Author: Steve

It is usually so dry here. This is a wonderfully wet year. No water
shortages: plenty of rain. The rivers have water in them. The lakes have
water in them. It got us to thinking about water and the planet. Is water
created and lost from year to year, or is it a closed system? Is there a
certain amount of water on the planet, and all the snow, ice, rain, rivers,
lakes and oceans will always total to the same amount? Floods and droughts
are only about the distribution of water on the planet? One area’s dry year
is another’s flood? Just curious. The “high altitude puff”. As altitude increases, everything in sealed
containers expands. Well, the air in the sealed containers expands, anyway.
Bags of salad puff up as inflated balloons. Potato chips poise for their
opportunity to explode. Squirt bottles of ketchup and mustard.
Deodorant….. Yeah. Roll-on deodorant. That can take a while to dry. Guys and gadgets. We love gadgets don’t we? One of my favorites has been
the indoor/outdoor thermometer with wireless remotes. When you buy it, you
get the home base and one remote. The home base will handle three remotes,
so you have to buy two more. Then, after a long time, one of the remote
units quit working, so I had to buy another. That was a problem. The new
remote was better than the old ones. The new remote had its own digital
display. So I had to replace the old remotes with better new remotes. That
was a problem. I had remotes units at home. I had them in the motorhome.
Over the course of several years, I lost track of all the remotes. You can
pick the channel you want the remote set to, but there are only three
choices. If you have more than one remote broadcasting on a channel, it
confuses the system. My system got confused. Nothing worked. To solve the newest problem I’ve managed to create, all I had to do is
locate all the remote units I had acquired over the last several years, and
take the batteries out to turn them off. Then I can turn them back on, one
at a time. Problem. The home base is working. All the remote units I can
find have been disabled. The home base is still receiving a signal from
remote unit one. We can’t use that channel until we can locate and disable
remote unit one. We searched the motorhome. We searched every drawer and cabinet in the
house. Nothing. How do we find a remote sending unit? We know it’s there.
Somewhere. I took the home base unit out to the motorhome. It stopped receiving a
signal from unit one. It was out of range. That told us the missing unit
was in the house, not in the motorhome. I tried to work it out by
temperature. The temperature signal for unit one was close to the
temperature of the home base. That meant it was in the house and not
outside. I couldn’t figure out how to narrow it down to a single room in
the house to search again, though. Finally, we had to give up. We waited.
We waited and watched. Remote unit one kept sending. How long would we
have to wait for remote one to just wear out and quit sending? A year?
More? It only took a week. Judy found it in a cabinet in the bedroom. We
disabled it and the reading for remote one disappeared from the home unit.
One at a time, we turned the remote units back on. It’s back. All systems
go. It’s currently 70 degrees inside, 59 degrees outside, 36 degrees in the
refrigerator, and 2 degrees in the freezer.

Yeaa Richard the RV guy! It’s cold at night here. Forty degrees. Cold
enough to use the furnace. We’ve messed around and messed around with the
rear furnace, trying to get it to work as well as the front furnace does.
Between these last two trips, Richard fixed it. He changed a limit switch,
but more importantly found a vent that wasn’t set up properly, so the rear
furnace was overheating itself and shutting off before it could heat the
back half of the motorhome properly. Now we get any temperature we want in
the back too. The front furnace continues to work flawlessly. Work during the day. Explore in the Jeep after work. Lots of birds around
the office. Starlings, finches, and sparrows. A flock of Cedar Waxwings
demolishing the ripe apples on the tree outside. Western Scrub Jays in the
campground in the morning. A wandering gang of Pinyon Jays at lunch. Black
capped and mountain chickadees. Back roads to explore. Wilson’s warbler.
Townsend’s warbler. Hermit thrush. Close-up with a Cooper’s hawk in an
empty campground up Cottonwood Pass. Gulls in the high country. Ducks.
Ring billed duck. Cassin’s finch. There don’t seem to be nearly as many bears here as there were at Ruedi
Reservoir on our last trip. We got there and set up right at dark. There
were bear warnings posted all over. By the time I went for my run, it was
totally dark. There was no moon to light the way. There were plenty of
stars. The Milky Way was brilliant, but that didn’t translate to a lighted
path for me. I couldn’t see any star shadows, so I had to run with a
flashlight. I never want to run with a flashlight. I’d rather make do with
available light, but without it, I couldn’t find the trail. Off I went, out of the campground and down the road, through the uninhabited
forest. The forest was uninhabited, except for the bears. I heard noises.
Not exactly bear noises. Not growling or anything like that. Just noises.
Leaves. Branches. Noises in the night. I could hear the bears all around
me. Surprisingly, I never saw any. I used the flashlight to look for them.
Nothing. I’d shine the light right at my feet while I ran, then spray the
forest with light to surprise them. It never worked. I never saw them. It
was not a comfortable run. I am happy to report that I’ve run at night
here, and never heard a single bear.

