Slowly Getting Organized

Since today is the last business day of the week, I've been trying to get a few things taken care of that count on offices being open. I called the Arizona Republic to stop our daily paper delivery. I told the lady to have our last delivery be this Sunday as we are planning to leave on Monday. I'll be curious to see if we get our Saturday and Sunday papers...

Then I went over to the Post Office here at Valle del Oro to return our mail box keys. It's changed a great deal here at the RV Resort since Easter. More people seem to be departing every day. There was only one other person in the Post Office instead of the usual crowd.

In a way it's a shame so many people have left as many of the flowers in the park are just beginning to bloom. There are lots of these yellow agave-type plants in bloom --

And this Beaver Tail Cactus is just loaded with blooms --

It's interesting how much they change color as they open...

This is one of the many little palm trees over by the office --

It, too, has clusters of yellow blossoms inside by its trunk --

Most of our neighbors across the street as well as the ones down our row have left. It's much quieter around the park, especially at night. There does seem to be a great deal of work being done on the Park Models. Two of the ones by us have had colorful coatings put down over their concrete driveways. They sure stunk when they put the resinous sealer coat on -- no wonder they waited to have it done after they left!

Paperwork

This had been one of those days where I spent a good share of my time just doing paperwork. It started with a call from our accountant who said he was emailing us a couple of forms that needed to be sent in to the feds. After we got those signed and ready to go, I scanned one of the W-2s and emailed it to the folks we're talking to about refinancing the RV.

Forry went to the post office to mail the letters and picked up a box of mail from Daughter MM. There were some forms in that box of mail that had to be signed and mailed back to the Farm Service Agency in Adams County. There was an invoice for dues that needed to have a check made out and gotten ready for the mail. Next there was a bunch of paperwork from the grain elevator that needed to be filled out (the elevator had been purchased by a new entity and we had to fill out new paperwork so that they could direct deposit checks for grain sales.).

By the time I got everything filled out and signed and ready to mail, the morning was long gone! I sorted through the rest of the mail MM sent, filed the ranch stuff and tossed a bunch of junk mail. Then I sat down and spent some time looking back at 2012 as my BlogToBook also came in the box of mail...

Finally, the Mail!

Daughter Mary Mae checked with the Post Office in Mount Vernon where Son-in-law Scott had dropped off the box of smail mail last week. They said the package had been picked up by the USPS truck and hadn't come back. They thought perhaps it might have made it to Ritzville and put in a "Postage Due" bin instead of with the General Delivery mail.

I called the Post Office in Ritzville. The lady who answered the phone sounded pretty skeptical, but said she would go look. Several minutes later she came back on the line and said that indeed it was there! Since I had made trips to Ritzville the last two days, we decided that it was Forry's turn. He came back with a nice fat box of mail.

I spent a good share of today putting together the packet of materials that the bank needs for the renewal of our ranch loan. We'll make a trip to Spokane tomorrow to take them the paperwork and to pick up the cross bars for roof-top of the new Suzuki (got to have a place to carry the ladder, you know.).

Finding the Great-Grands

I made another trip into Ritzville today. The Post Office was open today, but our mail wasn't there. Turns out our Son-in-law didn't pay the postage on the box... Daughter Mary Mae said she would go to their post office today to see if she could track it down...
The Farm Services Agency was open today also and I was able to get the CPR contract sheets that the bank had asked for, so I did get one of my errands done.

One of the things we discovered while looking for some of my ancestors graves in North Carolina was that my paternal grandmother's parents -- and one of her brothers -- were actually buried in the Ritzville Cemetery! I stopped at the cemetery on my way out of town to see if I could find their graves. I ended up going through the directory almost line by line until I finally found the gravesites (the directory lists names alphabetically, but by sections, so you have to look through each one.). The gravesites are on the edge of Section One, the older part of the cemetery.

I will have to do some checking with Cousin Terri to see if she knows anything about where they might have lived and if they followed their daughters out to the west. My great-grandmother Eliza Blackwood lived to the age of 85.

 Great-grandfather William S. Blackwood lived to be 88.

My maternal grandparents and great-grandparents (the Kubiks and Teleckys) are also buried at this cemetery. But, we have known about their graves and always went with my mother to decorate them.

I am actually writing this tonight from Auntie Violet down in the coulee at Tree Heart Ranch. (In the Northwest we have "coulees" while in the Southwest they have "arroyos." I think in other parts of the country you would call them "valleys.") Forry and I put up the new antenna this afternoon with the pipe we bought yesterday. It's up fifteen feet, but we may need to add the additional five feet we bought. It's awfully slow, but hey, it works!

 

At Dickens RV Park

We took a drive today to check out the immediate area. I had a couple of letters to mail, so we found the little town of Moncure. There isn't too much there, but we did find the post office. While we were out and about, we went about eighteen miles up the road to Sanford where we found a grocery store.

