Do you really need Plan A, Plan B, Plan C?

It’s time for me to come clean! I’ve been struggling  for 3 1/2 years — ever since we decided to sell our house and go mobile.

About most things in life I’ve never been a follower.  I’ve been happy to break rules, go my own way, and be happy about the things that make me happy — not the things that make someone else happy.

So then, why is it that no matter what I do I can’t stop thinking about some ‘plan’ that we should be following for now and/or for the future?  We talk with all these people who go ‘here’ every year for 6 months or they go back and forth between two places every year — as regular as clockwork.  And there’s this part of me that keeps wondering why we son’t have some kind of plan?

You can know intellectually and not know it emotionally.  Or vice versa.

No matter how many times I say, There’s no right way to RV. there’s a part of me that doesn’t want to embrace the reality;  there’s part of me that longs for some sort of structure; yet in the midst of one of those structured periods I’m longing for the structure to be gone.    I never said we were a rational couple.  We’re working it out as we go.

Neither of us has been the sort to return to places year after year.  There have been some that we’ve wanted to revisit maybe 5 or 10 years later, but we like seeing new things and enjoying new places.  When we were at Palmdale last winter it was hard to understand the folks who would return to So. Padre Island every year for 20 years and then when they retired they bought a park model mobile home and have been returning another 10 years.  That’s just not us;  so then why do I keep thinking a Pazucha version of that dream is something we should be looking at?  Beats me!

South West Wisconsin

These things being true, in our undocumented times at Potosi, and Thomson, and here at De Soto, we have been scouting around SW Wisconsin in search of private campgrounds that might be suitable for a periodic — or regular return.  We really like this area and if we could find a place we liked we might be willing to consider returning; after all in 3 1/2 years we have been back to one of these Corps Campgrounds four summers in a row, and we have been to a couple of them three years out of four.    In short doses we haven’t minded being in the same place; just not for months at a time.

 

I was saying to Peggy just the other day that Bosque poses a strange situation.  I have wanted to volunteer at a Wildlife Refuge,  I can think of no better Refuge to do it at, and yet I’m chomping at the bit about having made a commitment 6 months in advance and right now it feels like that time will never get here.

And then I do something like this.  Monday we are going to visit the Genoa Fish Hatchery. We made an appointment last week, to talk about volunteering there.  They have recently added an RV site to their facility and while I am not a fisher-person, and know nothing about fish, the idea of learning about what goes on at a fish hatchery is a curious draw for us.  So we’ll see whether it’s something that we might like to try.  Not this year, probably not next year either.  We’re just reconnoitering.

If we were to try to follow any kind of annual ‘plan’ other than wandering-as-the-spirit-moves-us there are a regular patterns that some RV’ers follow. We talked about this for the first time just the other day:

• Spend every Summer in one PLEACE and spend every Winter in ONE place
• Spend every Summer in one general LOCALE and travel every winter.
• Travel every summer and spend every Winter in one LOCALE
• Travel every summer and spend every Winter in one PLACE

There are a lot of parks where you can buy your own lot;  there are a lot of parks that are happy to have return renters in any season.  The opportunities are all out there.  But far the only ‘constant’ in our travels has been our annual return to WI physicals — in September.

We will scout out some other campgrounds in September, when we get to Milwaukee.  It will be something to do, informative, and maybe we’ll find something near our daughter that is appealing.  If not,  we aren’t in a position where we NEED to make any decision or commitment.

I am coming to think that I’m a bit different from a lot of RV’ers.  For one thing I find no great joy in setting up camp, or taking it down again when we move.  For us, it was an easy choice between a 5th Wheel, a Class A Coach, or a Class C Coach because in our opinion our Class A requires the least effort to set up, and to move.  I’m inherently lazy.

When I think about RV’ers who spend half year or more in a place I remind myself that RV’s seem to do best when they are being used, and not when they are sitting unused.  I think that applies as much to the mechanicals of the coach as to the appliances, etc..  The running gear needs to be run.  The brakes need to be used so rust doesn’t develop.  Things need lubrication, they need to be aired up and deflated, pumped up and released.  Our current lifestyle — the one with no definition — accomplishes just these things.  We work the slide mechanisms.  We work the dump valves and the air bags.  We work the engine, see to the routine maintenance and make sure all the moving parts move the way they should.  Sitting in one place for 5 or 6 months at a time doesn’t accomplish that end.

