Bittersweet......

7:16 am - Monday - September 30th - Ramona, CA - 43° F, 89% humidity, wind - CALM......cold, clear, blue skies this morning with a forecast high of 73° F......we are rocking three electric heaters as I write.  The view this morning......

Sunday was vacuum day not only for the workaday folks who visited our park this weekend, but for our children and their families.  We convened down at Sharon and Rod's cabin (#65) around 9 am for breakfast as it was too chilly to eat outside.  Kate graciously made pancakes for all of us, and Meredith contributed some sort of breakfast casserole.....very, very tasty!  

Usually we love Sunday's as the park returns to it semi ghost town feeling within hours, but this Sunday our kids were leaving along with them so it took on a sort of bittersweet feeling as we said our 'until next times'.  We had a wonderful time continuing to bond with our grand children.  Being able to see and spend time with them multiple times since we returned to SoCal last April is another added benefit of spending almost a year here.

We ran two heaters Sunday morning, and they remained in the 'ON' position until almost 11 am.  The cloud cover we have had almost continuously for the last 4 days began to burn off about that time, and by late afternoon we had clear skies once again.  Nevertheless, we kept all the windows closed all day long.....quite a change from just a week ago.  After a chilly few days our temps will return to the 70's and 80's for the next 10 days......nice Autumn weather if I don't say so myself.

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Good times.....

7:17 am - Sunday - September 29th - Ramona, CA - 53° F, 89% humidity, wind - CALM....heavy overcast this morning and still quite wet.  Must have rained overnight.....the view this morning.....

It rained all night long, and was still raining around 9 am when we walked down to Sharon's cabin for breakfast.  Chris Reeves, a long time family friend, and his wife Jen made breakfast burritos for all of us, and since it was raining we all convened in the aforementioned cabin to enjoy our food and each other.  As always there were several conversations underway at all times, and at times it leaned toward deafening.  

Over the course of our day I took two of my grandkids for a walk (me)/bike ride (Brayden and Jolene).....in other words I walked and they rode.....:-).  There were ducks to see at the pond, and boulders to climb........↴

Left to right: Jolene Rose, Crosby Mark, and Brayden James

...........walked in the rain↗.............sat and talked a lot.......↴

......enjoyed our small propane fire pit again.....↴

.....and played several horseshoe matches......Chris and Rod ultimately won out over Nick and Jake......the pits haven't seen this much use in weeks......↴

.....I made some adjustments on Brayden's and Jolene's bikes for them (raised their seats and handlebars), and trued the front wheel on Laila's new beach cruiser, so I was in bike heaven for an hour, or so.  Haven't worked on anyone's bikes in a while.

Ahead of time TLE had prepared her famous lasagna, and around 5 pm it was ready for dinner.  Laila contributed her famous tossed salad with bleu cheese dressing, and Meredith the toasted garlic bread.  I added a small glass of zinfandel for good measure.

By 7:30 pm TLE and I were exhausted and headed for home to unwind from our day enjoying our children and their families.   The rain quit around 10 am, and except for a few brief drizzling episodes, it stayed dry the rest of the day.

Thanks for stopping by!

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Friday & Family

8:14 am - Saturday - September 28th - Ramona, CA - 61° F, 97% humidity, wind 3 mph out of the south by southeast.....raining since 6:15 am....not forecast, and not supposed to be raining now.  Nice, gentle rain.....the view this morning......

Friday I put on my 'pool boy' hat once again as the weekend is upon us, and with a breezy couple of days since I last swept and vacuumed the pool on Monday there was a lot of vegetable matter visible on the bottom.  Rich and Dave are still working on the drainage system at the pool so I left the deck alone, but got both the Jacuzzi and pool ready for the weekend, and it if doesn't rain, it will be enjoyed by all.

After getting the pool area into shape I headed up to the horseshoe pits, and then down to the mini golf course to find hole #1 under water, and the others covered with leaves.  We have a large squeegee at the pool, so I retrieved it and began pushing the water off hole #1.  Once that was done I used the hand blower to clear all 9 holes of leaves.

