Another installment in my continuing effort to document everything that a person might do wrong while motorhoming. Item number 3,842. Let’s say you’re in a really nice RV Park with excellent desert landscaping and nice cement pads, and you don’t want to wait until you’re parked on gravel, you want to rinse off your batteries with a hose while the weather is warm, and you think you can just rinse off the cement below the batteries with the hose afterwards, and not leave a mark. Don’t imagine that you can spray some neutralizer from the auto supply store on it to stop it. Don’t think laundry detergent will help. Don’t think you can go buy some baking soda to scrub it with and make it go away. Nothing will help. It will leave a mark; a really interesting colorful mark. Then you have to go to the office and confess what you’ve done and everyone comes to look at it and shake their heads. Happily, this has never happened on our site here in Texas. It has happened on a really nice site in Mesa, Arizona, however.
The beach
You walk the same beach every day and see the same birds…. except now. Suddenly, they’re gone. The gulls are still here, but there is hardly a sanderling to be seen. Not a willet, plover, red knot, or turnstone to be found. They were all here the first week of January. It’s too soon to head north. Wonder when they’ll be back. You walk the same beach every day and every day it’s different. One day will be hundreds of sand dollars, the next day nothing. One day starfish the next day none. White jellyfish. Purple jellyfish. Chevrons. Cockleshells. Barnacles. Ghost shrimp. Sometimes the differences are subtle, but it’s always different. We drove the National Seashore beach last week with John and Jo. We drove it this week with Ron and Linda. Both times there were plenty of birds there, although this week we only saw one small plover. Hard to perfect our revised plover identification skills when all we see is one.
Movies
We have avoided the movie “RV” with Robin Williams. We like Robin Williams, but previews for the movie made it look like a string of lame RV clichés. Didn’t seem to be any reason to go there. Well, we clicked around the pay-per-view channels last night and decided to watch it. Last chance channel: last chance to pay for it before it goes on the other channels for free. We were right, a string of lame clichés about motorhoming. What a riot! Predictable: like watching a favorite standup routine where you see the punch line coming and it is funny every time. Best $1.99 we’ve spent lately.
Winter Pictures from Western KS
At the risk of making everyone colder than they already are, let me forward the pictures of Western Kansas Ken sent me. It would really suck to be that steer.
From: Steve Taylor [mailto:steve@taylorroth.com]
Sent: Friday, January 12, 2007 4:08 PM
To: spt@thetaylorcompany.net
Subject: FW: Winter Pictures from Western KS
From: Ken Roth [mailto:ken@taylorroth.com]
Sent: Friday, January 12, 2007 3:06 PM
To: Steve Taylor
Subject: FW: Winter Pictures from Western KSHope you are warm down there.
Texas
We returned to Texas with some trepidation. After all, there could be warrants out for my arrest, having not reported for jury duty as ordered. Judy, however will not go to jail. Her jury notice included a number to call if you couldn’t make it. Judy called and rescheduled her jury duty… to January. That worked so well, I decided to call the telephone number they gave Judy and reschedule mine too. No such luck. “I’m here in January, schedule me!” No can do. Without a current jury summons, I can’t be scheduled. I have to wait until I get another summons, call and reschedule that one. No penance allowed just because I happen to be in the state. Meanwhile, when Judy called to reschedule hers, they told her the date to appear and said she’d receive a new summons in the mail. She is scheduled to appear on Tuesday, but still no notice. Think she should go without one? Naa. No way they’d recognize her without a jury summons in her hand. We’ll just see what happens. After all, how bad could it be?