Remember over the past few weeks before I told you that we were going away this week and the work involved in preparing our RV for the trip? Well, we’re home - not away. Why?
I printed out my list of what has to be done to set up and pack the RV. We put the mattresses (actually pieces of the mattresses as each half of the mattress is made up of 3 pieces) in the RV. I pulled out stuff that was in the RV for the winter that is needed to pack it - food storage boxes, fabric shopping bags to carry stuff out to and back from the RV, and so on. I also have some stuff to do because it has not been used since last year - such as change the refrigerator baking powder holder (to keep it from smelling - same as a box of same in one’s home fridge - but I get the one that goes on inside the fridge with a suction cup as the box would probably fall over as we traveled around and make a mess). I checked that we had hand and dish soap and shampoo. You know -the sort of stuff you have at home and never think about needing on a trip - unless you have an RV.
Last Thursday we plugged the RV into the house electricity to make sure the batteries were fully charged. They are old and we should have replaced them, but that has not been in the budget, so we have to make sure they are charged, so that the fridge in it will keep working when the car engine is off when we are parked somewhere. (It does also recharge while we are driving and while it is plugged in at night in the RV park.)
On Friday I suggested to husband that I would makeup the bed while the RV was plugged in so I could run the air conditioner as it was soooo hot out - and inside is like being in a car that has not had ac on and even hotter. He reminded me that it could not be put on if the ac was plugged in at the house as the amperage was not enough, but - he had wanted to turn on the generator and make sure it was working.
So we turned on the generator - horrors, it turned on fine - but the microwave clock did not come on. You may be thinking - who cares about the microwave clock of all things. There are two things that will not work in the RV unless it is plugged in at full amperage - the ac and the, yes, the microwave. If the microwave light was not on - the generator was not transferring electricity to the RV. We turned the generator off and husband climbed under - again - and found that the fellow who worked on it had turned and left the connection switch off. We turned on the generator and this time the it was connected and working. I started making up the bed - a 45 minute minimum process as I have described before and husband walked out to let me work.
He was back shortly. There was oil coming out of the generator. Whether something was broken, or the plug was loose, or the fact that too much oil had been put in it - something was wrong. He ran inside and called the shop that had changed the oil. Well, 4:30 pm Friday - they would be glad to help on - Monday morning, when we scheduled to be on our trip. Husband made the appointment.
I suggested that we could set up the RV except for the last minute things, take the RV to the shop, come home, add the list minute things (or we would have to wake up even earlier to put them in and secure them in place) and go on our trip. Husband was not happy with this idea, as it is very hard to back the darn thing off our driveway - I have to stand in traffic and tell him when to back out and he has to do it quickly - and he did not want to do it twice in one day. I went back in the RV and did a quick set up of the bed as the generator was running and oil was still coming out of it. I only did the mattress set up, then we stopped the generator - I brought the pillows into the house to deal with them. It will be a lumpy set up in mattress as I was not able to smooth out the sheets properly - I will deal with it when we travel in it.
The more husband thought about it, the more he did not want to leave after going to the shop again. But - if we cancel the reservation we have to pay for it any way. In addition as the weekend went along, the weather became extremely hot and thunderstorms while we would be there. He panicked even more.
I decided to suggest that we go one day during the week - whichever day seemed to be the best weather - for us to go to the annual folk festival (crafts) that we want to go to (we can go there and home the same day, we have done so in the past) and try to move the reservations to next week. He agreed.
As I was about to do so I realized that there was problem with going next week - we had money coming in this week and it had to be transferred to checking to pay our “big” credit card bill which has to be mailed out the 10th. Darn!!!!!
I then suggested the week after - which seemed okay all around - we have a reenactment the weekend after it, but would be home Friday night and the reenactment is Sunday.
So this past Saturday I telephoned the RV park and explained that we had a reservation for Monday and we have had a problem with the RV and it could not be worked on until Monday. Could we please change the reservation to 2 weeks later - and I was told it was okay - the same space was even available. Now, I may find that they are not applying our deposit to the changed trip, but if so, well that is how it is. Hopefully we will get credit for the deposit.
So now we are home for July 4th. Something which I do not think has happened since we were married - and maybe before. With nothing to do. For “excitement” we went to Barnes and Nobles today.
Earlier in the week I was trying to think how to make today more July 4th ish. He has hot dogs for dinner around once a week so I moved them to today. We don’t have an outdoor grill. I have not been able to eat hot dogs for a few years, so I figured I would make my Thursday night turkey burger in an elongated shape so it would fit in the brat rolls we had in the house and I figured he would use for the hot dogs. We had some frozen fries I would make for him. When I went to make dinner I suggested that I use a cast iron pan with a grill that I had not used in awhile to cook my burger and his hot dogs to make them more like being grilled outside. (Normally he has me boil his hot dogs.) He told me to do one that way to try it.
I put the grill pan on the stove to heat up. I started making (canned) soup. I checked how much fries there were. Suddenly the kitchen was full of smoke and the smoke detector was going off. The grill pan - with no food added - was burning whatever was on it and the smoke was heading through the house. I turned off the burner, opened the back door (next to the stove) and fanned the smoke a bit with the door - this usually will direct smoke out the door if something like this happens. I turned off the ceiling fan - same. I turned off the soup. The alarm kept going off. I would push the button, it would stop, and then start again. I am 5'1" and have to stand on my toes on a chair to reach the button. I stayed up there pushing the button over and over. In between I would jump off the chair and try putting the ceiling fan on or off. After 10 minutes of this I texted husband upstairs for help. Between his hearing not being what it was and the fact that he was in a room on the other side of the house - which is not that far as the house is small, but he had the air conditioner on and the room door closed so he did not hear the alarm going off.
He came down and took over the spot on the chair, pushing the button over and over. We could not clear the smoke from the air. This is one of the new alarms with a permanent battery, so we could not pull the battery or the alarm would have to be thrown away. We tried covering it with a shower cap. (The RV is small and if one cooks in it the smoke alarm goes off and people put a shower cap over it to keep the smoke out of it when cooking - and it works, as cooked in it after a couple of hurricanes when we had no electricity in the house for the electric stove there.)
Finally about 45 minutes later the alarm stopped. The house still reeked of smoke. The pan was on the floor in the porch. Dinner should have been cooked and ready.
I turned the soup back on. I boiled his hot dogs. The fried potatoes had been cooking during all this in the toaster oven. But what about my dinner? I was not going to try to cook my burger in any of my pans and add more smoke to the house. I ended up cooking frozen vegetables for me for dinner - vegan for tonight. My burger is wrapped in plastic wrap for dinner tomorrow night. I have the grill pan soaking water to try to clean it.
THOUGHT OF THE WEEK -
No matter what one’s plans are they may go awry. One just has to be able to think and deal with the problems so that they are in some manner resolved.
We will go on the trip later than we figured - but this will probably be good as it will not be as crowded then - and husband hates crowds. Hopefully we will have a day that is nice to go for the one day trip - and as husband scowled over the cost of the tolls - I reminded him that when we go that way the tolls are much, much lower as we are going to a different area - maybe 1/3 of when we go to where we usually go.
Dinner was late (and we missed the start of the PBS “Capitol Fourth” on TV), but we had dinner and the show was rerun after its showing so we saw the start afterwards.
None of this is earth shattering - just an annoyance - and I had two stories about trying to be organized to tell you this week.
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