8-20-09 Thursday (Lions, Tigers and Clea)

Today we took the cats to the vet for their annual check up.  Jag was easy.  Clea was an absolute monster.  As a matter of fact, Jim and I have never seen her so evil.  The mountain lion vocals and hissing was unbelievable.  The vet assistant grabbed a towel to use in securing Clea to the table.  I think this made it worse.  Everyone had to back off.  Clea jumped into the sink and kept up with her growling and hissing while Jag under went his exam.   She was a complete bitch.  Jim was the only one brave enough to eventually grab her and stuff her ass back into the pet carrier.

 

We did a 30 minute cardio at the gym and then went to the Ale House with Mike, David and Dave for dinner.  They were running a 12 oz prime rib special for $10.95 with a choice of potato and coleslaw.  I opted for a rice and bean mix instead of fries.  3 out of 5 of us had the special and found it to be too fatty.  The Au Jus was creepy tasting.  Yes, I said creepy.  We’ll go back for other things in the future, but not for that.

Food choices weren’t too bad today.  For me, breakfast was a pear and lunch a big salad with baked chicken.  For dessert this evening we had Weight Watcher’s Ice cream sandwich thingys.  Eventually we’ll delete “dessert”.  For evening snaking we’ll stick with fruit (me) or cereal (Jim) in fat free milk.

8-19-09 Wednesday (Adding a 2nd Floor)

With getting to bed at 2am, waking up early just wasn’t going to happen.  Once we got motivated, I baked off some chicken and made salads.  I added corn, chick peas, black beans, broccoli, a pinch of feta (it came with the salad mix), chicken and lettuce and we ate a low fat meal using low fat dressing. 

A brand new RV supply store a block away from us had apparently just opened today and gave Jim a 20% discount (being the first or one of the first customers?).  Jim later compared priced and found they were only .50 higher than Camping World.  With the discount, of course it was a lot lower.  In addition to the savings, the convenience of not having an hour drive was a plus.  

Above: Scary burnt plug.

Above: New non-scary plug and scari-ish wiring.

Next project – Cardio.  We decided to go for a swim first and while there, Jim suggested we tread water in the deep end for a half hour.  I did it for 35 minutes, Jim for 40 minutes.  It felt like quite the workout constantly moving legs and/or arms.  I hope it was a good elliptical workout. 

You may notice me referring to Norma, Alix, or even Joanie in the next upcoming blog entries.  Norma is, in my eyes, a very fit health nut.  Alix has lost a lot of weight with Weight Watchers and looks fantastic.  Joanie is starting on Weight Watchers and has lost weight during her first week.  Here, Jim and I won’t be on any real strict diet but we do plan to lose weight.  We’ll be making healthier choices for lunch and dinner.  We’ll be cutting portions.  We’ll be doin’ the cardio thing and then eventually adding weight training as well.  We’ll get there.  We’ve done it before.

Speaking of food.  For dinner, I grilled a steak and we split it being it was thick.  I put a couple of potatoes in the microwave.  I then split them open, mashed them and added a smidgen (maybe a teaspoon)of butter, jarred garlic (I took it out of the jar first) and some Molly McButter Cheese Sprinkles.  I returned them to the microwave to finish the process (I removed it from the microwave prior to eating).  I steamed a HUGE portion of broccoli and topped it with some Mrs. Dash for some flavor.  The steaks sucked.  We usually like Sam’s steaks but these were tough.  We have 3 more in the freezer and then we’ll switch to Costco steak.  The potato concoction I created came out great.  The broccoli came out good.

So what’s to do on a Wednesday night?  Rummikub at Grandma’s!  This time when we came home it was a little earlier and the electric was still working.  Even though several of you said “Grandma is so cute”, she gave me crap for the picture I posted.  Yay for Grandmothers who can surf the net!

On another day’s blog comment, WalkOn posted this link which leads to this photo:

This was hilarious.  Ya know, there are benefits.  Perhaps wipers aren’t needed?

I really enjoyed this photo because I know things like this really do exist as we saw in Montana in September 2008.  Click here for that entry.

School buses are quite popular for use in remodeling.

8-18-09 Tuesday (Paris!)

At lunch time, Jim went shopping to Costco with Grandma.  Grandma is beholder of the membership card.  We let our membership lapse.  We had 3 warehouse memberships to BJ’s, Sam’s and Costco.  A little overkill for RV livin’, ya think?  Anyway, we still have our Sam’s membership since they’re more nationwide but we wanted some stuff that we found only Costco carried.  Two large bagged Parisian salad mix for under $4.00 each and a large bottle of Yoshida’s was on list, purchased, mission accomplished.  In the meantime, I went on some more job hunting-esque visiting.

 

For dinner, we went to Grandma’s and  prepared the meal at her house.  We brought chicken which Jim baked and then added BBQ sauce and some shredded cheese to.  Corn and baked beans = viola, a delicious meal.  Somewhat healthy.  Norma, what do you think?

After dinner, we played several games of Rummikub.  Before we knew it, midnight had arrived!  We hadn’t played this in a long time so it was a real treat.

