I remembered!

Woohoo, I remembered to post again! I'm excited...too bad I don't have much to say (sad face).  The weather has been amazing, and I have officially moved several large potted plants to our patio here at the campground.  It is definitely starting to feel more like home.  The big event this week was the truck load of stuff that we found at the house and decided we "needed" in our RV.  So I've spent the last 2 days trying to find nooks and crannies to stuff it all in to.  The upside is that I've discovered we have a ton more space than I realized.  The funny note for the week was partly our fault and partly not.  Due to all this rain/snow the past few months the ground here is very soft.  Normally not a problem until you put a 12 ton vehicle on large lego blocks.  The result as we found was that we were sinking, nose first into the ground.  Our solution was to extend the jacks fully, remove the blocks, add more too them to build mini pyramids and then lower the coach back down.  Sounds painfully simple doesn't it.  Those of you who know us will know this went soo wrong already.  The raising of the couch went very smoothly, I got the blocks dug out, reorganized and put back...the problem, yeah the jacks sunk too so the rig wasn't high enough to just put the blocks back under the tires.  Here's were we got slightly stupid...we decided to lower the rig/raise the jacks.  The idea being to then put blocks under the jack pads so the jacks would be taller, thus raising the coach further.  For some reason the concept of soft ground and heavy vehicle didn't reenter our minds and this effort was in vain.  At this point ralph is standing next to the rig, I'm in the drivers seat, the sun is setting and we are no where near level.  To add insult to injury, we did this without taking our slide in...which then meant as you may know from previous posts we couldn't bring it in since we weren't level.  The final answer, we are more level than we started by manually overriding the jacks and using the gyroscope on my phone.  The slide still won't retract, now due to the fact our engine battery is dead.  We discovered that while we thought it was just annoying that the cats enjoyed turning on the dash fans, in fact it was draining our engine battery as those don't run off the house batteries.  Today's trick will be to go buy a trickle charger and maintainer to recharge our engine battery, then hopefully bring in the slide, pull forward, replace blocks, back up and relevel.  I'm sure that some of your are laughing at us, as again it's a pretty safe prediction this will not go as planned either.  I'll update if we don't get crushed once this is successful.

Sorry

This is going to be a long one. I was doing so well with the every Monday plan, then life intervened and the best intentions got forgotten. So let's catch up. Part of the excuse for no new blogs is that my sister was in labor and her husband was away on a training mission. So I hopped the first flight I could catch to the east coast. Turned out to be Raleigh, NC. My mom in the same mad dash rented a car and drove down, swinging through Raleigh to collect me. By the time we arrived it was decided that while contracting she could go home and wait it out. So we did. The funny part of this story is that the next night around midnight we are timing contractions deciding to go back to the hospital and my mom says "wait, I have to plug in my curlers". For those of you who know her this was an expected response to let's go to the hospital. For those that don't....she just is. :-) the short version of this story is that while we did everything to convince Mckenzie it was time to come out, she held fast until her daddy got back and my mom and I had returned home. She was born on March 15th. Now while I was away, Ralph was left home with a dumpster and an entire house full of color coded post-its. For those of you that know me, this was not a surprise either. Since we have to be pretty much out of our home April 1st there was a lot to do and the timing was awful. But he did a great job so that once I returned we were in full swing. I do have to admit that it was considerably harder in some aspects and easier in others with this move. On one hand we had to decide the fate of everything we owned. To the motorhome, storage, donate/give away or the dumpster. These were the choices. Since we already had everything that would fit in the rig, that was a very small pile. The donate give away section had a date of being out or it would become dumpster bound. And while we never thought it possible we managed to fill a 20 cubic yard dumpster to the top which was taken away this morning. It's amazing to me the volume of stuff you accumulate over the years. On the positive note we have succeeded in passing along over 9 truck loads of goods to family, friends, friends of friends and our local good will. We also some how manganged to only half fill our 10x10 storage unit which was a major win in my book. We are down to the last of it, little piles here and there needing to be bagged or boxed. The house seems so empty now. At this point the only big thing left is finding a home for Molly. It saddens us to do so but she isn't tolerating the rig well at all. We have her at the house for now but are rapidly running out of days for her to stay here. I also have to say thanks to all those that helped schlep or took stuff, we greatly appreciated it. Back to a happier note. The rig is doing great. No freeze ups, probably because no below freezing weather but we are still excited. We have started the process of narrowing down fifth wheels to find a true four season rig and will hopefully swap out this summer. Going forward I will do my best to be a better blogger. However I do feel I should warn that I will be traveling again in April. That itinerary is; Washington dc, New York, Bethesda, 4 days travel down the coast, Florida, Alabama then back to Florida to return home. Should be fun and exciting. And I should have lots to blog about. See you in a week! (smiley)