Another trip around the sun for me! Another year older.

So what prompted me to do a blog? Lots on my mind I guess.

From previous blog entries I think you know that while in the desert in the fall we collect Mylar balloons. There is some speculation that most of the balloons come from Los Angeles and end up in the desert due to wind patterns. At any rate, lots of them do end up in the Mohave Desert.

What prompted me to write about this today was two things: I occasionally look at a YouTube channel put out by Sarah Jane Woodall, aka Wonder Hussy who moved from Las Vegas to the desert near Death Valley. She makes her living by traveling to destinations and making a video of her travels and adventures. She hates Mylar balloons and in her videos she makes no bones about it.

Second, I received an email from the City saying they are banning all plastic articles including Mylar balloons. I think it is about time and I support their efforts.

In the mean time us intrepid desert explorers will continue to collect Mylar balloons and post the results on our Facebook page at the Desert Balloon Recovery Crew or DBRC.

Last year in our almost 4 weeks in the desert for our fall trip we collected 119 balloons. I found number 120 along side the highway on my way home but could not stop as I had the trailer behind me and no place to pull off. It was a shiny red one which made it worse.

In other news, we did spend last week camping at a friends invitation, at a private RV park in Pismo Beach, CA. They had bought a new trailer and we have a tradition of celebrating with champagne whenever someone gets a new rig. We properly toasted the new rig.

It is getting to that time of year when I start thinking about the fall trip, so today I sent out the first pass at food assignments to the crew. We have a smaller crew this year which means we each need to cook one more meal for the time we are gone.

Yard work

 It has been some time since the last post but no apologies. Just lazy I guess, and not much to write about.

I have been working in the yard but find that heavy yard work is beyond what I can do anymore. After we had the Ficus tree removed from the back yard we had a water leak. We hired a local gardener to fix it just prior to us leaving for Arizona in January. The root from the Ficus caused the leak. The large hole to repair the pipe remained until recently when we had the gardener come back to remove some roots and fill in the hole. He also pulled up a bed of Agapanthas which had been there for years. What he took out filled 6 garbage cans. I had to borrow all the neighbors green barrels to get rid of it on garbage day. He replanted the bed so in time it will fill in and look as good as new.

I want to add some taller plants in the area of the defunct Ficus to block our view of the garden shed from the living room. To that end I have been repositioning some rocks and cement pavers we use as stepping stones. I also planted a couple of Clyda’s Asparagus ferns nearby which had outgrown their pots. It’s beginning to shape up.

I have lettuce in the garden which I got from the nursery but the crows ate off a lot of the leaves. I have managed to rescue some of it but as with any garden crop, it all is ready to pick at the same time. I put wire around one of the beds and tried netting around the others but we have had so much wind that it blows the netting everywhere which doesn’t do much good.

Speaking of netting, I also have tried it around my blueberry tubs to keep the birds from eating my ripe berries but again the wind blows it all over. So, today I ordered some heavier netting and am building a framework to tie it to. Maybe that will work. All this for a few bowls of blueberries.

Right now the garden is covered with California poppies but soon they will die back and I can pull them to clear my garden paths. They reseed so they will be back again next year.

I have some kind of squash plants given to me by a friend, planted in one of the raised boxes. The squash are long and thin when mature. Free food!

The boyenberries at the back of the garden are blossoming. It will be a while before they are ready to pick. 

We had a little rain last night but then the wind comes up and dries everything out so don’t know if we gain much.

Until next time.

Winter trip finally

 So, does anyone still read this stuff?

It seems most people have stopped blogging. I think some folks started to blog while they were traveling about the country as a way to keep family and friends up to date or as a record of their travels and adventures. However, with the pandemic, many people hunkered down and lost the desire to post anything. After all, what was there to write about when you don’t do much for days on end.

I admit there was a tendency on my part to do that as evidenced by my not posting since December. But we still have been doing something, not just pulling into our shell and watching the world go by.

I still spend way too much time on my computer, and we have been gone for 6 weeks to Arizona this winter. We left on January 18^th for several days in Quartzsite and a trip to the Big Tent for the RV show with several friends. We all meet in a BLM area and circle the wagons so to speak. Good food, good company and a few campfires while we are there.

Four of the couples moved on to Yuma where we visited a car museum called Clouds. The guys name is Cloud and he has 400 Model T’s from 1926/1927 plus lots of other rusty stuff. It’s easy to waste several hours here looking at everything. Of course us old timers remember lots of the “Rusty Stuff “ from our childhood.

We later visited a date farm and had a date shake which turned out to be our lunch for the day. A very good date shake I might add. I bought an 11 pound box of dates for a pittance compared to the normal price and shared it between 3 of us.