There is no resolution to this post.  I still find myself pondering plans; I don’t need them, but like our daughter there is a part of me that likes planning.  So, I do my research and sometimes we put plans down on paper and having no more than completed the task I tear them up and think up something better.

I don’t know if you need a Plan A, or Plan B,  I don’t even want to talk about plans because they never seem to go the way you plan them;  but for now I’m happy to be free to do just that.

Thanks for stopping by, and I’ll talk with you tomorrow.

 

No, it’s not an opinion, you’re just wrong

As RV’ers , one once in a while comes across people and opinions that defy explanation. In the spirit of enlightened tolerance  I had to repost this one.  It’s a departure from my usual territory but I thought this was worth a read.

This is a repost from the Houston Press of an article by Jef Rouner.

NO, IT’S NOT YOUR OPINION. YOU’RE JUST WRONG

BY JEF ROUNER

THURSDAY, JULY 23, 2015

Screencap from Kathryn Schulz’s TED Talk on being wrong

I have had so many conversations or email exchanges with students in the last few years wherein I anger them by indicating that simply saying, “This is my opinion” does not preclude a connected statement from being dead wrong. It still baffles me that some feel those four words somehow give them carte blanche to spout batshit oratory or prose. And it really scares me that some of those students think education that challenges their ideas is equivalent to an attack on their beliefs.
-Mick Cullen

I spend far more time arguing on the Internet than can possibly be healthy, and the word I’ve come to loath more than any other is “opinion”. Opinion, or worse “belief”, has become the shield of every poorly-conceived notion that worms its way onto social media.

There’s a common conception that an opinion cannot be wrong. My dad said it. Hell, everyone’s dad probably said it and in the strictest terms it is true. However, before you crouch behind your Shield of Opinion you need to ask yourself a two questions.

1. Is this actually an opinion?
2. If it is an opinion how informed is it and why do I hold it?

I’ll help you with the first part. An opinion is a preference for or judgment of something. My favorite color is black. I think mint tastes awful. Doctor Who is the best television show. These are all opinions. They may be unique to me alone or massively shared across the general population but they all have one thing in common; they cannot be verified outside the fact that I believe them.

There’s nothing wrong with an opinion on those things. The problem comes from people whose opinions are actually misconceptions. If you think vaccines cause autism you are expressing something factually wrong, not an opinion. The fact that you may still believe that vaccines cause autism does not move your misconception into the realm of valid opinion. Nor does the fact that many other share this opinion give it any more validity.

To quote John Oliver, who referenced a Gallup poll showing one in four Americans believe climate change isn’t real on his show, Last Week Tonight…

Who gives a shit? You don’t need people’s opinion on a fact. You might as well have a poll asking: “Which number is bigger, 15 or 5?” or “Do owls exist?” or “Are there hats?”

You saw this same thing recently when questions about the Confederate flag started making the rounds. It may be your opinion that slavery was not the driving cause of the Civil War, but the  Texas Articles of Secession mention slavery 21 times (rights are mentioned only six, and only once in a sentence that doesn’t mention either slavery or how way more flippin’ awesome white people are than black people). Do I even need to point out that some people are also of the opinion the Holocaust was fake, and that their opinion means absolutely nothing to the reality?

Pictured: A bunch of people who were murdered regardless of someone’s opinion on the subject From: The Auschwitz Album

And yes, sometimes scientific or historical data is wrong or unclear or in need of further examination. Everyone knows water expands when it freezes. Do you know why it does that when literally nothing else in the world does? Nope, and neither does science. Or hey, here’s a question; what was the racial heritage of the Ancient Egyptians because historians can’t come to a consensus and their art is too stylized to accurately judge.

Subjects like that are the sort of things that are ripe for an opinion. Water expands when it freezes because of the shape of the molecule. The Egyptians were a displaced black African race that settled the Nile. Here, opinion can be a placeholder for a greater understanding assuming there ever is a greater understanding. There is no verification; it can only be guessed at. Hopefully in an educated manner.

That’s where the second question comes in; is your opinion informed and why do you believe it? Though technically these opinions cannot be wrong they can be lacking in worth simply because they are lacking in structure.

Here’s an example. Let’s say I meet a fellow Doctor Who fan, and this fan’s favorite Doctor is David Tennant. Nothing wrong so far. However, upon further discussing the subject this fan tells me that he or she has never seen any of the pre-2005 episodes or heard any of the radio plays. Now, it’s possible that even if he or she had David Tennant would still be his or her favorite Doctor, but it’s also possible that it would be Tom Baker or Paul McGann or someone else.

