Tag Archives: Ann Arbor (MI)

2015/10/20 (T) Pop-X Pickle

It’s a good thing there are still five weeks until we depart for Florida; there are a lot of unfinished items that need to be taken care of on the bus and around the house/property before we go.

When Phil is here my attention tends to be on what he is doing.  He really knows his stuff, and is an excellent contractor to work with, but since he is not working from drawn plans there are inevitably questions and discussions about just exactly what it is I want and whether that is the best idea or even doable.

Phil had ordered a load of sandy soil for delivery first thing this morning and the “train” (double trailer) showed up not long after he did.  The sandy soil he wanted was not available so he got clean sand instead.  The train driver of the backed it over our third culvert and into the part of our yard were Phil wanted the material dumped.  That took a lot of skill and was impressive to watch.  I took a few photographs but video was really required to capture what was happening.  The Sony SLT-a99v does video in several different modes but I am just beginning to learn how to use it as a still camera and did not want to mess around with shooting video.  Besides, I am not a videographer; it’s a completely different way of thinking than being a still photographer.

Phil digs the trench for the electrical conduit from the SW corner of the garage to the far side of the driveway extension where he also dug a hole for the post that will support the RV outlet box.

Phil digs the trench for the electrical conduit from the SW corner of the garage to the far side of the driveway extension where he also dug a hole for the post that will support the RV outlet box.

With the material on site Phil was at the point where he needed to dig the trench for the RV electrical feed.  That meant I had to quickly make some final decisions.  I had an 8 foot 4″x4″ treated post and the PVC conduit pieces I needed to go from the post under the driveway to the other side but not enough to go all the way to the garage.  If I only put conduit under the driveway I could cap it, let Phil bury it, and then dig it up later and finish trenching from there to the garage.  I would not do that by hand, however, so it would mean having Phil come back next year just to dig this little trench.  Although I could have him dig the foundation hole for the ham radio tower at the same time that still did not make any sense to me.  Among other considerations I would have to fill the trench in by hand after I ran the cable.

Another option was to still use conduit just under the driveway but go ahead and run direct burial cable like we did two years ago for the pull-through driveway in front of the house.  I would need three (120VAC) or four (240/120VAC) large wires (or equivalent service entrance cable, each at least 80 feet long to get from the outlet box location in the post to the riser pipe on the garage and through the wall into a circuit breaker box.  Not only would I have to get the wire, which would be expensive, I did not have the outdoor outlet box or other parts I needed, so it would take me quite a while to go buy everything.  I also did not know exactly where/how I would feed the circuit.  (I had some ideas about that but they depended on just what the electricians do tomorrow.)

The most expeditious, and least expensive, option was to get more conduit and additional fittings and run the conduit all the way from the post to the southwest corner of the garage.  I left at 9:30 AM for Lowe’s as Phil started digging the trench and the hole for the post.

At Lowe’s I picked up five more 10′ pieces of 2″ PVC conduit, a 45 degree elbow, another 90 degree elbow, a right angle entry box, and a bag of 2″ conduit clamps.  By the time I got back to the house Phil had the post set in place and most of the trench dug.  I got all of the conduit pieces laid out on the ground and got the PVC cement, a hack saw, and the rope and weight.

Since Phil could not do anything else on the driveway until the conduit was installed he helped me install it (or vice-versa).  We joined 10′ sections to both ends of one of the 90 degree elbows and then dropped the weighted rope through it.  We then set the elbow and one of the straight sections in the trench with the elbow at the base of the post and the other straight section going straight up the post where I secured it with two clamps.  We proceeded to drop the weighted rope through additional straight sections of conduit, applied PVC cement to the ends, and put them together.  The conduit had to be inserted about 3″ into the mating piece and twisted as it went in.  I was glad Phil was there to help with this as I did not have the grip strength to do it by myself.  (I don’t have a lot of physical limitations but the arthritis in the base of my thumbs makes itself known in specific situations.)

When we got near the southwest corner of the garage we measured and cut a section of straight pipe to get us to a turn in the trench.  Because of a decorative grass plant the trench could not go directly to the desired location on the west side of the garage and had to go between the grass plant and a nearby small evergreen bush and then turned towards the garage.  We installed a 45 degree elbow to get around the corner and it ended up in the center of the trench.  When I said Phil knew what he was doing I meant it.  We again measured carefully and cut a short section of straight pipe to get us to a 90 degree elbow that would turn up and bring the conduit out of the trench and up the side of the garage.  I measured and cut the vertical riser section and we cemented it into the elbow.  We now had a complete run with conduit coming out of the trench vertically on both ends.

