Only three weeks?

 7:35 am - Wednesday - November 11th - TWW - 42° F, humidity 38%, cloud cover 0%, wind 11 mph out of the east by northeast......crystal clear, blue, sunny skies today with a forecast high of 66° F.  On this date in 2013 TLE and I were near Lee Vining, CA.....

......enjoying the view of Mono Lake from the Conway Summit vista point.  We had not been back to California since we left February 1, 2012 on our nomadic journey....we had been gone for close to 2 years.  The view this morning.....

......notice anything different?  Yeah, you're right, the weeds are gone!  Contrast this with yesterday's morning view.....

....I was determined that Tuesday would be the last day the 'morning view' picture would have a lot of long weeds in it.

I had two things I wished to accomplish Tuesday.....1) Connect the concrete piers to the new EcoWorthy solar rack, and 2) cut down some more weeds with my Echo SRM-266T string trimmer.  The first task required TLE's assistance.  While she lifted one end of the solar rack I would slide two of the concrete piers under the 4 x 4's to which the solar rack was attached.  It didn't take long before all 5 were in place, then it was just a matter of using lag screws to affix each pier to the 4 x 4's.....

....each of those piers weighs at least 50 pounds, so times 5 that means we've at least 250 pounds plus of weight keeping them from being blown over in a big wind.  I think, beginning to end, it took about an hour for the entire job.

Later in the day I got out my Echo SRM-266T string trimmer to trim the weeds around the ten 400 watt solar panels behind the barn which supply solar energy to the two large house batteries for the 3 bedroom, 2 bath house.  Due to the heavy monsoon rains we had in the last two months the weeds, which rarely get more than 6" high, had grown to 2, or 3 feet high around the panels partially obstructing the sun.....

....and, as I mentioned above, I trimmed around Phyllis' Newell, and the area in between her Newell and our Newell.

In between all that I took time to run both the Yamaha and Cushing utility carts out to the access road, and back, plus TLE and I ran a hose from one of the greenhouse totes into the interior so she can water her plants more easily.  I even took time to relax on the 'lido deck' eating a snack, and drinking some ice tea before heading back into the trailer to finish removing my old stereo system, which I used to broadcast Sirius/XM Radio.  I've had that stereo system since 2004, and it has worked well all these years.  Since I've reduced the number of Sirius/XM Radio receivers from three down to the one in the car, and now use a Bluetooth speaker to stream Sirius/XM Radio in the trailer, I don't need the stereo anymore.  I also moved the three battery chargers for the various cordless tools I own from the wall on the right side of the work bench to the tool table where the cordless tools are kept when not in use.  Since we are now permanently parked I don't need to have them on the wall anymore....

The old TEAC stereo with a woofer, and 2 speakers

Where the battery chargers, and one of the stereo speakers were hung

Where the stereo and the other speaker hung

The 3 battery chargers

......by the time I finished cutting down the weeds around the 10 solar panels behind the barn it was almost 4 pm, and time for dinner.  I think that's the longest I've worked in one day since we returned 3 weeks ago.  Wait, has it only been 3 weeks since we returned?  Seems like longer, but in a good way.

The weather trends for the next two weeks are what we would expect as we move deeper into November here at The Wilson Wilderness.  For the next couple of days we'll have temps in the 60's, then quickly slide into the 40's and 50's by by Saturday when it is supposed to rain (66% chance of rain), and by Tuesday of next week we'll see lows in the high 20's overnight.....winter is on its way!

Thanks for stopping by!

Making it up as we go.....

 8:06 am - Tuesday - November 10th - TWW - 38° F, humidity 43%, cloud cover 29%, wind 8 mph out of the north.....slightly cloudy today with a forecast high of 66° F.  On this date in 2023 TLE and I were at Glamis North Hot Springs, CA.....

.....enjoying a spectacular sunset.  We were working for Colorado Outback Adventures, and enjoying the hot springs on a regular basis. The view this morning.....

....unusual cloud formations today.

