It's Been Ten Days - Yikes!!!

We just realized it has been over a week since we posted anything, but this time it's not because the time has flown by.  Quite the opposite.  Time has been dragging its feet.  

I just washed my hair and can't
do a thing with it!  Do you think conditioner
would help?  

We are really ready to head home, but have already paid for the month in this spot.  No refunds for leaving early.   Rog sat down and calculated the weekly rate vs the monthly rate and figures we will hit the break even point on the 22nd if we had been paying by the week. So, we are leaving and heading home on the 22nd!  It's been uncomfortably warm (mid 90s) and Roger's sciatica is a pain - literally - so, for the most part, we haven't been able to get out and do any zoo trips or touristy stuff.   I'm too hot and he's too gimpy!  What a team! We also noted that the weather is going to cool off and be wet  in Sparks the first week of April when we were due home originally.  We didn't want to mess with the RV unpacking in the rain, so we are going to go home while it's still nice and warm there and get comfortable in our house before the unsettled weather happens.

We will be going from here to Nellis AFB in Las Vegas where we will overnight and then leave the RV in short term storage.  We'll drive home on the 23rd, getting in late (It's about an 8 hour drive.)   The rest of this week will be planning the packing of what we will haul home with us in the car and what stays in the RV.  Clothes - no problem as we have lots at home.  We do have to eat everything in the fridge and freezer, though.  That could be interesting.  

The reason for this is that we are due back down in the LA area the third week of May for our Stephanie's graduation from Cal State Long Beach.  We will pick up the RV in Las Vegas and spend a week at the Seal Beach Naval Warfare Center RV park.  It's about 10 miles from Long Beach and will give us and Steph's dad a place to stay.  We thought about coming back in the car and staying in a hotel.  Two problems with that:  1) expensive hotels, and 2) what do we do with Maggie?  This way we may be able to do a little LA sightseeing the week we are there - maybe.  

One day this week we did take our neighbors up on their offer to watch Maggie so we could go out galavanting for a day and not worry about leaving her inside for hours on end.  We did have a nice time.  We drove out to Coronado and found a nice place for lunch, then walked around the old neighborhood for a while looking at the small 1920s houses that cost millions.  After that we drove south along "The Strand" which is a spit of land linking Coronado to the mainland.  Lots of beaches but most of them owned by the Navy and not accessible by civilians.  Once we passed that area there was a state beach and it was packed with people and their RVs.  They were enjoying the unseasonably warm weather and the beach.   We made a couple of stops and did a little shopping and then headed back to Santee.  A nice day out.

The rest of the time we have been hanging out here and going out to the Dairy Queen when appropriate!   Roger sits outside listening to his Audible book while Maggie snoozes under the RV in the cool sand.  I've been staying in the air conditioned RV doing busy work.   

One of my activities included organizing the photos in iPhoto by year and then running an app to find duplicates.  That kinda worked.  Still some photos in the wrong year and still finding duplicates.  It's a work in progress.  This activity triggered another that has been quite fun.  I can't find any photos for 2009 (well, just a relative few) and I thought we went on a cross country trip that summer.  That segued into finding my old travel journals (before the web posted ones) and figuring out what we did that year.   Got to skimming over them and found them fascinating and fun to read.  What a kick to read about how much trouble we had with WIFI, the heat, the RV, and the price of gas -  a lot of the same issues we are still having ten years down the road.   I decided to print them all out and put them in a binder.  Then I ran out of printer ink.  But, I got most of the way through 2007 before I did.  The rest (8 more years) will have to wait until I get home.  I'm having so much fun reading the journal entries, which are in some serious need of editing.  They were written in the days before Roger edited my work as they weren't meant for publication.  I will be reading along and then just start laughing aloud because of some of our antics.  It's been enjoyable and I can't wait to get to the rest of them.  I've got to figure out how to print out the web-based ones.

Yes, we did take a long trip in 2009 and, no, I can't find any photos.  I'm hoping I moved them to a CD and they are at home,  Although, on one of our trips I did have a computer crash issue and after many hours on the phone with Apple Care was told I couldn't retrieve the photos I lost.  So,  maybe that's were they are - lost.  I sure hope not.   I also spent an afternoon building a spreadsheet timeline showing our trips so that in the future when Roger asks what year we went to Cooperstown, I can whip that puppy out and tell him!!  I know, crazy, huh?  

I've spent three afternoons working on Ancestry.  My friend Cathy has come up with a couple more names of ancestors that might be Revolutionary War "patriots", so I've been working on the links from one generation to another.  I'm finding glaring errors in my data. I have one person listed as a widow in 1860 census, but her husband didn't die until 1880.  Hmmm.  I decided that I had the wrong person with the same name in the 1860 census and deleted that information.  After that things looked a bit more correct.  It's been fun, though.  Yesterday I found a name in someone's private tree on Ancestry and sent them a request for information.  Today I got an email giving me permissions to go into their tree as a guest.  People can be so generous!  I love it!!

My iPhone had decided to drain the battery every day. There was also an app that was running constantly draining our data allowance - nearly 8 gigabytes (we only have 10 in our plan) in a couple of days,  I started reading about how to stop it and one of the things the article said was to reset all of the iPhones settings   I did.  I stopped getting emails.  After a few days of fiddling around I finally took it into an AT&T store where some young tech savvy person could help me.  He got the email working.  Today when I entered a vet appointment (just a check up and shots - she's fine) that I made, I discovered that the calendar wasn't syncing with the ones on the computer and iPad.  That was another afternoon of frustration and it still isn't working.  I never should have reset the dang thing!  Oh, well, lesson learned.  Think that kid will fix my calendar?  

The bike that Rog bought at a charity shop when we got here got thrown in the trash area this afternoon after a very close call with a Honda CRV.  He didn't fall but came awfully close and was a bit shaken.  That's enough bike riding.