Phil back fills the trench for the electrical conduit from the corner of the garage to the RV electrical post.

Phil back fills the trench for the electrical conduit from the corner of the garage to the RV electrical post.

While Phil used his excavator to scoop and push dirt back into the trench and tamp it down I closed off both ends of the conduit.  At the garage end I removed the gasketed cover from the entry box, cut a short piece of 2″ conduit, and put it in the fitting hole on the back side.  Next I brought the weighted rope up through the bottom fitting hole of the box and used Gorilla tape to secure it inside the short back pipe.  I put a cap on the other end of the short back pipe and then put the entry box on top of the riser sideway.   I coiled up the extra rope, taped it inside the box, and put the gasketed cover back on.   I did not cement any of these connections.  When permanently installed the gasketed cover will point away from the wall and the hole in the back will have a longer piece of paper 2″ conduit cemented in and going through a hole into the wall of the garage.

At the post I used a Rigid brand pipe cutter, designed specifically for cutting large plastic pipe and conduit, to cut off the vertical riser at a convenient height above the top of the post.  I threaded the rope through a 3/8″ hole in the center of a 4″ disc of 3/4″ plywood and tied a big knot in it.  I modified the 2″ cap by drilling three adjacent holes lengthwise from the bottom up and cutting out material with a hacksaw to make a slot.  With the rope hanging over the edge of the conduit I lined up the slot in the cap with the rope and put the cap over the end of the conduit.

Since I decided to not have Phil build the area leading up to the planned barn location I wanted to pull all of the unneeded yellow plastic stakes out of the yard and put them away.  Re-staking the layout, however, is a time-consuming task so I put 10″ metal (iron) spikes at the locations of the front corners of the barn and the center point for the curved transition into the driveway.  I drove them flush with the soil so Keith would not hit them with his mower but we can find them later with a metal detector.

With the conduit installed and the trench filled and tamped, Phil filled started building the “curbs” for the driveway.  He had excavated parts of the driveway path and filled in other areas to create a base for the construction fabric and road gravel that was eight inches below the finish grade.  The construction fabric is 12’6″ wide and Phil likes to wrap it up on the sides about 8″ so when he staked out the driveway to be 11′ 2″ wide.  Phil used the sand to build up the areas along both sides of the driveway so that it looked like he had cut the driveway out, but that is not, in fact, what he had done.

My main bus project today was cleaning up the kitchen and living room, which mostly involved moving tools back to the garage.  It is a confined workspace and tends to get cluttered over time as we fetch tools for this and that.  I also wanted to be able to see the desk and its Corian countertop.

Two of the three sets of cushions in place on the new built-in custom walnut sofa/storage base.

Two of the three sets of cushions in place on the new built-in custom walnut sofa/storage base.

I called Butch in Quartzsite, AZ regarding the distributor tester.  He suggested that I send him an e-mail requesting Bill’s e-mail address and he would send it in his reply.  We then discussed the refrigerator and he suggested that I set the freezer to a colder setting, leave the fresh compartment setting as is, and monitor it for a while to see if it changes.  I did that and reset the min/max memory for both compartments.

Phil is not done with the French drain yet and spent part of the afternoon working on that instead of the driveway.  He made lots of trips back and forth with the front loader to take the topsoil he had removed to create the driveway, spread it out along on top of the pea gravel that fills the drain trench, and grade it off to blend with the undisturbed yard along either side of the drain.  Before he is all done with these two separate, but inter-related projects, he will have to bring in several truckloads of topsoil.  It will be used to fill low spots, especially at the west end of the property, and to cover everything that has been disturbed.  All of the topsoil will be finish graded to blend into the existing contours of the property and then seeded with grass seed.

The view from the living room looking towards the hallway.  The new built-in custom walnut desk has its Corian countertop in place and the new refrigerator is in place next to the built-in custom pull-out pantry.

The view from the living room looking towards the hallway. The new built-in custom walnut desk has its Corian countertop in place and the new refrigerator is in place next to the built-in custom pull-out pantry.

I did not want to get involved in any complex or time-consuming projects so I hung out on the west half of our yard where Phil was working and took lots of pictures with the new camera.  Actually, I had been doing that all day trying to document the work as it progressed.  When I wasn’t taking photos I gathered up broken branches and larger deadfall and carried or dragged it to the brush pile on the west side of the line of large fir trees that separate the east and west halves of our five acres.