We've been waking up around 6:30 am since we arrived at TWW a few weeks ago, but not getting out of bed for another 30 to 45 minutes....sometimes even later....at least that's my story.  I really do not like getting up before the sun reciprocates, and right now that is a little after 7 am.  Our EcoWorthy dual axis solar tracker usually tilts toward the rising sun around 7:35 am on mostly sunny days.  I'm sure there will be future occasions when getting up before the sun is required, but those mornings will be few, and very far between.  Fortunately, I am married to a woman who is like minded.  In my former workaday life I was often up, even on the weekends, well before sunrise, and even years after we began our nomadic life I was almost always out of bed well before TLE, but not anymore.

Monday, as has been our modus operandi since we returned to TWW, we were out of bed by 7:45 am....well after sunrise, and neither of us felt an ounce of guilt.  TLE is back into her daily routine of spending time in the greenhouse tending to her flora, and I just kind of make up the day as I go along.  I moved a few more things out of the trailer and over to the garage, deployed our solar rope lights around the Newell (FINALLY), deployed some new solar torch lights, blew a lot of detritus off the artificial turf Charles and Phyllis brought up to TWW,  and with TLE's help moved the picnic table out of its summer cubbyhole, along with the market umbrella, placing them on the artificial turf.....

New solar torch lights

.....additionally, I successfully repaired a couple of our older solar yard lights, started and ran the 1969 Jeep CJ-5, started and ran the old Ford diesel loader/gannon tractor, did a little straightening in the CONEX (it needs a lot more), fiddled around with the new mounting brackets I'll be using the mount the two 330 watt solar panels we used to charge the Bluetti AC200P batter which powers the trailer.  Later in the day I finally vacuumed out the VW Beetle, which has needed a good vacuuming since before we left LPG&RVR.....lol!

We had the Newell windows open for much of the day, but the warmth begins to leave the air around 2:30 pm, at which time we close them.  Speaking of windows, TLE bought some felt tape off Amazon that when applied to the window sills, and lower portions of the windows is supposed to absorb, and reduce the amount of moisture which tends to gather on the windows overnight in the winter.....

.....the picture above is the driver side Salon window.  She's installed the felt tape on about 80% of the windows so far, and it seems to be working.  Soon we'll deploy our two RV dehumidifiers to help abate the overnight moisture inside the Newell.

Around 7:15 pm we went outside to take a video of our current yard light arrangements.....

.....for our evening entertainment we watched the MNF game (Monday Night Football) between the Buffalo Bills and the Minnesota Vikings.  Both teams came into the game with 6-1 records, so we thought it would be a close game, and it was well into the 3rd quarter, but the Bills ever so slowly pulled away to post a final score of 23-6.

Thanks for stopping by!

Day of rest....mostly....

 8:28 am - Monday - November 9th - TWW - 44° F, humidity 42%, cloud cover 1%, wind 6 mph out of the north.....crystal clear, blue, sunny skies today with a forecast high of 66° F.  On this date in 2014 TLE and I were in Sparks, NV.....

....staying at Sparks Marina RV Park while we commuted to Fernley, NV to work at Amazon.  I caught this beautiful sunset that day using my panorama option....click on the picture to see it properly.  The view this morning....

....I never get tired of seeing clear, blue skies.

Charles and Phyllis left for Phoenix sometime before 9 am; I wasn't paying attention to the time, but I'm pretty sure that is correct.  TLE and I are trying to be consistent at not working much on Sundays, and we managed to do that this Sunday.  I spent a few minutes adjusting, and straightening the gate latch on the north side of the greenhouse, and was successful.  I replaced the extension cord we use to keep Phyllis' Newell batteries charged with a heavier gauge one as the one we were using was overheating, and that took just a few minutes.  

You may, or may not recall that the past two winters we have had to turn off three of our electrical breaker switches when the temperatures inside the Newell, and in the water bay get down to 40° F, or lower, at night as the electric heaters would come on during those nights, and run our Bluetti battery bank down to zero.  The #1, 2 and 3 breakers in the service panel control both AC's and the three electric heaters, and one of them also provided power to our Salon TV, so I had to turn it on every night, and remember to turn it off again when we went to bed.  Needless to say, I forgot a few times.  TLE suggested I open up the thermostats which control the heaters, and see if I could disconnect the wires, so I did.  Sure enough, by disconnecting one of the wires the thermostat was no longer telling the electric heaters when to run.  It took me less than 15 minutes to disable all three thermostats!

