07-28-09

Noting but sunshine in the morning. It felt great after all of the rain the day before.
The soaked front door rug dried quickly in the sun. It’s very muddy here when wet. The rug makes a great landing pad for keeping mud out of the bus, but it soaks up the rain. I’ve seen other RVrs with larger, outdoor rugs making a patio area. I’m going to get one eventually, until then I have to dry out the rug when it rains.
I was also anxious for the rug to dry because I use it to lie on while working under the bus. Since the rain had stopped I could finally add hydraulic fluid to and work on my leveling jacks.
The leveling jacks were a process. One side was hard to get to under the bus, the other I could easily get to, but the reservoir was hard to pour into. I could get a small funnel in it, but there was no room above it to tilt the can. I thought a turkey baster would work, but I don’t have one. After some brainstorming I build a hydraulic fluid piping bag, like for frosting cake. A zip-top bag, bendy straw and duct tape. The bendy straw even made an adjustable spout. It worked great. I pumped three bags worth of fluid into the reservoir. The jacks didn’t all work right away. I bleed the lines and with some coercion eventually for the first time ever had all four of the jacks working…at the same time.
It was a day of small home improvement projects. Ones I had never seemed to find the time for. I found that the bus “car stereo’s” antenna was not plugged in, a quick fix. I took apart an old camera tripod of my dad’s and rigged up a dashboard camera mount. The tripod had a broken leg, so this was a great use for its good parts. I ran an experiment to determine if the electrical “cigarette” plug on the dash and the one in the cabinet ran off different systems. They do. The dash plug runs off of the engine battery. The one in the cabinet runs off of the house deep cycle batteries. This is important to me because I want to run a boom box off the house batteries and not drain the engine battery.
Trinity made apple oatmeal. The apples were really the star as she sautéed them in butter and added brown sugar so they got all caramely. Plus she used up the left over steel cut oats and blueberries.
We had a nice morning in the sun with double headphones on. I had two pair of headphones split out of my MP3 player, a big pair and a little pair. They keep us tethered together, or if one of us wants to leave, then the other one wears both pair. The little ones fit inside the big ones. It creates an extra intimate yet somehow claustrophobic music listening experience.
I rode my bike up the highway to a national campground. The low oxygen content is more obvious than I thought it would be. It was a tough climb, always climbing. When I came back down I didn’t peddle once. The Yin and Yang of the mountains; you must go up to go down. I was home in minutes with a new found curiosity of what was up the road around the bend.
Clouds rolled in and it started to rain. We snuck in a long hike between rain showers in the evening and then it started to rain and didn’t stop all night.
We watched a movie and went to bed. The rain on the rooftop was becoming deafening.