Linda called around 3:30 and asked me to see if her wallet was on her desk.  She thought she had it with her but could not find it.  She finally located it in her car where it had been since falling out of her case this morning.  She was on her way home by 3:50 PM.

I had a final chat with Phil, who won’t be back until Saturday, and then closed up the bus and the garage.  We were headed to Ann Arbor this evening and I needed to get cleaned up and put on nicer, more appropriate clothes for our evening out.  I used to wear Oxford shirts and nicer pants every day for work, and sometimes a sport coat and tie or even a suit.  These days it’s mostly polo shirts and blue jeans or sometimes REI ripstop nylon convertible cargo pants.  And this summer it has mostly been my work jeans and work shirts.

We left around 5:15 PM and were parked in Ann Arbor before 6 PM.  We agreed to meet Kate at the Lab Cafe which was just around the corner from the Thompson Street parking garage.  (This garage is behind the former Border’s book store #1 which also housed the company’s corporate headquarters.  Our daughter started with Border’s as a cashier at this store and within four years was a regional manager for their PaperChase product line before the company imploded and went bankrupt.)

Kate was sending Linda text message updates on her travel status and ETA so we ordered a couple of decaf coffees to go.  At $3.75 each they were pricier than we are used to paying for coffee but they were “hand-crafted” and the coffee was very good.  It took the barista at least 10 minutes to make our cups, grinding the beans just before brewing and then slowly pouring hot water through individual filter holders after pre-wetting the filters.  In the time it took to make our coffee I would have been on my second cup at Panera.

Linda (front) and Kate (behind) take in the interior of one of the Pop-X art exhibit sheds.

Linda (front) and Kate (behind) take in the interior of one of the Pop-X art exhibit sheds.

The music was too loud and really awful, a bad combination in our opinion, so we sat outside in spite of the occasional attempt to rain.  When Kate showed up we walked the short distance to Liberty Park to see the Pop-X Art Exhibit.  Organized by the Ann Arbor Art Center, all of the art was displayed in “sheds” designed by an architect, one artist per shed.  The sheds were approximately 10 feet square with steep pitched roofs.  The roofs, and the two sides they pitched down to, were covered in clear wavy plastic panels to let in a lot of natural light.  The back end was solid and the front had a pair of sliding “barn style” doors hung from tracks.  There was a solid floor that was elevated relative to ground level and provision for electrical power.  They were designed to be sold as potting sheds after the exhibit was removed at the end of the week.  Although the light was fading I was still able to get some decent shots with the new Sony a99v DSLT camera.  It has much greater light sensitivity than the Sony alpha 100 it is replacing as my primary camera and this was my first opportunity to take advantage of that since getting it.

Our main reason for coming to Ann Arbor was to have dinner with Kate but Pop-X was a nice bonus.  Ann Arbor has a LOT of dining options; hundreds I would guess just in the very walkable downtown area.  We decided to try the Grizzly Peak Brewing Company after Linda confirmed that they had some things on the menu we could eat.  It was a bit of a walk but the rain held off and it was an otherwise pleasant evening.

Linda had a dark Porter with definite chocolate tones and I had a hard cider with distinct cinnamon/vanilla tones.  It was also supposed to have roasted pecan notes but I did not detect that.  Kate had a red beer that was not hoppy and thought I might have liked it.  I had a sip of Linda’s Porter and it was very agreeable.  We both had small couscous and greens dinner salads, which were very nice, and both had wild mushroom burgers, which were excellent.  Linda said her chips were also very good and my French fries were tasty and generously portioned.  Kate had a burger and all of our meals came with pickles.  Kate does not care for pickles, which I knew, and does not care for vinegar in general, which I did not know, so Linda and I split her pickle rather than have it go to waste.  The waiter was very attentive and a good sport when I asked for a gallon of ketchup for my fries.  He brought two very full bottles for the table and a bottle of Frank’s hot sauce.  We tipped him accordingly.

At 9:30 PM we started a slow stroll back to the parking garage and chatted a while longer by our cars, which coincidentally were parked very close together.  It was 10:40 PM by the time we got home.  I fed the cats and we went straight to bed.  I was up later than I wanted to be trying to outline this post but I had not had much opportunity to work on it throughout the day.

