Intellipower 9200

I find myself having to effect more and more repairs of our little Castle, notwithstanding the Camping World fiasco.  Though two of the three repairs were OK.  I paid 139.99 for a "Diagnostic" wherein they apparently figured out the problem.  That fix amounted to nothing more than a little jiggling of wires and the repair lasted less than a day after we returned to our work location..  Faced with the dilemma of returning to Camping World and no doubt arguing whether or not this was a new problem, pay more money and leave or house "at the shop"  Screw it, I turned to Amazon.  for $150.00 I got a 45 Amp Intellipower Unit with Battery Wizard.  

Now all I had to do was get the old one out of here

Which took most of the day.  The old Newmark being four times the size and weight

The new Converter installed.

In addition to providing more Amperage to be used to power more utilities, this Converter also acts as a smart charger.  The old Converter provided a constant trickle.  Too little if on the road and only on shore power or a generator.  And too much if hooked to shore power for extended periods easily cooking the Battery dry.  The Battery Wizard here

Where I elected to hide it behind a cupboard door senses if the battery is fully charged and when parked on a short term basis has a booster function at the touch of a button to charge the battery faster.  Cool huh?  The job was more intimidating than it actually was.  The hardest part getting the old monster out amid a jumble of wires.   In effect there are only three wires and the Battery Wizard to install when the mess is all sorted out.  Newer modernized fuse boxes are made to go with these but honestly, the old one seems to work just fine.  Because there would be AC to deal with the DC, I think changing out the fuses would have been much more daunting

I was hoping to get a little more formal training on RV repair but I am probably halfway there with the issues I have dealt with to date.  Probably the most helpful has been the illustrated YouTube videos  Just thought I would share this little experience with likely an Eskimo, yes an Eskimo in, Let's see GREENLAND.  Probably the only other person to read this Post  Sigh....

Dose of Reality St. Paddy's Day in Austin

Lisa and I do not tend to spook real easily.  Both of us having experienced our share of unpleasant situations for many years in a past life.  We were released from our last gig two days ago.  Usually, I can do this stuff standing on my head.  This time though, between the really inclement weather and getting sick at the same time I finished up feeling like my butt had been kicked pretty good.  So back to Austin, hoping for the end of South by Southwest but having to settle for St. Paddy's day.  We went downtown, I suspect to the area where the three folks had been killed by the Dirtbag running from the Cops, No let me rephrase that Pre Crispy Fried.  Because that is what he deserves and hopefully likely to get.  God Bless Texas. I am sick to the point of throwing up about hearing of these guys poor home lives and head traumas they may have had.  I just want to hear when he is put down. Anyway,  this is a Big City.   I like many  others  think homeless folks deserve some kind of break. The situation handled in a humane manner  Particularly the Vets, which a substantial number of them are.  Lest one forget however, many of these folks are unstable, mentally ill or addicted.  And in fact dangerous in the right circumstance. On this last point we arrived downtown in the Sixth Street area about ninish and pulled into an apartment building parking lot..  A pathetic looking likely homeless guy was caught in our headlights crossing in front of us.  The angle that I was driving probably looked to the guy like I was tracking him but I wasn't and I stopped to let him pass in front. When I first saw the guy, it looked like he was adjusting a pad of some kind on his hip.  It wasn't a pad.  Probably thinking he was about to be attacked  he was in defense, and not offense mode as I saw the flash of a Kbar size knife flash under his jacket.  He didn't directly display it and momentarily glared at us, then scurried away.    He was about six feet away and Lisa did not see it.  Both of our windows down and door unlocked.  The action happened so fast that, frankly there wasn't time for action.  This occurred right after witnessing another drunk driver tearing up the wrong way on a one way.  We mulled the events over for a few minutes wondering if this was a bad karma night but decided to get out and wander anyway.   I won't even mention the crazy black guy following us to our car mouthing unintelligible sounds and swinging his arms.  Oh, I mentioned that didn't I?  Soooo...

This is really an awesome area.  It reminds me of Bourbon street in New Orleans.

             For Dustin.  Getcher wandering shoes on Boy.

Street View

Geeeeez why does she like closeups.  This is actually the best pic of me.  The Sons of Anarchy shirt had a Four Leaf Clover on it.  Sooooo, any other questions?

I got this Pic of Lisa as she was trying to escape. Hehe.

\

She decides to Pose

                                                                     Kind of getting into it.

