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Palo Duro Canyon State Park

An easy day driving. East on Interstate 40. Across the Pecos. Through Tucumcari. Central Time Zone. Lunch in Texas. South from Amarillo to the state park. The Grand Canyon of Texas. Two mile 10% incline. First gear engine brake all the way. Lots of good camp spots at the bottom. Haven’t been here in years. Wild turkeys wandering through the camp ground.
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Albuquerque

The dish is done. Two components replaced; the controller and the modem. The D2 is now a D3. The 6000 is now a 7000. A completely different mechanism for finding the satellite is now in play. It should be more reliable. We didn’t expect the KOA in Albuquerque to be as nice as Santa Fe Skies in Santa Fe, but it’s not so bad. We thought our proximity to the airport might be a problem. We thought maybe the airplane noise might be an issue as the departing flights turned right over our heads, but it’s hardly an issue at all. We can barely hear the jet planes over the freeway noise. And they haven’t had any more drive by shootings since that one before we got here. And besides, it wasn’t even actually in the KOA campground. It was in the apartment complex on the other side of the chain link fence. So, back to the satellite dish. We had to get out of the way while they worked on it, so we took a drive to the top of Sandia Peak. 10,600 feet. Nice views. Cool weather. Took a couple walks in the forest. Drove back down and reunited with the motorhome while Mike and Steve finished up making sure all the parts talked to each other. They finished by five and we’re back in our favorite Albuquerque KOA for the night. Tomorrow, points east…. Or south…. Something south or east. We’ll let you know.
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Albuquerque

SundayAnother day at the KOA in Albuquerque. Watched some football. Last weekend our teams were four for four. This week didn’t go so well. Only the Longhorns won. Colorado, the Broncos, and the Boys all lost. We thought if we flew each football flag at the right time our teams couldn’t lose. Got some chores done. There is always indoor sorting to do. Did some of that. Time to check the tires. Several times a year we have to start the big motor to run the compressor and top off all the tires. It doesn’t take much. We got nitrogen put in all the tires a while back. Nitrogen doesn’t bleed out as fast as normal air does. Periodically, though, we hook the air hose to each of the tires and one at a time let each one come up to the pressure of our air tanks, slightly below 110 pounds. Don’t want to drive on underinflated tires and wear them out. At the same time we do the tires, we do the batteries. The chassis batteries are sealed and seem to run forever. The house batteries are new, installed last January. We need to slide out the battery drawer, rinse them off, and top them off about as often as we do the tires. Got that done too. Tomorrow, off to the satellite repair facility to swap out some parts. They told us they could probably do the job in a day, but we’d better allow two just in case. We did. After that, there is no more room at the campground for us. Every place in town is booked for the balloon festival in October.
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Albuquerque

Santa Fe. Seventy-five degrees. Six mile commute. Great scenery. Great client. We didn’t really need to be done but we are. Saturday. Travel day. Sixty miles. South. We’re in Albuquerque. We have an appointment on Monday to get some satellite dish components replaced.
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Bailout

Millions of people were seduced into buying homes they couldn’t really afford. Now millions of foreclosures, millions of families being displaced, and the personal financial tragedies do not constitute a crisis. No government help to save them. It’s the free-market economy at work. They shouldn’t have bought homes they couldn’t afford. Now the companies that behaved so irresponsibly as to create the problem are in trouble, and they are so big that the economy will get wrecked if they go under. Now we have a financial crisis the government has to deal with. Things go bad and individuals pay the price. The largest corporations in the country behave irresponsibly, make untold amounts of money, things go bad, and they get bailed out by the government (which happens to be a collection of the same individuals that just got burned). We blame the victims and bail out the perpetrators at the expense of the victims again? It can’t really be this circular, can it?