It was now about 12 pm and I only had one hour remaining in my short 4 hour work day.  As I mentioned yesterday 4 of our kids and their families are coming to visit us for the weekend, so I called TLE at the office to find out what sites their RV's would be using and then took the hand blower to clear the oak leaves off both of those sites in advance of their arrival later Friday afternoon.  Once that was done it was time to call it a day.

We have been wanting to buy a portable propane fire pit, but were awaiting cooler weather.  Well, the cooler weather has now arrived so TLE and I drove into town to visit TSC (Tractor Supply Company).  They had just two smaller ones left, so we bought one of them.  At first I thought it was too small, but after using it Friday night we think it is just perfect.....

Picture courtesy my son-in-law, Rod

.....it provides just enough ambiance, and warmth.  Nothing like a campfire when you are camping!

Meredith and Jake arrived around 5:30 pm, and knowing the other kids would not be arriving for another hour we decided to head up to Wynola Pizza and Bistro for some brews and pizza, of course.  We had a lovely time talking and eating our thin crust pizzas.  While we were there TLE spoke with our daughter, Kate, who had just arrived and agreed to order a couple of pizzas for them, so we headed home around 7 pm with pizzas in hand to see the rest of our kids.  We sat around the 'fire' until after 9:30 pm planning to get back together in the morning around 8 am for breakfast, but the early Saturday morning rain has intervened and breakfast has been delayed until 9 am.....it is still raining....what a change from a week ago!

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Split rail mania - Part II

7:25 am - Friday - September 27th - Ramona, CA - 62° F, 93% humidity, wind - CALM......heavy cloud cover....rained all night long again......what is happening?  Forecast for today is clearing skies with a forecast high of 75° F.  The view this morning......

For the first time in many months we awoke to rain on our aluminum roof Thursday morning, and that rain/drizzle continued until about 10 am when stopped, but it came back late in the day.  Things were wet most of the day as we never had any sun.......

On our way to work

.......also, for the first time in months, I did not begin my day at the pool.....I headed directly back to the area where I began repairing some fencing......

....I spent the entire day replacing fencing between sites 24 and 31.  In all I replaced 13 sections of fencing......I attempted to reuse as many posts and split rails as I could, but most were toast.........

 The first 7 sections

 First 7 sections finished!

 Working on the next 6 sections

 Some of the split rails I reused

 Old posts with bottoms mostly rotted off

Final 6 sections completed....13 total Thursday

.....I finished the 13 sections a little after 3 pm.  For the final hour of my shift I hauled the waste material up to the large roll away dumpster in the back of the storage yard, cut a few more posts in advance of my next fence work, then headed down to the office to clean the sawdust off my cart.  It has been a long time since I built a fence....my last fence building effort was at TVC* back in 2017......

.....TLE actually helped me build this 300' long pole fence!  Over the course of the 3.5 seasons we worked at TVC I built and repaired a lot of fencing around the park, and I loved it!

Just as I was finishing with my cart Rich and Marnie returned from a trip to San Diego to buy some spare tires for our golf carts.  They bought 10 in all for $10 each.  These are 'take off' tires mounted on used rims, but they all have lots of tread, and it will be good to have such a good supply of spare tires.  I have a slow leak in one of my tires, so now I can replace it!

Four of our kids, their spouses/significant others, and children will be arriving Friday afternoon, evening to stay for the weekend.  We have been looking forward to this for a long time.  The last time they were here was back in May just after my heart attack.  It will be nice to host them this time under better circumstances.

Thanks for stopping by!

*TVC = Tahoe Valley Campground

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Split rail mania.......

7:25 am - Thursday - September 26th - Ramona, CA - 64° F, 90% humidity, wind - CALM......been raining all night.  Began just after 9 pm last night.  After so many dry months it actually feels weird to hear rain on our aluminum roof again.  The view this morning.......

