Yeah, that’s pretty much what I’m still doing, just plugging away on the new issue of the Gypsy Journal, just like I have been most of the week. I wish I had something new and exciting to tell you about, but you probably wouldn’t find the details of adding paper to my HP laser printer or running spell check on a draft of an article all that thrilling, so I’ll spare you the details.

Yesterday afternoon I got away from my desk long enough to stop in at Heartland Recreational Vehicles for a quick visit with Director of Sales Coley Brady to work out the details of a factory tour for folks attending our Eastern Gypsy Gathering rally. We have such a busy schedule of seminars during the rally that we couldn’t find the time for the tour until Friday morning, after the rally officially ends.

Anybody who wants to take the tour can meet in the main vendor room at 9:30 a.m., and a representative from the factory will lead a caravan the couple of miles from Elkhart Campground to the factory. Even if you’re not in the market for a new RV, it’s always interesting to see how the different companies build them. We learn something new with every factory tour we take. Elkhart Campground has plenty of room if you want to stay around for the tour, and maybe hang out with all of us who will still be here for the weekend.

Later in the afternoon, we went to Ryan’s Buffet, another favorite restaurant of ours, for dinner with Greg and Jan. The food was good, and the conversation with our friends was fun and interesting, as always.

I am going to take a break for a little while today, to go to the gun show in Shipshewana with Greg, and drool over all of the big boy toys we can’t afford and have no room for anyway.

While we’re doing that, Jan and Miss Terry are going to have some girl time and check out the big American Countryside Market. We were sad to learn that this big indoor bazaar, which features Amish foods and crafts, will be closing its doors in early September, and that its future is unknown. We always enjoyed browsing all of the vendor stalls and admiring everything on sale there.

I think parking everybody who will be coming in for our rally is going to be pretty easy, since a good number of the people who registered for the rally are already here, and more are coming in every day. Several people have stopped by to say hello, and while I haven’t have much time to visit, I’m looking forward to getting the paper done so we can get out and have some fun.

I’m starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel; by last night I had 25 of 36 pages of the new issue finished, and I’ll wrap it up by Monday, giving Miss Terry plenty of time to proof it, and to get it to our printer on Tuesday.

I’m not the only one working hard. Bad Nick posted a new Bad Nick Blog titled You’ve Got To Be Kidding Me! Check it out and leave a comment.

Thought For The Day – Good parenting is only gained by experience, and therefore only available to grandchildren.

Click Here To Register For Our Eastern Gypsy Gathering Rally!

I was hoping that the cold weather here in northern Indiana may have forced the gremlins who inhabit my computer to follow the rest of the RV snowbirds south, but alas, the little buggers are still hanging on.

We use a commercial mail service for sending the Gypsy Journal to most of our subscribers, who chose the Standard Mail rate. But we also send out separate mailings to subscribers who use the Escapees Mail Service, FMCA mail service, and some of the commercial mail forwarding services such as Alternative Resources, as well as for our subscribers in Canada, and those who choose to pay an extra fee for First Class postage.

Yesterday as I was trying to print the mailing labels for those subscribers, I suddenly starting getting an error message and they would not print. This has happened before, for no apparent reason, and usually after a lot of frustration, whatever the problem is seems to clear up and they finally print. But yesterday I spent hours fighting with the mailing lists, with no success at all.

Our friends Rick Schafer and Marcia Gantz stopped over to see our new motorhome and tell us all about their summer travels in Alaska. Between the two of them, they have forgotten more about computers and computer programs than I’ll ever hope to learn, and when I mentioned the problems I was having with the mailing list, they put their heads together and tried to come up with a solution. Rick downloaded new drivers for our HP laser printer, which we hoped would do the job.

As it turns out, the problem still persisted, and I tried to get the mailing labels to print out all evening. Finally, about midnight, the gremlins must have fallen asleep, because suddenly the problem disappeared and the labels printed just fine. I didn’t do anything different, so what gives?

I think we have figured out a problem a few subscribers to the digital edition of the Gypsy Journal had with the current issue. In each case, they could not open the new issue, and by a process of elimination, I discovered that all of their computers had recently done an automatic update to Adobe Reader version 9.

Miss Terry experienced it with her laptop, which did the automatic update after she had already opened the new issue on the older version of Reader. She deleted the update and reinstalled the earlier version 8 of Reader and once again could open the file with no problems.

We have also had subscribers who use Firefox as their web browser report the same problem, but when they use , it works. Did I mention that sometimes I hate computers?

Even with all of the computer problems, it was nice to see Rick and Marcia again, and to hear about their travels since we last crossed paths. Terry and I have not made the Alaska trip yet, but it’s very high on our bucket list.

Quite a few Gypsy Journal subscribers were readers of a great little tabloid called Two Lane Roads that a fellow named Loren Eyrich published a few years back. I was a fan of Loren’s work, and when he was diagnosed with cancer and had to stop traveling and publishing, we took over the balance of his unfulfilled subscriptions.

Several people have asked me from time to time how Loren is doing, and I’m happy to report that I got an e-mail from him yesterday. Loren has been cancer free for seven years now, and he told me that while he has some long term effected from the chemo and/or radiation, he’s well and happy to be alive. Loren posts occasional updates on his website at http://www.two-lane.com/, and I know he’d be happy to have you log in and pay him a visit. 

Thought For The Day – Don’t assume malice for what stupidity can explain.

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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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