Artificial intelligence........

8:05 am - Sunday - September 9th - Southwest Harbor, ME - 51º F, 71% humidity, wind 8 mph out of the north with a forecast high today of 62º F.  Today is also TLE's birthday.....she is celebrating the 20th anniversary of her 49th birthday.  Happy birthday my love!

I say this often, and I will repeat it once again.....I love spending time with visiting friends and family....I love it.  BUT, it exhausts me!  It didn't used to be that way, but over the last 7 years, or so TLE have spent the majority of our lives with just each other as we travel, and when we do have visitors I can almost feel the energy levels dropping day by day even though I find it also exhilarating at the very same time.  It is a true conundrum.  Nonetheless, I was looking forward to sleeping in Saturday morning, and I made it all the way to 7:30 am......9 hours of sleep with no obligations whatsoever on Saturday.

Ever since the beginning of our 4th season at TVC (Tahoe Valley Campground), which was the second year we had the use of our wonderful artificial turf I have wanted to repair it properly.  The first year we had it we made some cuts in it to allow it to fit around the permanent concrete picnic table in our site.  We had that crumbling concrete picnic table removed at the end of our 3rd season, so when we returned we had to patch the one small section of the turf back together.  I used Gorilla tape to do that and it worked pretty well, but over time it would pull loose.  I repaired that repair a few times over the intervening 12 months, but it was never 100% effective.

In this picture from 2016 you can see how we had to cut around the concrete base of the old, crumbling permanent table.....it was those cuts which needed repairing.

Before we put that turf back inside the trailer for our journey to Campbellsville, KY I wanted to really fix it, and had decided the only way to do so would be to buy some heavy duty, marine grade nylon sail thread to stitch up the few sections we had cut, then cover that stitching with my silicone caulk, then reapply the Gorilla tape.  It is fortuitous that we have access to a West Marine store right here in Southwest Harbor where one could hope to find such thread, which is used in stitching sails.  TLE and I pulled the turf out to a section of the yard where we would open it all the way, and get it all dried out for my repair efforts.  Then we drove over to West Marine to acquire more Gorilla tape, and the heavy duty sail thread.....

Turf laid out upside down and ready to be worked upon

  Sail thread

Gorilla tape

Silicone caulk

....we were in and out of West Marine in about 10 minutes.....it is so easy to find what you need there.......in addition to West Marine we made a quick stop at Sawyer's Market for some salad greens for dinner before heading back to the Newell.  Sawyer's caters to the sail and power boat set, which arrive in Southwest Harbor without surface transportation and are able to walk to the store.  They are a little pricey, and we normally do 95% of our shopping at Southwest Food Mart, but for stuff like salad greens they are comparable, and probably have a little better selection.

We were back home by the time the sun had been beating down on the rubberized backing on the artificial surface for about an hour making it much more malleable, and easier to penetrate with the large needle I would be using to stitch it.

The work went quickly, and smoothly.....the hard part was standing erect once again after sitting on the ground cross legged for an hour at a time......that didn't used to be so difficult!

 The stitch work

 About 1/2 done with one seam

The first section stitched, caulked and taped.....almost as good as new!

I took a break after finishing each seam, then began to caulk over the seam and thread to protect it and make it easier for the Gorilla tape to do its job.  It came out nicely.  I finished about 90% of the work Saturday, and will complete the work on Sunday morning.  Once the caulking is cured, and the tape is applied we will then refold it so it can be inserted in the trailer on Monday.  Why Monday when we are not leaving until Saturday?  Well, there is a 100% chance of precipitation on Tuesday, so it needs to go inside before it gets wet again.....now I have to get the trailer organized enough by Monday to do so!

The temperature began to drop quickly by 4 pm, and by 5:30 it was too cold to be outdoors.  The overnight low was projected to be 47º F, and as you can see by the temp I reported at the beginning of this post it got pretty cold last night.  We both turned on our electric blankets around 4 am.

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Standing on the threshold of 2020.....

6:46 am - Thursday - January 2nd - Ramona, CA - 37° F, 93% humidity, wind 6 mph out of the east by northeast......overcast this morning with a forecast high today of 69° F.

You could not have drawn up a finer New Years Day than we had this year, January 1, 2020.  It was the kind of January day that inspired the original organizers (Valley Hunt Club) of the Tournament of Roses Parade back in 1890.  They wanted to show the world what a great place Southern California was in which to spend the winter, or to even live full time.  While a lot of the country was buried in snow each January 1st, Pasadena had flowers blooming, and their orange trees are about to bear.......