The forecast high for Wednesday was 85° F, but it was over 80 by 9 am.  That was a little concerning, but within an hour you could feel the air cooling, and the high actually was 85°.

There are a series of 8 pool deck drains, and a number of them have not been draining properly since we arrived back in April.  Not a big deal since it hasn't really rained in months, but now that winter is coming we need to figure out what is plugging those drains, so Rich, Dave and I spent a couple of hours investigating the drain system, and trying to unplug it.  We were partially successful in getting 4 of them to drain once again, but the other four will have to wait for another day.  I spent some time at the mini golf course blowing two days worth of eucalyptus leaves away, and ended up sweeping a few of them to get the rest of the particulate matter removed.  

I spent the rest of the day continuing my project of separating the split rail posts from the rails, and cutting 6 posts to the appropriate size.....

 Building up a supply of usable posts

 Getting ready to cut a post down to size

 The posts in the foreground.....that is a lot of fencing material!

 The rails now accessible

......and then beginning to replace fencing down by the pond.  There is a long section of fence down by Rich's site which needs to have about half the posts replaced, and about the same number of rails.  When this fence was originally constructed years ago they just screwed the split rails to cabin #24 instead of digging post holes and setting posts for those rails.  I spent the rest of the afternoon removing the screws which affixed them to the cabin, and then digging two post holes and setting the poles.....

......I think it looks much more professional now, how about you?  During the process I had to make a couple of side trips.  The battery powering my impact driver (Porter-Cable) ran out of juice, so I had to retrieve a charged battery from the Newell electrical bay.  Then my last Phillips head driver I was using broke so I had to head up to the trailer to retrieve a few more.  By the time the posts were set, and rails attached it was just before 4 pm.

With the wind the past couple of days our artificial turf in our patio area was covered with leaves, and other plant matter, so I quickly retrieved the hand held blower and cleaned the leaves out of our patio.  It was now about 4:04 pm and time to put away my equipment.  TLE must have thought I forgot her as I found her walking home as I was heading to the office.  By the time I dropped off my 2-way radio, and tools and headed home she was just unlocking the Newell door.

We spent the evening catching up on recorded shows.  The Fall TV viewing season has begun so we had recorded episodes of NCIS, NCIS: New Orleans, Bull, & Gold Rush to watch.  While we finished catching up on those shows the premier episode of the 'Survivor' was recording, so we also watched that 90 minute premier before heading to bed a little after 10 pm.

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'Winter' projects.....

7:21 am - Wednesday - September 25th - Ramona, CA - 56° F, 72% humidity, wind 6 mph out of the east by southeast....clear, blue skies again today with a forecast high of 86° F.  Today is our 5 month 'anniversary' here at RORVR!  Forecast highs for the next 7 days:

1. 79°
2. 77°
3. 71°
4. 72°
5. 73°
6. 70°
7. 85°

Autumn is definitely here, and we are beginning to work on 'winter' projects.  A couple of those projects are 1) Replace, or rebuild a lot of the split rail fencing in the park, and pull logs and stumps out of the rear of the pond now that the water level is at it's traditional low for the year.  The pond, due to no rain for months, is down about 4' and that has exposed a lot of wood which needs to be removed before the rains come and begin to push it all down toward the dam.  

There is a section of split rail fencing near the same area where the logs and stumps are which has been missing since we arrived here back in April....

The two sections I installed

.....my task was to dig one post hole, and then install 4 rails to close the gap in the fencing.  Installing the rails was easy, however, I encountered a rock about 2.5 feet down (hole needs to be 3 feet deep), which I had to break out using a long, heavy pry bar.

I first installed the section on the left leaving a gap on the right where we could haul the logs and stumps up from the water using Rich's Dodge 4x4 P.U. winch.  I retrieved the Kubota front loader from the storage barn to haul the logs and stumps up to the storage area.  This took most of the afternoon.  Once we were done pulling the dead wood out of the pond I finished the fence by closing the final gap.

