Prospect, OR
Crater Lake Campground
Today we popped into Prospect Oregon's one diner, next to its one bar, next to its one grocery and its one hotel (!) and ordered an 11 o'clock breakfast. The place was empty; a waitress riffled through a stack of newspapers and took a couple of sections into the bathroom. Our waitress, a really pretty, heavyset woman in her late 30's, told us breakfast was cut off at 11, and the cook had just cleaned the grill.
We acknowledged his hard work, but told her it was eggs or nothing and we'd just pay for the coffee. She went back to the kitchen for the third time, and on her return she allowed as how the cook was willing to make us breakfast.
Fine. John was annoyed, I was amused and the waitress was delighted. She'd been able to get the cook to change his mind, although he'd probably be mad at her for the rest of the day. A couple of customers came and went, hunters from the look of things. Our breakfast finally emerged, and was served with a big smile. A few minutes later, the waitress returned to our table. She was carrying a photograph.
"Wanna see my baby?" she asked, coyly. She handed the picture to John, and he passed it to me without comment.
There she was, kneeling beside a huge deer, its rack enormous, its forehead bloody. "My first buck," she said, proudly. "He's my baby."
Lady, you just murdered this magnificent creature and you're calling him your baby?
Eeuw. I looked down at the homemade sausage that I'd sampled. It definitely wasn't pork. I think we were having baby for breakfast.
Oregon. It ain't California.
Friday, October 30, 2009
Saturday, October 17, 2009
Mojave Thoughts
Bakersfield, CA
Driving across the desert is the equivalent of a morning shower. Now, now, hear me out. The shower is solitary, quiet and somewhat boring, so I do all my best thinking there. The desert is solitary, quiet and really boring, so as I was driving along the 239-mile stretch of open, dusty road from Barstow to Bakersfield, I began to mentally wander.
Some idle thoughts: The Mojave is dry and dusty. It makes the word arid sound moist.
I talked to my son briefly, and he informed me I needed to say the word Mojave right. He contended that it was Moh-Jav. I’m not that gullible, Heff.
Not one hour after having our coach washed in Barstow to the tune of $52, we drove through a swarm of bees. We scored 25 direct hits and countless ricochets. The only thing that makes it worthwhile is that everyone has suffered the same buggy insult, including that annoying vintage T-Bird who passed me on the right and then had the nerve to honk at me for being in the left lane. I would have moved over, but there was an idiot next to me.
We pass a Frito-Lay truck and the driver is eating a sandwich. I think to myself, “I wonder if he’s having chips with that.”
This desert doesn’t look like my idea of a desert. I have a pristine vision in my head: miles and miles of white, sparkling sand, impossible to walk on without snowshoes, but great if you’re on a horse. I guess I’m Lawrence of Arabia. This desert is brown sandy dirt, with brown mountains on the horizon and scrub in all shades of brown.
(The next morning, another wanderer told us to take 99 North to Tahoe for some great scenery. Then he added the clincher. A two-lane road through the desert. Uh, I don’t think so.)
On passing Tehachapi, I think that the language of the Native Americans, with all its iiiii’s and breath stops between syllables is a lot like Welsh with all its consonants and braubrichthinwhichglaglydds that are equally impossible to decipher. So do you suppose the Navajo could learn Welsh faster than we not-native Americans?
Some seventy miles into the Mojave stands a sign that reads, “Land for Sale.” Why? Who would buy some desert? For what purpose? And have they experienced a drop in property values like the rest of us? Could you get it for a real steal?
We pass Edwards Air Force Base, and I notice brand-new tar roads on either side of the highway. What’s up with that? Why would anyone put a black tar road in one of the hottest places in the country? Today it’s 104 and this is Mid-October. When I was a little girl I stepped in tar in the Jones Beach parking lot and was burned so badly the whole car of us had to turn around and go home. Then I realize. This isn’t a road. It’s human fly paper, designed to catch and severely maim any terrorists who might be thinking they’d invade Edwards and stage a coup from there. I feel so much safer now.
After miles of nothing, we hit a town. Eighteen tin shacks, one stop light, and 468 truck, car and washing machine carcasses. What do they produce here? Rust? Then my appetite for the comic is sated when I spot the single store in town. A lean-to with a Coke machine out front. It called The Emporium.
Why do they close rest stops? All they are is a pull-off from the road. Are they trying to get us to rest less and exercise more?
In Tehachapi, amid the miles and miles of brown, there is a swath of green that is surrounded by 16 tall green cypresses. I was so curious at this anomaly that I went on line to find out. Nothing about the curious little park and how it got there. I did, however, learn that Tehachapi’s biggest industry is the California State Correctional Institution. The thought passes through my mind: free labor?
As we head through the last pass through the mountains, I leave the desert and head into one of California’s famous valleys where riots of nuts, fruits and wine grapes are happily growing. So why, I wonder, in the middle of all this lush greenery, is there a town called Weedpatch? Isn't that just a little counterintuitive? Would you want a beautiful orange from Weedpatch?