In a perfect world someone confronted with this would simply say, “Well, David Tennant is my favorite that I’ve seen.” There’s plenty of reasons to not have seen any older Doctor Who. It’s not all on Netflix, there’s a lot of it, radio plays can get rather expensive, etc. Having a narrow opinion from a narrow set of information is only natural.

What mucks it all up when a narrow set of information is assumed to be wider than it is. There is a difference between a belief and things you just didn’t know. It’s easy to believe, for instance, that whites face as much discrimination as people of color, but only if you are completely ignorant of the unemployment rates of blacks versus whites, the fact that of the Fortune 500 CEOs only five are black, or the fact that of the 43 men who have been president 42.5 of them have been white.

In other words, you can form an opinion in a bubble, and for the first couple of decades of our lives we all do. However, eventually you are going to venture out into the world and find that what you thought was an informed opinion was actually just a tiny thought based on little data and your feelings. Many, many, many of your opinions will turn out to be uninformed or just flat out wrong. No, the fact that you believed it doesn’t make it any more valid or worthwhile, and nobody owes your viewpoint any respect simply because it is yours.

You can be wrong or ignorant. It will happen. Reality does not care about your feelings. Education does not exist to persecute you. The misinformed are not an ethnic minority being oppressed. What’s that? Planned Parenthood is chopping up dead babies and selling them for phat cash? No, that’s not what actually happened. No, it’s not your opinion. You’re just wrong.

A moment of sobering truth in the midst of plenteous opinions.  Thanks for stopping by and I’ll talk with you tomorrow.

Trip Advisor

There are RV specific travel tools and there are NON-RV specific tools.  One of my favorites is Trip Advisor.  It’ won’t help you find a camping site for a 45 foot tandem axle behemoth of a coach, but it will tell you a lot about what’s in the area you plan on exploring and it will certainly give you better than even odds of finding a good place to eat — seeing as eating out is the frequent best-loved activity of most of the RV’ers I know personally.

From the lowly home page where you can pick your veritable ‘poison’ there are plenty of opportunities to benefit from the experiences of others along the way.  Like any public review site you have to take the reviews with a grain of salt — there will always be the guy or gal with a sour taste in their mouth from some real or imagined insult or slight but most of the reviews I’ve read are people genuinely giving their point of view.

How a food truck outranks a sit down restaurant I don’t know, but in Florence OR that’s the case.

In Milwaukee it’s not at all surprising to see Sanford’s at the top of the list — for a place where you can easily spend $100-150 a couple on a meal that might be expected, But to have a frozen custard stand in second place is not surprising, and an Italian market which isn’t really even a restaurant — but which does have a takeaway deli in third place is completely understandable.

You also have to be aware that there are a lot of people who will go first to their favorite franchise business whether or not their services are good or their food is tasty.   On occasion I look at a city’s restaurant listing and I scratch my head.  It’s hard for me to fathom a place with 10 5 star ratings coming out ahead of one with 150 5 star ratings.  That doesn’t make sense to me. Having said that, Trip Advisor is very democratic;  given enough high scores the place is rated higher than another regardless of cost or (in the case of restaurants) cuisine. As a result you can find great restaurant that are budget conscious, and steer away from high priced duds.

You also have to read the reviews with an open mind.  Some people will give a superlative review to the best restaurant in an area, as distinct from giving superlative reviews only for what they consider superior restaurants.  Personally, I think it’s not hard to figure out whether the place (attraction, hotel, or restaurant) is one I’m interested in from the reviews.

If you haven’t found Trip Advisor yet, I enourage you to do so.  AND… if you are going to places listed on their site why not take the time to review it yourself!!!!.

Thanks for stopping by, and I’ll talk with you tomorrow.

Boat and River Watching

I’m sure there are folks who wonder just why we like these Corps of Engineers campgrounds on the Mississippi River.  Well, let me take a few moments to give you some ideas. After spending a few years as an over the road driver the idea that a standard 15 barge tow can haul as much freight as 1000 semi trailers just boggles my mind.  So I like seeing the different kinds of tows, barges, combinations and processes.