And for the finale of our meager work Sunday we pulled everything out of the VW hatch, reorganized it, and put it back; and that was it.  We keep 'go bags' in our hatch in case we are ever stranded in the VW and have to walk home.  Being stranded to the degree we would have to walk home from wherever we might be at the time would be a doomsday scenario, obviously, and we hope that never happens, but we keep the 'go bags' stocked with water, clothing and food as a precaution.   

We were back indoors watching NFL football by 11 am.  With the recent return of California to standard time, along with the rest of the nation's time zones, everything we watch on TV comes on an hour later now (Arizona does not participate in DST; thank you very much).  When California is on DST NFL football begins at 10 am here in Arizona.  In a way having them come on at 11 am actually works better for us as if we want to get something done early Sunday before football begins we usually can, and that was the case this Sunday.

There were a number of good NFL games Sunday, but most of them were not available in the Phoenix market, which is where YouTubeTV says we are, so we get what we get.  With YouTubeTV your programming is based on the nearest major market, which is Phoenix, in our case.  When we were still in Likely the nearest major market was San Francisco, and we got a lot of good games.  There were two games available for our viewing Sunday morning......Seahawks vs Cardinals which ended, predictably, 17-3 in favor of the Seahawks.  The other morning game between the Chiefs and Jets was supposed to be one sided, and it was...Chiefs over the hapless Jets 35-12.  The afternoon game between the Cowboys and Colts was not supposed to be interesting, and it should not have been, but you know the Cowboys....they make a habit of coming from ahead to lose, and almost did again Sunday, but pulled it out with a last minute field goal.  Now, the evening game between the Bears and Buccaneers ended up being the best game of the day with both defenses causing multiple turnovers.  In the end, the favored Bears won on a last second field goal 27-24.

Thanks for stopping by!

Let's wrap it up!

 7:48 am - Sunday - November 8th - TWW - 39° F, humidity 45%, cloud cover 0%, wind 7 mph out of the east by northeast....crystal clear, blue, sunny skies today with a forecast high of 65° F.  On this date in 2015 TLE and I were in Bishop, CA.....

....at Schat's Bakery having some coffee, and for moi a chocolate eclair.  The view this morning....

The EcoWorthy dual axis solar tracker already tilted 

before 8 am and doing its job

....another cloudless day!

Friday night over dinner we had decided that our priority for Saturday would be to rewrap the east and south sides of the greenhouse which suffered damaged to the Visqueen during a severe windstorm this past summer.  You never know how things like this will go, but in this case they actually went pretty smoothly.  Following are pictures of our work on the east wall, however, we also rewrapped the south side.....

Before...lot's of missing Visqueen

Working on it

Finished

.....Charles, Phyllis and TLE began working about 30, or 40 minutes before I arrived and managed to get all of the furring strips, plus old Visqueen removed on both sides before my arrival at 9:30 am.  Then it was just a matter of rolling out the Visqueen, stapling it to the frame, then reattaching the furring strips to firmly hold the Visqueen in place.  In all we spent 3 hours beginning to end (after I arrived) wrapping the east and south ends.  There was a lot of climbing up and down ladders, and kneeling on the ground during that time, and by the time we were done, I was done.  It was only 12:30 pm, but my body was sure it was more like 5 pm....lol!

I spent the afternoon watching NCAA College Football, and true to form, there were a number of upsets, primarily #1, undefeated Miami being defeated by #11 Notre Dame.  Additionally, unranked Oklahoma convincingly defeated #24 Florida, #13 Tennessee defeated #6 Kentucky, and #23 Oregon defeated #12 Ohio State.  #8 UCLA is now 9-0 for the first time since the 80's after defeating unranked Minnesota, and #3 Utah also remains undefeated at 9-0 after beating #9 BYU.

We had dinner around 4 pm in the house with Charles and Phyllis.....

Phyllis preparing Chili Lime Chicken for our dinner, to which TLE added some sliced avocados, and pickled tomatoes/cucumbers....yum!

