Happy New Year!

My days are becoming busier and busier with less time to blog.  I’ve given notice with Heartland and after January 31st will no longer be able to blog for them.  I’m gonna do my best to keep up our personal blog though…so y’all can follow along on this crazy business venture we’ve started.

We celebrated the New Year by sleeping through it…in bed by 10:00 pm.  New Years Eve has never really been a big thing for us…why start now?  We did, however, try to bring as much luck into the new year by enjoying some ‘good luck’ foods – pork ribs, sauerkraut (me) and black-eyed peas (Michael).  We were also supposed to have some corn bread but I completely forgot to make it!  Let’s hope that that one omission doesn’t taint our good luck for the year!

Along with the rest of the country we experienced cold snap here in San Antonio too.  We had a couple of days with highs in the mid 30s and about 4 or 5 nights of below freezing temps.  Michael disconnected the hose from the water spigot (letting it drip) and made sure we had water in our fresh water tank so we had water…but the hose froze so he couldn’t hook it back up to the spigot until it thawed out.  Too cold to thaw outside, so he brought it in and let it warm up in the shower…that worked!  LOL

It has finally warmed up enough that the hose it hooked back up to the spigot and the fireplace and space heater aren’t working over time.  We’re now looking at highs in the 60s for the foreseeable future.  That’s more like it!

We don’t use much propane but since it was so cold, the furnace kicked in a few times because it was too cold for the heat pumps to turn on.   Since we’ll be heading toward Arizona soon we had our two 40 pound tanks topped off here at the park, so we should be good to go for the trip west.  Propane was $2.65 here at the RV park on post…what is it in the ‘real’ world??

Tuesday, Michael and an abdominal ultrasound to see determine what is causing the pain in his upper right quadrant.  He has no appendix or gall bladder…so it’s not either of those maladies.  The ultrasound tech asked him, ‘Do you have a follow-up appointment scheduled?’…which, to us, sounded like he should have one.  I called the clinic to see if I needed to make one and was told that the provider would check the test results and get back to us.  Ok…

The ‘all too familiar’ Star Wars introduction

That afternoon we stopped at our ‘mail box’ and picked up the three boxes we’d shipped here from Wisconsin and then went to the movie theater to see our first movie of the week of 2018, Star Wars.  We both really enjoyed it.  We both said that most times we have a hard time following along and fully understanding what’s going on in a Star Wars movie – but this time we were completely able to follow along.

How many guys does it take to inspect a refrigerator??

Wednesday brought an insurance inspector and our RV repair guys.  The extended warranty program required an independent inspector to come and check things out (they did last time too) before they make their final decision on how to proceed.  Last time the inspector recommended a new refrigerator…and the insurance would only pay for a new cooling unit on the back.

It took several weeks for the cooling unit to come in and then be installed.  Unfortunately, we don’t have that kind of time to wait since we have to start our trek west on Monday.  So without knowing what the insurance company’s decision was we had George order a new fridge, since it was available and ready.  If the insurance only pays for a cooling unit, we’ll pay the difference.  Please cross your fingers and say a prayer or two that the insurance company goes our way.

Our new site is just on the other side of that Raptor…quite a haul!

Thursday morning we moved from one site to another as we’d had to extend our stay here a few days while we waited for the refrigerator.  The complete move took us about 20 minutes from hook up to disconnecting.  We are now snuggled into site 2, which is two rows directly across from where we were in site 14.

Michael helped maneuver the old and new units

Thursday afternoon, Kenny and Brandon were back with our new fridge and got it installed with some effort and a couple of pinched fingers.  We were asked to let it sit for about 24 hours without turning it on since it had to be laid on its side to get here.  They did turn it on long enough to be sure it worked and then quickly turned it off.

Shiny and new!

Our old fridge had ‘wood’ doors and this one is stainless steel.  Michael wanted to switch out the doors and put the wood on this fridge…I convinced him not too.  I like the stainless steel and never really liked the wood-look.  The fridges are pretty much identical except for that and that this new one has a water dispenser in the door.  Not sure if we’ll every really use that…but it’s a neat feature.

Now, that we have a fridge (hooray!) I’ll need to go to the commissary this weekend and get some meat in the freezer.  We managed pretty well with refrigerator/freezer over the past week.  Thank goodness for free ice and freezing temps to keep things cold in a cooler outside!