The information I’m going to share (and I’m only going to talk about the smallest amount of what’s out there) is available online all the time, from anywhere in the world.  But the idea that we can be sitting alongside the river and be able to see what ships are moving, where, and when is almost an obsession.

And you can not only find out about the freight/barges, you can also get moment by moment status checks on the state of the river,  the depths, the flow rates, the positions of the cam gates, temperature, and lots more.

The featured photo is the actual positioning of all the commercial traffic on the Mississippi on Wednesday July 22 — at about 1:00 P.M.  between locks 1 and 11.

The place to start is here:  The Home Page for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers LOCK PERFORMANCE SYSTEM The options are simple but extremely powerful.  And a couple hours of playing around with them will give you an overview of commercial boat traffic on most of the navigable waterways in the U.S. And you can specify search criteria and get real time results for traffic,  lock status and river status. Depending on how interested you are in the rivers or shipping this info may be of little or no interest.  Or if you’re like me it can be fascinating!

The system covers all of the US Corp navigation projects. The information is there for those who are interested and I encourage you to investigate what they are doing, and how your belongings get from place to place.

So, next time I say I’m sitting on the dock of the bay, or on the edge of the river… know that I’m doing more than just sitting….

Thanks for stopping by,  and I’ll talk with you tomorrow.

Laundry & Free WiFi Day

Who would have thought that I’d get excited about doing laundry.  When we revisit areas  there are always “Happy Returns” among them. Sometimes it’s a restaurant.  There does happen to be one of those here (The Great River Roadhouse in De Soto).  But even more exciting is returning to our favorite La Crosse Laundromat with free customer WiFi!

When we were working and living in sticks & bricks Peggy used to do laundry all the time.  I mean ALL THE TIME. Little loads, but lots of them and lots of ironing.  I always felt bad about that.  She spent so much of her time doing all that drudgery. She was always pleasant about it;  as if laundry was a Zen experience for her; but I still felt bad  seeing as so much of the ironing for my clothing.

When we bought the RV and decided to fulltime the first laundry related change was selling our iron in the estate sale.  We are iron free!  That has occasionally been a bad decision — we have several times wished we had an iron so that we could use IRON-ON cloth hemming material; but we found that FABRIC GLUE works just as well.

Now, instead of doing lots of small loads we take 2 to 2 1/2 hours every 14-21 days and we do it all at once.  Yeah — It costs more in the long run — but we are doing what we want with our retirement and to us it’s a decent trade off.   And we have an at least an extra 9 cu ft of storage space not taken up by a washer dryer combo, or 19 cu ft of storage space taken up by a washer and dryer.

While we’re waiting I get to download program updates.  My Adobe Cloud subscription can use a LOT of bandwidth.  And of course Apple system updates are horrendous — over 5 gigabytes per upload for my laptop and server,  plus there are now two smartphones to keep up to date.

Update Clue

For those of you who are also apple users, if you have more than one machine using the same update.  Before clicking to begin the update close out of Apple Updater and find the downloaded update file in your applications folder.  MOVE the file OUT OF THE APPLICATIONS FOLDER. Once the update file is outside of the applications folder it will not be deleted as soon as the update has finished — then you can port the file over to another laptop / Mac and do the installation there as well with the same download.

We all Change

As we were sitting riverside watching the water flow past, we got to talking about how a person changes without realizing.  At that moment it was all about how I never used to be able to sit still — and how I could hardly control myself to sit and enjoy a setting as I do now.

But our conversation was really about more than that.  We both have little physical issues that may threaten (at some point) to take us off the road before we’re really ready for that change.  Periodically taking some time to talk about the changes going on in my body, or in Peg’s body are a good thing.  I don’t know if she’s having problems with her vision, or her arthritis, or whatever it might be.  She doesn’t know if I’m having problems with my legs or my weight (meaning do I get winded too quickly).  The only way we know those things are by talking; sharing the things no one wants to talk about — with someone else.

I’ve always felt that we can handle anything — once we know what it is. The key there being good communication between the two of us. Recently one of those physical weaknesses raised it’s head and I have started thinking about how we might plan our future travels differently to insure that Peggy gets everything possible out of our up-coming travels.  Knowledge is power.  And acting as if that is true is always better than pretending we don’t have limitations and then being disappointed because we planned something we really aren’t able to accomplish.

 

The Possibility of Friendship

I have to say I’ve been a little bit upset lately.  The current round of pre-presidential-election-nominations, and the consequential politicking have been making me sick to my stomach. When I was young I was very proud of this nation.

