Author: Steve

The locomotive. The train. In Silverton. It just parks on the street.

Sunday A leisurely leaving from Navajo. The orioles came by for a visit this
morning. The striking black and yellow female, and the striking black and
orange male. They sang to us from the tree. The kingbirds fluttered and
hovered and hawked for insects. We enjoyed the cool morning. We drove to
Durango. Settled into the Alpen Rose RV Park. Located tomorrow’s job.
Located the train station for the steam train ride to Silverton. Located
the Wal-Mart Superstore and treated Judy to anything she wanted for Mother’s
Day. Got phone calls from the kids. Ate some serious barbeque. Serious.
I mean it! The name of the restaurant is Serious Texas Barbeque. Very good
very different. Very thirsty. Drank water, club soda, ate and drank fruit
cups. Too full to drink any more. Still thirsty. Drank Alka-Seltzer.
Good barbecue. Rags is a water connoisseur. He can drink his water straight from the pet
dish, but, generally, that is not what he wants. At home, we have an
electric watering dish, that holds water in a reservoir and constantly
circulates it with a pump. It filters it then drops it back into the dish
with a tiny waterfall. He prefers that. He prefers water from unusual
places. His favorite place seems to be the bathroom sink. He’ll bug you to
death while you’re at the sink, until you give up and set the plug, turn the
water on till it fills all the way up, then turn it off, or better yet,
leave it just slightly on with enough trickle to keep it constantly seeping
out the overflow drain. Leave it like that, and he’ll spend an hour lurking
by the mountain lake, drinking to his satisfaction. Hummingbirds here too. We listened to them before we left Navajo. Nothing
like Sylvan Lake last year, though. At Sylvan Lake, they came in swarms.
We didn’t have a hummingbird feeder, so Judy improvised one out of sugar
water, a saucer, and a red Gatorade bottle. It worked. We had hummers
throughout the day. Some kids at a neighboring camp had been there a week
with their feeder, and the hummingbirds were so tame they didn’t mind people
at all. We sat right next to the feeder on the picnic table. So tame, we
could hold out a finger in front of the feeder for them to land on. The
weight of a hummingbird standing on your finger? I think you can only
detect it if you can see it. A fifty mile drive. Not enough for the cat to get used to the motion. He
wandered around and drooled. We got settled in here. It’s a nice park. Paid a little extra and they let
us wash our RV right at our site. As a general rule, that’s not allowed.
Got the dust all off it, and the windows clean again. I scrubbed. Judy
rinsed. It’s hot and sunny enough, we put the sun screen over the
windshield to help control the temperature inside. Tomorrow. Back to work.

Wednesday This job is not happening in three days. Finished the income and did the
liabilities and equity. Still have the gen file, audit program, and
clean-up to do. Scheduled the exit conference for tomorrow afternoon. Glad I fished a couple times earlier in the week. The weather is so warm
and nice, the spring runoff has started. The water is higher, faster, and
brown. It’ll come back down, and clear back up, at the end of June, just in
time for the Salmon Fly hatch. Big flies, two inches long. Big trout come
up to eat them. While fishing, downstream from the campground, I heard a swoosh on the water
behind me. Looked back to see a big merganser swimming away from me. I’m
sure he didn’t notice me there or he wouldn’t have landed so close. He
paddled over to the other side of the river to watch, where he would be
safe. We took a hike tonight across the river on the footbridge, up the hill on
the other side to stand at the top and look back down on the cabins and the
river. The three of us. Rags stayed home. The trail followed a little
stream part of the way. Most of us stayed out of the water. We came back
down by dark, put Annie in the sink and washed her entire lower half. She
was a two-tone, black and brown dog. Now she’s all brown again. There are massive brown forests of aspen trees covering entire hillsides.
That beautiful lime green color is just beginning to wash upward from the
lower altitudes as they reclaim their foliage. This motorhome is so much bigger than Shamu, our last one. The bedroom is
in the back, and the entire back of that room is one big closet. I knew it
was a big closet, but I didn’t realize how big it was until I walked in to
the room to find Judy standing in the closet, with the light on inside,
hanging up and organizing clothes. It’s a walk-in closet! Well, if you’re
Judy’s size, it is. We have these really nice window shades. Day/night shades. Pull down the
bottom part and you block out the direct sun, but not all the light. Pull
down the next part, and you block out all the light too. Problem is, they
seem to have a three-year life, and our motorhome is three years old. About
a month ago, I pulled the one next to the dinette down and it broke. The
string on the side snapped. Before we could get it fixed, the one behind
the recliner broke while Judy was pulling it down. It cost a bit to get
them fixed. It takes a trained professional to restring them. Then, first
week out on this trip, the one over our heads in the bedroom broke. It’s
been broken for a week now, waiting for us to get back to civilization so we
can get someone with shade-fixing skills to take care of it. Until this
morning. This morning, before she even got out of bed, Judy fixed it. She
was lying there looking up at it, got to fiddling with it, and discovered
that the strings on the sides had popped off, and all she had to do is pop
them back on their holders on the bottom. That was it! Problem solved.
The window shade fixer was right here all the time. Tomorrow. Finish the job.