30 April, 2016 - Raking leaves, buying campers, firefighters, parades, and more...

It's been nice to be home!  We still had tons of unpacking to go and we're working on de-cluttering the place (which isn't nearly as much fun as cluttering it up in the first place!). Boredom hasn't been an issue lately!  The place always needs some spring cleaning so we got into that as well.

There were still some hold-out leaves left on the trees when we left last winter so we finished raking them up this spring.

Since we have no chickens to scatter our freshly raked leaves, Scott volunteered to do the job.

We took the newly acquired ATV's out for a spin as well.  Scott is sitting behind Susan on the big four-wheeler.

We bought a kit to take the film off the headlights on one of our vehicles.  Scott took it on as a personal project when he found out that we got to use the drill and sanding disk.

And we have lots of work to do on the garden area.  Our garden has suffered some neglect the last three years as we've concentrated on using up some of our stored food.  We still have plenty of food stores but are going to start bringing the garden back up to snuff as well.  More on that later.

We bought an 1988 Ford One-ton camper conversion van.  This is what we've been looking for the last several years.  Something that's easier to get around in yet still has the comforts of home (at least some of them!).  The body is in good shape and the motor seems to run fine.  It needs some minor work done but I can handle that.  The first thing that's going to go is the AC unit on top. (It's been taken off now and a roof vent put in it's place.)

The view from the center looking forward.

And from the center looking toward the back.

And Scott trying it out for comfort playing on his tablet.

The guy we bought it from was pretty honest about what worked and what didn't.  He mentioned that the back tank was about dry but the front tank was full.  Don't know if he forgot to mention or didn't know (we bought it from a dealer) that the tank switch didn't work so when the rear tank ran dry ... Susan made a trip to town to get some more gasoline!  I had a feeling I should have filled the rear tank before we left but I didn't.  The Onan generator starts and runs but they have the wiring so messed up I don't know if it actually generates electricity yet.  I knew about that before we bought it.  The generator is nice but was not a deal breaker. I have some other tweaking to do on it as well before it's pronounced "healed."  By the way, the front tank was indeed full of gasoline.

Part of spring cleaning is burning slash piles.  We only had three I was concerned with so we picked a day between rain storms to do some burning.  Unfortunately, before the day was over I had to make a trip the emergency room.  My asthma flared up and the inhaler I carry for emergency use wasn't able to knock it back. I didn't realize at first what was happening.  We were finishing up on colds we caught in Nevada so I thought the coughing was from the cold.  I just got tired and laid on the ground next to the fire to rest.  Susan couldn't see me then and came over to find out why.  So Susan got me loaded up and we headed for Prompt Care in Eureka (about 20 miles).  They got me breathing okay again (Susan said I don't look that good when I'm turning purplish/blue .. I kinda' looked like Papa Smurf) and sent me home with a nebulizer and $100.00 in prescription medicines.  I'ts been pretty good since then.  Hope it stays that way.

Scott's uncle Tristan is the assistant fire chief on the local volunteer fire department and offered to let Scott ride in the truck in the Rendezvous parade.  Scott, of course, thought that was a fantastic idea and couldn't wait to get suited up and go with them.

Of course all the guys (and gals) know Scott and were enthusiastic about him being there.  They really are a great bunch of people who regularly put their lives on the line and get nothing but a "thank you" in return (most of the time).

Ready to roll!  That little guy is so happy he's about to burst.

We had to rush to get back on the street to see the parade.  

We didn't get to see all of it because we had to pick Scott up at the fire station.  This is looking down main street in Eureka.  That's probably about half the population in this end of the county.  There was a new archery shop in town so I stopped there and bought another string server and some more broad heads for my arrows (Zwickey 2-blade).

Parking can be a bit of a chore in a small town.  This is the highway coming in to Eureka from the south.

Booths are set up at the lower end of town near the river.

We also had company coming so we headed home quickly after the parade and were just a few minutes ahead of Scott's mom and dad and little brother.

We needed to swap out the studded snow tires on Scott's mom's car so his dad and I spent some time doing that before we had lunch.