Oooohhhh Lights

   

                                                                                        Coooooollll

And that about sums up our night.  We went to a bar a lot closer to home.  I had a couple of IPA's and a shot of Irish Whiskey.  Thoroughly kind of trashed as being near sixty tends to make one a cheap date again.  Lisa drove us home.  Happy St. Paddy's Day.  Yeah there were a lot of folks in costumes and what have you that we could have taken pics of but we know how that probably would have turned out.   See you on the Boat.  

Working on it

“I always said that if I wasn’t studying psychopaths in prison, I’d do it at the stock exchange.” – Robert Hare, creator of the Hare Psychopathy Checklist and its variants, the most widely used diagnostic tools for psychopathic personalities.


Three days to go and then Vacation.  Last two weeks have been rough on this old body.  Last week notably by first the Cold.  Wind whipping so hard that I couldn't move in and our of our little trailer the wind threatening to tear the door off.  Consequently, I sat in the Bronco with the Heater on full.  Check in a few rigs and duck into the Bronco, shivering and bone cold.  This was then followed by a few nights of rain.  To refer to what we called a Daveism, the moniker we chose to name my old friend, well Dave's various descriptions of events.  "It rained like a Cow pissing on a flat rock" for hours on end.  Also bone cold chilling. Almost makes one look forward to Summer.  Oh thats right, it gets to around 118 here.

Nevermind.  Because our Crew is breaking up our sweet alternating two week gig is coming to an end after this  period.  Too bad.  We had just gotten to know these guys and our Bosses.  Best bunch so far.  Hate to lose them.  The "Company Men" who I swear range from late twenties to early eighties make a point out of stopping for short chit chats coming and going to the facility. They talk us up to our Company guy, (the one who we are independant contractors for).  Paid top dollar too, $200.00 a day.  Far cry from some of my old bosses at the state.  I would qualify this that not all but some, especially the bigger bosses  either glared at me in passing or seemed to really try to make a point of convincing me that my presence was not really appreciated.  Consequently causing me to complete a list of all those who, if drowning, or broke down in the Desert, probably should not ask me for a lift, life ring, five bucks...whatever 

Repairs
I am slowly getting accustomed to the fact that these rigs we are living in, were probably not designed to be lived in very long.  The upkeep is driving me a little crazy.  I was getting behind and kind of threw up my hands.  Screw it, I'll just take it to Camping World and have their skilled technicians fix the stuff and just pay for it. 

Two weeks later standing in line waiting to pay a thousand bucks for what I had estimated would be about two thirds that amount, I looked down and saw an entry for a hundred bucks for a muriel that had been pasted on my refrigerator door of Deer.  Fifteen minutes of  some heated discussion got that portion of the bill modified.  (The muriel had been glued on somebody else's refrigerator, the kind of person who had excess fun tickets to pay for that kind of thing.)  Still, I walked out nine hundred and change shorter than I had walked in.  

Two weeks later, other that what appears to have been a credible job of attaching a new bumper, I seem to have paid about five hundred bucks for some tech to wiggle a few wires on an old converter and spend fifteen minutes connecting a new water pump without checking to see if it would work all right after it was installed.  Earlier we had sat in a waiting area listening to some other folks griping.  I had discounted the talk as folks who were just hard to please.  Then from the accounts from reviews found on the Internet I'll be rethinking ever going to Camping World for repairs.  I seem to wind up doing most of them anyway.


So, some kind of Google software picked out these two photos as, I don't know, worthy I guess.  I am reposting them here

http://ifarton.com/_farticles-Lincoln-fart-joke.html/#.UyFdGvldXW4



Sorry, got distracted.  And this one......



I don't have a clue.  I could see why Stonehenge Abe might get picked but the Pic I dubbed Redneck 2 I think is only marginal.  Anyway.