We visited Los Algodones Mexico one day. It is just across the border from Yuma and is the place to go for drugs at a cheap price. The line to return in the late morning can be hours long so we came back early to avoid that. We had lunch at Linn’s a Chinese buffet in Yuma one day. Well worth it and we will go back if we are ever in the area again.

We moved on to Ajo, Arizona a small town once owned by a copper company. While there we made a day trip to Organ Pipe National Monument.

From there we camped on the West side of Tucson for 6 days and spent 2 days visiting the Gem and Mineral show which was spread over 71 venues this year. It is something to see. We visited Tubac, an artists community South of Tucson and the Titan Missile silo in Green Valley. This is always of interest to me as Delco Electronics built the Inertial Measurement Unit for the Titan and the cabinets in the Launch Control Center have a plaque with that on it. Side note: I worked on the last ground support upgrade for the Titan way back when. It was decommissioned shortly after the upgrade was completed.

From Tucson we moved on to Casa Grande and the Gourd Festival for 5 days. I don’t do gourds, at least not recently but we do enjoy being there.

While everyone moved on separately from there, Clyda and I drove South of Tucson to Sierra Vista to visit our Niece Dawn and her family. We spent a week with them, parked in their yard. We had a very enjoyable visit.

We headed towards home with a stop in Gila Bend at the Elks club one night then Quartzsite again to have the brakes on the trailer checked at RV Lifestyles. While the brakes were being checked we visited our neighbors Paul and Kathy for lunch. They were camped with a friend on his lot in Quartzsite.

The trailer was done early enough in the day so we decided to drive to Indio for the night and stay at Spotlight 29 Casino in their parking lot. Not ideal but free. The next day we drove home through the desert which I haven’t done that route since the kids were little and we would go to Joshua Tree National Park.

While we are home our days consist of weeding the garden and yard, and I still work Saturdays at the Elks club splitting and selling firewood. Keeps me off the streets. As to this summer, well who knows. We would like to visit family and friends in Oregon and Washington but fuel prices being what they are, it may not be feasible. We also would like to make a trip to Wisconsin at some point as it has been 3 or 4 years since I have done that. We’ll see.

So, we are still here!

 I just haven’t posted since April as not too much was happening.

We did do a few RV trips but only locally and with a select few of our friends. I did do my usual desert trip this fall with my son Tim. That is always a special time for us. We again collected Mylar balloons we find our in the desert. Last year we collected 78 balloons and this year we exceeded that by a large number as we collected 119 total.

Balloon, balloons, balloons!

Firewood for campfires.

Tortoise Intaglio near Barstow, CA

When I came home from Death Valley I dropped the trailer at the Lancaster, CA Elks club and left it in dry storage. A week later we picked it up and went to Boulder City, NV for Thanksgiving with 3 other couples. That really worked out well as I didn’t need to bring it all the way home, park it, and then drag it all the way back the same route a week later.

We had a great time in Boulder City. We stayed at the Elks Club. The weather was nice enough that we could eat outside most of the time and have a campfire at night.

Bighorn sheep at "Bighorn" park in Boulder city, NV

The club hospitality was excellent and we really enjoyed ourselves. Clyda and I extended our trip by 2 days so we could visit friends in Henderson, NV. On the way home we spent one night at Arabian RV Park in Boron, CA our go to spot on the way home from the desert.

We plan to do our usual winter trip to Arizona starting about the middle of January.

I want to wish all a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. 

Please keep in touch.

Time to post an update.

 Time seems to fly by and I forget to post a blog. Not that there is a lot to write about.

I have been working in my garden and have added several wooden boxes 2 foot square and a foot tall which allow me to add more dirt as my soil is not that deep. In fact, most of the soil in my garden was hauled in 50 years ago when we moved here and over time has lost some of it’s bulk.

I planted peppers, lettuce, radishes and onions in the big raised bed (ate the first radish today). In the wooden boxes I have pickles, zucchini and yellow squash. The wicking tubs have 3 kinds of tomatoes in them. I also planted 3 blue berry plants in wicking tubs so will see how they do. Other neighbors have planted blue berries and they have done well.

California poppies in my garden.

Large raised bed in background.

Blue Berry bushes.

Potato bed.

The potatoes have been “hilled” once and will need a second “hilling” soon. The last asparagus plant just came up so all ten I planted have survived. Considering how they looked when I planted them, I am surprised all survived.

What else is new….. We bricked in the parkway between us and the neighbors so no more dirt there. It is cement brick which matches the other side of the neighbors driveway. It looks nice.