.....January 1st, 2020 was the kind of January day that inspired the original founders 130 years ago.  We were up watching the annual Rose Parade by 8 am, and the day just improved from there.  

One of my plans for New Years Day was to repair our patio awning.  The thread in one of the seams came apart in the last Santa Ana episode.  Our Zip Dee awning is 38 years old, and although the Sunbrella fabric looks as good as it did 38 years ago, those same 38 years of UV exposure have damaged the heavy duty thread used on the seams to the point where it is now giving way.  When the first seam gave way a few years ago I called Zip Dee to find out how to fix it and they told me to use clear, silicone caulk to rebind the seam (Sunbrella is made out of silicone).  I did, and it worked.   Trying to hand sew that 6.5' seam would be a nightmare, and short of replacing the entire awning, using the silicone caulk is a good half measure.  The original seam I fixed about 5 years ago is still holding just fine.  

So, it was now 1 pm, and the awning was bathed in sunlight, and would be for about 3 hours, so I set up the outdoor TV (The Rose Bowl game was set to begin at 2 pm), and began to work on the seam.  With TLE's help I had it repaired in about 90 minutes.  I first used some black sail thread to tack the seam together in two places so the rest of it would overlap properly, then applied the caulk.  With an hour the caulk had cured to the point where the seam was once again sealed.

Once we were done we went inside to watch the rest of the Rose Bowl game (#6 Oregon Ducks vs. #8 Wisconsin Badgers), and what a game it was!  The score seesawed back and forth the entire 3+ hours........the final score as the clock wound down to zero was 28-27 in favor of the Oregon Ducks.  The other two games were very one sided, and not worth mentioning.

Around 5 pm I lit the Sea-B-Que to grill our New Year filet mignons......I grilled them for 5 minutes on each side, and they came out a perfect medium rare.  TLE added mashed potatoes, and a salad......

......what a great way to wind down the first day of the New Year!  We were standing on the threshold of dreamland by 9:30 pm with big smiles upon our faces.

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The 'lido deck' repairs...........

7:54 am - Saturday - March 21st - Wittmann, AZ - 51° F, 65% humidity, wind 3 mph out of the northwest......partly cloudy skies with a forecast high of 70° F.....the view this morning.......↴

Morning health update.....TLE and I continue to be asymptomatic.  We are healthy, not so wealthy, and a little wiser.  The worldwide confirmed case totals as of Friday morning are still below a quarter million, and worldwide deaths just over 10,000.  I know as of Saturday morning those numbers have gone up.  Within the U.S. as of Friday night the death rate in the U.S. was 1.3%....far below the forecast 2%.  In Arizona we recorded our first death from the Chinese Virus, and we have 63 confirmed cases of the Chinese Virus.....nothing catastrophic yet.

 As of Friday morning

I had two projects Friday to occupy my time......fix the Zip Dee patio awning, which was not on my 'TO DO' list originally, but was added after the microburst, and finally install the new passenger door interior pull handle (to close the door from the inside) which broke a few weeks ago, which was also not on my original 'TO DO' list.  Over the past 6 years we have repaired most of the seams as the 38 year old thread has given up the ghost.  The two seams which came undone during the microburst are the last two seams.....the other seams, which had been previously glued using the clear silicone caulk held during the microburst, which made us very happy.  We use silicone caulk for the repairs as the Sunbrella® fabric is also silicone based, and it has worked, and continues to work well in repairs. The Sunbrella® itself is in wonderful condition considering its age.

To repair the 87" long seams I use black sail thread to stitch the seam back together in two, or three places.....

You can see the two places I stitched with the 

light shinning through the open seam in between the stitches

.......once that is done I wedged a 2" x 4" in between the roller mechanism, and the roof just under the awning, then get on my telescoping ladder and apply the silicone between the overlapping pieces of fabric all along the 87" seam then press the fabric down against the 2" x 4", and let it cure in the sun for an hour before removing the 2" x 4", and moving to the next seam.  I could only reach half of the seam from the ladder, so I had to go on the roof, lay on my stomach to apply the silicone, and then compress the seams together....it worked well....