Cat's out of the bag.  Had an earthquake here the other night near Yorktown, a short distance from here.  I didn't feel a thing.  Apparently it was a pretty small one anyway about 2 on the Richter scale.  I've literally personally been present in at least five earthquakes wherein I should have felt some tremors.  No nada, never.  But to the point that this most recent earthquake occurred as a direct result of oil recovery activity ie Drilling. For some reason despite all of the back and forth hoo hah between Big Oil and the Environmentalists, each hurling allegations at each other that may or may not be true, there seems to be a lot of dead air.  In this case there don't seem to be any pricey abogado mouthpiece involvement.  The truth is according to the papers here anyway is that nobody is denying this fact.  The culprit is not "Fracking" (well maybe indirectly) but the use of injection wells.  Filling the void where the Oil used to be with water .  Apparently here in Texas these injection wells are located near or on a number of faults.  There doesn't seem to be any expert opinions on what the longer term effects may be or if the Earthquakes might get a whole lot bigger.  One thing's for certain.  The drilling industry is here to stay.  The amount of Oil taken from here is enormous and even though there seems to be grudging acknowledgement of the cause of the Earthquakes, the spin on this  is that the earthquakes are so small as to be inconsequential.  Hmmm, maybe Mother Nature won't take kindly to being  disrespected in such a manner.

The Right wing is always talking about job creation.  It's their mantra really.  Obama Care in the House was officially titled the "job killing" Affordable Care Act or some such thing.  The pushback on raising the minimum wage was that half a million jobs would be destroyed.  However they seem to get a pass whenever they make laws to steal jobs from the private sector and turn inmates into slaves.  Currently the Idaho Legislature is trying to pass a bill to force inmates to work for farmers but only in the event they can't find enough "Agriculture workers" (interpret this as illegals, another class of slave)  But a simple Internet search would have saved them the trouble as this tact has already been tried and failed in other red states.  The cost of supervision and offsite feeding and housing offset any benefits from it.  Unless you want the gasp "Taxpayer" to fund the labor to the profit of private parties.  And another reason to which I think I can speak with some authority on.  Alot of these folks wind up in prison because they don't want to work AT ALL. let alone hard farm labor.  Don't get me wrong, a lot of prisoner's are hard workers but the average unsocialized youngster tends not to be.  As a PO, it was difficult to keep some of these guys working when the jobs were plentiful.  So unless they want to pass another bill called the " Taser Incentivization Bill" or something similar, it's a bust and as stupid as some of the other things they have done.  

Jack Crabb:  General you go down there.

General Custer:  You are advising me to go down into the Coulee

Jack Crabb:  Yes Sir.

General Custer:  There are no Indians down there I suppose.

Jack Crabb:  I didn't say that.  There are thousands of  Indians down there and when they get through with you there won't be anything left but a greasy spot.  This ain't the Washite river General and them ain't helpless women and children waiting for you. They're Cheyenne brave, and Sioux.  You go down there General if you've got the nerve.

General Custer:  Still trying to outsmart me aren't you mule-skinner,  You want me to go down there, but the subtle truth is you  really don't want me to go down there.

From Little Big Man

26 Degrees and 30 MPH winds

4:00 AM and freezing my Ass off  in South Texas, where the Snowbirds go.  However in about three weeks I will be lounging in a deck chair off to Europe for a three week break.  Paid for the tickets today.  Makes it all worth it somehow.

Nice Panoramic near Gonzales

http://i41.photobucket.com/albums/e265/mmmike222/Mikes%20Album/1802_zps82dc6377.jpg

