We are fast running out of time here in Apache Junction, and we still have a lot to get done before we head to Yuma for our Arizona Gypsy Gathering rally in March. We still need to replace the tires on or motorhome, replace the house batteries, I’m working on the new issue of the Gypsy Journal, and once it is printed, we need to get it mailed out. And, of course, there are still a few dozen rally details and chores that need completed too.

Aside from work related tasks, we still have some folks who want to get together for lunch or dinner, I want to get down to Tucson to visit my cousin Beverly, and I’d like to spend a few hours at the Family History Center of the LDS Church in Mesa. I’m not a Mormon, but their genealogy research facilities are open to anyone, and I’m running into a brick wall on my father’s side of my family tree.

A couple of weeks ago I bought Miss Terry a new Bernina Bernette sewing machine, and while I was working on the new issue of the paper yesterday, she went to a class at Quilter’s Ranch in Tempe to learn about all of the new machine’s bells and whistles. What, you say? A class to learn how to operate a sewing machine? No, Terry has been sewing since she was a youngster, this class was just to learn all about the features of her new machine and its many capabilities.

What the heck, when I got my Blackberry Storm last summer, Verizon had a free class to learn to use it! Of course, I still can’t do much more than make a call or answer e-mails on it.

Yesterday, my friend Sharon Del Rosario sent me an e-mail to tell me about a great country singer and yodeler named David Bradley that she and hubby Don met in Quartzsite, and she suggested that I contact David and talk to him about performing at our Yuma rally. Since I value Sharon’s opinion, I called David and we worked out an arrangement for him to come to the rally and perform a concert on Monday evening.

David is the son of world champion yodeler Gene Bradley, and has been performing since he was five years old. He performed with the famous Sons of the Pioneers for five years, and was a featured solo artist at the popular Country Tonite Theatre in Branson, Missouri, where he won the Featured Entertainer of the Year award. You can hear some sound bites of David’s music on his Born To Yodel website. Check it out, and make plans now to attend his concert at the rally. Between David and the Michael Hargis’ concert, we’ll have plenty of reasons to tap our toes at the rally, won’t we?

Besides great entertainment and a full line of seminars at the rally, you will also have the opportunity to take advantage of some extra activities, including getting your RV weighed by Rick and Joyce Lang from RVSEF; taking behind the wheel RV driving classes from the RV School, and taking a class to obtain a non-resident Utah or Florida concealed weapons permit from Traveling CCW.

There is a separate fee for any of these valuable extras, and you should make arrangements before the rally if you can, because they all fill up fast. For RV weighing, contact Rick Lang at ricklang46@hotmail.com; for the RV School, contact Dennis Hill at rvschool@wizwire.com; and for the CCW classes, visit the Traveling CCW website.

News out of Elkhart, Indiana is that Heartland Recreational Vehicles LLC., builders of what I consider some of the finest fifth wheel trailers on the market, has purchased the rights to the brand names Prowler, Mallard, Pioneer, Wilderness, and other Fleetwood towable products, and will begin to build their own line of trailer models under those names. A company press release says they plan to begin manufacturing RVs under the acquired names in the next year. Given my personal opinion of Fleetwood products, I’m not sure this is a move I would have made, but if anyone can build something worthwhile under those brand names, I think it would be Heartland.

As busy as we are, Bad Nick still found time to write a new Bad Nick Blog post titled Dying With Dignity. Check it out and leave a comment.

Thought For The Day – Don’t believe all you hear, spend all you have, or sleep all you want.

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After reading my blog about repairing a broken radiator hose on our MCI bus conversion earlier this week, a soon to be fulltimer e-mailed to ask me what basic tools I carry in our rig to keep us out of trouble.

Obviously this is a brand new reader, because anybody who knows much about me at all knows that in my case, the more tools I have available, the greater the opportunity for me to create disaster. For me, less is better.

Keep in mind that when we were in the early stages of converting our bus, I set fire to it with sparks from an angle grinder. That I once fried our inverter when I fired up the big air compressor we carry in one of our bays while we were dry camping and overloaded the circuit. And then there was the time I decided to polish our stainless steel with a rotary buffer. The pad flew off and hit me in the mouth, I stumbled backward and tripped over a toolbox, and knocked a nasty hole in my skull on a rock. I think the rock fared even worse.

That being said, the only power tool Miss Terry allows me to play with is a small Dremel tool, but she hides all of the cutting wheels and wire brushes that come with it, and only lets me have access to tiny little cotton buffing wheels.  