 

2014/07/21 (M) Matthaei Botanical Gardens

Ron and Mary are leaving tomorrow morning so we did our Ann Arbor trip today.  Before leaving we closed up the house and turned on the air-conditioning, the first time we have used it this year, as the forecast was for a warm, humid day and we wanted it to be comfortable when we got back.  It was also a good excuse to run the system and make sure it really works.

Mattheai Botanical Gardens (Univ. of Mich), Ann Arbor, MI

Matthaei Botanical Gardens (Univ. of Mich), Ann Arbor, MI

We chose the Mattheai Botanical Gardens over the Arboretum primarily based on ease of parking.  The “Arb” is located near the University of Michigan campus in the center of Ann Arbor where parking can be very difficult.  The Gardens are on the east edge of town, somewhat in the country with very little traffic on the access roads, and has parking lots with plenty of spaces.  We still had to pay to park—there’s no such thing as free parking for any facility connected to U of M—but the rates are reasonable and admission to the Gardens is free.

 

Gardens and Conservatory at Matthaei Botanical Gardens, Ann Arbor, MI

Gardens and Conservatory at Matthaei Botanical Gardens, Ann Arbor, MI

The botanical gardens were very nice with an emphasis on native Michigan plants which we appreciated.  After walking the gardens and conservatory we hiked one of the shorter trails along the stream.  I took quite a few pictures but it was a sunny, cloudless day, so I don’t know if any of them will be any good.  The plants were brilliant to see, but this was certainly not ideal light conditions for plant photography.  We were there for two hours, long enough for a first visit on a warm day, and left in time to have lunch before visiting our son and his family in town.

 

Mattaei Botanical Gardens

Matthaei Botanical Gardens

We went to Elevation Burger on Washtenaw Avenue west of US-23 for lunch.  EB is an organic burger joint with a couple of veggie burger options, one of which was vegan, and an interesting choice of toppings.  They also have fries and ice cream offerings.  Our vegan burgers and fries were very good.

We arrived at Brendan and Shawna’s around 3 PM to find Madeline already awake from her afternoon nap and visiting with Jake and China.  (Shawna’s mom, Carol, is married to Cliff.  Jake and China are Cliff’s sister’s grand-children.)  Our daughter, Meghan, drove in from Dexter to join the family gathering.  Shawna took Jake and China to see downtown Ann Arbor while the rest of us walked to Burns Park.  Madeline played for about an hour, with lots of help from Mary and Meghan, before we all headed back to the house.  Shawna returned and we visited some more until Madeline indicated she was hungry.  We left around 5:30 PM as Madeline was beginning her dinner.

 

Matthaei Botanical Gardens

Matthaei Botanical Gardens

 

Madeline shows her dad where the airplane is (Burns Park, Ann Arbor)

Madeline shows her dad where the airplane is (Burns Park, Ann Arbor)

We were going to take Ron and Mary to downtown Brighton for a stroll on the boardwalk that surrounds the Mill Pond, but we were all tired so went directly home instead.  We had a lovely dinner at home of chickpea salad, wild rice salad, sliced nectarines, and whole grain bread with vegan “butter” spread.  It was an easy meal, as Linda had prepared the salads ahead of time, and the lighter, cooler dishes hit the spot on one of the warmest days we have had this summer (upper 80’s with humidity).  After dinner we played a card game called “Up the River and down the River.”  I’m not much for games, but the other three really like them so I was a good sport and played.   I lost, but I did not care.

 

 

L-2-R: Ron, Mary, Meghan, Linda (behind), Brendan, and Madeline (in stroller).

L-2-R: Ron, Mary, Meghan, Linda (behind), Brendan, and Madeline (in stroller).

2014/07/05 (S) Re-Search

Contractors who do outside work, such as excavators, builders, and landscapers are at the mercy of the weather, so they work when they can, and when they can work, they often put in long hours.  For those of us who made our living doing “white collar” work for companies with paid holidays, the 4th of July often meant a 3- or 4-day weekend.  For other kinds of workers, the 4th of July is a day off; one day, and for yet others (think retail) it is just another workday.  It doesn’t matter that it fell on a Friday this year.  The landscapers couldn’t work on Thursday because of the overnight rain.  No work means no pay.  Saturday July 5th, however, was forecast to be great weather for working outside, and with sunny skies and no rain since Thursday, our job site had dried out sufficiently to allow people and machines to work.  Alas, the holiday spirit was with them and they did not show up first thing this morning like I thought they might.

