Rally Rally Really

Oktoberfest was a big success. I won a couple of raffles (nothing I needed) and first prize in the egg throwing contest. We all ate more than was needed. I helped serve and clean up at the BBQ dinner. Here are some pictures from Oktoberfest.

22 of us cooked up our favorite soups and sold them for 1 meal. We donated the proceeds, almost $500 to CARE. My selection was Vagabond Stew/Soup. It's what I eat about 1/3 of the time and was one of the most popular of all the soups. It disappeared really fast - and I was afraid of having too many left-overs to put in my freezer!

Immediately following the hitch up breakfast, I went to the Chapter 30 rally in Gun Barrel City. I ate some more and geocached a little – it was a good time. More pictures of my rallying there.

Between rallies I went to Dallas Chapter of the ARC and serviced the mobile kitchen. All was quiet and uneventful there.

Chapter 10 Rally in Belleville was with a lot of old friends and boy are we ever getting old. None of the old active games were played just board and card games and, of course, more food. It was a good time though, with lots of free time to share.

At the rallies there were meetings and auctions - the proceeds going to a good cause - more food and things for the future.

I took a side trip to Steven F Austin State Park and checked it out. It is a nice park, but I wouldn’t want to host there. They expect their hosts to be “on duty” 24 hours a day and I know that the other parks don’t think that way. I plan to check out some other parks in the next few weeks. On the way to S.F.A. S.P. I found 7 geocaches.

After the Ch 10 rally I checked out Huntsville State Park and it sounds a lot better. I think that I will try to take a tour there in April or May, if it fits into my schedule..

Really Ready to Rally

It’s been a busy week at Rainbow’s End Escapee Park. Frank Williams (my temporary landlord) and I painted parking stripes in the CARE Center vehicle lot on a very warm and humid day. That is the first time this year that the heat has really gotten to me. I guess I’m showing my age. Of course Frank is still just a young man at 92, so it didn’t bother him.

The stage is set for the Oktoberfest that starts tomorrow. I am going to make and serve Vagabond Stew for Tuesday’s Soups for CARE. Different soups will be served and the proceeds all are donated to CARE. There will be a big BBQ dinner and lots of food all through the week. It seems that that is the main theme of most Escapee events – we don’t go hungry.

After a week of fun in Livingston I will go to Gun Barrel City for the Chapter 30 Rally and then a few days later head to the Chapter 10 Rally in Bellville.

With all of the rally traveling and also because my van is now 6 years old, I figured that I ought to get my wheels checked out and up to date. Joel West in Livingston has been doing mechanic work for the Escapees for years, so I took it to him. Service work sure has gone up since I had my service station in 1957! But on the bright side, I now have a good feeling going down the road that my home on wheels isn’t likely to give me any problems.

Another new thing in my life is a rear view camera! I made it up so that I can install it on either the van or the trailer and see what I am backing into – or what is following me too close. I feel it will make life a lot easier when I arrive in a crowded campground – or parking lot.

Last Sunday I went geocaching after church and got stuck in a ditch when I pulled “just a little bit” too far to the right on a 1 lane road. A few minutes later a nice young couple in a jeep came along and rescued me, so another bad moment turned good! There are a lot of new caches in the Livingston area, but I am saving them for the time between the rallies and my cardiologist appointment on the 30th. After that I may even head to OK for a while.

I’ll try to remember to get some pictures to show you all of the fun things as I “Rally around Texas!”

Almost time to leave Lake Texana again

There have been lots of improvements at Lake Texana. Best of all – we got about 3 feet of our water level back. Here is a picture of the cove that I had previously shown as completely dried up.

With the water our wildlife has come out to play (and eat the green foliage). Here is one of our larger bucks.

We have a new Nature Center and we saved some of the murals from the old center to put around a storage area and hide the wheels on the new center – I did the work. Here are some pictures of the murals at the new nature center.

The old nature center was torn down except for the porch which the Director hopes to keep as a porch for a rental cabin (our first). Here are the pictures of the old nature center’s demise, starting with a view showing the murals removed and ending up with the final demolition.

I did some of the work of decorating the new nature center – hanging the taxidermy next to the mural that is being done by the same artist that did the old center. He will return and fill out the mural to work in the taxidermy better. Here is the work in progress.

We also put in a bird viewing area and trail in the woods behind the center. I helped with blazing the trail and irrigating the pond and birdbath in the bird area.

Before I leave, next week, I hope to get the new information kiosks installed at the 4 host sites. Then I will be off on my October adventures – mostly RV rallies in Texas.

The other day I had one of those small world experiences. I was geocaching in Victoria and when I looked up from my computer, logging in a find in an RV park, there out the window was my good friend, Frank Williams. We spent over an hour sharing what we had been up to and agreed to meet again next week at Rainbow’s End in Livingston. I will even be staying on his lot there and we will go to at least one of the rallies together.

Well, I guess that’s all for this blog – I’ll share again in a couple of weeks.

Back home in Ganado TX

I am back at Lake Texana State Park and back in the ABVM parish in Ganado. I was welcomed home by three of the guys with whom I went on the ACTS retreat. I will spend a month here working at the park helping to set up the new Nature Center. The Labor Day weekend was very busy but the rest of the time has been pretty quiet. My first days off I went to a geocaching meeting in Houston and also visited the Ingurgios. Victor seems to be recovering from his hip surgery just fine. After supper I went to Sara and Matt Spinks to visit. Sara is my granddaughter – David’s daughter. I had never met their family. They have three great dogs – 2 terriers and a black lab. Of course, I was using my new geocaching program to cache along the way! After spending the night at Hotel WalMart, I geocached my way back to Lake Texana via Galveston Island State Park, Mud Island, Freeport, Brazoria, West Columbia, and Bay City. The program is great and I have learned to use my Nuvi to geocache. The project for this weekend is removing two outside walls on the old nature center that are painted with murals and taking the walls to the new nature center where they will be used to fence in a storage area and decorate the back of the building. The man who painted the murals is making new murals on the inside of the building and we are helping him by fitting in some of the taxidermy from the old center. There will be visiting dignitaries from TPWD on the 22nd, so we are all going to have to work hard to finish our part of the move! Monday and Tuesday will be days off again and I will head west geocaching.