.....one of the repaired seams can be seen in the picture above.......⤴  While I waiting for the first seam to cure in the sun I turned my attention to removing the old door pull, and installing the new one....the new, aftermarket, door pull is a much better design, and I think this one will last much longer than the first.......↴

The new door pull

......I had to make a run to the Wittman P.O. to pick up the Thetford rebuild kit I bought to replace the 38 year old rubber gaskets in one of the valves.  The kit rebuilds one Thetford valve, so  I removed the gaskets from the new Thetford valve I bought a few weeks ago for the second valve.  Ironically the rebuild kit cost more than buying the new Thetford valve.  I will endeavor to do the rebuild Saturday.  I'm hoping it will all go smoothly....hoping, hoping, hoping!

We continue to enjoy our stay here on the property of Tom and Darlene, and appreciate the fact we are in the perfect place at this time in history.  We are not stuck in the middle of large, dense population centers.  We have acres of open space, good air to breath, and very gracious, generous, and caring hosts willing to put up with us for weeks at a time each year.  Life could not be better right now in spite of the circumstances.  We will get through this, and we will come out stronger on the other side.....let's just hope the 'other side' is not too far in the distance.

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Sunbrella....

8:46 am - Monday - January 24th - Newell House, AZ - 43° F, 57% humidity, wind 3 mph out of the east.....crystal clear, blue skies today with a forecast high of 67° F.  On this date in 2013 TLE and I were watching our 28th Cedar Key sunset......↴

TLE and I have been doing five laps around Newell House a couple of times a day for the past three days for exercise.  If we follow the fence line around the backyard where Newell House is and do just over five laps we hit 1 mile exactly.....

Great power walk!

....in our afternoon fast walk we covered the 1 mile in 15 minutes and 24 seconds at an average pace of 3.9 mph, and consumed around 180 caloric units in the process....our best effort so far.  

In the morning we watched another complete English Premier soccer match, and caught up on a few YouTube channels we follow such as Gone with the Wynns.  Nikki and Jason Wynn (35 and 36 respectively) originally started their YouTube channel in their 20's with video content of their full time RV life/nomadic lifestyle, but transitioned to full time sailors aboard their catamaran 'Curiosity'  four, or five years ago.  With nearly 500,000 followers, and a 6 figure annual income, theirs is one of the more successful YouTube channels out there.  They have been traveling in the South Pacific for several years now, and now find themselves in New Zealand.  The production quality of their channel is very high, and we enjoy their weekly videos about their lives at sea which are released most every Sunday.

Curiosity

After the completion of the soccer match we redeployed the patio awning, and sun shade, and then I spent some time with my silicone caulk gun patching a few seams from which the 40 year old thread had separated.  If only the thread which binds the Sunbrella fabric panels together on these ZipDee awnings was as tough as the Sunbrella fabric itself!  We were first introduced to Sunbrella when we owned a 1973 Columbia 26' sailboat for about 12 years from 1992 to 2004 at which time we sold the Columbia, and transitioned to the RV world.  The sail bags, and main sail covers were made from blue Sunbrella, a silicone based fabric, which never fades, and seems impervious to ultra violet damage.

Other than the ZipDee repair work I took it easy again Sunday.  For dinner we enjoyed interesting conversation, and a pleasant dinner of pot roast with Tom and Darlene prepared by the loving hands of TLE.

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Stitch in time........

8:20 am - Wednesday - April 1st - Wittmann, AZ - 62° F, 52% humidity, wind 4 mph out of the east by northeast.....heavy cloud cover today with a forecast high of 82° F.

Back in the summer of 2018 after we had left Smuggler's Den Campground to spend a month on the property of our friends Tony and Janet I began to stitch several cuts in our artificial turf which I had intentionally cut so it would fit around our concrete picnic table in our site at TVC (Tahoe Valley Campground) in the summer of 2016.  When the old picnic table was removed I just used Gorilla Tape to put the small area of turf back together, and it worked okay, but after a lot of rain the tape would begin to come off.  With time on our hands in September of 2018 I decided to buy some sail thread (I wrote about that here) at the local West Marine store and begin to stitch those cut sections back together......

Back in September of 2018

.......I laid out the turf upside down on the grass next to our site at Tony and Janet's home, and began the slow, arduous task of undoing my mistake from two years earlier.....I should never have cut that turf!  Over a couple of days I managed to get about half of the stitching completed, but our time was up in Southwest Harbor, so I decided I would finish it when we got back to SoCal.....yeah, right!  My process was to first stitch the sections I had cut back together, then apply clear silicone caulk to the stitches to protect them from the elements, and then cover each seam with Gorilla Tape.....

