Sometimes I don’t have anything special to write about, because a lot of the time, living in an RV is just like living in a house or apartment. We do chores, we goof off, we visit friends, and before we know it, the day is gone. Yesterday was a good example.

My friend Dave Damon had asked if I could pick him up in Clermont yesterday about 12:30, after an appointment he had, and I said no problem. He actually called about 11 and said he had finished up early, so we drove the 15 miles or so to pick up Dave and his pretty wife Jean, and drove them back to the Thousand Trails campground.

The last couple of nights, I have been unhooking our water hose overnight because it was getting so cold, so back at the motorhome I hooked it back up and filled our fresh water tank, and left it hooked up so Terry could do some laundry.

I had been craving some of Miss Terry’s delicious crepes, and while I was doing that, she made up a batch for brunch. Yummy! I’ll never be a slender man.

In the afternoon, I spent some time trying to familiarize myself with a Kodak Zi8 digital video camera I recently bought for an upcoming project I’ve been working on. The Zi8 is a pretty nifty little camera. It’s about the same size as my Droid Incredible phone, and the quality of the videos, even taken inside the motorhome with just ambient light, is pretty impressive.

I knew from the reviews I had read that the camera’s built-in microphone is basically worthless for outside use, so when I ordered it, I also ordered an Audio-Technica lavalier microphone. But even with the mike, the sound volume was very low. My buddy Greg White has the same camera, so I called him in Texas and picked his brain. Greg said he’d look at his camera and try to figure it out, but about then, I found the camera’s volume adjustment, and solved the problem myself. When all else fails, read the directions.

Greg is a computer whiz, so while I had him on the phone, we talked about the fact that my Dell desktop seems to be getting slower all the time, in spite of running all of the different cleanup programs and such. The computer is about three years old, and that seems to be about the lifespan for one for me, since I use it so much, and bounce them around all over the country. We decided that when we hook back up before our Arizona Gypsy Gathering rally, Greg will try to work his magic on it, and if that doesn’t do it, it’s time to go shopping.

After I got off the phone with Greg we made a run to WalMart, which was busy, but not as busy as we had expected, what with folks returning Christmas gifts and shopping for after-Christmas bargains.

It was a good day for telephone conversations, so once I got my fill of WalMart (which didn’t take long), I left Terry to the shopping and went outside and talked to my buddy Orv Hazelton, who is at the Escapees Jojoba Hills co-op in southern California. Orv said it was supposed to get very cold there overnight. That made me feel a little bit better. If I have to be cold, everybody should be cold!

When we got back to the motorhome, our neighbor, Charles Deutschmann, invited us over for a bowl of ice cream and some conversation during the evening. Never one to turn down free food, especially ice cream, I quickly said we’d be there.

We had a nice time visiting with Charles and his wife Nancy in their beautiful Monaco motorhome. It’s a mid-entry diesel pusher, which you don’t see many of, and the layout was very nice. The ice cream was delicious, the conversation flowed well, and before we knew it the time had flown by and it was after 10 p.m. We felt bad for taking up Charles and Nancy’s entire evening, so we took our leave and came home.

We watched TV for a while, and by the time I caught up on a few e-mails and wrote this blog post, it was getting late and time to think about bed. Where did the day go?

Thought For The Day – I’m not cynical. I’m just experienced.

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Several people have shown us the excellent cabinets, furniture, and RV accessories that Amish craftsman Carlyle Lehman creates at his company, Focal Wood Products LLC, in Nappanee, Indiana. So when we got our Winnebago Ultimate Advantage, we paid a visit to Carlyle and talked to him about building a set of custom desks/workstations for us.

Miss Terry and Ron Speidel put their heads together and came up with a design, we ran it by Carlyle, and he went to work. Yesterday we drove the motorhome out to his place and Carlyle installed everything. All I can say is wow!

Unlike Terry and Ron, I can’t visualize things. I need to see the finished product. I am just amazed what they can sketch out, do some measuring, and come up with! Carlyle built us each oak desks customized to our individual needs.

Mine, in the foreground, has a regular drawer on the left side, and below it a slide out tray where our HP laser printer sits. The center has a pull out keyboard drawer, and the right side has two file drawers.

Between the two units Carlyle installed a matching bookshelf, and then we come to Terry’s unit. Hers has two regular drawers on the left, along with a file drawer. The center has a pull out oak dining table, with leaf, that slides in for travel or space savings. Below the table, two double doors lead to a storage area with shelf.

