The perfect storm.....

 8:44 am - Friday - December 11th - Seal Rock, OR - 47° F, 93% humidity, wind - CALM.....heavy cloud cover, raining.....rained all night, and will rain the rest of the day with a forecast high of 47° F.  On this date in 2010 we were on a long weekend at Rancho Jurupa Regional Park in Riverside, CA....a little more than 13 months before we went full time in the Newell.  We still owned the 2002 T-Bird......↴

I reported for work at 10 am unsure as to how long 'work' would be viable as the sky was threatening to unload a bucket load of moisture any minute.  I retrieved the golf cart from the shed, and picked up Blake at the Landscape Shed.  From there we headed over to sites 9, 10, 11 and 12 to see how many picnic tables we could scrape before the predicted precipitation arrived.  I was on my second table, and so was Blake at 10:45 am when we felt the first rain drops.  By 11 am we had finished four tables between us, and the rain was falling pretty steadily so we packed it in, and returned our tools to the Landscape Shed.  I dropped off Blake at his 5th wheel and headed home to change into some dry clothes and get warm again.  Oh well, I almost worked ten straight 2 hour shifts without rain.

After spending parts of two days troubleshooting our Dometic fridge's non-working status we have come to the conclusion it is either the cooling unit, or the heating elements.  The circuit board appears to be functioning correctly.  To replace the cooling unit would cost anywhere from $745 for a rebuilt one, or close to $900 for a new one.  Taking into consideration the age of the Dometic (13-15 years) we made the decision to purchase a new one through Camping World.  With our Good Sam 10% discount, and no sales tax in Oregon (the sales tax in California would have been another $100) it will cost us just over $1,100 for a new Dometic, and another $75 for shipping.  

Not only has the year 2020 been a year scarred by the Wuhan flu fiasco, but it has been a year of reckoning for our appliances.....it's like the perfect storm.  So far, in last 13 months, we have replaced our water heater, our Norcold basement fridge, our toilet, rebuilt the black tank dump valves, replaced our bedroom TV, our satellite dish, our Splendide washer/dryer, and now our Dometic refrigerator.  And to top off that our Detroit Diesel gear driven alternator quit working on our drive from Coupeville, WA to Seal Rock, OR, and will have to be rebuilt in the near future.  I keep telling myself "It's only money....".

TLE was home a little before 12 pm.  Shortly after she arrived home we went outside to move the dorm fridge into the trailer to keep it from getting wet.  It appears we will have rain on and off for the next 10-14 days.  But, and there is always a 'but', before we could do that TLE informed me the entry door would not close.  I thought "How can that be?", but she was right....it would not shut.  It appeared that there was something wrong with the latching mechanism.  I was able to manually make it work, but when I would go to shut the door it would not engage.  I finally removed the trim piece around the door handle to see if there was anything obvious with the mechanism that was keeping it from working.  Not only was there nothing obvious, it appeared to be in perfect working order....WTH!  I tried spraying lubricant into the locking mechanism, but still the door would not shut.  Finally I unscrewed the entire locking mechanism to move it out of the way so we could at least close the door while I worked on the locking mechanisim....mind you, it is raining the entire time, the wind is blowing the entire time (about 30 minutes at this point), and it's now getting cold inside the Newell.....  

The latch when the door is closed....the latching mechanism is wrapped around the strike post holding the door closed

The latch when the door is open....when closing the door the strike post hits that mechanism, and is collapses to allow the post to engage the latch, and shut

....so, I removed the locking mechanism and went to close the door.....it still would not shut....well, that is just impossible.....unless (as I shortly discovered) the lower dead bolt had deployed way back when TLE opened the door (now 40 minutes later), and it was the deployed dead bolt that was preventing the door from closing the entire time.....DOH!.....

The real culprit

.....well, that was 45 minutes of my life I will never get back......LOL!  Needless to say TLE and I had a good laugh......we both completely missed the fact that the dead bolt was deployed.  Sometimes being too focused is not a good thing.

The rain continued unabated all afternoon, and into the evening, and it was still coming down when we went to bed.

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