That thought has barely left my head when I spot two leathery looking men beneath beach umbrellas fishing in a man-made canal. What would they catch? Fish sticks?
Betty
Driving across the desert is the equivalent of a morning shower. Now, now, hear me out. The shower is solitary, quiet and somewhat boring, so I do all my best thinking there. The desert is solitary, quiet and really boring, so as I was driving along the 239-mile stretch of open, dusty road from Barstow to Bakersfield, I began to mentally wander.
Some idle thoughts: The Mojave is dry and dusty. It makes the word arid sound moist.
I talked to my son briefly, and he informed me I needed to say the word Mojave right. He contended that it was Moh-Jav. I’m not that gullible, Heff.
Not one hour after having our coach washed in Barstow to the tune of $52, we drove through a swarm of bees. We scored 25 direct hits and countless ricochets. The only thing that makes it worthwhile is that everyone has suffered the same buggy insult, including that annoying vintage T-Bird who passed me on the right and then had the nerve to honk at me for being in the left lane. I would have moved over, but there was an idiot next to me.
We pass a Frito-Lay truck and the driver is eating a sandwich. I think to myself, “I wonder if he’s having chips with that.”
This desert doesn’t look like my idea of a desert. I have a pristine vision in my head: miles and miles of white, sparkling sand, impossible to walk on without snowshoes, but great if you’re on a horse. I guess I’m Lawrence of Arabia. This desert is brown sandy dirt, with brown mountains on the horizon and scrub in all shades of brown.
(The next morning, another wanderer told us to take 99 North to Tahoe for some great scenery. Then he added the clincher. A two-lane road through the desert. Uh, I don’t think so.)
On passing Tehachapi, I think that the language of the Native Americans, with all its iiiii’s and breath stops between syllables is a lot like Welsh with all its consonants and braubrichthinwhichglaglydds that are equally impossible to decipher. So do you suppose the Navajo could learn Welsh faster than we not-native Americans?
Some seventy miles into the Mojave stands a sign that reads, “Land for Sale.” Why? Who would buy some desert? For what purpose? And have they experienced a drop in property values like the rest of us? Could you get it for a real steal?
We pass Edwards Air Force Base, and I notice brand-new tar roads on either side of the highway. What’s up with that? Why would anyone put a black tar road in one of the hottest places in the country? Today it’s 104 and this is Mid-October. When I was a little girl I stepped in tar in the Jones Beach parking lot and was burned so badly the whole car of us had to turn around and go home. Then I realize. This isn’t a road. It’s human fly paper, designed to catch and severely maim any terrorists who might be thinking they’d invade Edwards and stage a coup from there. I feel so much safer now.
After miles of nothing, we hit a town. Eighteen tin shacks, one stop light, and 468 truck, car and washing machine carcasses. What do they produce here? Rust? Then my appetite for the comic is sated when I spot the single store in town. A lean-to with a Coke machine out front. It called The Emporium.
Why do they close rest stops? All they are is a pull-off from the road. Are they trying to get us to rest less and exercise more?
In Tehachapi, amid the miles and miles of brown, there is a swath of green that is surrounded by 16 tall green cypresses. I was so curious at this anomaly that I went on line to find out. Nothing about the curious little park and how it got there. I did, however, learn that Tehachapi’s biggest industry is the California State Correctional Institution. The thought passes through my mind: free labor?
As we head through the last pass through the mountains, I leave the desert and head into one of California’s famous valleys where riots of nuts, fruits and wine grapes are happily growing. So why, I wonder, in the middle of all this lush greenery, is there a town called Weedpatch? Isn't that just a little counterintuitive? Would you want a beautiful orange from Weedpatch?
That thought has barely left my head when I spot two leathery looking men beneath beach umbrellas fishing in a man-made canal. What would they catch? Fish sticks?
Betty
Thursday, October 15, 2009
Getting High in Albuquerque
October 3-11, 2009
Now I don’t say this lightly.
Actually, I do say it lightly, because this is about balloons. Not little balloons. Big, no, enormous balloons. We were fortunate enough to get to the Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta this year.
Oh what glorious blue skies they have in New Mexico. And to see them filled with floating, drifting, bobbing bacchanalia is to feel your heart burst from your chest and float straight up, untethered by life’s concerns. The fiesta producers called the 2009 Fiesta, “Mass Happiness.” They were right.
Imagine dragging yourself from your bed on a chilly desert morning, well before the sun, well before anything should be moving except the bedsprings. Imagine dressing without your usual shower because you just had to get outside. You put on jeans and a tee shirt, and then you add a long-sleeved shirt, socks, a windbreaker, scarf, gloves, earmuffs and you grab a cuppa joe because you won’t stay warm without it. What could make you do such a thing?
