Join us now that we have retired and are now fulltiming in our 1982 Newell Classic Motorcoach, and traveling across the width and breadth of the USA. I know, it looks like a bus conversion, but it was built from the ground up to be a motorcoach!! (Photo by Steven Dempsey)
7:26 am - Thursday - February 26th - TWW - 42° F, humidity 42%, cloud cover 30%, wind 4 mph out of the east by southeast.....partly cloudy today with a forecast high of 71° F. The view this morning....
....and on this date in 2019 I had just arrived home from Flagstaff Medical Center where I had a benign cyst removed from my right cheek.....its formal name was a parotid cyst (saliva gland)....
Before....
....after
...and once again my face had symmetry. Can't believe it has already been 7 years. Seriously, it does not feel that long. I was just 69 then, and now I'm heading rapidly toward my 77th birthday.
We hadn't been to Seligman in over a week as of Wednesday, and we had mail/packages stacking up in our PO Box, so a little after 10 am we were in the Explorer making the 30 minute drive into town. Our first stop was the local Family Dollar where TLE went shopping while I walked next door to to the Post Office to pickup our mail/packages. By the time I returned TLE was about ready to check out....aren't we efficient.
Next up was a stop at Seligman Market to buy some produce, and then over to Highway Hot Dog for some coffee and Gelato (double chocolate for moi, and lemon pie for TLE). The temp was in the mid 60's and it was sunny, so we sat outside.....
They have a low budget Police Department in Seligman....lol.
YUM!
.....we sat enjoying our gelatos, and coffees, and talking about this and that as we always do until a tad after 12 pm when we decided it was time to head back to TWW. We arrived right at 12:30 pm, and quickly unloaded our purchases, and packages. One of the packages was new seat covers for the Yamaha Rhino. The ones on it were the originals and they were falling apart, so I ordered some new ones off Amazon for about $30......
......they are basically 'slip covers' and I was able to install them in just a few minutes.
As you can see in the background we ran our 175' of fresh water hose from the greenhouse over to the Newell to refill our fresh water tank (down to 60 gallons after 9 days), and dump our black tank. In all it takes us about 35-40 minutes to do the deed, and we're set for another 8-10 days. Once that was done I finished putting the seats with the new seat covers back in the Rhino, and retired to my anti gravity chair to nap and read away the rest of the afternoon.
By 4 pm I was indoors have taco salad for dinner....another house favorite, and then spent a few hours reading before it was time for bed. Thursday we'll be back to work around the property, so stop by tomorrow to see what we get done, and, as always, thanks for stopping by today!
7:52 am - Wednesday - February 25th - TWW - 48° F, humidity 39%, cloud cover 30%, wind 4 mph out of the south by southwest....cloudy this morning, but clearing later with a forecast high of 68° F. The view this morning....
.....and on this date in 2021 TLE and I were installing my new Steelcase captains chair in the driving position in the Newell....
.....this new Steelcase is way more comfortable that the 39 year old original.
With temps back into the 60's we are getting outside to work by 10 am now, instead of 11 am, or 12 pm when it was it the 30's and 40's. We're still only working 2-3 hours each day, but we seem to get so much done! First up on the 'to do' list was to plant potatoes. As you will recall we planted some potatoes last winter, but over the summer rabbits got into the fencing and devoured most of them. Since then we have made improvements in our fencing by installing the old poly carbonate roof panels we took off the greenhouse to keep out the rabbits. We'll see how that goes.....
TLE hoed the rows...
....and I planted the potatoes
Finished
....in all we planted 13 rows of various varieties of potatoes, and are looking forward to the results!
Next we began to move the metal pipes out of the field behind the chicken coop, and by 12 pm we had moved about half the stuff out there. No need to move it all in one day....
Where the pipes were....
....and where they are now....sacked up on the back of the barn
....we'll move the rest of the metal on Thursday.
One of the metal items we relocated from the field behind the chicken coop was the stand for the cement mixer. When we moved the cement mixer the other day we didn't realize this base belonged to the cement mixer, but figured it out later....
.....TLE loves her 'lawn art'!
Satisfied with our accomplishments for Tuesday we began our walk back to the Newell, but stopped short when we walked past the glass table and umbrella. The umbrella was damaged in one of our recent windstorms, and needed to be repaired, plus we wanted to move the table further away from our woodpiles.....