Moving on - Heading West

It’s a sad and a happy time for me now. I’m leaving all of my friends at CARE and heading back to Lake Texana State Park, where I will be camp host for at least a month.

The work at CARE has been harder for me this year. I am sure that it is not that the work has been harder – just that I am losing some of my younger year’s energy. Dan Duryea, the volunteer coordinator has done an excellent job of organizing the volunteer job and I appreciate that the job has therefore become easier. The work is the same however and volunteers are scarce these days. We only had 3 teams this month – 5 teams is the desired number. Since the new September teams are now arriving, our team is bidding adieu to the routine and going back to our regular (?) lives.

I have been working feverishly in my spare time to get a program to more easily load my geocaches in both my hand-held and my auto GPS units. A couple of days ago I succeeded and I now have over 470 caches loaded – ready for the Victoria area! I did manage to have enough time to get to a few of the new geocaches in Livingston – but I have to leave a few for next time. I will be returning to Livingston for a cardiologist appointment in late October.

Lots of changes in my life

After the trip to Kristi’s in Clear Lake south of Houston, where I gave Mary some books and picked up a new antenna tripod, I got down to work. The tripod helped a little – then I extended the pole to 20’ and that helped a little more. But, alas, it was not quite enough. So I ordered an 8 bay Channel Master Antenna from Fry’s.
SUCCESS! Now I get a great picture on 34 Houston channels free (for about $137 in parts). I am happy with the results and now I think I am ready for the Lake Texana park host job again, since I will be able to get TV there as well.

Another of my ongoing projects is my LOCKet. It is a USB memory stick with a secure program on board where I have now stored all of my passwords, credit card information, addresses, medical information, and other sensitive information. The information all stays in the LOCKet which now is my secure vault. I have backed it up to another memory stick, so as not to worry about losing the information. My computer doesn’t contain any sensitive data, so I don’t need to worry about identity theft via e-space. I have also found it real convenient to have all of this information so handy. If you are interested in the LOCKet you can go to http://www.technorv.com/ – that’s the place that I got it at the Escapade in May.

I have also made a dramatic change in my bookkeeping procedures. I have perfected my use of Quicken 2009 and it has totally freed up the time I spent in reconciling all of my financial files. I still have to do a little manual entry, but very little! For only $9.95 I even have an offsite backup that I can access, if (when?) I have a computer failure. With the Locket and the new Quicken backup I am free of fear of a crash of my computer now.

Another new thing in my life is a program to develop better visual skills and improve my reading speed (which has always been slow). The program is called eyeQ. I have only done one day of the eye exercises and reading practices, so I can’t tell how good it is yet. I’ll let you know in my next blog if it seems to be working – and how good.

My time at the CARE Center has been greatly appreciated. There are only 3 volunteer teams left and there are lots of needed chores. Most of them center on getting meals prepared and served to the residents, staff, volunteers, and guests. Sometimes that comes to as many as 70 people. Here is a picture of our great kitchen and dining room serving area.
We also drive residents to appointments, shopping and some eat out events. The other day 12 residents and volunteers had a great dinner in Coldspring TX. Our other chore is being on call for the needs of the residents overnight and on weekends. Sunday I will be going to Kristi’s to take care of the greatgrandkids while Kristi takes Victor in for his hip replacement. I am cramming that in between “on call” and kitchen duties.

I have not had much time to go geocaching, but there are quite a few new ones in the area – maybe in the next few weeks……..

Because I CARE

Well I got everything Cathy could think of up to date – installed the French drain, fixed the dryer, installed the ceiling fan, got the refrigerator replaced – and so I headed south.

The first stop was Dallas, where I went to my Red Cross chapter and did the monthly maintenance on the mobile kitchen. While there I also completed my papers and details about my “promotion” to supervisor. I won’t be doing anything different for Red Cross but I guess it makes them happy to be able to call me a supervisor. Also while in Dallas I got together at Outback Steak House with David one afternoon. He was able to check out the kitchen and I think he would make an excellent replacement for me as its custodian. Of course he would have to retire first – and maybe buy an RV. He didn’t sound too interested though, so I won’t hold my breath.

After Dallas I went to Livingston to the Escapees CARE Center (Continuing Assistance for Retired Escapees). It is staffed by volunteers and in the summer it is hard to find people to volunteer because of the south Texas heat and humidity. I will be here for at least a month and maybe in my spare time I will be able to catch up on some of the new computer programs that I have acquired. Many of the volunteers will be leaving this month so I may not have much spare time. It feels good to work hard for a good cause, so I am not complaining.

A project that I have started this week is to improve my TV reception. Livingston is on the fringe of Houston and the reception is very poor – especially since the analog to digital changeover. So far I have added a yagi reflector bar to my portable antenna and that has made a big improvement. I still lose channels off and on. I have ordered an antenna tripod so that I can get better clearance for the signal. I will let you know next week blog (2 weeks) how well it works.
Tomorrow (Sunday) I will go to Houston to see Mary and the Ingurgios and pick up the antenna.