popping and crackling. When we were confident there was not a fire, we sat down and scratched our heads. “What went wrong?”

It turns out that someone had a dumass attack. Mike wired up a 30 amp 220 volt plug. Our RV is 30 amp 110 volt! He was so mad at himself! We checked as many things in the RV as we could. Microwave, TV, lights, fridge... Oops! More popping, crackling and smoke when Mike turned on the breaker for the fridge. He turned it off and we switched it over to gas and it works fine that way.

You can see, in the lower left portion of my photo, that black, resister looking thing has a swollen and split top and the backside is burned black.

“It could have been worse,” I tried to console Mike. “We could have fried every electrical system in the RV.”

Our appointment at Camping World was for early Wednesday morning. “Peg, with the fog in the mornings, why don’t we drive up the day before?” Mike suggested. And of course, that was fine by me.

We fried the coach on Monday, so at least we didn’t have long to wait until we found out the full extent of our snafu. Monday night, as we lay in bed (we sleep in the RV) things started beeping.

“What is that?” I asked Mike

“Batteries are dead,” he replied. Then we guessed we may have damaged the charger as well.

Tuesday we packed up a few things and closed up the mill for our two day trip. “Let’s just turn all the power off,” Mike said.

“Good idea,” I agreed. “We won’t have to worry about fire that way.” The scare of the coach “catching fire” was still fresh in my mind.

Mike is driving the RV, I’m following behind in the Jeep. We don’t want to tow it until our issues with the breaking system are resolved. We get about ten minutes from our destination when it hits me.

We left a fridge full of recently purchased supplies and we turned off the power! Talk about dumass attacks!

“Are we going to have to throw everything away when we get home?” I asked Mike.

“I don’t know,” he said.

So what did I do? I did what I always do when I have a problem. I called my mother. “Momma, am I going to have to throw everything away when we get home?”

“No. I don’t think so. With no one there to open the doors, it will stay cold for a long time,” she told me.

And just so you know, she was right. We were gone from 11:00 Tuesday morning until 6:00 Wednesday night and stuff in the freezer was still frozen and stuff in the fridge was still nice and cold.

We arrived in Bath, New York two hours after we left home. Mike pulled over in front of some rinky-dink garage and said, “We’re here.”

“You’re kidding!” I exclaimed. If this was the place then there was no way they could handle an RV. There was a Walgreen’s parking lot right across the road. We pulled in there intending to walk over to the garage but before we would just leave the RV in anyone’s lot, Mike first went in to ask permission.

“Guess what?” he said when he came back out.

“What?”

“Our GPS let us down. Camping World is on the highway on the other edge of town.”

So we loaded up and headed out. Sure enough, on the edge of town, is a huge Camping World. We parked and went in. “Our appointment is in the morning,” Mike told Carrie, the gal in service. “When can we check in?”

“We open at 8 but make calls for the first hour. You can check in at 9,” Carrie told us.

“You’re not going to believe what I did,” Mike told Carrie.

“What?” she asked with care and concern in her voice.

“I had a dumass attack,” he said rolling his eyes. He started telling Carrie about the mix-up with the 110 and 220 and as soon as he started talking, a slow smile spread across her face.

“It happens all the time,” she assured him and agreed that they could check it out tomorrow as well as the braking system.

That left us with the rest of the afternoon to kill.

Bath, New York is an old town. It was founded in 1793 and you should see some of the houses! Wow!

We found a nice little family restaurant in the historic part of town and had a bite of supper, then it was back to the RV for the night.

The next morning we check in and since they need both the Jeep and the RV, we were pretty much stuck in the lounge. Fine by me, I have a Nook. All morning long we watch RV’s come on to the lot. Camping World had had a show in another town and they were bringing the RV’s back.

“Let’s go look at RV’s,” Mike suggested.

We wandered around, looking at RV’s and trailers, and campers and basically just killing time. Pretty soon we go back to the lounge and Carrie from service came to find us. “We checked all of your systems and everything seems to be okay. The only thing we found is that you need a new inverter,” she told us. We really were lucky.

Then, just before we were getting ready to leave, in came a class A Hurricane made by a company called Thor. “Let’s look at it,” Mike said. It was a pretty nice RV, it had LED lights inside and out and glass front kitchen cabinets, a king size bed, a good size bathroom and I was sure we would never be able to afford it. Then we saw the show price and I couldn’t believe it. It was a lot less than we paid for our class C Outlook six years ago! One thing led to another and before long Mike had made a deal on the Hurricane.

So, guys, it looks like we will be going back to Bath, New York next week and trading our Outlook in. In a way I’m excited about it, who doesn’t like nice new things? But I have to tell you, I have always really liked our Winnebago.

 
Hey! Check out this porch swing that I found in our little town of Wyalusing. Pretty classy, don’t you think?

Let’s call this one done.

Lots and lots of love,

Peg and Mike