Dawn patrol, that’s what. In the dark of the earliest morning, two balloons would hoist themselves up to greet the rising sun. They would carry American flags, and suddenly the Star Spangled Banner would play over the omnipresent loudspeakers. Over 5000 people as crazy as you would clap wildly, as the balloons drifted overhead and the pilots took measure of the wind. That is the real reason for Dawn Patrol: to gauge the wind velocity and direction for the rest of the balloonists. Nevertheless, the moment always caused me to hold my breath.
Before long, the field, roughly the size of several football fields, would begin to develop a riot of lumpy, bumpy protuberances you hadn’t noticed before. Big mounds of colorful marshmallows, swelling and bobbing where before there had only been flat fabric, easy to overlook. Now they were demanding their piece of the atmosphere as they filled with gas and assumed their shapes.
One by one, they’d fire up, the heat of the fires causing the gas to expand and send them skyward in a slow aerobic ballet. Each balloon has one or two pilots and by my count about 20 handlers. Many are volunteers who come for the sheer joy of holding a guide rope in the freezing cold so the balloon stays in place until it is time to let go. Many get team jackets to wear. All are smiling. Now I understand what it is to be in a job whose only purpose is to make people happy.
At this point, you are probably imagining a sky full of colorful light-bulb shapes. But what is this that’s floating by? Pepe le Pew? A giant can of Pepsi? A United Van Lines truck? Two balloons, or I should say two bees, kissing? These are the special shapes balloons, wonderful variations that are generally bigger than the average balloon. Especially the Parthenon. No kidding. There really was a Parthenon balloon. And the space shuttle, a stagecoach, a huge chicken and a scarecrow (they usually flew together), the perfect clown head, and hundreds of other crowd-pleasers. There’s a competition every year, and this year it was won by the Creamland Dairy, whose entry was an enormous cow that dwarfed its competition and charmed the crowd. How they got that thing up every morning is still a mystery to me.
The biggest cheer, however, came when Darth Vader took off. The movies’ biggest villain always arose to a claxon of approval. “I am your father, Luke. And a balloon.”
Once you’d had your fill of fun, some two hours later, it would be time to venture down onto the field. We had VIP parking, high on a ridge above the field, so that our view of the skies was uninterrupted. But now it would be time to join the day-trippers for a stroll on the midway. Two facing rows of white tents housed vendor row, where people could get breakfast burritos, curly fries, mini donuts fresh out of the cooker, ice cream, chalupas, sopapillas, baked potatoes, free beer!, coffee, hot chocolate, funnel cakes, corn dogs and all the usual carny fare that is so bad for you and so impossible to resist.
There were tee shirts, sweaters, hats, mittens and gloves to be had. Jewelry, both real and fake, made in China, and made on the reservation. And pins. Oh the pins. The big thing at the festival is pin-collecting. Lapel pins, priced from $3 to $300 for the ones from years gone by. Most of the balloons were represented, and Darth Vader sold out on the first day. If you were nutty enough, you could buy a silly hat – a Cat in the Hat, or an oversized top hat, or a Viking hat, or a big Rasta topper – and cover it with the pins you’ve collected. Some jackets covered with pins must have weighed a hundred pounds.
And everywhere you went, any time of the day or night, all would be mellow. Can you imagine somewhere between five and ten thousand people all walking around with dopey grins, even if their kids were wailing, and saying “Excuse me, sorry” if they so much as ruffled the sleeve of your jacket as they passed? Balloons are a natural high.
Midway along the midway, you’d have taken off your jacket, because the sun had warmed the morning and unfrozen your fingers. You might venture over to the Balloon Museum, where you’d learn that ballooning originated in France in the 1700’s and was used commercially for a time. It was the first time ever that man had conquered the skies, so that in itself was a pretty big deal. Some more-industrial nations adopted ballooning fairly early on, but Japan never had its first balloon until 1969. Go figure.
The most famous balloon, of course, was the Hindenberg, but this is a happy chapter, so we’ll leave that alone.
Once your arthritic knee couldn’t take another drubbing, you’d head back up the hill to your motor coach for a hot shower and some down time. But of course, there are the Albuquerque sights to see, so you wouldn’t stay on the couch for long. Besides, whatever you had to do had to be done by 5, because that’s when the cocktail hour started, and preparation for the Glowdeo commenced. The Glowdeo is the twilight event, where the balloons are inflated but stay earthbound, and as soon as it is dark enough, the rodeo master commences the countdown and the fires are lit, illuminating all the balloons for about ten seconds and causing oohs and aahs that will be repeated at 9 o’clock, when the fireworks, as spectacular as any I’ve ever seen, start. You’d walk the field during the Glowdeo and see the balloons close up. They’re much bigger than you imagine and you can talk with the pilots, and ask about the balloons. Kids run around collecting balloon cards, like baseball cards, from each team.
I made the biggest gaffe of the week when I went up to one balloon’s crew and asked if the Koshare (ko-sha-ree) was a Japanese cartoon character. After some good-natured kidding delivered in a faux Asian accent, the pilot, an Albuquerque native, informed me that the Koshare was a Native American totem, a mischievous character who represented fun and good times. Ooops. Kachina, not Pachinko.
