Puzzling Behavior

Flamingo Lake RV Resort
Jacksonville, FL

I just took four Advil. That’s no surprise. I am a classic overindulger. If two will make my back feel better, just imagine how much faster and how much more effective four will be.

I have my son to blame for this backache. He gave me a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle for Christmas, which I have been bending over for four hours straight. John quit sorting at about 45 minutes. He’s much more of an immediate gratification type and I guess the task I had assigned him – finding edges – was not doing it for him.

The weather here in Jacksonville is gorgeous. It hit a high of 81 today, but a dry and breezy 81, so I was lured outside with my puzzle and the new felt roll-up puzzle-saver I just bought.

I labored on creating my border for most of the afternoon, stopping only when I realized I could put the stripey building together in short order. Immediate gratification. I’m not immune.

The whole time I thought I was doing a San Francisco skyline, but when I consulted the box, it turned out to be New York. What’s with these puzzle makers? They take every pretty building in a city and squoosh them all together next to the waterfront and you’re supposed to recognize your home city?

Last time I looked the UN wasn’t pink. Nobody was fishing in the East River. Trolling for bodies, maybe, but not for something you might possibly eat. And I defy anyone to photograph Lincoln Center from the Brooklyn Bridge. It’s on the other side of town, guys!

When you can’t recognize the city you worked in, played in, loved and hated your whole adult life, that’s not a picture of your city. It’s a nice picture, a colorful picture, and a fun puzzle to do. It’s just not my city.

All of which is why, having blown an entire afternoon trying to get started, I’m still not finished with the border. I do have the stripey building, but god knows where that goes. (Or where it is in Manhattan, for that matter.) For now it’s in the middle.

At five, I called it a day and rolled up my green felt cloth, stuffed it into the tube that was in the box, then read the directions and realized I should have rolled the puzzle up with the tube inside the felt to keep the pieces in place.

So it looks like I’ll be doing the border over the next time I take my puzzle out to spend a lovely day in the out of doors, with the sun and the breeze and a Diet Coke and nothing but nothing else to do but have fun. Ah well.

Upgrades

Flamingo Lake RV Resort
Jacksonville, FL

All the behaviors you practice as a homeowner come into play when you live in an RV.

At home, if you go to bed with the dishes undone, it’s because you forgot to turn on the dishwasher. When you do that in an RV, you wake up to a sink full of smelly dishes.

If your recliner breaks one day, you consign it to the basement and let the kids jump on it. In an RV, you get out the gorilla glue, turn it upside down and try to mend its sorry guts. That’s what I’m staring at right now. An upside-down recliner that’s leaning on a counter trying to recover from my ministrations. Lovely.

If your rug gets dirty you can clean it yourself, or send it out. Here, when the dog regurgitated a hairball, or whatever dogs regurgitate, we didn’t see the spot until the stain had set permanently. Then we noticed another we’d overlooked. So now we have to rip up the rug and completely redo the interior of our coach. Putting a plant in the middle of the rug is not an option.

You’d think I’d be upset about this, especially given our recent bill for a new bumper for the car, but actually this works right into my house-behavior theme.

I love to decorate, and changed things in the house with some frequency. But RVs nail everything down. Every piece of furniture, except for the afore-mentioned broken lounger, is permanently installed. The rug is wall-to-wall, extending up the wall in places, a style that went out in the fifties. Everything is beige or gold or brown, none of which is my color, not that I dislike the combination for somebody else. It’s just not me.

In fact, this not-decorating is not me. So now I get to re-do our new home after only eight months. Heaven!

I’m going to rip out the ugly rug, tear up the brick-shaped white tile in the kitchen and bath area, and put in a tile floor. Speckled black, if I get my way. No matter that every dog hair will show. I’ll just get out the damp mop and tidy up. And it will be shiny and reflective and make us look like those $3 million Newells. The ones with the gold faucets and mirrored ceilings. And what are those mirrored ceilings for anyway?

John wants to replace all our window screens with sleek black motorized screens. Ah, one more remote to misplace. I love this idea, since as I look up from the computer screen, not one single shade is plumb. They’re all at odd angles, and I feel like I’m living a scene from Gaslight where Charles Boyer tries to convince his wealthy wife Ingrid Bergman that she's crazy by tilting all the pictures. If that technique really worked, I’d be a lunatic at this point.