Since grand-daughter Madeline spent her second night in a row with us last night she was still here this morning.  Consequently we did not go to our ham radio club breakfast in South Lyon like we usually do on Saturday morning.  Madeline woke up hungry and Grandma Linda had her bottle warmed up and ready to go.  She had also prepped all of the ingredients for her yummy vegan blueberry pancakes.  Madeline had a little banana and some fresh blueberries while grandma cooked the pancakes and I made the coffee.  We all enjoyed our breakfast.

Madeline Eloise sitting on our fake rock in our front yard (it's the cover for our well).

Madeline Eloise sitting on our fake rock in our front yard (it’s the cover for our well).

After breakfast we played and read and went outside to walk around in the driveway.  Our son called and we figured out who was going to travel where and when to get Madeline back home.  He was working on a project to rebuild their front porch/steps and was involved in painting wood pieces prior to assembling them, so we agreed to drive Madeline to their house in Ann Arbor in time for a light lunch before her usual nap time.  That also allowed us to stop at the Whole Foods market near their house on our way out of town.  A Whole Foods market is the only thing we do not have in the Brighton/Howell/Hartland area that we truly miss.  We would shop there several times a week if we had one nearby.

I managed to sneak away to the basement occasionally to do a load of laundry and install 126 updates on our Linux computer.  The updates involved file downloads totaling just over of 310+ MB so I started the process and let it run.  We get an effective download speed from our AT&T High Speed Internet (HSI) DSL connection of just over 1 Mb/sec or 64 Mb/min.  That is roughly 8 MB/min.  At that speed, 320 MB takes about 40 minutes to transfer, assuming AT&T doesn’t detect the amount of data being transferred and “throttle” (slow down) the speed.  Cell phone companies are known to do this but it is less clear whether AT&T does that sort of thing with their landline services.

We got back to the house at 2:15 PM.  Linda developed a headache while we were out, so she took some meds, put the groceries away, and laid down to rest.  There was no sign of the landscapers and no phone call, so there was no chance at that point that they would show up today.  That was OK with us; it is a holiday weekend and it was their idea to come work today, not ours; I just said it was OK if that’s what they wanted to do.  Apparently they didn’t.  The one thing I was looking forward to was having Steve show me how to operate the Kobelco sk35sr-3 excavator and then practicing operating it by removing concrete blocks, bricks, downed trees, and other detritus from the woods by the road southwest of our house.  Just behind these woods is where they are piling all of the construction debris anyway, so I would be able to position the excavator to allow me to grab most of the trash out of the woods and then swing it over and deposit it on the pile.  Maybe Monday?

Yesterday I posted a question to the WordPress.org support forum for the Jetpack plug-in and I got a reply a couple of hours later that directly answered my question.  I wanted to install/activate the Jetpack on more than one self-hosted website and needed to know if I could use a single WordPress.com account or if I needed a separate account for each site?  I was glad to find out that I only needed the one account that I already have.  The Jetpack plug-in is massive overkill for what I need to accomplish immediately, but some of the reviews suggested that it is so comprehensive it may be the last plug-in I ever have to install.  That is unlikely for a number of reasons, and a bit contrary to the open source nature of WordPress and the international community of developers that support it, but the plug-in does have 33 different “components.”  For most of those features there are other plug-ins available–in some cases lots of them—but this provides everything in a neat package with its own special place on the admin panel menu.

Linda was feeling better after a long, much-needed nap but did not feel like cooking.  She picked up ingredients at Whole Foods today to make mock beef stroganoff but decided to make it tomorrow.  Our go-to for no-prep meals are the various frozen products from Amy’s.  We try to always have a few in the freezer for occasions when Linda does not have the time or interest to prepare a meal from scratch.  Tonight we had the lasagna.  Linda wanted some fresh greens with dinner but did not feel like making a salad so she used a bed of mixed greens as a base for the lasagna.  If that sounds a bit strange, all I can say is that it was very nice for both taste and texture.

I spent more time this evening investigating the WordPress Jetpack plug-in, the result of which was that I deferred installing and activating it.  The attraction of this plug-in is that the Carousel feature works with the existing WP Gallery shortcode(s).  That means it works retroactively with every page and post containing a WP Gallery and that I would continue to create galleries they way I always have using the native WP Gallery functionality.  That sounds like exactly what I need, except that on further investigation I started seeing comments about banner ads, and a feature that allows website/blog visitors to comment on individual images with no easy way to disable it.  The workaround involves custom CSS code.  Ugh.