And so to bed. You’d retire early, because tomorrow was another day, because you’d now been up and about for 18 hours straight and because with all that heavenly wonder still rumbling around in your brain, the last thing you needed to do was to watch television.
You’d already made your own kind of magic, and Letterman just wouldn’t cut it. Not tonight anyway.
Betty
Now I don’t say this lightly.
Actually, I do say it lightly, because this is about balloons. Not little balloons. Big, no, enormous balloons. We were fortunate enough to get to the Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta this year.
Oh what glorious blue skies they have in New Mexico. And to see them filled with floating, drifting, bobbing bacchanalia is to feel your heart burst from your chest and float straight up, untethered by life’s concerns. The fiesta producers called the 2009 Fiesta, “Mass Happiness.” They were right.
Imagine dragging yourself from your bed on a chilly desert morning, well before the sun, well before anything should be moving except the bedsprings. Imagine dressing without your usual shower because you just had to get outside. You put on jeans and a tee shirt, and then you add a long-sleeved shirt, socks, a windbreaker, scarf, gloves, earmuffs and you grab a cuppa joe because you won’t stay warm without it. What could make you do such a thing?
Dawn patrol, that’s what. In the dark of the earliest morning, two balloons would hoist themselves up to greet the rising sun. They would carry American flags, and suddenly the Star Spangled Banner would play over the omnipresent loudspeakers. Over 5000 people as crazy as you would clap wildly, as the balloons drifted overhead and the pilots took measure of the wind. That is the real reason for Dawn Patrol: to gauge the wind velocity and direction for the rest of the balloonists. Nevertheless, the moment always caused me to hold my breath.
Before long, the field, roughly the size of several football fields, would begin to develop a riot of lumpy, bumpy protuberances you hadn’t noticed before. Big mounds of colorful marshmallows, swelling and bobbing where before there had only been flat fabric, easy to overlook. Now they were demanding their piece of the atmosphere as they filled with gas and assumed their shapes.
One by one, they’d fire up, the heat of the fires causing the gas to expand and send them skyward in a slow aerobic ballet. Each balloon has one or two pilots and by my count about 20 handlers. Many are volunteers who come for the sheer joy of holding a guide rope in the freezing cold so the balloon stays in place until it is time to let go. Many get team jackets to wear. All are smiling. Now I understand what it is to be in a job whose only purpose is to make people happy.
At this point, you are probably imagining a sky full of colorful light-bulb shapes. But what is this that’s floating by? Pepe le Pew? A giant can of Pepsi? A United Van Lines truck? Two balloons, or I should say two bees, kissing? These are the special shapes balloons, wonderful variations that are generally bigger than the average balloon. Especially the Parthenon. No kidding. There really was a Parthenon balloon. And the space shuttle, a stagecoach, a huge chicken and a scarecrow (they usually flew together), the perfect clown head, and hundreds of other crowd-pleasers. There’s a competition every year, and this year it was won by the Creamland Dairy, whose entry was an enormous cow that dwarfed its competition and charmed the crowd. How they got that thing up every morning is still a mystery to me.
The biggest cheer, however, came when Darth Vader took off. The movies’ biggest villain always arose to a claxon of approval. “I am your father, Luke. And a balloon.”
Once you’d had your fill of fun, some two hours later, it would be time to venture down onto the field. We had VIP parking, high on a ridge above the field, so that our view of the skies was uninterrupted. But now it would be time to join the day-trippers for a stroll on the midway. Two facing rows of white tents housed vendor row, where people could get breakfast burritos, curly fries, mini donuts fresh out of the cooker, ice cream, chalupas, sopapillas, baked potatoes, free beer!, coffee, hot chocolate, funnel cakes, corn dogs and all the usual carny fare that is so bad for you and so impossible to resist.
There were tee shirts, sweaters, hats, mittens and gloves to be had. Jewelry, both real and fake, made in China, and made on the reservation. And pins. Oh the pins. The big thing at the festival is pin-collecting. Lapel pins, priced from $3 to $300 for the ones from years gone by. Most of the balloons were represented, and Darth Vader sold out on the first day. If you were nutty enough, you could buy a silly hat – a Cat in the Hat, or an oversized top hat, or a Viking hat, or a big Rasta topper – and cover it with the pins you’ve collected. Some jackets covered with pins must have weighed a hundred pounds.
And everywhere you went, any time of the day or night, all would be mellow. Can you imagine somewhere between five and ten thousand people all walking around with dopey grins, even if their kids were wailing, and saying “Excuse me, sorry” if they so much as ruffled the sleeve of your jacket as they passed? Balloons are a natural high.