Next up comes the bathroom, with its Sanitas wallpaper. How great would some marble tile look in there? And it would be nice to replace the folding coffee table that I “repaired” with some extra-long screws that are now poking through the top of the table. Please, don’t judge me too quickly. The newspapers don’t slide off anymore.

Can I find an excuse for replacing the bed linens? I’ll figure something out. I always do.

This redecorating is fun. We haven’t spent a dime yet, and I’ve already mentally wiped out our retirement nest egg. We’ll be saying “Welcome to Walmart” sooner than we expected.

Maybe I shouldn’t do the marble in the bathroom.

Granite could work.

One More Time

Sun City Hilton Head SC

It seems only fitting that I resume this blog with a tragedy, since that’s how it started, and especially since my misadventures apparently make you all chuckle out loud. (I can only imagine how hilarious you thought granny’s funeral was, or how Uncle Hiram’s bum leg made you weak with laughter every time he fell down.)

In any event, we’ve been in New York briefly, then in Mexico for two glorious weeks, then back up to Syracuse to pick up our newly repaired motor coach after only 7 months of delays. Turns out the subcontractor was holding up sending the doors to the body shop because the maker of our coach owed them money. We paid the subcontractor directly, and the doors showed up three days later. Go figure.

We hooked up our Jeep to the RV and took off again for more adventures. The drive south – believe me, the only place to head when it’s nineteen degrees everywhere else – took us through Tennessee, where we stopped for a rest, enjoying the 60 degree weather, shucking our coats and even contemplating riding our bikes. Not riding, just contemplating.

We got up the next morning to snow and a 22-degree freeze. Brrr. We put the coats back on, then another coat on top of that and decided to wait until the sun melted the snow. It didn’t, so two days later, we slipped and slid our way out of Tennessee.

We stopped overnight in Charleston, SC, and had dinner with our good friend Jimmie Moreland, then proceeded towards Hilton Head. We decided to have a look at one of Del Webb’s Sun City retirement villages and were going along a lovely palm tree-lined street, at 5 mph I swear, when John suddenly announced, “The bumper’s gone.”

Hello, what? What bumper? Gone where? From where? I hadn’t heard or felt a thing, and believe you me, you do get tuned in to trouble when you’ve had as much as I have.

I looked out the front window of the bus. “No," John said, “Not the bus, the Jeep.”

I jumped out of the coach and ran to the rear. There, trailing along behind us, was the Jeep’s bumper. To be more correct, the bumper wasn’t gone. The Jeep was.

Almost. It was holding on by a shred of plastic and in another five seconds would have been on its merry way, alone.

No sooner had we assessed this latest catastrophe than four men appeared out of nowhere and offered to help. “No face plate,” one intoned. “Bad installation,” said another. “Gimme that, “ said the third, taking the sledge hammer out of John’s hand and proceeding to tap out the connecting bolts.

Now this is a fact. I’ve seen it more than a few times in these eight months. Retirees are the most willing, helpful, generous people in the universe. It’s as if they sit around waiting to put all the skills they ever learned in life to good use. Have a breakdown and they fight each other to be first to offer assistance. Got questions about life in this community? How much time have you got to listen? Need directions? Hell, they’ll take you there, buy you a meal and wash your car while you’re eating.

Of course, they won’t hesitate to tell you why what you’re doing, or where you’re going, or how you were doing something is wrong, but that’s because they’ve done it all before, many times. It’s just the price you pay for the expertise.

We paid it gladly. They had the bumper shored up, the tow bar removed from the RV, and the Jeep ready to roll in a matter of minutes. Then they gave us directions to the Jeep dealer, information on where to park the RV for the night, and a baloney sandwich.

Okay, I lied about the sandwich, but you get the idea.

The RV park turned out to be a boat and RV storage lot, but it’s quiet, at least, and we do have water and electricity. And just because we love spending the big bucks, we’re going to rent a car while the Jeep is in the hospital and go see Hilton Head Island.

What, one little tragedy and you think we’d sit here in dry dock feeling sorry for ourselves, doing crossword puzzles, eating potato chips, and calling our friends to complain?

Actually, that sounds like fun. Talk to you later.

Mehico.