.....it is always a pleasure to end the day with a communal meal!  Life is good!

Thanks for stopping by!

Coping with the abstract.....

 7:57 am - Saturday - November 7th - TWW - 43° F, humidity 48%, cloud cover 0%, wind 12 mph out of the northeast.....crystal clear, blue, sunny skies today with a forecast high of 64° F.  On this date in 2017 TLE and I took a tour of Desert View (east entrance) and the Watchtower at the Grand Canyon....

.....if you've never visited Desert View at the Grand Canyon you should.  The bottom picture was our view every day at work.  The view this morning....

.....the first completely cloudless day in quite a while.

Friday morning we spent time redeploying our patio awning, and the two 'sail' sunshades, unlocking everything we had locked last Saturday.  I ran the Champion 7,500 kw generator, and our Honda 2000 for about 10 minutes just to run them.  Later in the day I started the Jeep, and it fired right up and idled as smooth as ever.....nice!  We also moved the 2nd Rubbermaid outdoor storage unit into the 'lido deck, deployed one of our market umbrellas, and set up two of our four anti gravity chairs.....

....the three Bluetti 100 watt, portable solar panels are still on the trailer roof, even though I am no longer using them to supplement the solar charge going into our Cloud Energy lithium batteries, so I decided to connect them to the Bluetti batter bank in the shed.  The EcoWorthy dual axis solar tracker provides 600 watts of solar power to the Bluetti, and now the three Bluetti portable panels will add an additional 300 watts for a total of 900 watts.  We haven't run the Predator 5000 generator since last Saturday morning, and now that we are past all of the storms we shouldn't have to use it much in the next couple of weeks, either.

I stayed pretty busy all morning, and into the afternoon doing a lot of small things, and finally took a break on the 'lido deck' around 1:30 pm in one of the anti gravity chairs.  This will be a relatively warm weekend, so I can foresee some time spent relaxing on the 'lido deck' watching football on the outdoor TV.

Since we will not be moving the Newell for the foreseeable future, and certainly not in April to head north, we've begun to move things out of the Newell interior, as well as the storage bays which will no longer need to be kept there in anticipation of moving.  It is kind of a strange feeling to know we have finished our perpetual movement around the country, and we are both still processing that.  We both know, intellectually, that we are done, however, the reality of that decision is still kind of an abstract concept.  I'm sure as April of 2027  comes and goes, and we haven't moved, the reality will become more real to us.

We met in the house for dinner at 4 pm with Charles and Phyllis.  TLE prepared her famous lasagna for our dining pleasure.  We spent time talking about priorities here on the property, and decided that Saturday we would begin to repair the wind damage to the greenhouse over the summer.

Thanks for stopping by!

The long road home.....

 7:46 pm - Friday - November 6th - TWW - 46° F, humidity 76%, cloud cover 3%, wind 11 mph out of the east by northeast....clear evening skies with a forecast low of 37° F tonight.  On this date in 2017 TLE and I had just arrived at the entrance of the Grand Canyon, or 'The Watchtower' as it is officially named.....

....and settled into our site for the next 4+ months while we worked at the General Store as cashiers.  Our elevation at this site was 7,410' above sea level, and it proved to be a cold winter, but not much snow.

We were up at 5 am Thursday morning California time so we could be on our way home to TWW by 6 am (7 am Arizona time).  We had put about 70 miles on the VW since we filled up in Palm Desert on Tuesday, so we stopped at the local Union 76 fuel station to top off our tank for the 308 mile trip home.  By 6:05 am we were eastbound on I-10 retracing our steps from Tuesday.  Soon we were passing Chiriaco Summit, and within another 20 miles exited I-10 for SR-177.  We had already covered 100 miles, and would cover another 100 miles before merging with I-40 eastbound just west of the Colorado River where we would re-enter Arizona.