Midway along the midway, you’d have taken off your jacket, because the sun had warmed the morning and unfrozen your fingers. You might venture over to the Balloon Museum, where you’d learn that ballooning originated in France in the 1700’s and was used commercially for a time. It was the first time ever that man had conquered the skies, so that in itself was a pretty big deal. Some more-industrial nations adopted ballooning fairly early on, but Japan never had its first balloon until 1969. Go figure.
The most famous balloon, of course, was the Hindenberg, but this is a happy chapter, so we’ll leave that alone.
Once your arthritic knee couldn’t take another drubbing, you’d head back up the hill to your motor coach for a hot shower and some down time. But of course, there are the Albuquerque sights to see, so you wouldn’t stay on the couch for long. Besides, whatever you had to do had to be done by 5, because that’s when the cocktail hour started, and preparation for the Glowdeo commenced. The Glowdeo is the twilight event, where the balloons are inflated but stay earthbound, and as soon as it is dark enough, the rodeo master commences the countdown and the fires are lit, illuminating all the balloons for about ten seconds and causing oohs and aahs that will be repeated at 9 o’clock, when the fireworks, as spectacular as any I’ve ever seen, start. You’d walk the field during the Glowdeo and see the balloons close up. They’re much bigger than you imagine and you can talk with the pilots, and ask about the balloons. Kids run around collecting balloon cards, like baseball cards, from each team.
I made the biggest gaffe of the week when I went up to one balloon’s crew and asked if the Koshare (ko-sha-ree) was a Japanese cartoon character. After some good-natured kidding delivered in a faux Asian accent, the pilot, an Albuquerque native, informed me that the Koshare was a Native American totem, a mischievous character who represented fun and good times. Ooops. Kachina, not Pachinko.
And so to bed. You’d retire early, because tomorrow was another day, because you’d now been up and about for 18 hours straight and because with all that heavenly wonder still rumbling around in your brain, the last thing you needed to do was to watch television.
You’d already made your own kind of magic, and Letterman just wouldn’t cut it. Not tonight anyway.
Betty
Be Careful What You Wish For
Arizona
On the Way to Tahoe
For over a year I have been bemoaning the state of the yellowy-almond colored rug that covered the living area of our coach. It was nice on the toes, but it collected every bit of dust, mud, food spillage, dog tossup, and hair from at least one of the two humans and the canine that collectively live here. At least three times a week I’d have to vacuum, then clean the clogged vacuum, poking at the dog hair and detritus it had just inhaled. And it fit absolutely nowhere, so it was relegated to a corner in the bedroom where it sat, quietly turning us into asthmatics. At least twice a month, I’d be down on my hands and knees with the scrub brush and the bottle of rug shampoo. And for this I’d retired?
We came to a collective decision, although I can’t really speak for the dog, that the rug had to go. It was too dirty, too smelly, and way too much work. So we (I) set about finding the perfect flooring.
It didn’t take long to find my heart’s desire. At a recent convention of motor coaches, there among the many shining examples of coachly indulgence, sat a brand-new 2009 Beaver Coach with a BLACK GRANITE FLOOR! Oh did that shine. Oh did that look elegant! Oh this was the floor for me.
Never mind that the coach was a super suspension, designed to pull much more aggregate weight than my 2004 model. Never mind that granite is one of the heaviest of flooring materials. My sense of the rightness of that floor was set in stone. Unintentional pun.
At this self-same convention, I also walked the exhibit hall and met quite a few converters (RV renovators) who all had the same answer for me: impossible. Your tires will pop. Here, try this nice 1950’s style vinyl tile. It’s easy to keep clean.
I turned and fled that negativity. I was undeterred.
There were other naysayers. People with beige floors, people with rugs, people with envy for my decision. It’ll never be clean, they’d say. It’ll show every dog hair, they’d moan. You’ll be cleaning it constantly, they’d squawk. I’ll do the work, I promised myself, and besides, they don’t know how hard it was keeping that rug clean. Only one woman, forever after my new best friend, thought it was a cool idea. She hates her rug too.
Now here was the problem. I could get very light granite. It was made in Italy, split into thin sheets, cut into nice-size tiles and backed with a kind of foamcore. It needed special adhesive, a special underflooring and might scratch when the slides were rolled closed. And it would cost $24,000. For a floor the size of, oh ,say 240 sq ft. That works out to $100 a square foot, I believe. John, cranky old skinflint that he is, would not go along with this plan.
Would I have acceded to this madness if he hadn’t put his manly clodhopper down on my dainty little toes? I live in this thing, don’t I? Okay, I can’t lie. Of course I wouldn’t have.
So after ascertaining that my number two choice, porcelain, was just as damnably heavy, I unhappily took a look at the kitchen tile I so dearly had tried to avoid. Vinyl. Oh my goodness, they make beautiful vinyl tile these days. All I had to do was choose a nice, shiny black tile that looked like granite and I would be happy.
Not in style, the sales people all said. What you want is the tumbled marble look. In a nice white, or beige, with no shiny anywhere. No, I wanted black and shiny.
