Gone Walkaway....

Ok, we wandered off finally.  Photos:  oh hell no!  Not trying to make lots of miles but landed in Leeds, UT for our first time. The Leed's park is a nice little place off the highway; we have been here before; didn't go to the Zion Park just because we'd been at the park before.  Drove on to Salt Lake City today.  Nice quite drive until.....

We were in Salt Lake City coming off I-15 coming onto Westbound I-80 and it was just crazy.  First of all I must admit that my wife and I have different ideas about what happened.  I'm kind of supporting her version but that's because I was busy at the time.  Let's face it, I'm driving and I don't have the universal view.  Here's the deal.

While we were coming off I-15 towards I-80 Westbound we saw an accident.  My wife says that a vehicle ran up onto the INSIDE of the curve, turned over and stuff flew out.  I don't know, I was too busy avoiding the guy in front of us who moved over into our lane.  Happily, there wasn't anyone in the lane to our right so I was able to escape him.  I was also able to escape a LOT of sharp rock that the rolling vehicle had tossed into our lane.  We called 911 and reported the wreck but we didn't really want to park a 50+ foor rig on the side of the road and block things up even more! 

So now we are in Salt Lake City and headed north.  We'll update you from time to time.  Hope there aren't any more accidents!  Take care.

Dummy Alert!

Oh boy, did we do a dumb thing the other day.  We have the trailer out of it's shed and next to the house because we are doing a little work on it - the new bathroom sink.  So we opened the awning to keep the morning sun off the side so it would be cooler.  So far so good but then comes the dumb moment:  we left the awning out and came into the house.  You know what happens next:  the wind comes up and suddenly I hear this whacking sound.  The awning was doing it's best to try to rip itself to bits.  I ran out and grabbed it but it was too much for me.  Happily my wife heard it as well so she followed me out after a minute or two.

We tried flipping the lever to roll it up but it was jammed and wouldn't roll up.  Finally I had the bright idea to release the awning legs from the side of the trailer and just let the awning hang down against the side of the trailer.  My wife couldn't get her end of the awning to release but I managed it and that released all the strain from the 'roll up' lever and we managed to get the awning rolled up.  Damn, that was a near thing!  We've been running around in trailers for almost 15 years that's too long to be making a rookie screwup.

We do have a new sink though.  It looks good and hopefully we'll get the plumbing done later this afternoon.  My wife is the family plumber; all I do is hand her the tools.  I won't be taking any photos of that! Here's a photo of the old sink propped up in the cutout for the new one.

And here is the new sink happily installed.  What a difference!

My computer is officially screwed up.  My battery icon gives me a message that says "6% available (plugged in, not charging)".  It's almost exactly 5 years old and when I took the battery out, it's leaking.  It's just a bad deal.  I checked out batteries online and they are running about $30.  I checked out the ones at the local BatteriesPlus store in Las Vegas:  $100.  Hmmmm.  Guess I'll be buying online again.  On the other hand, there is a nice Toshiba Click 2 advertised for $530.  It's small but maybe I could get used to it.  We'll see what happens.  Stay tuned!

Thanks for stopping by.  Have a good one. 

Jeez, I'm getting worse!

Ok, I haven't updated the blog in over three weeks.  In my defense, it's been pretty dull around here!  This is our 'monsoon' season so we've had several storms blow through leaving their usual .002 inch of rain.  That ain't much even in millimeters.  The mountains between here and Vegas catch all the rain and they have had some flooding.  We got a little mud on the roadway but not a lot.  We did have one really cool storm in the night with a lot of lightning hitting the desert floor.  Pretty unusual and totally beyond my ability as a photographer but it was cool.  You'll just have to take my word for it.

These days excitement is defined by stuff like having a guy come and powerwash our tile.  Well, at least it is expensive if not exciting.  He suggested we should be sure the gap between the tile and the baseboard is sealed so I spent two wonderful days crawling around with the caulking gun and a tube of silicone.  Then there were the two days laying around groaning about the crawling around.  Gotta tell you 65+ year old guys who are overweight just really don't like crawling very much especially on a hard surface like tile.  I used a pad but couldn't stay on it the whole time and my knees knew.

My wife had a birthday recently and we celebrated by going into Las Vegas for Dim Sum.  We went to a place called Ping Pang Pong in the Gold Coast Casino.  It is pretty well rated and got a good mention in some national magazine (like Travel and Leisure but don't quote me on that).  Two of the other Dim Sum restaurants in Vegas have been closed by the health department within the last two months so we just kind of knocked them out of consideration without hesitation.  Anyway, I was pretty surprised because the place was really quite small.    I've never had Dim Sum before but thought the food was pretty good.  Carts are brought around with various little plates on them.  You get like three dumplings on a plate.  Plates are between $2.50 and $7 at this place and there are a few things that are more.  We got some bbq pork that was a quite large serving for $9.  There were a few things that I didn't like.  First it was so noisy that I couldn't hear the cart ladies nor could my wife so we ended up with a few things we wouldn't have ordered.  (There was way too much shrimp for someone like me with a shellfish allergy.)  Secondly, the cart ladies all circled around at once so we ended up getting lots of food on the table whereas had we gone a little slower it would have been a better experience and the food would have been warmer.  I suppose that is our fault though; they didn't twist our arms to take food!  Finally, and perhaps the largest complaint is that we were standing in line outside the place for a full 30 minutes.  We had read in reviews about the wait but we were hoping that mid-week at 1 p.m. it wouldn't be quite so bad.  It was.  I think next time I might try someplace less popular.

This morning I'm waiting for a guy from DIGIS, our internet provider.  They use some kind of radio signal to get to our house so we have an antenna, much like a DirectTV dish, for the internet.  They put a new one on a couple weeks ago so we have quite good service. (Ping is 61ms; download speed 10.94 mbps, upload is 1.98 mbps for those who know about such numbers.  They are claiming that when the installation is right and their tower gets upgraded next week we should see 15 mbps download.  We'll see.)  Unfortunately they used 4 lag screws to hold the dish on and two have already fallen out.  Not exactly a wonderful installation so they have to come back and fix it.  Not something that's worth taking photos of either! 

Our staghorn cactus is trying to have a flower.  It's not quite open yet but I need to get a photo when I can.  The flower doesn't stay around very long.

If it sticks around and I can get better photos I'll do so. 

Anyway, that's life in the slow lane.  We'll do something crazy soon, I promise.  Until then, thanks for stopping by.