11-18-08 Tuesday (Almost Home)

I called Bountiful RV yesterday. The 2 items left were the drip rails/gutters that had come in that day and getting a guy in to get the graphics done. I told the owner, Darren, that if need be, we could wait on the graphics and come back through for them after St. George. I asked that he call as soon as it's done. We never got a call, so I guess it's not done.

I hate to be a pain in the ass and call them so often. Being in the automotive industry, I dealt with the annoying "status check" phone calls. I can see why people do it. It's places like these that force me to stay on top. Tomorrow will be 3 weeks! Yeah, yeah, I know some of the holdup was getting parts. Some of the hold up was them not getting the right parts. From wrong colored awning arms to gutters no longer being made, a lot of this should have been hashed out 2 weeks ago. If we hadn't stopped by and noticed the wrong arms or the piss-poor gutter rail repair, this would have been even longer of a fiasco. I'm still not happy with some of the other "repairs", but I'm DONE. I want to move on.

I'll take photos of the repairs and post them. There was a "slice" in the rubber roof. They patched it with a glob as if they were frosting a cake. Maybe they thought to treat the patch like meringue? The other repair was the shower drain. They globbed white sealer onto the almond tub, obviously forgetting coloring basics - stay in the lines! Argh! You'll see it. You'll hear me bitch about it again, too. Trust me.

In a big city such as Salt Lake is, Progressive didn't have a preferred partner to make the repairs. This kind of leaves us to deal with the mess ourselves. We can't pass the blame onto Progressive. Besides, even if I could, I probably wouldn't. At times, we Americans are all about passing blame. "I'm late because of traffic, it's not my fault." "They should have salted the ice, now I've fallen and I'm going to sue." "They wouldn't have stolen the GPS if Studio 6 had security." Maybe WE were dumbasses for dangling the GPS-carrot out for the world to see. There's so many other blame placing quotes I could come up with, but you get the idea and probably have something better to do. So to sum it up, do I blame Progressive for not having a preferred partner? Nah.

While I'm up on the soap box, let me take a step up a little higher. Now, I'm just ranting. I can see how my mom raised me and how Jim's mom raised him. They weren't perfect, but they did a damn good job! I'm not leaving fathers out. Dads are there for us, but moms were around more often and did more of the wrong-right molding. I remember my mom having a conniption if I threw gum on the ground. She always gave me a piece of gum, and saved the wrapper in her purse. If no trash can was around for the now flavorless glob, she'd get that wrapper, wrap the old gum and put it back into her purse until a trash can was in sight. Jim and I do that with cigarettes. If you are the type that throws it out of the car window, you're an idiot. We've always taken our butts and put them in our pocket. Gross? Isn't smoking gross to begin with?

I won't even get started about pet owner's who don't pickup after their dogs.

Maybe I need to change this blog title to "Random Rants" or "Ramblings on Soap Box"?

We're EXPECTING the RV to be done today. In preparation, I'm doing laundry. That would be Preparation L, not H. It would take way too long to do all of this in the RV. I don't have to remind you of prior laundry blog posts.

Jim called Bountiful, they say it will be ready at 4pm. I have a bad feeling. I hope I'm wrong.

I've picked up on several other blogs in the past few days. I told you already that I've subscribe to some but now it's many. I'm almost addicted in ways. For blogs that have been around a long time, it does take a bit of reading to catchup, but once that's over, it's easy reading 1 entry per blog a day. Besides, we're temporarily retired, so what else do we HAVE to do? I take to reading the blogs much more than Jim. Jim reads maybe 2 out of the 9. Hell, he doesn't even read ours stating "I've lived it, why do I need to read it?" He does read our blog maybe once a week, probably out of boredom. I read the comments posted to keep him in the loop. Sometimes, I'll give him the general gist of the comment. To me, blogs are good reading.

Last night I chatted with Char (Charlene), a neighbor upstairs from us. She and her dog Ruby have been here for months. Messy divorce. Char, not Ruby, silly. We liked Char. She said something about if we had met sooner should would have invited us out with the girls. Sure, we're leaving tomorrow and now we finally meet someone. Dasher met Ruby, but it didn't go very well. They fought. Good thing they both were on leashes. Char, good luck to you and fry that bastard!

Laundry is now complete. Next task for us is to get the salt washed off the Cherokee and to pickup our hotel reimbursement check from Progressive. Exciting.

I'm so bummed. It's hard to find a gay RV park in California. One would think that even San Francisco would have one. We can't find one with full hookups. That's a lie, we found 1 but they aren't very close to the major cities. We prefer the gay parks. We can be ourselves. A lot of those parks have meet and greets and potluck dinners to attend. It's so awesome making new friends throughout the country. We haven't been at one since Georgia. Sigh.

OK, 6 hours later, we're back. We picked up our Progressive insurance check, had the Cherokee washed and then had its oil changed at Jiffy Lube. After that, we picked up the RV. It cost us $1300 for our deductible plus the non-covered repairs. We ate dinner at Applebees. Yeah, we had desert too. As I ate the lava cake, smothered in hot fudge with yet more hot fudge in the center and accompanied by icecream, I asked myself "Why am I getting fat?", but then I forgot what the question was so I finished my desert.

With the RV in the hotel parking lot, most of our stuff is back in the RV. We'll let the fridge/freezer cool and load the food tomorrow. We have some more to take to the RV but I called a coffee break (literally). I was feeling so tired, I needed the caffeine boost.

It's 10:30pm, we've finished loading what we can into the RV and now we can relax. One of us will sleep in the RV tonight to ensure its safety. We're just a little skittish since "The Great Cherokee GPS Heist of 2008 at Studio 6 in Salt Lake City Utah."

We've decided to stay in Salt Lake City a little longer. Yeah, I know but we have 3-4 days left on our prepaid RV park stay at Mountain Shadows. Another sigh........