I bought 1 foot square paver’s to install in front of my shed behind the garage in place of the pea gravel which has been there for years. Craig dug out the pea gravel and I laid the paver’s this week. I still need three of them cut in half to finish the job.

One thing about Googles Blogger, which is what I use for these posts is that you have little control over spacing and text size. I select the text I want to use but it has other ideas. 

A long over due post.

 We are still here on the West Coast and have both received our Covid-19 vaccinations. I got the Pfizer vaccine and Clyda got the Moderna vaccine. Neither one of us had any reaction to the vaccinations. We still maintain most of our previous protocol when out and about as we mask up, maintain social distancing and use hand sanitizer after any contact.

That all being said, we do limit our socializing as not all of our friends are vaccinated yet. I still work at the Elks woodlots on Saturday’s but we do use masks and watch our interaction with people. It is only common sense.

Enough of that. I have planted a few things in the garden. Craig bought asparagus crowns, and potatoes to plant so those are in the ground. It may be too early but I think we are past the frost date for this area so they should be ok. Clyda’s sweet peas are up and about to climb the fencing I put up. My peas are up and the trellis is ready for them. I need to plant radishes but it has been cold and windy so not conducive to garden work right now.

Craig had re-done the garden fence into a more permanent fence from the slap-dash panels I had put up last year. It is all to keep the dog out as she likes to walk all over the beds usually chasing lizards. Yesterday she tore up the small woodpile near the garden looking for lizards who hang out there during the day. She has a large scab on her nose from getting into something in the yard. It hardly has time to heal before she knocks the scab off. Her poor nose suffers.

I had my truck repaired after the night when the horn started blowing around 1 in the morning. Water had gotten to an internal fuse block in the cab and shorted the horn relay out. A replacement fuse block cost a lot as Ford no longer makes them. Some place in Kansas has the stock and they hold it up for a Kings ransom if you need one.

After the fuse block was replaced, I took the truck to a body shop to have the rust around the windshield repaired and a new windshield installed. I also had the hood repaired and the front of the truck and the top repainted. It looks nice and should last as long as I plan to drive it.

A short post just to let folks know we are still here.

Fall trip done.

 I just realized that it has been 4 months since I last posted.

So, what is happening here on the West coast? Not much. It is either locked down or burned up this summer. Poor old California has had a lot of bad luck lately.

We were not in any of the fire areas. We have had smoke from the earlier fires North of us but that dissipated after a few days.

We on the other hand have not been doing much. We limit our socializing to a few friends. I still do wood at the Elks every Saturday with masks and social distancing. We occasionally go to the Elks on Monday night for hamburgers, etc also with friends. We just limit our interaction with people as much as possible.

We did go camping in October for 5 days. Just up the coast North of us with a few friends. I had taken the RV in to have the MorRyde pin box hitch rebuilt. It is 12 years old and was showing sun damage on some rubber and plastic parts. It took some time to find the right rebuild kit and do the work. The truck has been serviced so we are good to go for this fall.

The garden has been cleaned out. I roasted the last of the Anaheim Chili's. I used some for chili rellanos and the rest go in the freezer for use later. I had pulled the jalapeno pepper plant after making “poppers”. Those last “poppers” had a real kick to them.

The tomatoes are done. I had a bumper crop of Romas. So many in fact that I took 4 lug boxes to the food bank over a few weeks time.

Then there are the gourds. I have slowed down the watering to those hoping they will stop growing. I keep the new growth cut back as anything putting on gourds now won’t finish this fall. I have all the gourds tied up in t-shirts to take the weight off the stems as each one is soooo heavy. I planted what was supposed to be Birdhouse shaped gourds but only one of those is on the vines. Lots of large pear shaped ones however. Once the stems turn brown I will cut them loose and hang them in the garage rafters where it is warmer so they can dry out.

I just came back from my annual fall trip to the desert. This year Tim was with me again. He spent over a week here before we left. We traveled up the East side of the Sierra’s to Ridgecrest and Bishop, CA then on to Mina and Tonopah, NV spending 2 days in each place. We visited museums, poked around in old mining towns, looked for petroglyphs, and drove 4-wheel drive roads. We visited a memorial for an X-15 crash site near Randsburg, CA and found a 1995 plane wreck in Death Valley. The plane was trying to deliver Christmas trees to Furnace Creek when it crashed 60 feet short of clearing a ridge. The wreck wasn’t found for 6 months until it was discovered by 2 technicians going to a nearby microwave site.

We hiked and drove back roads in Death Valley National Park and collected mylar balloons as part of the DBRC (Desert Balloon Recovery Crew. Look for us on Facebook). This year we set an all time record of 78 balloons collected in 3 weeks.

Another great fall trip.