For months I looked and looked. I looked in Florida, New York, Texas, and Ohio. Everywhere I was told, “No luck, sister.” It was either the wrong color, the wrong weight, the wrong material, wrong, wrong, wrong.
I got very discouraged. Then one of the coach converters wrote me to say he’d found a company that makes elevator tile (A weight issue here too! Why hadn’t I thought of that?) and they had a granite-type tile that was actually a composite of granite chips, glass and vinyl. It was light, it was tough, and it was black. Not only that, it was $7.99 a tile. Forget that you can go to Home Depot and get industrial tile for 83 cents a square foot. This would be a $7000 floor and not a $30,000 floor – the Italian price had gone up in the months I was deciding.
I now have a beautiful black floor. It was shiny for about a week. I Swiffered it and it got dull. Nothing seems to make it shiny. Not only that, everything seems to make it dirty – walking on it, for instance. We have tried everything to clean it, from dishwashing liquid to shower cleaner to Fantastic to promising the dog a year of running free on no leash if he would only lick the floor with his magic tongue. Zilch. The little bit of shiny that’s under the driver’s floor mat is bleak reminder of all I had hoped for.
But I am not done yet. We bought a bottle of urethane-type finish that the sales clerk said Walmart uses on their floors, and Walmart floors are always shiny. We’ll put it on our floor and see what happens.
Truth is, no matter how it turns out, it’s still 100 times better than that smelly old rug, and six times easier to clean than the white bricks with grout that were in the kitchen area. I’m inordinately happy with how things look, as long as I don’t look too close.
Love can forgive anything.
On the Way to Tahoe
For over a year I have been bemoaning the state of the yellowy-almond colored rug that covered the living area of our coach. It was nice on the toes, but it collected every bit of dust, mud, food spillage, dog tossup, and hair from at least one of the two humans and the canine that collectively live here. At least three times a week I’d have to vacuum, then clean the clogged vacuum, poking at the dog hair and detritus it had just inhaled. And it fit absolutely nowhere, so it was relegated to a corner in the bedroom where it sat, quietly turning us into asthmatics. At least twice a month, I’d be down on my hands and knees with the scrub brush and the bottle of rug shampoo. And for this I’d retired?
We came to a collective decision, although I can’t really speak for the dog, that the rug had to go. It was too dirty, too smelly, and way too much work. So we (I) set about finding the perfect flooring.
It didn’t take long to find my heart’s desire. At a recent convention of motor coaches, there among the many shining examples of coachly indulgence, sat a brand-new 2009 Beaver Coach with a BLACK GRANITE FLOOR! Oh did that shine. Oh did that look elegant! Oh this was the floor for me.
Never mind that the coach was a super suspension, designed to pull much more aggregate weight than my 2004 model. Never mind that granite is one of the heaviest of flooring materials. My sense of the rightness of that floor was set in stone. Unintentional pun.
At this self-same convention, I also walked the exhibit hall and met quite a few converters (RV renovators) who all had the same answer for me: impossible. Your tires will pop. Here, try this nice 1950’s style vinyl tile. It’s easy to keep clean.
I turned and fled that negativity. I was undeterred.
There were other naysayers. People with beige floors, people with rugs, people with envy for my decision. It’ll never be clean, they’d say. It’ll show every dog hair, they’d moan. You’ll be cleaning it constantly, they’d squawk. I’ll do the work, I promised myself, and besides, they don’t know how hard it was keeping that rug clean. Only one woman, forever after my new best friend, thought it was a cool idea. She hates her rug too.
Now here was the problem. I could get very light granite. It was made in Italy, split into thin sheets, cut into nice-size tiles and backed with a kind of foamcore. It needed special adhesive, a special underflooring and might scratch when the slides were rolled closed. And it would cost $24,000. For a floor the size of, oh ,say 240 sq ft. That works out to $100 a square foot, I believe. John, cranky old skinflint that he is, would not go along with this plan.
Would I have acceded to this madness if he hadn’t put his manly clodhopper down on my dainty little toes? I live in this thing, don’t I? Okay, I can’t lie. Of course I wouldn’t have.
So after ascertaining that my number two choice, porcelain, was just as damnably heavy, I unhappily took a look at the kitchen tile I so dearly had tried to avoid. Vinyl. Oh my goodness, they make beautiful vinyl tile these days. All I had to do was choose a nice, shiny black tile that looked like granite and I would be happy.
Not in style, the sales people all said. What you want is the tumbled marble look. In a nice white, or beige, with no shiny anywhere. No, I wanted black and shiny.
For months I looked and looked. I looked in Florida, New York, Texas, and Ohio. Everywhere I was told, “No luck, sister.” It was either the wrong color, the wrong weight, the wrong material, wrong, wrong, wrong.
