3rd month sitting still for the winter

January 16 – February 11, 2015   

Like I said in the last post, I will be not making as many posts while we are sitting still for the winter.  This is my third one for this year!  

A cool trike at the local WalMart.  I want one!

We went to one of the big flea markets here a couple of weeks ago.

This is what we came away with from the flea market.  These 2 ceramic guys replaced our old weather station we brought from the old S&B in Hopatcong NJ.  

As we were leaving the resort one day we saw this heard of goats grazing across the street.  There are no fences to keep them off of the road, only the 2 people in the truck.

The weather has finally gotten back to the good to great level.  Most of January, the weather was mostly in the bad to good level.  The temperatures were in the 40s for lows and mostly low 60s during the daytime.  The real bad thing was that the sun didn’t come out very much.  Here, like most places in the south, if the sun comes out it feels great even with lower than normal temperatures.  January also brought quite a bit of rain.  But now, in February, we are finally feeling the great weather again.  So far, the weather in February has mostly been in the high 70s and low 80s.  Also, the nights are now starting to again be in the 60s.

Starting with Patty, she has not really gotten much better, but is sort of stable right now.  It just seems that she has hit some turning point in her diabetes that is not for the better. She still has the very low blood sugar (BS) episodes that she doesn’t see coming, and that is the point, she doesn’t see them coming.  She doesn’t use her continuous glucose monitor (CGM) because it is not very accurate making it a pain to use.  Well, right now I feel she needs to give this a try again.  When she had issues with the CGM accuracy she knew when she was having a BS low and could react before there were any issues.  Maybe the CGM will be accurate enough to give her a warning now.

Patty still reacts to having low BS with becoming unresponsive, but now has a very strange and scary state she goes into some of the times. This new state is where she becomes unresponsive but also agitated almost cartoon like. She contorts herself into weird positions and either screams and/or talking like she is in a cartoon.  The whole time she is like this she cannot follow basic instructions like “here, eat this sugar tab” or “please lay down so you don’t get hurt”.  It is a real struggle to get her BS back up.  This is especially true if we are out in public!  I am hoping people reading this can get the picture.

Patty is also still having low blood pressure (BP) episodes. However, this has lessened to some degree; not sure why either.  As for the arm scratching, Patty has had a neck MRI to check for nerve damage that might be causing the scratching.  We have not yet not had a follow-up with the PCP for that.  We are hoping for something positive there.

The bottom line here is that Patty needs to take better care of herself (eat frequently and on time, check her sugar levels and blood pressure often and regularly).  She has never done a very good job of this but now it is starting to matter!

A little about me, I’m basically in good health.  I now have a Primary Care Provider (PCP) here in South Texas, same one as Patty.  I had some blood work and had a visit with the new Dr and he said I was good to go until our next visit in a year, yeah!  

My golf game still sucks but it always just feels like I am about to turn the corner and lower my score into the 90s.  I have been right on the edge like that for a long time now.  I play the game so much better and more consistant but just not scoring better.  

Nice orange tree just off of the golf course.

Nice golf course pictures.

Big black birds sitting in a tree on the golf course.  The water around the courses here is mostly nasty treated sewage!  Some of it really smells bad.

A 150 yard par 3 hole over water.  I used a 6 iron and hit the wall on the far side. Great shot right at the pin but too short.

Lots of turtles around the courses. 

Now some news about the RV.  A couple of weeks ago as I was just finishing my first 1 mile lap on my morning walk, I get near the RV and I notice that the underbelly is sagging really low.  This usually means that there is a water leak somewhere filling up the plastic underbelly.  Water leaking in an RV is usually never a good thing.  I stop my walk and get under the RV and see that an area where 2 screws that hold in the plastic underbelly is torn revealing about 3 inches of the grey water tank.  So one of the grey water tanks has come loose from the RV frame and is partially exposed under the RV, not good!

The silver thing is the corner of the grey tank.

As usual, most RV parks have references to services that have treated people well in the park and here it is no different.  I got the name of a mobile RV tech and gave him a call.  He came out and took a look and thought at first that I would probably need a new tank and that was a 12 hour job! Can we say $$$$$$$$$$!!!!  The RV tech and I made an appointment for the following week to come out and fully diagnose the issue and see if I needed a new tank or not.  At that time we would get the warranty people involved.  Sounds like a plan!