I kept looking and found a plug-in where the “author” had simply “forked” (extracted) the code for the Carousel function from the Jetpack plug-in and offered it as a separate plug-in.  Ignoring whether that was even ethical, some of the reviews suggested that it did not work correctly and that support issues were not being resolved.  I need something more reliable and better supported so I kept looking and found a very extensive plug-in that was free and had been downloaded over 1,000,000 times!  Now that has to be a great plug-in, right?  Maybe; maybe not.  The reviews were very mixed and many seemed to complain about the constant “tinkering” the author does with the plug-in, issuing updates every 3 – 4 days.

If I was willing to spend money for a plug-in my options would be greatly expanded, but I have looked at those as well and they all have mixed reviews.  The leading contender is the NextGEN Gallery plug-in, but the biggest downside with all of these gallery plug-ins is that they do not work with the native WP Gallery shortcodes which, in turn, would require me to rebuild existing galleries from within the plug-in. The ones that I find the most annoying are the ones with a free version that turns out to just be a teaser; the features I need are always in the “pro” or “premium” version.  An episode of Doc Martin gave me a needed and entertaining break from my research, which is appropriate in this situation as I have searched for a good image display plug-in before and now I am searching for one again.

 

2914/06/20 (F) Couch Potatoes

Over the last few months I managed to connect our friends and fellow Prevost H3 owners, Chuck and Barbara Spera, with our friends and fellow Prevost XL owners, Pat and Vickie Lintner.  Chuck was looking for a sofa to replace the one in their motorcoach and Pat and Vickie had one they were looking to sell.  Today was the day for consummating the deal, which necessitated a road trip from the Detroit, Michigan area to the Elkhart, Indiana area to pick up the couch, pay for it, and bring it back to Chuck’s shop.

Chuck and I drove down in his Ford Excursion.  I went along to keep him company, for the opportunity to catch up on a lot of conversation, and to help load and unload the couch.  We arrived in Elkhart just after noon and grabbed a quick bite to eat at Burger King.  I had French Fries, thus today was about couches and potatoes.

While I was away on the road trip, Linda went to Ann Arbor to visit our 18 month old grand-daughter and her parents (our son and daughter-in-law).  By dinner time we were both tired so we had Amy’s Pad Thai and turned in to watch two episodes of Doc Martin.  We did not get to watch any episodes while we were at the rally in Goshen, Indiana so we are catching up.

 

2014/04/29 (W) Normality?

When we got home on Monday, the bus and I had been away from the house for 128 days (130 days including the day we left and the day we returned) spanning portions of five months.  We moved into our new (to us) house on April 12th, 2013.  From May 1st of last year through the end of April 2014 we were in our motorcoach 214 of those 365 days ( +/- a couple of days).  Not bad for our first year as extended-time RVers and our first snowbird season.

Although we are still relative newbies at extended-time RVing this past year allowed us to develop a reasonable understanding of how to make it work for us.  But now we are home and that entails a different pace and rhythm to which we have had to quickly adjust.  First and foremost was letting folks know we were back and arranging visits with family and friends.  After that we have to deal with dentist appointments, veterinary appointments, doctor appointments, car appointments, computer upgrades, WordPress websites, photo editing software, ham radio club breakfasts and meetings, a communications tower, ham radio antennas, an OTA TV antenna, a cell phone repeater system, landscaping projects, fruit trees (pruning), a pole barn, conversion of the house to natural gas, and a list of bus projects (of course).  All by December 1st.  Right.

Gus the cat.  Look closely; he has the longest whiskers I have ever seen on a cat.

Gus the cat. He has the longest whiskers I have ever seen on a cat.

Today was dental appointments followed by a detour to Ann Arbor to visit with our younger grand-daughter and her parents.  I’ve put some photos from that visit in a separate gallery post.  We stopped at the Whole Foods market and picked up something for lunch as well as ingredients Linda needed for making granola.  Madeline was napping when we arrived, so we got to visit with Brendan for a little while, but once she woke up she was ready to go.  It was 70 degrees F outside so we put her in the stroller and took her to the park that is the centerpiece of their neighborhood.  She spent a lot of time walking and running in the grass, up and down concrete ramps, but especially climbing the stairs for the slides and then sliding down.  Not long after we got back to the house Shawna got home from work and Madeline got a lot of mommy interaction.  By that point it was rush hour and we decided to stay for dinner.