Above: Jim will say this is a bad picture and I shouldn’t have posted it.  I guess he should have smiled so now it’s his problem.

 

Above: Eventually, Grandma had so many tiles she needed an extra holder.

 

Above: Harold thinks he might win.

We got home, obviously late, and our power was off.  We checked the breakers and what not’s.  The culprit was a burnt out plug end.  Scary.  That could have been a fire.  Off to 2 Walmarts I went with no luck of getting what we needed to make the repair.  To get through the night Jim spliced a cord.  Now we’ll he’ll have lots of cord end replacing to do tomorrow.  It was 2am by the time we got to bed.  Ugh.

8-16-09 – 8-17-09

Sunday:

And so it starts. Jim and I went to the campground gym today. I think I used to do 45 minutes of cardio on an elliptical machine. Today? Not so much. After 20 minutes I was sweating like a pig and so tired. I switched to a bicycle for another 10 minutes. Geez, we are truly out of shape.

Monday we plan on going grocery shopping and will plan healthy meals. Back to chicken and salads and maybe we’ll get into fresh fish. I’ve only made some stuffed fish (not so healthy) in the past and it was pretty good. Another time we bought some frozen fish fillets and they were mushy and gross. We like mild fish, any suggestions as what seasonings are tasty?

Later in the evening it was off to Bruce & Kevin’s house for dinner. It was damned delicious too. Pork roast with some sort of sweet and spicy dipping sauce made from maple syrup, soy sauce and some other yummy stuff that I can’t remember right at the moment. We also had stuffed butternut squash. Very good too. I’ll be gettin’ those recipes.

Monday:

The other day, Mom and I went to lunch and had hot wings. I was disappointed that the wings were scrawny and not as I remembered them to be. This time, Mom wanted to have Hooters hot wings. We went. They were meatier. I think they were stingy with the sauce which I guess was OK since I didn’t like it as much as “my place”. The sauce at “her place” kept separating into the butter and hot sauce from which it’s made. At times, that made it to be greasy. I won’t have those again. We’ve agreed to try another place in the future.

After lunch I went out to visit a ton of people from the organization (Galloway Family of Dealerships) I once worked at. I was basically stopping in to say “Hi, I’m back in town, if you have something for me, I’m probably interested.” I spent a lot of time chatting with about a dozen people. I still have a few stops tomorrow. We’ll give it a little bit of time here and if nothing comes up, then Jim will put out some more applications in other states. He’s applied for a few he really likes but we’re trying to stay here in the Fort Myers area, or at least in this state would be a plus.

Later some Publix subs and then off to Sam’s and Walmart for a healthy grocery list! We even bought some veggie burgers that rated highly per Consumer Reports.

In the Sam’s parking lot, I snapped a photo of this arrow. For some reason, it interested me. Did Sam’s pay extra to have an arrow within an arrow? Did the arrow guy have a book of stencils to show the Sam’s people?

“… and here we have the arrow within the arrow design which is great to use when possible doubt arises as to which direction is OK. We call this design the Arrow Squared Collection. Be the first warehouse club in your city to have this beautiful arrow.”

I’m just so sure it went down like that.

8-13-09 - 8-15-09

Friday: We’re still trying to work on the bath tub issue.  It’s not leaking right now, but it will again.  We’re looking into replacing it but it’s been discontinued.  We decided to go to a couple of RV dealers and look at current models in hopes of finding a similar tub.  We didn’t find one that would truly work but it was fun looking at motorhomes, 5th wheels and travel trailers.  They’re so cool.  We fell in love with this 5th wheel.

 

The floorplan is perfect.  No, we’re not buying it.

Wow, it’s been a slow 2 days.  Normally I’d just tell you about where I ate and who we visited with but that just makes for a boring entry sometimes.  A highlight from the past couple of days was Friday’s trip to Verizon.  As of the 14th, our contract was up and it was time to take advantage of new phone deals.  While I really wanted a Blackberry, the increase in monthly charges is just dumb for us.  Especially being 2 of us.  We picked the Motorola Rival A455 with a slide out keyboard.

Friday night we had dinner with Jim’s Mom and Morgan, and then Jim and I went to Walmart and Target looking for “the perfect” inexpensive holster for our cell phones.  A Friday night and there we were shopping.  We joked about our lack of a life which I suppose could be said about our fellow shoppers.  Life?  Aisle 12.

Saturday we met up with Jim’s Grandmother and Harold.  Harold hadn’t seen the RV so we gave him a tour, sat around and chatted for a while and then went to lunch.  Later, Jim’s Dad, Terry stopped by to look at our tub and make some suggestions.

Later in the evening, off to Glenn & Kevin’s for dinner, joining us was Brenda & Peggy.

Above: Glenn working the table.

 

Above: Glenn working the oven.

 

Above: Glenn folded the end of the toilet paper.  He sure knows how to impress us trailer folk.  I stole about half the roll.  Ever since they started locking the toilet paper up at Walmart, it’s been rough… literally.

 

Above: Jim, Brenda and Peggy.

 

Above: Kevin entertains us while Glenn prepares the table.

Thanks guys and ladies for a nice evening with good food and even better company.