I wish I was still as proud as I used to be.

Lately, it seems as if the barbarians have taken control and all they have done is turn up the volume on rancor without fixing anything.  

The one thing travel has done for me is to show me that there are multiple ways of living which are equally valid.  They are not the SAME as ours, but they are certainly capable of sustaining high levels of civilization for longer periods than we have even been a nation. And what gives us the right to impose our arrogance on them — other than a national greed that seems to know no bounds.   And as we ramp up for yet another election where our best choice is not the best choice, but rather the lesser of two evils I find myself wondering whether there is any hope for an end to hatred and bigotry.

So let me take a different tack today.  Maybe not so much about RV’ing today and more about the nature of friendship.  Friendship is something RV’ers know a lot about.

“Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat,
worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that
if we try to understand each other, we may
even become friends.”
– Maya Angelou

It’s funny how a “thing” can be right in front of a person’s eyes and remain invisible. Like the possibility of friendship. Of course one has to be open to possibilities; and I’m not sure a lot of politicians are — but that’s another blog for another day.   Yet and all, I like this quote from Maya Angelou.  I’ve been holding on to it for a couple years because I haven’t been sure what I dared  to say about the quote or about travel as a mediator, or about how easy it is to blind oneself to possibility.

I’m from a happy family, a healthy family, a family that loved each other and bent over backwards to help each other.  Let me tell you a story about them.  My parents got engaged on Pearl Harbor Day. They married on Christmas of 1941.  There was a lapse in time before they could take a honeymoon. By the time that was possible gas and rubber rationing had already been implemented and they could not afford to drive a car to Mount Rushmore as they had planned.  In order to take their honeymoon they borrowed a car from one sister, borrowed spare tires from a couple  brothers (tires weren’t nearly as reliable then), and received the gas ration cards from pretty much the entire family so that they could make the trip.  We are still that same kind of family, just a little bit smaller now.

I have already mentioned that Kathryn was here recently for another Meet-Up.  Making an effort to meet up in spite of distance is part of the reason we’re still close.  We don’t take each other for granted and we’ve never broken the bond of trust — which, once broken is nearly impossible to put back to what it had been.  And we hold a mutual respect for each other.  We hold out possibilities as equal to reality;  we move heaven and earth to make possibilities come true.

I think Leo Tolstoy was right when writing Anna Karenina:

“All happy families are alike;
each unhappy family is
unhappy in its own way.” 

There may be only one way to win a game, but there are many ways to lose it.  I think families are a great deal like sports in that regard.  When I was growing up I knew nothing of fighting and feuding. I thought my parents were quiet people.  But that was not always the case.

My dad, too, was a conscientious objector.  He was called up in the Army (as were so many, many, men) and assigned duties as a non-combatant.  As things worked out he was assigned to Coastal Defense and spent WW-II stationed along the West Coast manning diesel generator installations at lighthouses and radar stations.  My mom who was not about to be left behind followed him up and down the Coast from LA to Port Angeles, WA.  He lived on base, she lived wherever she could get a flat, or apartment, and a job — and they saw each other whenever the Army decided in it’s infinite wisdom that it was OK.

I remember my mom telling a story about  shortly after getting married having an argument with my father (I wouldn’t come along for another 8 years).  Dad went storming out of the house and into the backyard.  There was an apple tree in that back yard, and in his anger my dad picked up an apple, hefted it in his hands a few moments and then threw it with all his might at a shed in the back yard.  The apple went S-P-L-A-T!

After witnessing my dad’a anger, mom told me she said to herself, “If he can do that to an apple, I don’t want to see what would happen if he got that angry with me.”

When I was young I thought that a strange statement for her to tell me.  I never saw any indication of that anger in my entire life.  And I never saw any indication that there was any aspect of fear in their relationship.   By the time I came around — 8 years into their marriage, I don’t think there was.

I tell this story after the Tolstoy quotation because I think my mom had the sense to realize that she was on an unhappy course;  by being willing to change direction she discovered that someone else changed direction too: dad.  I have come to believe that the reason the “apple event” held such an memorable place in her mind was that it was the fulcrum around which she changed her behavior towards him and ultimately he changed his behavior towards her. Because they both were willing to change, what began as physical attraction grew into a deep love and they spent the 54 years together in every way they possibly could manage.