....it took us about 30 minutes to fix the umbrella, and is now providing shade for us once again. By this time it was 12:30 pm, and we had worked 2.5 hours....perfect!
I spent a few hours on the 'lido deck' reading, and listening to music, but I decided I was not done with my work day yet. I was thinking about the gas control regulator for the Sea-B-Que, which I had determined was the cause of propane not getting to the burner. I decided to remove it again, and soak it in Aero Kroil (penetrating oil) for a couple of hours to, hopefully, eliminate the blockage.....
....I reinstalled it just before dinner (4 pm), and turned on the propane, then lit the burner.....SUCCESS! Not sure why I didn't think of this before, but it worked. I will still install the new gas control regulator as it is newer, and gives me more heating settings than the current one which just has low and high.....nothing in between.
For the 3rd successive evening we headed out to the 'sunset fire deck' to see what kind of light show nature would provided this evening....
....it wasn't spectacular like the previous two sunsets, but was interesting. We remained by the fire until just after 7 pm when we headed inside for the night.
7:35 am - Tuesday - February 24th - TWW - 37° F, humidity 35%, cloud cover 27%, wind 12 mph out of the west by northwest.....partly cloudy today with a forecast high of 65° F. The view this morning.....
....where there are a 100+ metal sculptures dotting the landscape....these are just a couple of them.
I've had a project on my long range 'to do' list for about a year now, and have been procrastinating about fixing an issue with our patio awning, but recently, due to some high winds we had, it became worse, so TLE and I promised ourselves we would fix it Monday morning, on the warmest day we've had in weeks. What was the issue you ask? Well, a picture is worth, they say, a thousand words, so here is a picture of it fixed....
....the Sunbrella fabric had pulled loose from the aluminum slot beginning about 2" from the left side (see red circle) over time. We have fixed it once before, about 8 years ago, but it had begun to pull loose again a few years ago resulting in a 3-4" gap. After the recent windstorm the separation had expanded to about a 10" gap running to the right side of the circle where you could see daylight, and it appeared it would come completely undone in the very near future. The reason I kept procrastinating was it took us several hours to fix it last time. Once we had decided to fix it I began my usual process of trying to figure out how to fix it more efficiently this time, and believed I had figured it out by Monday morning.
Before we could work on the 'FIX' we needed to isolate the roller so it couldn't roll up, and then place a 10' 2 x 4 under the roller to relieve the tension on the aluminum and fabric. Once that was done, and it didn't take more than 20 minutes, I used a large flathead screwdriver to spread the aluminum slot so I could push the fabric back into it again. Once the fabric was in place I used my metal dollies, which I've carried with us for at least 10-12 years to close the slot over the fabric, and secure it firmly in place. All of that took another hour, but it worked, and now for the first time in a few years there is no daylight coming through the gap anymore. I wish I had taken more pictures of the process, but suffice it to say my plan made it much easier to fix this time around....in all we worked about 90 minutes, not hours like last time.
Once the awning was fixed we were able to redeploy it for the first time in a couple of weeks, and since the weather so delightful we brought out our anti gravity chairs and spent a few hours on the 'lido deck' reading (both), and napping (me).....
Our 'lido deck' is restored!
....I would have been content to spend the rest of the day doing that, but I had another solar powered lamp like the one I installed in the greenhouse to install in the dog kennel house. You will recall that last year I thoroughly cleaned all the mice, and rat poop out of the kennel, and left the door open, but that didn't discourage the little buggers, so I decided to install the solar lamp so when any vermin enter the light will come on and, hopefully, discourage them from residing there. I also ran another string of solar powered rope lights in there, and put them on intermittent flash mode. We'll see if that combination does the trick....
....I'll take time Tuesday to tack down the rope lights so they cover the whole floor. And with that final task done I returned to my anti gravity chair for another couple of hours.
Based on the clouds I could see on the western horizon I believed we were in for another great sunset, so we headed out to the 'sunset deck' around 6 pm to see if I was right, and I was. We another slowly evolving sunset that went on for 40 minutes...
These contrails really light up at sunset....looks like it's on fire!
.....just like the last sunset, this one evolved, and evolved. We didn't head inside until after 7 pm. And thus another amazing day at TWW came to an end. Now that it appears the worst of winter is behind us there will be more days spent on the 'lido deck' reading, and relaxing.