_____________________________________________
From: Steve Taylor [mailto:spt@thetaylorcompany.net]
Sent: Thursday, August 26, 2004 5:42 PM
To: Bill Taylor (E-mail); David Taylor (E-mail); Tom Taylor (E-mail)
Subject: Buena Vista Never know what you’ll run across when you’re out driving around. That’s a
lot of tunnels all at once. I think it was six altogether.

After leveling the motorhome In Yellowstone, the last step out of the
motorhome was really big. We had a little footstool to put out to make up
the gap, but it wasn’t sturdy enough. Here is our sturdy new portable step.

Judy is so smart! When we were young, we would tease her for being mechanically “level”.
Well, no more of that. She keeps figuring things out and fixing things now. This time she did it to the bicycle rack. The new bicycle rack. The old
bicycle rack was a problem. It plugged into the hitch receiver on the back
of the Jeep. Once the bicycle rack is on, you can’t open the lift gate to
get at anything in the back of the Jeep. And now that the weather is warm
and we’re carrying the kayaks, you can’t load or unload the boats from the
top of the car without removing the bicycles and the bicycle rack first. Well we changed that. We bought a different bicycle rack. We bought a rack
that attaches by means of a sleeve that fits over the tow mechanism for the
car. It stands up between the motorhome and car while we’re towing so the
back of the car stays clear. That works, but that also creates a problem.
The car tow mechanism has to lift and rotate when we hook and unhook, but
the bicycle rack sits low over the tow mechanism and blocks that motion.
The bicycle rack works, but the tow mechanism is disabled. Solution to that problem: buy an extension for the tow mechanism. That
makes the tow mechanism protrude out from under the bicycle rack. That
worked, but with the extension in place, the bicycle rack mount got moved a
little forward. The rack no longer cleared the bumper of the motorhome.
Next solution: mount the bicycle rack farther out on the tow mechanism and
reverse the gooseneck that comes up from the sleeve to move the bicycle rack
back towards the motorhome. That worked. But we still weren’t there. The bicycle rack is mounted. The tow mechanism
works. But when we put the bicycles on the rack, they didn’t fit. The
rails were too close together. The handlebars clashed. We moved one
bicycle forward as far as it would go, and one back as far as it would go,
but they still clashed. I turned one around, but then the handlebars of one
clashed with the seat of the other. It still didn’t work. Now we were
considering how to reengineer the bicycle rack itself. Do we cut the rails
off and move them farther apart? Do we cut the rails off and stagger them
so the handlebars will clear? Judy to the rescue. Judy said: “Why not turn the front wheel around on the outside bicycle?
Wouldn’t the handlebars clear then?” The handlebars move with the front
wheel, so that would put the handlebars in a different place. Well. Yeah.
That was certainly the simplest solution. Now everything works just fine.
That was the last solution we needed. We’re only on the road for a week this trip: unless another job gets
scheduled in the meantime. We have several good prospects for new jobs.
We’ve been talking to Glenwood Springs, Carbondale, and Trinidad. After all the places we’ve had to go, all over Colorado, we spend this week
in a place called Buena Vista. It doesn’t take much Spanish to figure out
what that is about. Buena Vista sits in a broad mountain valley at 8,000
feet. The view is of the Collegiate Peaks range: a whole line of
fourteeners.