After six months of traveling around the country in a motor coach, with its tiny shower and cozy bedroom, its efficiency kitchen and mini living spaces, we left our coach in Syracuse and headed in our little Jeep back home to Westchester.

We spent a night in the glorious and welcoming comfort of our dear friends Maggie and Fred’s’ home, then headed for their getaway on the lake in Goshen, Connecticut, for two wonderful days of doing nothing: sitting by the fire, watching TV, drinking Cosmos made by Fred and eating wonderful meals made by Maggie. We spent a night out at our favorite haunt, Amalfi’s in Briarcliff Manor, then were treated to a delicious meal at Kathy Higgins’ house. I spent a day by myself in New York City, getting my poor neglected head of hair righted, seeing loved friends and dropping in at the office.

In the daytime, we got our health checked out by the doctors in Mt. Kisco, dropped off one bag of dry cleaning, the sum total of six months of on-the-road living, and bought shoes and sweaters for ourselves.

At the end of the week, having lived off the generosity and kindness of Mag & Fred, we took off for Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, with Marty and Joyce Kaplan. We’ve now been in Mexico for five days, and I’m sitting on the veranda of our time-share, watching the sun go down, drinking a glass of wine and planning the next visit to the spa, where I will have another wonderful hot-stone massage.

If you’ve never had a hot-stone massage, let me recommend one to you. I am as limp as a half-cooked noodle, my muscles singing from the gentle, warm treat they just enjoyed, and trying to keep my eyes from closing. John is snoring in the bedroom, Marty just gave up on his book, and Joyce is still in the hot tub back at the spa. How decadent can one vacation be.

Cabo is one of the most beautiful places in the world. The people are welcoming, kind and friendly. You can walk the streets at night without worry, and the sunsets are not to be believed.

The whales are here, but they’re not close to shore, as they were last year, when I had a junky litttle camera that never caught them as they danced and pirouetted near the shore. The whale show was the reason I asked for and received a fabulous Canon camera for my birthday, but it looks like we’ll have to move our lazy selves off our terrace and into a motor boat to see them. That’s okay. We have all the time in the world, and it’ll be an adventure. I only hope that I get some decent shots.

Cabo is growing exponentially, and the prime seaside homes are going for over a million, and some are in the ten-million-dollar-and-up range. It makes me very grateful that we spent the money we did seven years ago to buy a timeshare here in one of the prettiest places around.

For all its newfound sophistication, and despite John Travolta’s fiftieth birthday party which brought it into the headlines big time, Cabo still has some of the aspects of a small town. There’s a paper called the Gringo Gazette, which this week carried a paid advertisement that read “DAVE ANDERSON, DEAD BEAT. Sponge painter, owner of Baja Finishes. This is a small town, you need to pay your bills! Aren’t you running out of people to rip off yet? We see you can afford to pay for sex at Mermaids, why can’t you pay your bills?

I guess ad space is pretty cheap. A couple of pages back, another ad reads “Cross Roads Country Club Doesn’t Live Up To Its Name” You’d think it was a slam at a place that disappointed some would-be golfer, but no. It’s a paean to the food, the owner, and the services. As far as I could see, there is no connection between the body of the ad and the headline. Not even a play on words. But they did get me to read it.

The publisher of the paper, identified as one Carrie Duncan, H.H. – now what can that mean? –is a California blonde of a certain age, who also owns a restaurant in town. Everybody here also owns a restaurant.

This week’s editorial talks about a plane trip she took up to California, where she purchased some t-shirts to sell down here. Returning to Cabo, she was radioed by the border police and told to land, which she did. As they were searching her plane for contraband, they discovered a Home Depot tool box which she told them had “cat shit” in it. The guard reached into the box, and came up with a handful of “cat shit,” which of course infuriated him, but she was allowed to continue on her way. Cat shit, as humorously reported in the local newspaper, as a good way to transport taxable goods across the border. Not exactly New York Times kind of language. I doubt they would even allow “cat poop.”

And so, the sun has set, my wine is low in the glass, my hair needs drying and my husband needs to be wakened before he spends the night in his bathing suit, his dirty feet sticking off the end of the bed.

It’s a low, slow Mexican kind of night, and I am having a wonderful time. All too soon it will be over and we’ll head back to Syracuse to pick up the bus and continue on our other kind of vacation.
MEHICO
It’s been a lovely interlude. Gracias, universe.