On the right, there is a pull out tray for her laptop computer, and then a door opening into another storage cabinet with another shelf in it.

Even with the RVs living room slide in, we still have enough room to move about comfortably, and with the slideout extended, the units take up less space than the two recliners and original table that were in the motorhome when we got it. We are very pleased with the results of this upgrade, and after years of working at a tiny desk, I feel like I’m in a regular office now.

Back at Elkhart Campground, Ron and Brenda couldn’t wait to see how everything came together, and were suitable impressed. If you are thinking about upgrading or refurbishing your RV’s interior, I very highly recommend Carlyle and Focal Wood Products.

Unfortunately, now that I have my brand new workstation, it seems like everything I use has stopped working. When I got ready to write the blog, I fired up my Dell desktop computer and we smelled something like hot electrical wires and then the computer went dead. I just bought the thing in March, so I’ll be on the phone to Dell first thing this morning.

Okay, having your desktop workhorse computer die on you sucks, but that’s why I have a backup laptop computer, right? I got my Dell laptop out, fired it up, and it would not connect to the internet thought our Verizon air card and Cradlepoint router. It shows that I have an excellent signal from the router, but every time I tried to go online, it gave me a message saying I had limited or no connectivity. I knew the air card and router were working, because Terry could get online with her laptop.

I tried all of the limited things I knew how to do, and finally gave up and stuck the air card into my laptop and went online just fine using the Verizon VZAccess Manager software. I’m sure this is a simple problem my pal Jim Guld from Geeks on Tour can fix, but it really raises my frustration level when the gremlins get to messing around inside my computers. They are my tools, and I don’t like it when my tools don’t cooperate.

Thought For The Day – The older I get, the better I was.

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Well, depending on which internet weather report you want to believe, we are either going to have several more days of wet, cold weather, alternating between rain and snow showers; or we are going to see sunshine and temperatures in the low 60s this week. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see how it pans out.

I spent most of the weekend working on the new issue of the Gypsy Journal to get it ready to send to the printer this week, and I have to tell you, I’m very pleased with my new Dell computer. It is so much faster than my old HP desktop that it makes the job go much easier.

One of the big issues facing new fulltimers is what to do with all of their stuff. Some pitch it, some sell it, some give it to their kids, and some store it. Most of those who store it eventually get tired of paying those monthly fees and finally get rid of everything if they stay on the road very long.

Even then, we all keep finding things we no longer want or need, and wonder why we have hung onto them for so long. Yesterday while I was busy writing, Miss Terry went into a sorting and separating frenzy, and we ended up carrying boxes of books, clothing, leftover crocheting supplies, kitchenware and other stuff out to the van to take to one of the local charity thrift shops. I’m sure we lightened our load by a couple of hundred pounds at least.

And that was mostly just in the bedroom! We still have the rest of the bus, and all of the bays underneath to sort through. The great thing about a bus conversion is that you can carry a ton of stuff. The bad thing about a bus conversion is that you can carry a ton of stuff, and usually do!

I also took a break from my writing and sorted through a stack of travel brochures and assorted magazines I’ve been carrying around too long. For the life of me, I don’t know where a lot of the things we have come from. I found a little booklet from the post office about stamps dedicated to veterans and the military. I decided to keep that one to look through before I dispose of it. But old brochures for places we have visited and done stories on already went into the trash, along with more from places we won’t go to anytime in the near future.

I’ve carried around a lot of clipped out magazine articles on places we want to visit for a long time, always planning to scan them into one of my external hard drives, but I never seem to get around to it, so I think most of that will be headed for the dumpster in the very near future too. As it is, I have about three lifetimes worth of places on my Must See list already. It’s time to make some room in my file cabinets.

Thought For The Day – The trouble with doing nothing is that you never know when you are finished.

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I spent most of yesterday setting up my new computer, loading all of the programs I use into it, and transferring projects I had been working on from my laptop to the new desktop unit.

Even though the laptop and the desktop are both Dell computers using Windows XP, there were still enough things that were different that it took me a while to get things set up optimally for my use. It’s nice to have a full size computer to work on again.

While I was doing all of that, Miss Terry was sorting through cabinets and cubbyholes, doing some Spring cleaning and deciding what to keep and what to pitch. Even after ten years on the road fulltime, we still find things we’ve been carrying for years and have not used.

Sometime in the evening I started sniveling about being famished (and trust me, when it comes to food, I can out-snivel the best of them!). So Terry made a delicious dinner of fried chicken with a crispy coating that just melted my the mouth. It was so good that I ate until it hurt, and I still wanted more.

