The compound.....

 7:37 am - Thursday - February 6th - TWW - 39° F, humidity 53%, wind 11 mph out of the southeast.....crystal clear, blue, sunny skies today with a forecast high of 63° F.  On this date in 2020 we met Rich and Marnie for breakfast in Borrego Springs, CA....we both own New Beetles...theirs is diesel....

....a little context....we had just finished working 9 months for them at Ramona Oaks RV Resort.  One of the best workamping jobs we've ever had, and the best managers ever!

TLE and I spent some time first thing Wednesday moving the rest of our 'stuff' from our former site to our new compound....the Sea-B-Que, its propane tank, the table, and the artificial turf....

....eventually we'll fill in the blank spaces with more artificial turf.  Once that was done we turned our attention to cutting, and splitting more firewood.  The need for firewood never ends in the winter at 5,500' elevation, and we have a lot of dry wood stacked around the property awaiting the cutting edge of our Stihl chainsaws.  Way back in October we trimmed a lot of dead wood, and branches out of the trees right in front of the house, and made two stacks in front of the dog kennel....one of very dry wood, and the rest to burned at a later date.  Well, that later date was Wednesday.  Both stacks of wood, and cuttings were as tall as the 4 foot fence which surrounds the kennel (not in use right now), but after an hour, or so of work they were gone....

There used to be two large stacks of dry wood, and small stuff where that fence is

.....I used the Ford 420 with the pallet forks to move the large pile of stuff waiting to be put on a burn pile back to our burn pile area, and then I plowed through the dry wood stack cutting the big stuff into suitable lengths to be split.  We were able to increase the size of our stacked firewood by about 1/3.

In the picture below you see the now clear area where there were two other large stacks of tree cuttings awaiting their trip to the burn pile area, which I moved using the Ford 420 once again....now that area is clear once again.....

....by the time we finished putting away our tools, and changed back into shorts, and t-shirts it was around 1:30 pm.  Once again we got a lot done in just a few hours.  

In spite of the clear, blue skies we had all day we decided to have another sunset fire.  Knowing there would be no spectacular sunset displays due to the lack of clouds on the horizon we went out around 5 pm, about a 1/2 hour earlier than normal, to see in the evening, and watch the sun slide slowly to the western horizon....

...we are loving our new view, and the privacy that comes along with it.  It feels like we're a hundred miles from where we were before, but we only moved 75'...lol.  It was well worth the wait.

On the solar front, now that we have moved, our need to run our Predator 5000 generator 2-3 hours per day is gone.  Over the last few days we've run it less than 1 hour each day, and today (Thursday) we will not be running it at all.  Now that our rooftop solar panels (620 watts) are getting full sun about 2 hours earlier than normal, we don't need to run the generator to give the house batteries a boost before the sun hits them.  On Wednesday our house batteries were back to 100% by noon time, and our Bluetti AC200MAX batter bank was back to 100% by 1 pm.  I'm sure there will be days coming when it is very cloudy that we may have to run the generator, but I'm thinking it will be very little from this point forward, and that has been our goal since we arrived.  The trailer Bluetti AC200P solar charger is on autopilot, and I am just leaving the trailer with full power 24/7 now.  The two 325 watt panels get it back to 100% by 1 pm every day.  The same goes for Phyllis' sister Newell.  We haven't used the Champion generator to charge her batteries in 3 weeks now, and her batteries are usually at 100% each day by 1 pm.  The house battery bank is back to 100% by 10 am each day.

Our three Suburban gas furnaces are working so well I don't even think about them other than when I'm turning them on and off each morning.  They are so much quieter with the new motors, and sail switches installed.  I've got a 3rd spare new motor for the bedroom Suburban, but for now it is working flawlessly, however, if the need arises I've got that motor, and sail switch, as well as spare Dinosaur control boards for the bathroom, and bedroom furnaces.

Another benefit of moving to our new site is we are now about 50' closer to the sewer cleanout into which we pump the effluent from our black tank every week, to 10 days, so we're not going to need a 100' hose anymore to reach the cleanout.  Over the next few weeks we're going to begin building 2 more RV sites, one for the sister Newell, and one for Charles' 5th wheel.  Ultimately we hope to have an additional 2-3  more RV sites.

Thanks for stopping by!