Thursday, May 22, 2025

Five things to do.....

 8:28 am - Thursday - May 22nd - LPG&RVR - 56° F, humidity 33%, wind 9 mph out of the northwest......mostly clear skies today with a forecast high of 70° F.  On this date in 2012 TLE and I were spending a few days at Craters of the Moon National Monument in southern Idaho.  While there we were able to observe a partial solar eclipse.....


.....I was trying to take a picture of the eclipse, but it didn't come out, however, in that red blob below the sun you can see the eclipse....how that happened I don't know.

I always have a bunch of small projects needing my attention around the Newell/American Trailer floating around in my head, and Wednesday seemed like as good a day as any to cross a few of them off that mental list.  First up I finally installed a power strip/surge protector I bought way back in January off Amazon....


....surprisingly this took me more time than the other projects combined....lol.  When we were staying overnight at the Hotel St. Michael in Prescott, AZ this past January the hotel room had some of these deployed around the room.  In addition to the regular 120 VAC outlets there are also USB ports.

Next I used silicone caulk to reseal a seam on the right rear window awning (TLE's bedroom window awning), then used the last of the Sunbrella swatches I got from ZipDee many, many years ago to cover over a rub hole in the patio awning.....


.....caused by the plastic wheel on the top of the entry door that keeps the sharp edge of the door from contacting the awning fabric.  The problem is that after 43 years the wheel has begun to create a wear line that eventually wears through the fabric.  ZipDee sent me, free, many years ago several fabric swatches I could use for just this kind of repair.  The Sunbrella fabric is made out of silicone, so I use silicone caulk to glue the swatch to the fabric.  As you can see in the picture above I have made other repairs over the years....


.....my next repair project of the morning was to install a new snap on the sun shade.  The one to the left ripped out of the sunshade fabric, and since TLE didn't want to take the sunshade down to sew up the hole I just moved it to the right a few inches.....

You can see the old snap location on the left, and the new one on the right

.....after finishing that snap I headed into the trailer to work on tightening the quarter turn latches on the aluminum cabinet mounted on the passenger side interior wall of the trailer.....

I installed these cabinets, as well as the work bench back in 2011 when we were at Rancho Jurupa Regional Park living for a year before heading out on the road.  They are very durable.

.....the latches have been opening while in transit, especially on our trip back north to LPG&RVR, so it was time to figure out how to tighten them....



.....they're not as straightforward as they look, and it took me about 45 minutes to figure out how to properly adjust them so they stay latched while in transit.  I do run a fabric strap across all three doors when we are traveling, and it has been held them mostly closed when the latches open, but I don't want them to open in the first place.  They are all tight once again.  I love working on small projects like these, and on this particular day was able to get a lot of them done.

 By the time I finished fixing the latches it was almost 12:30 pm, and time for a snack, and nap.  The weather Wednesday was delightful, and I actually wore short pants and a t-shirt for much of the day....looking forward to many more days of being able to do that.  We're running the electric heaters for shorter durations each morning, and not at all at night now.  It seems like we've been living in winter conditions since early November of 2024.  Time for warmer weather!

Thanks for stopping by!

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