A couple of days ago I wrote in a blog post that Terry and I were recognized with the honor of bringing in more new members to the Escapees RV Club than anyone else. In our mail this week, we had a note from Escapees Executive Director Angie Carr telling us that two more members have joined on our referral. We’re pretty proud of that.

As I’ve written before, our travel plans are always set in jello. This summer we had planned to explore the Pacific Northwest, but now we’re looking at another plan. We want to try to put some money away to either upgrade our bus or buy a newer rig, and by aggressively working some rallies, hopefully we can do that.

We think we’ll go to Escapade in Sedalia, Missouri in May instead, and then work several RV rallies in the Midwest and East this summer.

Of course, as you well know, anything can change at a moment’s notice. But right now we’re looking at the FMCA Midwest Area Rally in Albert Lea, Minnesota in June, the FMCA International Convention in Bowling Green, Ohio in July, and the FMCA Northeast Area Rally in Essex Junction, Vermont in August. I’m also scheduled to teach at the new RVSEF RV Lifestyle, Education, & Safety Clinic in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania in mid-September. Then we’ll be in Celina, Ohio for our Eastern Gypsy Gathering rally September 28 to October 2. And who knows, we may find a rally or two along the way to pop into.

What was that I said about slowing down? I think that was just a campaign promise.

We have been talking about getting a vendor spot at The Rally, Affinity’s big event, which will be in Albuquerque in April. But between the cost of the booth and the fee for RV parking, we’re looking at an investment of over $1,000 for the rally. We’d have to sell an awful lot of subscriptions and books to make any money at that rate.

Thought For The Day - The indispensable first step to getting the things you want out of life is to decide what you want.

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I have decided not to attempt to sell our bus and find a used rig as a replacement. Instead, today we are placing our order for a new 2009 custom built 45 foot Prevost coach with triple slides and every option.

We have gone with a beautiful black and gold custom paint job, and the stainless steel bays shine so brightly you could charge your solar panels off them. I wanted to carry the color scheme into the interior of the new bus, but finally gave into Miss Terry’s better eye for design, and we have settled on an off-white leather for the seats and sofa.

No we didn’t hit the lottery, and my elusive rich uncle didn’t pass on and leave me his fortune. I’ve just decided to apply for my bailout money.

After all, I run a business that could use a big cash infusion, and I’m at least as incompetent as those jerks who run outfits like AIG. I figure I’ll give myself a couple of million bucks as a bonus, take a leave of absence, point that nose of that new Prevost down the highway, and ride off into the sunset.

I’ll miss all of you folks, but you have to understand that with my new elevated financial status, I really have a lot on my plate. So if we never cross paths again, please understand that it’s not that I don’t care for you. But let’s face it, the rich really are different.

Ouch! Okay, never mind, Miss Terry just jabbed me in the ribs with her elbow and told me to stop snoring. I’m awake and back to reality now.

It’s been hot here in Apache Junction, about 90 degrees the last few days. But it cools off nicely at night, which makes sleeping very comfortable.

Yesterday Miss Terry and her mom had a girls’ day out, doing some shopping and having lunch, while I stayed home and did some work on my new Honor A Veteran website, and updated our Gypsy Journal website. In the early evening, we had dinner with Terry’s parents, and Bess had cooked up a delicious meal of roast beef, mashed potatoes, gravy, and all the trimmings. Yummy!

My new Dell desktop computer also arrived, and I’ll be busy today getting it set up and getting all of my programs installed into it. It will be nice to pack my laptop away and get back to a Nick-sized computer. Yeah, I know, I can plug a regular keyboard into the laptop and hook it up to my big LCD screen. But just as my comfortable old recliner fits me, I need (or more likely want) a computer that fits me too.

I don’t watch the Fox News channel, because I don’t enjoy listening to endless political rhetoric from either side of the great debate. But I received a press release that former Arkansas governor and presidential candidate Mike Huckabee will be broadcasting live from the RV Hall of Fame in Elkhart, Indiana this Saturday at 8 p.m. Eastern time on Fox, in a segment called Save This Town.

Elkhart is one of our favorite haunts, and the folks who live there have taken one hit after another from the economy and the failing RV industry. It’s not just the laid off RV workers who are hurting. Everyone from restaurant workers to small business owners are suffering, and we feel sorry for our friends in Elkhart. Hopefully things will turn around for them soon.

Thought For The Day - In some attempts, it is glorious even to fail.

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