No one was prepared to cook and rather than get carryout or delivery we decided to go to The Lunch Room, a relatively new vegan restaurant in Ann Arbor’s Kerrytown district.  Linda had a vegan mac & cheese and I had a mock Rueben made with Tempeh and a cup of vegan tomato bisque soup.  Everything was very good, including the vegan desserts: a grasshopper brownie for Linda and a no-flour chocolate cupcake with a Bourbon / Caramel / Pastry Cream frosting for me.  All of the food was very good and reasonably priced, which is not always the case in Ann Arbor.  By the time we got home and I took a phone call, there wasn’t much of the evening left.

So the new normal for us is not one or the other, it’s both/and; figuring out how to balance two very different ways of living and, in particular, how to flow back and forth between them as easily, smoothly, and quickly as possible.  But that may be just the sort of challenge our brains need to remain agile as we begin our forth score of years.

 

2013_10_23 (W) Williamston MI Bus Garage

Today started out complicated but settled in as it progressed.  Linda had to babysit today as we were still out of town on Monday and our daughter took Monday instead.  Normally Linda would just get up and drive to Ann Arbor, but our son borrowed her car just before we left for Tennessee and still had it.  She could have taken my car had I not needed it.  But I did, so I got up early and drove her to Ann Arbor.  But first I started a load of laundry.  (Even retired people sometimes have to multitask in order to get everything done that needs doing.)

An early morning trip is always an excuse to stop at Panera, especially as we so rarely do this anymore.  Bagels and coffee in hand we were back on the road.  I’m not driving all the way to Ann Arbor and not see my grand-daughter, so stayed for a while and watched her play.  She is a very active 10-month old and was either looking at her book collection or crawling around the living/dining rooms the whole time.

I eventually headed back to the house, put the laundry in the dryer, cleaned the cats’ litter tray (but forgot to feed them), gathered up the various things I needed to take with me, loaded them in the car, and reconnected it go the bus.  The laundry wasn’t dry yet, so I spent some time repositioning the stakes that we placed last evening to mark the outline of the bus barn and driveway.  It took longer than I expected, but that’s almost always the case, so I am used to it, and OK with it.  I hung up the dried clothes and prepared to drive the bus some 40+ miles WNW to Williamston, Michigan.

The reason for the trip to Williamston was that our mobile mechanic, Joe Cannarozzi, was already there working on another customer’s coach.  The customer had a 2-bay bus garage with heat; no small thing given that overnight lows were forecast to hit freezing or below.  Joe had all of his tools unpacked there, and was staying in the customer’s coach, so it was a much better place for him (and me) to work than our driveway.

Joe was wrapping up a conversation with John, one of the seven (7) partners in the partnership that owns the coach, so I unhooked the car while they talked.  I got to meet John and see the coach, a Prevost XL-45 LeMIrage “entertainer” conversion.  It was a nice conversion and they have had Joe do a fair amount of work on it.  John had never seen a motorhome bus conversion, so I gave him a brief tour of ours.  I also showed him the generator bay as they are also facing a soundproofing redo.  As a token of appreciation for letting Joe work on our bus in their garage, I gave John copies of the February and May 2013 issues of Bus Conversions Magazine and the summer issue of The Gypsy Journal.

Joe and John concluded their business and I 3-point turned the bus and pulled it into the left bay of the garage.  I then pulled my car into the other bay.  We unloaded tools and parts, raised the bus high enough to get the stands under it, and set it down on them.  Joe needed food so we went to get lunch at a nearby Italian restaurant.  Joe had a full meal while I had a salad of dark greens (mostly spinach) with sun-dried tomatoes and olives and a homemade Italian dressing.  It was quite good.

Linda called to let me know that two boxes had arrived from Prevost as promised.  I asked her to drive them out to where we were, which she did.  Joe then put me to work removing the “beauty rings” and lug nut bling from the wheels, after which he started removing the outside dual tires/wheels and the tag axle tires/wheels so he could install the Centramatic dynamic wheel balances.

While Joe muscled the tires around I dug out my metric hex wrench set and tightened the outside rear view mirrors.  (Prevost Car, Inc. is located in Saint Claire, Quebec, Canada and their coaches are an interesting mix of U.S. and metric parts.)  The passenger-side mirror, in particular, had been just loose enough for a long time that it vibrated while driving (slightly irritating) and wouldn’t hold its position (very irritating), dropping down beyond the limits of its remote adjustability to the point where I couldn’t use it to see down that side of the coach (dangerous).  Like many “little things”, however, I kept forgetting to fix it once we got home as we are very busy immediately after returning from a trip.