I got very discouraged. Then one of the coach converters wrote me to say he’d found a company that makes elevator tile (A weight issue here too! Why hadn’t I thought of that?) and they had a granite-type tile that was actually a composite of granite chips, glass and vinyl. It was light, it was tough, and it was black. Not only that, it was $7.99 a tile. Forget that you can go to Home Depot and get industrial tile for 83 cents a square foot. This would be a $7000 floor and not a $30,000 floor – the Italian price had gone up in the months I was deciding.
I now have a beautiful black floor. It was shiny for about a week. I Swiffered it and it got dull. Nothing seems to make it shiny. Not only that, everything seems to make it dirty – walking on it, for instance. We have tried everything to clean it, from dishwashing liquid to shower cleaner to Fantastic to promising the dog a year of running free on no leash if he would only lick the floor with his magic tongue. Zilch. The little bit of shiny that’s under the driver’s floor mat is bleak reminder of all I had hoped for.
But I am not done yet. We bought a bottle of urethane-type finish that the sales clerk said Walmart uses on their floors, and Walmart floors are always shiny. We’ll put it on our floor and see what happens.
Truth is, no matter how it turns out, it’s still 100 times better than that smelly old rug, and six times easier to clean than the white bricks with grout that were in the kitchen area. I’m inordinately happy with how things look, as long as I don’t look too close.
Love can forgive anything.
Thursday, October 1, 2009
My new g-string
Cuba, Missouri
Don't ask.
Darling
I just wanted to tell you again how much I love my new g-string.
You’ll be pleased to know it’s had the desired effect.
It fell out of my purse yesterday and my husband looked at me with a question in his eyes.
Oh this? I said. It’s nothing. Just a g-string.
What would you want something like that for? he asked.
Don’t be silly, I said.
When did you get it? he persisted.
Yesterday, I said. When I was in the city.
How much does something like that cost, he said suspiciously. You know we’re on a budget.
I turned his annoying question aside. It was a gift, I said.
Really, he said, mollified.
This man doesn’t have a jealous bone in his body.
I put my g-string back in my purse and vowed I’d find it a good spot among my lingerie so I wouldn’t forget where it was when the time came to put it to good use.
Later that night, he said, so when were you going to tell me about it?
Oh, I said nonchalantly, I wasn’t.
He turned over and went to sleep.
I can’t wait to get my guitar out of storage.
Love
Betty
Don't ask.
Darling
I just wanted to tell you again how much I love my new g-string.
You’ll be pleased to know it’s had the desired effect.
It fell out of my purse yesterday and my husband looked at me with a question in his eyes.
Oh this? I said. It’s nothing. Just a g-string.
What would you want something like that for? he asked.
Don’t be silly, I said.
When did you get it? he persisted.
Yesterday, I said. When I was in the city.
How much does something like that cost, he said suspiciously. You know we’re on a budget.
I turned his annoying question aside. It was a gift, I said.
Really, he said, mollified.
This man doesn’t have a jealous bone in his body.
I put my g-string back in my purse and vowed I’d find it a good spot among my lingerie so I wouldn’t forget where it was when the time came to put it to good use.
Later that night, he said, so when were you going to tell me about it?
Oh, I said nonchalantly, I wasn’t.
He turned over and went to sleep.
I can’t wait to get my guitar out of storage.
Love
Betty
Big Rigs
Effingham, IL
On the road to Albuquerque
This country, in case you weren’t aware of it, is truck-dependent. I’m so used to hopping over to the grocery store, or the mall, or the corner deli, I never even considered just how all those products got onto all those shelves. I mean, I’m not stupid. I just never thought about it much. But traveling as we have, back and forth, up and down, over and about, I have seen the light.
Trucking is huge.
If I had a light attached to every big truck I see, it would show a pattern of lines up and down, over and under, here and there, coast to coast. Actually, some people have already done that with traffic at night. It makes a pretty picture.
If you separate out the big rigs from the roadsters, coupes, SUVs, sports cars, family haulers, RV’s, pickups and other types of small vehicles, and if you tracked only them, you would have a pretty clear picture of how this country sends and receives its things we cannot do without. And that’s not counting the government trucks, army trucks and other non-commercial big boys. Not to mention air transport. But that’s a whole ‘nother industry.
The movers-of-stuff-that-keeps-us-going seem to fall into a few categories: container corporations like SeaLand who use independent cabs, shipping companies like Crete who have their own trucks, and the corporate trucks with names like Walmart and Sunkist. Sometimes it’s hard to tell which is which. All of these are driven by truck drivers, men mostly, but increasingly women, and they come in all shapes, ages and sizes, including the cliché big burly guy, but also the petite little blonde who jumped down from a huge semi at a truckstop, much to the pleasure of the other drivers. I wonder if she carries mace. I would, if I were pulling a million dollars worth of cargo in a truck worth almost as much on a lonely stretch of road. Hijacking is a very real threat. I know of someone whose entire household contents were stolen when their moving van was hijacked on a lonely road between New York and Florida. But that too is a whole “nother story.
