November 9, 2005

November 9, 2005

Coarsegold, California

YEAR 2 DAY 145

 

Today was a warm, bright, sunny day. First day of sunshine for us in about a month. The joy of a sunny, warm day was a bit offset by the head cold I developed overnight.

This morning after regular morning routines and chores, I went outside to do today's preventive maintenance. Wednesday's preventive maintenance is checking the air pressure in the trailer tires. When I crawled underneath the living room / dinette slide to check the air pressure in the street side trailer tires, I discovered that the thick rubber weather stripping underneath the slide was pulling out of the moulding attaching it to the lower skirt of the trailer. I had to remove a couple of long sections of moulding to reinsert and reattach the weather stripping. That job took up most of the morning. Part way through the job, I drove Joanne to the main clubhouse so that she could do some laundry. When I finished my weather stripping repair job, I washed up, grabbed the laptop, and headed for the clubhouse. While Joanne finished the laundry, I got online to send and retrieve e-mail and update my blog.

We had lunch, then headed to Madera. Madera is the nearest large city, about 30 miles southwest of here. First stop was Vintage GM to pick up the OEM battery cable that I ordered yesterday. Then we found our way to Wal-Mart where we replenished some groceries and supplies. Madera is an older city, with no rhyme or reason to their street layouts. Finding the GM dealer was difficult, and finding the Wal-Mart even more so. Dee-Dee is overdue for an oil change, and I intended to have an oil change and lubrication done at Wal-Mart, but Madera's Wal-Mart didn't have an automotive service centre. We drove into a large, empty parking lot across the street from Wal-Mart because it looked as if there was a flea market going on. The flea market was over, and the vendors were just packing up. We were appalled at the horrendous amount of litter left behind by the flea market vendors and customers. As we were leaving Madera, we noticed that there were a few service stations with a good price on diesel, so we refilled Dee-Dee before heading back to Coarsegold. Listening to the radio, we learned that the area we are in is known as the San Joachim ( pronounced "wakeem" ) Valley. Just before we got back to SKP Park Of The Sierras we decided to go to the nearby Chuckchansi Gold Casino & Resort to check out the restaurants and entertainment scheduled for this weekend. YUCK ... Wayne Newton ! At 60 bucks a pop ! I wouldn't go to see Wayne Newton if they paid me 60 bucks ! We found a section of slot machines that were penny slots, so we decided to put in a dollar and play the slot machine until the dollar ran out. Geeeeezzzzz ... it took an hour to lose the dollar ! I would have lost it faster, but when I was down to about 20 cents, Joanne wanted to play. Her luck is obviously much better than mine. When I got bored, I wandered around looking at the different restaurants, and when I returned she still hadn't finished blowing off the dollar. I kicked her off the machine, sat down myself, and promptly finished off the buck. Get out of my way, sweetheart, let me show you how a real loser does it. HA HA HA HA HA !

We returned to the trailer, put away today's purchases, I walked Bo and fed the animals, and Joanne prepared supper. I began working on today's journal entry and accounting on the laptop. We had supper. I finished the accounting, then downloaded and processed some photos I've taken over the last few days. We watched The Apprentice : Martha Stewart. I spent the late part of the evening dealing with the batch of incoming mail we picked up in Chimacum, Washington a week ago. When I took Bo out for his late night walk, there were frequent loud bangs on the roofs of trailers and motorhomes. The odd shaped, elongated, large acorns are falling from the Blue Oak trees in the park.

DSK