.....and for the spots I stitched that process has worked out quite well.  The seams have held, and are still solid after 2.5 years.  On the sections I had not stitched I just reapplied a new round of Gorilla Tape.  So, fast forward to January of 2020 when we are leaving RORVR after 9 months.  As we were folding up the turf to insert it in the trailer those unstitched seams pulled loose from the Gorilla Tape, and it became obvious that I would have to finish that long delayed project.  That date with destiny came Tuesday morning.  I rolled back the edge of the turf where the remaining cuts to be stitched are located, pulled off what remained of the Gorilla Tape, then began to stitch the remaining cuts, determined I would finish this undesirable task in one sitting, and I did......

....I probably laid down around 200 'whip' stitches in all, and I got it done in about 4-5 hours.  Above you can see the entire area I repaired Tuesday, and below is a close up of the 'whip' stitches on one section......

......once all the stitching was complete I laid down a bead of the GE clear silicone caulk over all the seams......

The seams are caulked

......once the GE clear silicone caulk has cured I will reapply Gorilla Tape to the newly stitched seams, and then roll the carpet back to right side up.  It only took me 4 years to correct my bad decision back in the summer of 2016.

By the time I put my materials away I was around 4 pm, and I was tired, but it was a good tired, and now one more thing is crossed off my 'TO DO' list.  I watched a few more episodes of 'Luke Cage', plus another episode of 'Outlander' (season 5, episode 2) with TLE, and it was time to call an end to Tuesday and head for slumberland.

TLE and I continue to be asymptomatic, and continue to do well.  The Arizona numbers are shown below.....

.....Arizona numbers are still not alarming.  Here are the numbers nationally.....

.....NY has 1,550 of those deaths and almost 76,000 of the national cases, and continues to be the national epicenter.  The rural areas of the U.S. continue to be way less affected than the large urban areas.  Most states have just single, or double digit deaths reported, while a few have triple digit deaths.  World-wide numbers how 889,213 cases, and 44,323 deaths.

We get a little stir crazy now and then, but once I can immerse myself in another project it goes away.  Of course, the list of projects is diminishing, but "I'll worry about that tomorrow" to quote Scarlet O'Hara in Gone With the Wind.

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Flurries........

7:32 am - Thursday - March 26th - Wittmann, AZ - 50° F, 47% humidity, wind 7 mph out of the northwest.......cloudy this morning with a forecast high today of 62° F.

After taking a couple of days off from projects Wednesday saw a flurry of activity.  I began my day applying Leather After Life to the seats in the VW Beetle......↴

.....I learned about this product a few years ago from my friend Richard Entrikin, who also owns a Newell (1999).  He has used this product on leather furniture with great success, so I bought a bottle quite some time ago, but had never used it yet.  We first used it on TLE's new to us Villa passenger chair in the Newell, and most recently I applied it to the front seats in the VW to see how it worked, and it worked well.....

.....Wednesday I applied it to the rear seats, and console.......↴

.....it really made them POP!  Next I turned my attention to the driver seat where I had noticed a seam in the side of the seat was coming apart.  I used the same sail thread I used on the awning to repair the seam, and was able to close it once again......↴

......next I turned my attention to re-caulking around the 3" sewer outlet to try and keep the wee beasties out of the water bay.......↴

......quickly following that I put the bottom of the leather back on TLE's Villa chair back together, and using Velcro, reattached it to the frame.  Now, if I need to get in there again there will not be 70 staples in the way.......↴

.....while I was on a roll I turned my attention to repairing the strip LED lights I had installed a year ago on the driver side rocker panel.  This project took most of the afternoon, but by 3:30 pm I had installed a new 171" length of LED strip lights, and they now work as they should.......↴

 Victory!

......now I have the accent lights on both sides of the Newell.......↴

 Driver side

Passenger side

......we were treated to a very nice sunset.  TLE had me grill hamburgers for dinner, and we watched 'Survivor', and then an episode of 'Outlander' (Season 5, Episode 1) before calling it a day.......

.....TLE and I continue to be asymptomatic, and continue to practice social distancing.  As of Thursday morning the number of U.S. cases is 69, 210 with 1,046 deaths.  In the 'micro' view every single one of those deaths is tragic and devastating to those left behind.  In the 'macro' view the numbers are still muted in the U.S., but we are beginning to see a daily surge in the numbers.  Let's pray we see a flattening of the curve sooner than later.  World-wide there are 491,623 confirmed cases with 22,169 related deaths.  NYC and surrounds still is the U.S. epicenter for the China virus with majority of the reported U.S. cases.

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