It was just under 50 miles to Kingman, AZ from there, and we reached Kingman in about 45 minutes where TLE bought some produce at the local Basha's Supermarket, and then we topped off our tank one more time for the final 58 miles home.  We reached the north/south arterial around 1 pm, and by 1:20 pm we had reached TWW.  The VW ran like a top for the over 800 miles we covered in the past 5 days.  She may have over 202,000 miles on her odometer, but she runs like she has half that mileage.  We bought her when she had 124,000 on the odometer, so we've almost put 80,000 miles on her since January of 2014.

While TLE began to unload the car I went to open the door of the Newell, but I could not get either of the deadbolts to disengage.  When we left last Saturday we stowed the patio awning due to predicted high winds while we would be gone.  As a result the door had direct sunlight on it for a number of hours which caused the aluminum frame to expand effectively jamming the door shut.  This has happened a few times over the years, but this is the first time in over 10 years.  The only way to cool down the door is to spray cold water on the frame for a few minutes, but we were impatient.

How did we get in?  Well, TLE's passenger side window does not always latch when you close it, and, thankfully, it had not latched the last time she closed it.  I was able to force it open, and after fetching a step ladder from the greenhouse, TLE was able to shimmy her way through the open window and unlock the door.  This was the first eventful thing which happened in over 800 miles, and it was at our home.....lol.

I drove all but 50 miles of the the entire 308 miles home, so I was a little tired.  After unpacking, and changing clothes I took a 45 minute nap.  As you know, up to 1/2" of rain was forecast for our area Saturday/Sunday, and as a result 3 of the 6 new IBC totes are now full, and the other 3 are 1/2 full, so we now have 9 full IBC totes, and 3 one half full, so we've caught a lot of water in the last two months....probably close to 3,000 gallons....not bad!

Thanks for stopping by!

Bad planning......

 7:54 am - Friday - November 6th - TWW - 39° F, humidity 55%, cloud cover 14%, wind 13 mph out of the northeast.....partly cloudy today with a forecast high of 59° F.  On this date in 2015 TLE and I were just south of Lee Vining, CA.....

....at a boondock site overlooking Mono Lake.  The view Thursday morning.....

....in Beaumont, CA as we were getting ready to head back to TWW.

I have not yet written about Wednesday, which I will do shortly.  We were up at 5 am California time so we could be on the road by 6 am (7 am TWW time), so I chose not to write the blog post about Wednesday until we returned home.

In retrospect, we should have made our dental appointments for Thursday and Friday, so when we headed up to Beaumont for 2 days we would be able to spend more time with our kids.  TLE and I forget that while we are unencumbered with work and school schedules, or kids still are.  We can't just go an hang out with them on a Tuesday, or Wednesday as they are working.  I say that to say this.....Since the aforementioned is true we got to hang out with ourselves Wednesday, which we already do 24/7, 365 days a year.  We enjoy our company, and can always find something to do to pass the time.  

We haven't been 'junking' in a long, long time so we did a little checking, asked our kids, and found a large thrift store in Calimesa called Deseret Industries (I think they are owned by the LDS (Church of Latter Day Saints), plus a Trader Joe's just down the road in Yucaipa, so we set our plans to visit both around midday.  We haven't been to a Trader Joe's in 6, or 7 months, so we were well overdue for our TJ's fix, and I think the last time we went junking was in Klamath Falls in August.

Our first stop was at the Yucaipa Trader Joe's, which is relatively new.  Most of the TJ's we've been to over the last few years are all laid out in a very similar fashion, so it is easy to find that for which we are looking.  Within 30 minutes we were backtracking to the thrift store in Calimesa.  We've shopped at several Deseret thrift stores over the years, and this one was no exception as far as quality of clothing offered, and the display thereof.  I found a black t-shirt with a CONVERSE ALL STARS logo on the front which I liked, and TLE a couple of items without which she could not live....lol.

Around 5 pm we met our oldest daughter Meredith, our daughter Kate, her husband Nick, and two of their kids (Jolene and Levy) for dinner at Dora's Cantina and Mexican Grill about 2 miles away from our hotel in Beaumont, CA.  I neglected to take pictures, however, the food was top notch. Yelp gives them a solid 4 stars on 368 reviews, and we would do the same.

We were home by 6:30 pm, and in bed a little after 9 pm in anticipation of our early departure Thursday.

Thanks for stopping by!