I opened the garage door to call Linda and check on her progress only to discover that it was raining lightly and watched the rain turn to snow right before my eyes.  When I arrived there was a little bit of graupel falling.  Welcome to Michigan in October.

Linda arrived with the parts, visited for a few minutes, and headed back to work on thank you cards for our open house guests.  Joe removed the driver-side outside drive tire, examined the oil leak evidence, and said he thought I only had a gasket leak.  He pulled the axle flange and we discovered that it didn’t have an axle flange gasket.  The last time someone worked on it (before we owned it) they used “form-a-seal”, a thick liquid that you squirt out of a tube like caulk or toothpaste, and it was obvious that there were areas where no effective seal existed.  Joe said that this is a “common” practice, but his preference was to use the appropriate gasket, several of which I now have in stock.

We cleaned off the remnants of the old form-a-seal and then Joe reassembled the hub, installed the wheel balancer, and reinstalled the outer dual tire.  I cleaned the oil from the inside of the beauty ring, as we did not want the old oil residue making us think we still had a leak, and then Joe reinstalled that as well.  We were short one washer, it was late, and Joe was tired, so we called it a day.  I packed up and left, taking one of the washers with me so I could buy more of the correct size.

I stopped at the Home Depot in Brighton, found the split-ring lock washers I needed, and finally got home around 8:30 PM.  Linda had picked up an Amy’s Roasted Vegetable pizza.  It is absolutely the best vegan pizza I have ever had.  It was real treat and a good end to a good day.

2013_10_22 (T) A Good Day’s Drive

Today was the final leg of our 12-day trip to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and back by way of Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley and the mountains of West Virginia.  We had 276 miles to travel and figured it would take us 5.5 hours as our planned route was mostly US highways with some Interstate highway legs and a little bit of surface roads.  We planned to leave around 10 AM and arrive home between 3:30 and 4:00 PM.  We actually left at 11:19 AM and arrived home at 5:00 PM.  Although we were approaching Ann Arbor from the south around 4:15 PM and encountered increasingly heavy traffic, we slowed down to the posted truck speed of 60 MPH and sailed right around.

The drive from Chillicothe, OH to Columbus, OH on US-23 was very pleasant.  The highway was 4-lane divided most of the way, and often limited access.  The terrain was still gently rolling and was very pretty with fall colors under nice sunlight.  Lunch hour traffic around the outskirts of Columbus on I-270 was moderate but not congested, even in the construction zones.  We exited I-270 at the northwest corner of the Columbus area onto US-33 headed northwest.  Again, an excellent multi-lane divided US highway that rolls through some lovely countryside and passes just next to the highest point in Ohio.

We stayed on US-33 until it intersected I-75N at Wapakoneta, OH.  From there it was 90 miles to Toledo, OH but we exited before reaching Toledo, heading west on I-475/US-23 which turned north towards Sylvania, effectively bypassing Toledo.  Crossing the border into Michigan it always feels like we are almost home, but we are not.  The shortest distance to a border from our house is about 60 miles, which gets us to the bridge or tunnel from Detroit to Windsor, Canada.  But the shortest route to a bordering state is US-23 to Ohio which is straight north/south shot to our community.  Even so, it was 70 miles and another 80 minutes of driving, or about 25% of our trip today.

While it is always nice to return home, it is often the worst part of the trip in terms of roads.  Many of Michigan’s roads are not in the best shape, and US-23 from Ohio to Ann Arbor is one of those roads.  It’s not only annoying (our tax dollars not at work), it’s embarrassing.

We pulled into the driveway around 5:00 PM, plugged in the electrical shoreline and unloaded much of our stuff.  I got a load of laundry started while Linda put groceries away.  We still had some daylight, so we grabbed our box of yellow plastic stakes and a 100 foot tape measure and marked the approximate location of the proposed bus barn and driveway.  While Linda fixed dinner (black beans and rice from leftovers) I called Phil at Precision Grading to let him know he could stop by at his convenience to measure the layout for estimating purposes.

On balance it was a good 12-day outing.  We learned quite a bit about using our digital SLR camera in conjunction with powerful but free image editing software.  We were in scenic parts of the country at an ideal time of year for photography.  We got to do some sight-seeing, hiking, and captured some nice photographic images.  We got to spend time with new friends and with family.  And the coach ran well.