It was pretty breezy Tuesday so I did not waste my time blowing leaves off the mini golf holes as the wind would have covered them again within minutes.  In fact, the only thing I did at the pool was run the tests, and add water to the big pool.  No point in cleaning the deck, or blowing the leaves out of the playground either.

TLE and I were off work at 4 pm.  Even though the temps got up to 92° F the interior of the Newell cooled off quickly once we opened all the windows.....no A/C once again.  One of the reasons the coach cools off so quickly is by 4 pm the coach is almost completely in the shade again, whereas at the old site we would get sun all afternoon on the driver side, and front of the coach until almost 6 pm.  Since we moved to site #53 almost 3 weeks ago we have only used the A/C after work a few times.

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First day of Autumn.....

7:20 am - Tuesday - September 24th - Ramona, CA - 52° F, 77% humidity, wind 3 mph out of east by northeast.......sunny, clear, blue skies today with a forecast high of 91° F.

Monday was the first official day of Autumn, but it has been feeling like Autumn for about a week now.  I was done with the pool by 11:15 am, and on to the horseshoe pits shortly thereafter.  The pits were lightly used over the weekend so I was done with them in 10 minutes, or so.  As I was driving down to the mini golf course I noticed the Red Barn parking lot was covered with pine needles, so I decided on the spot to use my hand blower to clear away the pine needles.  It was a good day for this as a decent breeze was coming out of the west, and really helped propel the pine needles eastward across the parking lot.  With no wind, and using the backpack blower it takes me over an hour to do this parking lot, but with the aid of the wind I had it done in less than 45 minutes.

By the time I finished with the mini golf course it was closing in on 1 pm, and a little past time for lunch.  I like to take lunch no earlier than 12:30 pm because that means I only have 3 hours left to work after lunch.  The shorter the afternoon stretch is the better.  

After lunch I turned my attention to installing a new garden hose at the office, and removing the old hardware from the old hose before disposing of it.  My last task of the day, and one to which I have been looking forward was to rebuild two sections of split rail fence directly behind site #72.  I retrieved a post hole digger from the tool shed, and then headed up to dismantle the old portion of fence which was in need of replacement.  The posts for these split rail fences, just like the rails, are all irregular.  By that I mean no two posts are the exact same dimensions.  All of the replacement posts we have were slightly larger in diameter than the old post, so I had to widen the existing hole before inserting the new pole.  It took most of the final two hours to complete the job.......

......before my work three of the four rails were lying on the ground.  It looks much better, and now the site is ready for us to return sometime in early October.

Since Marnie and Rich were on vacation for a week, TLE had to work until 5 pm Monday, so I returned to retrieve her just before 5 pm.  It never got above 85° F, so the Newell interior was still very comfortable, and no A/C was necessary.  I think we've only run the A/C a few times in the last 2+ weeks, which is wonderful!

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Outdoor living.....

7:22 am - Monday - September 23rd - Ramona, CA - 59° F, 100% humidity, wind - CALM.....clear, blue skies today with a forecast high of 86° F....much cooler than yesterday when the high ended up being 94° F.....today is officially the first day of Autumn.

You could feel the heat just lingering there is the early Sunday morning air.  It's weird when that happens....the air has this cool feel to it, but you can sense the heat in the background just awaiting it's chance to break loose.  Usually we close all the windows first thing in the morning lately as it has been so cold in the morning, but we left them all open, and never closed them all day long.

Our screen door was deployed by 8:30 am, and a few minutes later we were outside watching an English Premier  soccer match on the outdoor TV.  We streamed the game in order to see it in HD (high definition)....we are loving our new outdoor Roku TV!

There is not really much else to write about Sunday as we both remained outside all day long relaxing in our anti gravity chairs catching a nap here and there......TLE even took a nap....she rarely if ever takes a nap.  As the temp rose steadily towards its high of 94° F the breeze picked up keeping it comfortable.  I looked at my phone at one point to see that the humidity was down to 27%....that's pretty low.