As for hand tools, forget it! Saws and screwdrivers have sharp edges, I would probably snap a pair of vise grips on some part of my anatomy that wouldn’t respond well to the sudden intrusion, and I can scrape several layers of skin off my knuckles trying to use the wrong size wrench on a stubborn bolt.

Even something as simple as an aerosol can is a tool of destruction and mayhem in my hands. Our old bus has an oil bath air cleaner, which means that the metal air filter sits in a big canister of motor oil, and the oil is supposed to catch the dust and grit that would otherwise get into the engine. Periodically, the oil needs changed and the air filter needs washed out. In an RV environment, this should be done about once a year. It’s actually a pretty simple job. Yeah, right.

A couple of years ago I decided to tackle that chore, and in the process, I discovered a thick layer of crud and gunk that had built up on the inside of the big canister. By the time I scraped it all out with a putty knife, I was black from head to toe. I knew Miss Terry would have my hide if I tracked that mess through the bus, so I looked in the bay and found a can of engine starting fluid. I thought that should cut the grease and get me cleaned up in no time at all, so I pulled off my shirt and commenced to spraying.

Have you ever been on fire? I never have, but I think I came damned close to it that day! A minute or two after that stuff hit my skin, I felt a burning sensation that cannot be described. It was like a million fire ants were eating me alive. So there I am, outside the bus screaming my head off, Terry ran outside and grabbed a water hose and sprayed me down, which did little to dilute the chemical burning its way through my skin, but did help to spread this homemade napalm to other places on my body it had not yet reached, by way of the trickle down effect, if you get my drift. It was not my finest hour.  

But, I have finally found a tool that even I can master, and so far, I have not been able to get into any mischief with it. And I have my pal Rick Lang from the Recreational Vehicle Safety Education Foundation (RVSEF) to thank for telling me about it.

My new Blackberry Storm smart phone has hundreds of applications, called apps, that can be downloaded, many of them for free. One Rick showed me is an electronic level, just like the levels many RVers use to be sure they have their jacks down properly and their refrigerators will work okay. Except now, instead of having to use some mechanical device to check our level, I just hit a button on my Blackberry and there I go. Isn’t technology a wonderful thing?

I just checked, and according to my Blackberry, I’m at least half a bubble off.

Thought For The Day – You can’t leave a footprint that lasts if you’re always walking on tiptoe.

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Miss Terry has been busy the last couple of days finishing a project on our MCI bus conversion.

When we started the conversion, we left the escape hatch in the roof of our bus, which was in the bedroom, accessible. When we had our tripod mounted HughesNet satellite dish, we installed a custom roof mount on the bus for it, and I would boost Terry up onto the roof and she would deploy the dish. She got so good at it that many times we could be online with both the Internet and satellite TV in less than ten minutes from the time we opened the hatch.

Now, this did make for some interesting experiences. Once we were parked here in our favorite spot at Elkhart Campground and Terry’s foot was in my cupped hands and she bounced up and down, doing our standard “One, two, three, and up” routine. Once she was up on the roof, the fellow in the motorhome parked next to us said “I’m sure glad to see you! I thought I was going nuts. I kept seeing this head popping out of the roof of your bus and then disappearing!”

We replaced the satellite dish with a Verizon air card and Cradlepoint router, assisted by a Wilson Trucker antenna and Wilson amplifier from the 3G Store a couple of years ago. Once we took the satellite dish and mount off the roof, Terry never had a reason to crawl up there again, so we decided to close in the hatch.

The last few days she has been busy staining wood and sealing around the hatch. Today we put the finished wood up and it looks great! But by the time the job was completed, Terry was more than ready to call it a day.

While Terry was busy putting a last coat of stain on the wood, I made a quick run to the post office to mail out a couple of orders, then stopped at the Verizon store to tell them to cancel the VZ Navigator option on my Blackberry Storm. It’s neat to have a fully functioning GPS in my cell phone, but we already have a GPS, and I couldn’t justify the $10 extra a month for the feature.

Our friend Al Hesselbart, historian for the RV Hall of Fame Museum, has been promising to take us out to dinner ever since I accused him of being a cheapskate a year or so ago, but the timing never seemed to work out. So yesterday just about the time we were wrapping up the bus ceiling, Al called and suggested we drive up to Lunker’s, a neat sporting goods store in nearby Edwardsburg, Michigan for dinner. Lunker’s has an excellent restaurant called the Angler’s Inn, and our dinner was wonderful. Did you ever notice that food tastes just a little bit better when somebody else is picking up the check?

Back at the bus, we returned a couple of telephone calls, and I wrote this blog post, edited the new Todays Hero Blog post, and by then it was time to start thinking about bed.     

Thought For The Day – If you have to choose between two evils, pick the one you’ve never tried before.

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