Wednesday 2/16
That’s what I get for waiting to update the blog - neither of us can remember what we did on Wednesday!
Thursday 2/17
The first time we ate at Beyond Bread a couple of weeks ago I managed to chip off a piece of a front tooth on the particularly hard bread crust (they do have a symbol on the menu warning you to be careful!), Well, it turns out I also cracked a filling in another tooth! It has been starting to hurt and getting worse, so I made an appointment at a dentist in Tucson Estates. Dr. Schmahl turned out to be very nice and very gentle. I was a bit apprehensive since I have been going to the same dentist for 35 years! Probably will eventually need a crown, but I chose to try to get by with a filling until we get home.
Friday 2/18
Nancy had a meeting at the campground this AM to plan for the cook-out next week. I installed the new Sirius antenna on the truck, so now we can use the Sirius radio both in the trailer and in the Volvo, should be nice on the road. We still do not have a radio in the truck with audio input, but the Sirius receiver we bought also transmits in FM so we can pick it up on the FM radio.
In the afternoon Nancy went over to the University where she had appointments for a pedicure and a facial at the Aveda Institute. Afterward we found a new Chinese restaurant to try. The Mandarin Grille turned out to be pretty good, not up to the standards of the East China Inn in Batavia, IL where we usually go, but better than anything else we have found in Tucson.
Saturday 2/19
Running around town doing some shopping today and we ended up on the north side of town so we stopped at Beyond Bread - I stayed away from the really hard crust bread that I broke my tooth on!
We are really enjoying having the Sirius radio in the trailer, should have done this a long time ago instead of messing around trying to find local stations. This evening after A Prairie Home Companion we just put on the classical pops station and read all evening.
Sunday 2/20
IT RAINED TODAY! First measurable rain for Tucson in 2011 (there was one day of scattered showers, but it did not rain at the airport). Cooled off bit as well, it has been sunny and in the high 70’s all week! Of course being Sunday we had the AM TV shows to watch and then the Daytona 500 along with a Blackhawks hockey game at the same time. So it was pretty much sit around and watch TV all day!
Monday 2/21
Morning meeting at the campground. We had a headlight burn out on the smart the other night. Turns out the whole front fiberglass shell has to come off to get at the bulb! Last year we found that we had to do that to get at the valves for recharging the AC. The AC has turned marginal again so we will get that charged as well. So Monday afternoon we took the front of the car apart and dropped it off at Tucson Mountain Motors for AC service.
Tuesday 2/22
Getting ready for the campground Recycling Picnic on Wednesday. Pericles (the owner) springs for hot dogs and hamburgers with the money saved by recycling, everything else is pot luck. While Nancy was baking cupcakes and brownies for the picnic I volunteered the Volvo to help move tables. We picked up 13 folding table and stacked them on the deck to move over to the picnic area, then picked up a couple of picnic tables as well.
After doing the picnic set-up we drove into Tucson to the NAPA store to pick up new headlight bulbs for the smart. The smart has Hella headlights that were put in with the federalizing conversion. They are pretty good on low beam and spectacular on high beam. Well, now they are spectacular on high and low beam! We replaced the 65 watt headlight bulbs with 100 watt Zenon bulbs that put out a powerful, really white light. A big improvement.
We also stopped at BK Sonoran Hot Dogs for lunch. Had tacos and caramelo de carne asada, which were excellent. Along the way we stopped at Barrett’s Propane and filled a tank.
Wednesday 2/23
Campground picnic today, had about 160 people there and lots of good food.
Sometime in January Pericles asked in the Monday morning if there was anyone interested in dog sitting while their owners were away from the campground for an extended time. We volunteered and that was the end of it, now all of a sudden, we are in demand. We had a dog we were taking care of Sloopy, a Boston Terrier who is shoot from guns on Wednesday, and will be looking after her again on Saturday. On Tuesday Pericles called and asked if we could go to another RV and take Rufus for a walk as his owners were stuck in town having some car repairs done. So we went and introduced ourselves to Rufus, a really sweet little dog. On Thursday we will be taking care of Sprocket, a sheltie, who is very laid back, seems to have separation anxiety.
Thursday 2/24
Watching everything on the news and speculation about what it is doing to oil prices, we decided to top up the tanks on the truck. My original plan was to top up in Oklahoma on the way out here in December (which we did) and that would give us enough fuel to get back to OK on the way back east. It is looking like the fuel in OK might be more by the second week in March than it is here now, so we went 50 miles up the highway to the Flying J on Eloy, AZ and put in 150 gallons of diesel at $3.739!! Oh well.
Along the way we stopped at a Cracker Barrel for lunch and then stopped at Total Wine and More to stock up on Scotch and Irish whiskey for the rest of the trip. We stopped at PetsMart to pick up a toy for Molly, Nancy’s friend’s labrador. Next door was an Ultimate Electronics that was having a going out of business sale, so we looked in to see if they had a deal on a Sirius home dock that we could use back home - no luck there, but we did see a Sony HD TV that looked like it would fit in the space in the trailer. The current TV is a flat screen, but not HD or digital. Went back home and looked up the dimensions and determined it would fit and I drove back to Ultimate Electronics and bought the last one in stock.
Then I spent the evening trying to figure out how to get everything hooked up again so it works! With three possible inputs - satellite dish, RV batwing antenna for over the air, and a hook-up for campground cable connections - it requires a distribution box and hook-ups to the TV from the all three inputs plus the DVD/VCR. Takes a good bit of head scratching and cursing to get it all right, especially since the inputs on the new TV are different than the old one!
Friday 2/25
Headed up to the Arizona - Sonora Desert Museum this morning, busier there than we had seen it before, six busses in the parking lot and the closest lot was full at 10 AM. When we left at 11:30 the line to get in stretched all the way out to the parking lot! We did find out that as members we can just skip the line and walk right in, another nice perk!
After we got back Nancy did the laundry and I finished the TV installation. Had to modify my homemade stand a bit as the mounting holes in the new TV were in a different place than the old one! Nothing is ever easy. The new TV will make it a lot easier to watch NASCAR, F1, and hockey.
We went with Nancy’s friend Karen to a little dinner nearby that has a fish fry on Friday evening, excellent fish.
No comments:
Post a Comment