Across the Country almost, in black and white mostly then aw crap

So starting on the sixteenth of last month we set out on a 7 state ordeal to make a quick trip to Idaho to catch the second Bday of our Granddaughter.  Flying back, I got stuck in Salt lake City for the night.  I spent a fair enough time poring over various cheap hotels and picked one mostly because it had a shuttle.  All for 46.00 bucks a night.  It's not like there weren't any other good deals in SLC, on any other night there were.  Just not that night because of a convention of Salt Lake Citers or some such thing.  So after picking what I thought would be an appropriate fleabag, WITH A SHUTTLE on Hotels.com, Where as soon as you push the button you are already past the deadline of getting even a partial refund back,  So, I gave them a call to come pick me up..  Manager says the Shuttle driver is gone and he does not have  a badge to get in the Airport.  He invites me to take the Light Rail.  So, affable guy I am, I say sure.  Now I have two fatal flaws that Lisa tends to make up for me.  Consequently as a team we tend to get around pretty effectively.  Alone, I am a disaster.  The first:  I couldn't navigate myself out of a paper bag without a GPS.  The second loveable characteristic about me that has plagued me my entire life and has been passed down generation to generation is a tendency to be absent minded. OK that is kind of an understatement. Seriously, when my son was little and his Grandfather came to visit, I became aware the next morning that my Dad, couldn't find his car keys, I couldn't find my wallet and my son, who was about seven at the time, couldn't seem to find his backpack. It was kind of hilarious all this scurrying around trying to find crap.just to start the day.  Anyway, back to my story.  Naturally I became confused and disoriented trying to figure out the SLC transit system.  Anyway I soon figured out that I had passed my stop about six stops and needed to get off to take another train back.  I just barely stepped off when I noticed my back pack containing my LIFE, was not on my back.  I swung around to grab it just as the train doors close.  Vainly punching at the button that's supposed to open the damned door.  Aaaand I watched my stuff speed away.  After geting over the gut wrenching of it all I contacted a transit cop checking tickets.  He listened sympathetically and even radio'd ahead to try I guess make some kind of positive outcome of it all.  Problem is I have been in that guy's shoes.  Looking at some poor dumbass like myself and we both knew my stuff was gone permanent.  I have experienced some incredibly good Karma before.  But you just sense when it has run out. .  I have put in a report of the stolen stuff and I have googled as many black magic and voodoo sites as I could find in the hopes that whoever swiped my stuff will have a lot of bad shit happen to him.  Kind of like those stupid Final something movies. As soon as I am alone I throw a tantrum properly reflecting the dignity, or lack thereof, of  a guy of my age nearing sixty.  Anyway... (Ive been saying Anyway a lot sorry)vghju8  So after a virtually sleepless night, I go to the lobby of said fleabag and pluck a powdered sugar donut named "Continental Breakfast" and ask the nice lady if I could have a ride to the Airport.  She says she is clueless as to the driver's location but that he has taken some folks somwhere, not the Airport.  I kind of thought that was the main purpose of the shuttle, and the driver's existence. Shows you what I know. Anyways, make a long suffering story come to a close, the driver shows up ten minutes later.  Says he cant't take me to the Airport for forty five minutes.  Fleabag rules the guy says.  Guess I probably should have put this whole rant on Trip Adviser, just I don't want to get sued by the Motel with the initials EL, the first word being Econ... something something (in Salt Lake City).  OK.  

The trip was fast and we were only in Idaho a few days.  I took the following  pics along the way.  I think some of them are interesting given that we were in Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado, Wyoming , Utah and finally Idaho.  Little time to see the family, hit a Bday party and little else. 

Ss

We stopped in Wellington in North Texas for lunch at the Roberson Family Resturant.   For six bucks you get Chicken fried steak, bowl of Beans, salad, french fries, drink and chocolate frosted yellow cake.  As I have mentioned before I think. Every town to the last tiny cotton picking one has at the least, a Pizza Hut, Sonic and DQ.  The last time I ate at Sonic, for a few burgers and some extras it came to twenty seven bucks.  



Whether you're a believer or not, you'll get a healthy side of Jesus and be served by a waittress you know whose name is Flo or some such. . .You'll also eat with good people with  Texas accents so thick you can't understand a word they are saying.  You just know they are damn fine folk.  Never in my life have I had the door held for me so often or been addressed as "Sir" so often.  

                                    Interesting Texas Landscapes or boring Texas Landscapes depending on which side you are on.

                      I like taking pics of water towers.  I don't know why, Cuz I do.

                                                                        Shamrock, Texas Duh

i                                      Nearly all of these Towns are old.  Some are dead.  Not sure why this one seems to be thriving.  They really all look alike.

                                           

                                             

                                         And Windmills.

                                                                                                                       

                                                                                                              And Old stuff

And sometimes just basically nothing.

                                                     Lisa calls these "Halloween" trees.

                                           

                                                   Freeze action at 75+ mph.

                                                   Perspective

The following two pictures were taken with a zoom.  Lisa just happened to see the silhouette of the praying Cowboy.  It is strategically placed and seems to be a memorial of some kind.  Anyway, I think these are just awesome as you can tell from my header pic.

                                                                                            b                                                                                                                                Beat and Dog weary tired in Oakley Kansas.  

                 
          I dunno, I thought there might be rainbows and cute little cartoon animals running around the front lawn.  Maybe there is if you partake.  Instead there are armed guards and cameras.  Denver, CO

Angry weather building over the Rockies.

                           Ever see the old Stephen King movie "Langoliers"

And if I have completely bored you then No, I will not be giving you back the last ten minutes of your life.  Maybe better luck next time. Anyway we just purchased the Cruise to Barcelona. Should be interesting. Ardvaark.