This is looking across the park to the other side of Dickens RV Park where many of the units are doubled up on the RV sites.

Auntie Violet is parked on the other side as part of a single line. Note her satellite dish proudly poking up towards the south!

Looking down the road from where we are parked.

It was actually chilly this morning and only got to about 72 degrees by noon. It's kind of nice after all the heat we dealt with in Florida and has made for great sleeping. But, I did put on a pair of jeans this morning. It's the first time I've been out of shorts for several months!

Another Hot Day in Florida

It was another hot day in Florida today. It's interesting that everyone keeps talking about how "unusual" the weather is. Evidently March and April weather is usually only in the eighties at most, not the high nineties we've been seeing.

We've been watching the weather reports on TV with all of the tornadoes in Texas yesterday. It appears the storm is heading towards the east coast, but with diminished intensity. We may see the edge of it here in the Orlando area -- they're predicting thundershowers tomorrow. It's amazing with all of the destruction the tornadoes caused, there doesn't seem to have been any loss of life.

We made a trip to the Post Office this afternoon -- barely got there before it closed at four. When Forry went to start the car, all we heard was the infamous "click-click." We tried using the portable charger, but it didn't have enough charge to turn the starter; added some water to the battery; plugged in the charger and got the Toad started. Forry stayed in the car while I went into the Post Office, then again when we made a stop at the grocery store.

I don't think it's my day. I had a grocery list that included tea bags for iced tea, but I forgot them. I tried to upload a file to our accountant and it was rejected as being too big. I zipped it and sent it again, but it was still too big.

Maybe tomorrow will be a better -- and cooler -- day.

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Life Goes On -- Even in an RV Park...

It says in the brochure for Peace River Thousand Trails that the park can accommodate rigs up to forty feet long. That may be true, but they certainly don't enforce it. Early this morning, there was this 45 foot, three-axle fifth-wheel that was attempting to park across the narrow road from us. With the truck and trailer, he is a good 70 feet long --

The driver knocked on the door of the neighbors next to us and had them more their car. He had us boxed in. We really can't move Auntie Violet as there is a tree right behind us! The truck pulling the fifth-wheel was a huge Volvo truck that ended up less then a foot from Auntie Violet's nose --

I was sure glad that I had put my little lavender tree and the wrought iron road runner alongside Auntie Violet instead of in front where I usually put them (the above two pictures were taken through the cooling screen we put in the front windows) --

Then when they finally got the fifth-wheel parked, instead of parking the truck alongside, he parked it along the road. It's a pretty narrow road and due to the tree in the back of our site, we are right close to the edge as well...

Oh well, I guess I just need to relax and not worry about anyone clipping us as they fly by...

When we arrived at the RV Park yesterday, the package with my new Kindle DX was already here. It looks just like the old one except that it is black instead of white. It seems to function a bit more quickly than my old one as well. The Amazon people had sent me an email with a prepaid mailing label to print. Forry removed my old Kindle from the case and put the new one in; then I repacked it in the same box the new one came in and taped it up and put the new label on.

This afternoon we went to the post office in Wauchula to send the old Kindle back and discovered that it was a UPS label, NOT a USPS label. And there is no UPS store in the town. The lady at the post office said that we would have to call UPS and have them come pick it up...

So when we got back to the RV Park, I stopped at the office to see what I would have to do to allow the UPS guy to come through the security gate. She said I needed to leave the package at the office and they would see that it went out with their UPS delivery in the morning.  I do have the tracking number so I guess I can make sure it gets sent...

Mail Call

It's always a good day when the mail comes. When you don't get your mail every day, it seems like a real treat on the day it does arrive. We have been very fortunate that our eldest daughter Mary Mae has continued to receive and forward our mail for the last almost five years that we have been on the road. She mainly uses the Priority Mail Flat Rate boxes. Almost every time we pick up a box at the local post office, we get a comment about "getting our money's worth!" MM can pack more stuff into one of those boxes.

Today there were two boxes. One was the usual fat heavy one, while the second was a bit thinner and quite a bit lighter. What a delight when we got home to open the lighter one and find that Grandson Varick and Granddaughter Claire had decorated an evergreen swag to hang from Auntie Violet's outside mirror. This has been a tradition every Christmas at their house to decorate swags for family and friends and it was neat to get one in the mail!

We spent a good share of the afternoon reading through the mail and enjoying Christmas cards and letters. A special treat was getting the school pictures of Varick and Claire and a nice card with pictures of my Nephew Jared and Becky and my darling grand-niece Ellie. Pictures aren't as good as actually seeing them, but they help.

Later this afternoon our friends Leslie and Bill came over bearing shrimp for supper. I made us each a salad with green onions, avocados, cucumbers, orange peppers, palm hearts, artichoke quarters lettuce and tomatoes topped off with peppered toasted almonds. Bill stir-fried the shrimp with some special seasoning he had and we once more had a feast.