We get the life we deserve (both collectively and individually as a nation).  We get the life our decisions give us. Good choices, good results.  Poor choices, poor or even catastrophic results.  Each and every experience I have with strangers reinforces the fact that other people will behave towards me as I behave towards them. Not always instantaneously— sometimes I have to work at it a little. Or a lot.  But if I stay the course, almost always they will come around a bit and neither of us will be quite the person wearing a social mask that we pretended to be when we met.

The thing about change is that there needs to be a reason for change in order for it to really happen.  And if not a ‘reason’ then at least a willingness to consider change.  It seems today there isn’t much willingness to consider change on anyone’s part in the political arena.  With the rancor about the Confederate Flag,  the continuing hatred expressed towards our President, the on-going mass shootings, and the spate of Blacks killed by police it seems as if we are locked racial hatred as real as any in the history of the world and I thought this country could be better than it is.

I often hear people (women especially) speak of “THEIR” children.  I wonder if they ever consider how dangerous that sense of possession can be?  In listening to women talk about ‘their’ children I have also noticed how often the wife assumes the children were ‘hers’ as if the husband didn’t have any skin in the game at all, or even any claim to them. It’s something that has always bothered me.  Those little moments, insignificant moments when we speak what’s in our heart not realizing others can actually hear what we are saying.  Those kids belong to me!

I know this isn’t the most apropos time to be quoting Middle Eastern philosophers, with what seems like rampant hatred of everything Muslim but I’m a firm believer in not throwing out the baby with the bath water. On that note, Khalil Gibran hit the nail on the head (IMHO):

Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself. They came through you but not from you and though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

The idea that we possess things has gotten humans into a lot of trouble over the years.  Whether it’s possession of our children; possession of land;  possession of ‘rights’ and ‘privileges’ — the idea that things belong to us is a dangerous concept.

The micro dysfunction we see when parents can’t let go of their children isn’t all the different from the macro problems we see when the human race thinks it can do anything it wants to Mother Earth.

A parent doing a great job of parenting can make a huge impact on the life of the child.  And truly, some of the problems we are having in this country today are the results of poor parenting.  But that’s not the end of the story.  At some point the ‘kid’ bears the responsibility for their own actions and decisions.  I feel terrible about stories of blacks shot or beaten by police — but I do know that I have too often witnessed both blacks and whites who approach cops with an attitude of confrontation.  And if you are out in the middle of the night being confrontational with Law Enforcement that’s simply not a very smart decision.  Or you have the poor child who drowned here at the park.  That’s heart breaking, but a nine year old child isn’t able to take care of themselves and his parents owed him better care than he got.  It’s a two way street.  Parents and child both have responsibilities.

Similarly we have been arrogant about our stewardship of this earth.  Millennia of our forebears have passed on an earth that was serviceable and healthy.  We can argue all we want about whether Global Warming exists but there is no argument about the many species of plant and animal that have ceased to exist, there is no argument about the pollution we have caused, there is no argument about the fact that we build cities on top of seismic faults and take no thought about moving our activities OFF of those locations, and we build cities on the edge of the water assuming that the water level will continue as we have always known it — whether or not it has always been at that level.  With all our knowledge we will know so little about how this planet functions and yet we arrogantly continue on our self-determined course even though we see warning signs around us.

Of course part of the reason we do so is we are a Capitalist society.  We worship (as a nation) the almighty $$$$$$.  We really should give up any thoughts about living in a democracy, or a republic.  It’s about time we realize that we have collectively sold the store.  There is nothing that is not for sale in this country, including politicians.  We are reaping the harvest of Capitalism.

In such a world there’s not much incentive to look for friendship on a national scale.  There’s not much incentive for politicians to look for compromise.  In a Capitalist world all that matters is the next quarter’s profit & loss statement.  Even philanthropy is subject to the bottom line.

I promise not to rant tomorrow.  But once a year or so I think it’s good to let go of what’s brewing.  Thanks for being patient with me, and I’ll talk with you again tomorrow.

Goods & Service

If you’ve been following my blog for any length of time you’ll at least have an inkling that access to goods & services is always somewhere near the top of my priority list.  We spend a lot of time at campgrounds removed at 20 to 50 miles from cities.  At our age no one can afford to be cavalier at their age and access to healthcare and the things you need to live your life.  Just what those things might be are as individual as the RV’er / Retiree / Human.

