Birthday Boy & Where Is the Summer Going?

“Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans”

 

Today marks another birthday in our family. They just keep coming. Actually, that’s a very good sign as we wouldn’t want the birthdays to stop. You know what that means don’t you?

 

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, LEE

The reunion is over for another year.  Terry wanted to hustle back to see if the backhoe work we had ordered was finished.  Heck, it hadn’t even been started.  We were beginning to wonder if the work we wanted to do would be done this year or we would have to wait until next.    At least we were happy to see the deer were waiting for us to return.

I recently received an email from a fellow RV’er.  In the email he indicated that summer was getting away from him.  He was starting to get to the point of thinking about heading south.  Then, I looked at the calendar and was shocked.  August is here!!  Winter is just around the corner!!  After all, we plan on being on the road again in less than two months  -- I know, I know .. earlier than last year. We have a shindig planned the 8th of September and will start thinking about our tracks soon after that.

With that in mind we figured it was time to stop working on projects that could be put off until next summer and start working on projects that needed to be finished before we could head south.  The biggest project we thought was caulking all the little outside cracks.  Or, maybe it was trying to make the concrete on the pavers look even.  Ugh!!

It was a great day to burn all the odds'n end wood pieces we had been tossing in the firepit.

All the little things we needed to fix required a trip into town.  Those trips usually mean 8 or 9 stops at different places.    One of those stops included visiting the motorhome.  It’s been a real pain going from one RV to another.  We have many duplicates between the two but some items we just can’t duplicate.  I’m not sure if it’s can’t or don’t want to.  Anyway, such has been the case.  So far, we’ve made three trips back to the motorhome to pick up items we put in it when we were heading to the reunion but left in it when we arrived back at the “home base”.   I hate that lugging back and forth thing.

There were two little "oops" we noticed when we visited the motorhome.  One was that the front slide wasn’t perfectly level.  Anyone have experience with this??  We’re not quite sure what to do but snapped a picture and plan on forwarding to Monaco in Eugene for ideas.  We may have to adjust our schedule now to accommodate their schedule.

The other was that our Wilson antenna now needs to be replaced.  We can only guess it was from the hanging branches going into and out of my cousin's property.

Then, just as luck would have it when we ordinarily would have been getting ready for our morning dip in the pool (sorry no pictures here), we saw something that tickled our inners.

It was the backhoe!  Terry was off to give directions.

Slowly our front landscape was changing.

It wasn’t finished in a flash.  Seven truck loads of dirt were hauled away.  Then, 7 yards of gravel were delivered and spread.  We had it spread instead of just dumped since we don’t get much help up here and that would have been a real lot of work spreading it.  Well, our “camper” neighbor came over and helped a little.  Then, Terry had to go over and help him with his gravel a little too.  You know how that thing is supposed to work.

How much did this cost?  We have no idea and actually we don’t want to know.    However, I’m sure soon enough we'll find out.  Our intent is eventually to bring in blocks to build a retaining wall and steps.  We also wanted to put some type of berm on the roadway.  This is what we came up with.

We hope eventually to add several deer-resistant plants.   At our other “base camp” we had two RV parking sites.  One would accommodate a 75’ RV.   However, since they don’t make 75 footers that I know of we figured a 54’ parking site here was big enough especially since we also have vehicle parking in the back.  The connections are in for electric and water but the dump is around the corner.  I guess that’s what the blueboy is for.

That’s it and Happy Birthday again, Lee.  ‘Tis life on the road.