Around 5:30 pm TLE disappeared inside to prepare a wonderful dinner of pollo asado street tacos....I chased my three tacos with a bottle of Leinenkugal Grapefruit Shandy.......

.....we discovered this beer at a liquor store near Bar Harbor, ME last summer, and love it on a hot afternoon.  Since then I make it a point to always have a 6 pack of this bear in my Norcold refer.  We finally retreated indoors around 7 pm...very nice sitting outside all day!

Time to get ready for our work week.....thanks for stopping by!

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Last Blood......

7:56 am - Sunday - September 22nd - Ramona, CA - 50° F, 71% humidity, wind - CALM......clear, blue skies today with a forecast high of 91° F......the view this morning.....

I remember watching the first Rambo movie back in 1982 (First Blood), and we have seen all of them over the years (First Blood: Part II, First Blood: Part III, Rambo, and finally Rambo: Last Blood).  It has been a very successful movie franchise for Sylvester Stallone.  When we heard that the last of this franchise was being released this weekend we bought tickets at Angelika Film Center and Cafe in Poway......

They have alfresco dining!

.......we've seen a couple other movies there since we arrived in Ramona back in April.  It only takes us 30 minutes to drive there.  The added benefit of this location is that COSTCO is about 1 block away, and Trader Joe's is about 2 blocks.....perfect.

We bought our tickets off the Angelika website....you can even pick your seats.....we chose two in the middle of the back row.  Our movie time was 10:15 am so we departed RORVR about 9:15 am and arrived at 9:45 am.....

.....I decided to take my new Bob Marleys along for the ride......all of the seats are power leather recliners with a little table that swings into position after you are seated.....

.....this movie, like the last one (Rambo) is rated 'R', and it is pretty violent.  Nevertheless, we enjoyed this final installment of the Rambo series....I'll leave my description at that, so no spoiler alerts necessary.

One of the things we love about Angelika is they also have a cafe which serves excellent pub style food, as well as a large selection of draft brews.  If you utilize the cafe the same day of your movie experience you get a 50% price reduction.  Our two draft brews, plus two entrees came to $47, but we got them for $23.50.  They have outdoor dining available, but we chose to eat up in the mezzanine......

 Bacon Cheeseburger for moi, and a Bacon Grilled Cheese for TLE

We sat at the low table in the middle of the table section

.....as you well know I love alfresco dining, but I neglected to wear a hat on this day, and I need to be more circumspect about my sun exposure after my two recent skin cancer surgeries....next time I'll take a hat!  At any rate, the food and brews were top notch

Since the COSTCO near the Angelika Theater is about 10 minutes closer to  where we live, and about a mile from my doctors I moved my prescriptions from the San Marcos COSTCO over to what I thought was the only Poway COSTCO, however, when we arrived to pick up my current prescription I found that there were actually two COSTCO's in Poway, and the one I had called was not the one I wanted.  My little error cost us about an hour in wait time while they backed out my filled prescription at the other Poway COSTCO, and got it filled at the one I was at (off Carmel Mountain Road).

We were home a little after 3 pm....the high for the day was 88° F, but the coach interior was quite comfortable when we arrived home.....no A/C necessary.  We retired to the 'lido' deck for the duration of the afternoon.....TLE read, whilst I streamed a few college football games....

....on our way back into the park we stopped at the office to pick up an Amazon package which had been delivered while we were at the movies.  A few days back the fluorescent light fixture over the kitchen sink bit the dust.  The original fixture was a very expensive 12 volt fluorescent light (over $100), and I didn't want to replace it before we had gotten our money's worth out of it....I guess 11 years would be considered our money's worth.  I ordered a new LED light to replace it.....

.....and it is very, very bright!  It's about 4 inches longer than the old one, and will draw less current than the old fluorescent one......

.....it took me about 30 minutes to remove the old fixture, and install the new one.....for a Hockwald project it actually took about as long as I had anticipated.

It was a very good Saturday.....I haven't been to 'dinner and a movie' with TLE in a long time....thanks for stopping by!

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