When our Microwave / Convection oven started misbehaving a couple weeks ago we began wondering how we were going to handle getting it fixed or replaced.  With a full summer of reservations — all of which were a fair distance away from major cities even access to a decent RV dealership wasn’t looking good.  And in this particular area there aren’t a lot of mobile RV services either.

We have an extended service policy on our coach — which covers the Microwave but we thought our deductible might be higher than the cost of repairing the old microwave.  Maybe we should just replace this 11 year old monster with a brand new one.  We took an information-gathering-chance and called the Sears Appliance Repair service.  Let’s see what the cost would be.

We made our appointment and the tech was scheduled to arrive 6 days later.  Monday night we got a phone call to advise us we were the first call of the day.  When the tech called Tuesday morning I agreed to meet him at the entrance to the campground.  The service tech was particularly nice.

We learned that the repair would cost about as much as replacing the 11 year old model with a brand new one, and that it would be two weeks before he could come back to install the parts (longer than we were going to be here).  He re-wrote the service order and we ended up paying about 30% of the quoted service call rate. That was a technician’s discretion thing I guess, but I’m convinced that the way you treat people makes a big difference in how they treat you. He went out of his way to help us out on the cost of troubleshooting.

He was gone soon after arriving and I got on the phone.  45 minutes on the phone with the Sharp Corporate offices verified which current ovens were same-size replacements.  I went a step further to verify which of those replacement models were current production.

You can often get great deals online — but sometimes the deals are no deal at all when you discover that what you bought has been discontinued by the manufacturer some years before! So, being careful not just to buy the cheapest oven that had the same dimensions was important to me.

The replacement is on order.  It will be shipped to Milwaukee and this September when we were in town for a month Michael will help me pull out the old unit and replace it with the new one. (He says wiping hands!)  Now to live with limited microwave capacity for a month and a half.

The takeaway for me is twofold:

• Warranties are warranties — they aren’t a guaranty that nothing is going to go wrong.  And they don’t cover everything.  When you make choices about things what warranty policy or extended service policy to by you balance deductibles against purchase price:  you can cover more and pay more, or you can cover less (higher deductible) and pay less for the policy. You make a calculation about how much risk you want to take.  We have collected nearly all the cost of our extended service policy already.  The fact that this repair isn’t going to be covered isn’t anything to be upset about.
• Cost of ownership is more important than ideas about “getting your money’s worth.”   Being frugal, is not the same as being cheap.  Being economical is not the same as being miserly.  We could repair the microwave we have, and some other part in the 11 year old appliance could fail in 30, 60, or 90 days.  For not much difference than the cost of our deductible we can replace the entire unit and hopefully live failure free for a few years.

Power Control

If you’ve been computing more than 10 years you may remember the old “Power Control Centers” that a lot of us used to use.  The 2” thick box laid underneath the old desktop computer and you would plug all your power cords into the back and on the front there were individual disconnect switches for each of your accessories.

Well, I’ve been thinking about those things.  I used to have two of them and I wish I still had them (except that they were too large for what I need now) Above the driver’s seat we have a cabinet where the satellite receiver, the DISH antenna control, and the DVD/BluRay controller live.

From time to time the DISH receiver needs to be disconnected for 10 seconds for various changes in programming and antenna problems.  Then there is the antenna controller which needs to be powered on when we arrive at a new site, but does not need to be powered on for the entire 2 weeks, or 4 months that we are living in pone place.  If you hit the POWER button on the Antenna controller it automatically goes into STOW mode and retracts the antenna into travel position.  The only way to power off the controller is to disconnect it at the power source.

I finally found a small version of the same idea that will fit in the overhead cabinet.  Now I’ll be able to disconnect the individual appliances as required, without standing on my driver’s seat and reaching way back into the recesses of the cabinet to find the proper plug to pull!  LUV it!  That will be shipped at the same time as the microwave.

I use Amazon quite a bit.  For me, Amazon Prime is a good deal.  This particular purchase we aren’t having shipped to US, but that’s because we’ll wait until Michael can help me to install the 70 lb Micro/Conv oven.  But we have shipped to Corps Campgrounds, to Forest Service offices and to Campground addresses all with success. And Amazon Prime for the entire year costs about as much as shipping for this one purchase.

Thanks for stopping by, and I’ll talk with you tomorrow. 🙂 🙂 🙂

 

Only In Iowa

What Can I say?

(Other than please don’t try this!)