We have an extended warranty on the RV so I got out the warranty paperwork to see if it was covered.  I learned my lesson from my last experience with the extended warranty as it applied to the truck.  The warranty is basically written that all is covered, but with a big list of exceptions and these are written with legal punctuation, you know, paragraphs that go on for several lines without a period and lots of commas and semicolons.

The only thing I found was that the warranty does not cover bolts and fasteners.  At this point I believe that the tank issue is probably due to a fastener coming loose and allowing the tank to fall down and that would not be good for us in collecting a warranty.
  
The day after the tech left I was pacing around in my head about what the issue is with the tank.  I am thinking that it may not be covered so I might as well start the investigation myself to save some money by taking the RV apart and also to satisfy my own curiosity.  

After taking more of the underfloor down I was able to get my head in under the floor and get a closer look at the tank.  I found that the tank is molded in the shape of a large T with the top of the T running across the RV from side to side, frame rail to frame rail.  The tank is made to be supported by the top of the T by angle brackets, one on each side.  The front side is where the tank has fallen out of the angle bracket.  The front angel bracket is welded in place to the 2 side frame rails and is still intact.  The other side of the tank, the back side, is also held in place with an angle bracket. However, this angle bracket is screwed into place with 2 self-tapping screws on each end to the frame rails.  Here too the screws are in place and secure.  So why did the tank fall? 

A look inside the under belly of the RV.  Directly above this is the storage compartment.

I'm trying to get a picture of the screws holding the tank bracket to the frame.  The only picture I got was of me on the outside looking in.

It looks as if the back screwed into place the angle bracket was not installed close enough to the tank on one end.  Then, over time, the tank moved around just enough to find the space to fall through the angle brackets.  In other words, the back angle bracket was installed incorrectly by the manufacturer.

I was feeling pretty good as I thought that an item that was not installed correctly by the manufacturer would certainly be covered under the extended warranty.  Well, I found out that I was wrong about it being covered!  It seems that any installation work by the manufacturer is not covered.  I was like, WOW!  The good news is that the cost was only $175 by the mobile tech to remount the bracket.  I have a $50 deductible so I only lost $125 on the deal.  Not really too bad; it’s just the principle that sucks!

A picture of the RV tech using 2 bottle jacks to raise the tank back into place.

Note the 2 holes to the left.  The holes are where the original screws went for the tank bracket. The 2 silver things next to the holes are where the new location is for the bracket.  That is all the space it took to let the tank drop down.

On one of the cooler days last week I decided to wash the entire rig, including the roof.  This is a big job which requires about 4 hours of time and a lot of work.  I try to clean the roof every 4 months or somewhere close to that.  The last time I cleaned the roof was when we were in Jackson Mississippi waiting on the truck repair back in Mid-October, 2014.  I probably didn’t need to clean the roof as much as the gutters needed to be cleaned as they were plugged up with pine needles from sitting under pine trees in Jackson.  Jackson was probably not a good place to clean the roof.  The exterior, however, did need a good cleaning.  I will probably clean the exterior sides again just before we leave here in April.  The roof, not again until sometime in June or July.

Ok, we have one more issue, a cracked windshield.  The crack runs right through our Florida toll road Sun pass.  Looks like we will need to get a new pass when we go back to Florida.  Since there are lots of rocks coming off of trucks here in South Texas, I am not going to replace the windshield until either it gets in my way or just before we leave here.  Windshields are cheap here as is the labor.

Yesterday we had a really great luau here in the park.  A few people got together and smoked brisket and pork butt all night for the party.  I think the amount of meat was around 150 pounds!  I managed to get 2 sandwiches, one brisket and one pulled pork.  The weather was great too at 80 degrees with a bright blue sky.  We also had just enough wind to make it very comfortable.  One of those days you can get really sunburned if you are not careful!

We start the Fun In The Sun (FITS) games this week and they end at the end of next week. FITS is a way for all of the park to have a great time and it also makes money for future entertainment.  Each game you sign up for you pay $2.  I am signed up for water volleyball and we both are signed up together in darts, Wii bowling, and horseshoes.  I would have signed up for golf but Patty has 2 doctors appointments on that day next week.

That’s pretty much it from here. 

Stay tuned!