February 21, 2006

February 21, 2006

Rainbow's End SKP Park, Livingston, Texas

YEAR 2 DAY 249

 

Today was cloudy and cool.

I slept late again this morning, still not feeling well. And Bo's diarrhoea problem persists. He's been ill ever since his vaccinations 5 days ago, concurrent with him eating a plum pit. We're not sure which of those is the cause of the problem. The typical dog diarrhoea therapy of feeding a boiled ground beef and rice mixture hasn't solved the problem. We're getting worried.

After lunch we headed to Livingston to run some errands. On the way to town we stopped at Allen Propane and refilled an empty propane tank. We've been running the furnace since we got here, so we used up a tank of propane in a week, quicker than usual. Next stop, in town, was Miller's Barber Shop for haircuts for both of us. Miller's is an old, "wild west" looking barber shop, with 2 barbers, real old fashioned barber chairs, and a bunch of old men sitting around, chatting, waiting for haircuts. Drawls so thick I couldn't understand much of what they were saying. Got the worst haircut I've had in a very long time. I don't think they get too many men with long hair in Miller's. This part of Texas looks pretty much like a short hair kind of place, old men and young. Joanne seems satisfied with her haircut. How come they can cut a woman's hair well, but can't seem to cope with a man with long hair ? After our haircuts I dropped Joanne off at Wal-Mart, then went to Lowe's to buy some hardware to repair the truck tailgate latch. From there I went to the Post Office to pick up our mail. It still has not arrived. I'm not optimistic it will. We're leaving Thursday morning, with or without mail. If it's not here by then, I'll have to arrange to have the Post Office forward it to us if and when it arrives here < sigh >. I picked up Joanne at Wal-Mart. On impulse, as we drove back through Livingston, I stopped at a "pit barbecue" take out stand, and we bought some "barbecue" for supper tonight.

Back at Rainbow's End, I worked on the tailgate latch repair. I ended up completely replacing the tailgate latch cable. That wasn't what I set out to do, but the further into the repair job I got, the more sense it made to replace the entire latch cable. Initially that seemed impossible due to corrosion, but with persistence and perseverance, and a teensy bit of luck near the end, I did it ! Yippee ! Joanne helped with me with the parts where 2 hands weren't enough, then she went to visit Arley. I cleaned up, took Bo for a long walk, did today's accounting, and started today's journal entry. I'm going to suspend obedience training sessions with Bo until he feels better. I use dog biscuits as reward when we're training, and I don't want to feed him any dog biscuits until his diarrhoea problem is solved.

While Joanne prepared fries and coleslaw for our barbecue, I went to the computer room, got online, sent and retrieved e-mail, updated my blog, and attempted to retrieve the MasterCard statements. I was able to get the Canadian dollar statement, but the U.S. dollar statement was unavailable due to some technical problem < sigh >. I'll have to try again tomorrow. Back at the trailer I printed and reconciled the Canadian dollar MasterCard before sitting down to supper.

Supper was a disappointment. We've had “barbecue” in Memphis in Tennessee, Hondo and Harlingen in Texas, and Lafayette in Louisiana. Livingston’s version wasn’t as good as any of them, and was very expensive. HMPH !

DSK