There’s even an industry based on just the logistics of getting one product from here to there. These people don’t necessarily ship; they facilitate. Consider a widget made in China that must travel by rail to Shanghai, then by cargo ship to England, be transferred to another cargo ship on a particular day and time, then arrive in Toronto and be transferred with the same accuracy to a trans-Canadian truck and transported, say, by rail, to Seattle and then trucked to Terre Haute.
Miss a connection and you’ve just blown all the profit that widget could have made. It happens. That’s why there’s insurance for just such a thing. And why I know about logistics in the first place, because I used to write ads for that particular form of insurance.
Just for fun, here’s a list of some of the big rigs I’ve seen when I’ve looked up from writing this blog. We see these same names every day, over and over. This does not count an equal number of unidentified cargo trucks, or all the ones pulling things like logs, cement, tractors, industrial pipes the size of houses, and other huge cargo. I mean, trucking is big. Really big.
Arnold
Autobahn
Bridge Steel
Butler
Carman
Carter Express
Celedo
Challenger
CHRIS
Con-Way
Crete
D&D Sexton
Dart Advantage
Dick Lavy
England
FEDEX
Freymiller
Frito-Lay
GDS Express
Glen Moore
Great Lakes
Gully
JB Hunt
Kewpoint
Knudsen
Land Span
Manfredi Logistics
Marten
New Century
Ohio Pacific Express
Old Dominion
Oliver
One Freight
OnLine
PAM
Panther
Penske
Prime
REM
Rex
Roadway
Scotlynn
Sherwin-Williams
Southern Cal
Stallion Express
STI Canada
Sunflower
TSI
Tyson
UPS
Walmart
On the road to Albuquerque
This country, in case you weren’t aware of it, is truck-dependent. I’m so used to hopping over to the grocery store, or the mall, or the corner deli, I never even considered just how all those products got onto all those shelves. I mean, I’m not stupid. I just never thought about it much. But traveling as we have, back and forth, up and down, over and about, I have seen the light.
Trucking is huge.
If I had a light attached to every big truck I see, it would show a pattern of lines up and down, over and under, here and there, coast to coast. Actually, some people have already done that with traffic at night. It makes a pretty picture.
If you separate out the big rigs from the roadsters, coupes, SUVs, sports cars, family haulers, RV’s, pickups and other types of small vehicles, and if you tracked only them, you would have a pretty clear picture of how this country sends and receives its things we cannot do without. And that’s not counting the government trucks, army trucks and other non-commercial big boys. Not to mention air transport. But that’s a whole ‘nother industry.
The movers-of-stuff-that-keeps-us-going seem to fall into a few categories: container corporations like SeaLand who use independent cabs, shipping companies like Crete who have their own trucks, and the corporate trucks with names like Walmart and Sunkist. Sometimes it’s hard to tell which is which. All of these are driven by truck drivers, men mostly, but increasingly women, and they come in all shapes, ages and sizes, including the cliché big burly guy, but also the petite little blonde who jumped down from a huge semi at a truckstop, much to the pleasure of the other drivers. I wonder if she carries mace. I would, if I were pulling a million dollars worth of cargo in a truck worth almost as much on a lonely stretch of road. Hijacking is a very real threat. I know of someone whose entire household contents were stolen when their moving van was hijacked on a lonely road between New York and Florida. But that too is a whole “nother story.
There’s even an industry based on just the logistics of getting one product from here to there. These people don’t necessarily ship; they facilitate. Consider a widget made in China that must travel by rail to Shanghai, then by cargo ship to England, be transferred to another cargo ship on a particular day and time, then arrive in Toronto and be transferred with the same accuracy to a trans-Canadian truck and transported, say, by rail, to Seattle and then trucked to Terre Haute.
Miss a connection and you’ve just blown all the profit that widget could have made. It happens. That’s why there’s insurance for just such a thing. And why I know about logistics in the first place, because I used to write ads for that particular form of insurance.
Just for fun, here’s a list of some of the big rigs I’ve seen when I’ve looked up from writing this blog. We see these same names every day, over and over. This does not count an equal number of unidentified cargo trucks, or all the ones pulling things like logs, cement, tractors, industrial pipes the size of houses, and other huge cargo. I mean, trucking is big. Really big.
Arnold
Autobahn
Bridge Steel
Butler
Carman
Carter Express
Celedo
Challenger
CHRIS
Con-Way
Crete
D&D Sexton
Dart Advantage
Dick Lavy
England
FEDEX
Freymiller
Frito-Lay
GDS Express
Glen Moore
Great Lakes
Gully
JB Hunt
Kewpoint
Knudsen
Land Span
Manfredi Logistics
Marten
New Century
Ohio Pacific Express
Old Dominion
Oliver
One Freight
OnLine
PAM
Panther
Penske
Prime
REM
Rex
Roadway
Scotlynn
Sherwin-Williams
Southern Cal
Stallion Express
STI Canada
Sunflower
TSI
Tyson
UPS
Walmart
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