March 9, 2005

March 9, 2005

Usery Mountain Park, Mesa, Arizona

DAY 264

 

Today was sunny and very warm, temperature in the low 80's. I couldn't help but think repeatedly today ; some people have to drive through the snow to their PET VALU stores, and unload trucks in the freezing rain ... but I don't ! HA HA HA HA HA < SNORT SNORT SNORT >

Teddy and Bo woke me early this morning to be fed and walked. Sometimes when they wake me this early, I feed them, walk Bo, and go back to sleep. Sometimes I just roll over and ignore them. Today I stayed up after feeding them and walking Bo. I watched the sun rise up over the mountain. I went to the comfort station and showered early. We're using the comfort station here for showering, since we don't have a sewer connection at our site, and we don't want to fill up the bathroom grey water tank too quickly by showering in the trailer. Without using the shower in the trailer, we can probably make it the whole week without having to drive to the dump station to dump the holding tanks.

I spent much of the morning working on a job I've been procrastinating doing for a long time. I worked on building our investment files in the MS Money software. I have the investment files built into spreadsheets, and when I update them, I manually transfer the data to MS Money. When I'm finished building them into MS Money, I should be able to update them directly into MS Money. Just before noon, we walked with Bo over to the group campground to see what's happening with the rally. The official start to the rally activities was at 2:00 P.M. today, but we wandered over early to check things out, and socialize, which is the largest part of any Escapee rally. We chatted with a new arrival, a couple from Montreal. We returned to the trailer for lunch, and as Joanne was preparing lunch, I took Bo out for an obedience training session. He's progressing well.

After lunch, we returned to the group campground picnic area where the rally officially began around 2:00 P.M. with registration ( and socializing ) followed by official opening ceremonies ( and socializing ), then the "adoption" of each first time Chapter 44 rally attendee ( like us ) by an "experienced" Chapter 44 member couple. We were "adopted" by Lil and Gord Casey from Pincher Creek, Alberta, in the southwest corner of the province, near Alberta's borders with British Columbia and Montana. After more socializing, the communal spaghetti dinner began at 5:30. Immediately after supper, I went back to our rig to get my campfire building supplies. I volunteered to be the "host" for tonight's campfire, as well as again on Friday evening. I got the campfire going by 7:00 P.M., in time for the evening's entertainment. Tonight was a woman singing and playing guitar, accompanied by another guitarist and a man playing the dulcimer ( tsymbaly to my Ukrainian friends ). The entertainment ended about 8:30, and we all sat around the campfire until about 9:30, "dissing" Americans. HA HA HA !

DSK