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The RV adventures of Sparky and (the late) Jett |
The shed now has a layer of insulation, which should make the air conditioner very happy.
I also got the plumbing inspection which means that the way is now open for installing the walls. That is the last major piece of work needed before we can install the washer and dryer. Which, after all, is what this is all about.
I have changed the theme to “Twenty Nineteen” which is last year’s default WordPress theme. I mostly like it – clean and crisp. It also has two of the widgets that I most wanted – an “Archives” widget so that you can go as far back as you want and a “Search” widget so you can search for a post with a particular topic. Try them – then are located at the bottom so you have to scroll down.
Things that are still missing or need to be fixed: (1) the “Recent Posts” list is actually a list of pages, not posts and (2) there is no way to filter by category. I will figure these out, I am sure. In the meantime I will leave this new theme active and look forward to any feedback.
UPDATE: Got the list of pages to be properly labeled as “Pages” and eliminated all but the Search and Archives widgets. Still can’t filter by Category, though.
UPDATE: I am considering the “Adventure Journal” theme. It restores the graphic banners that were lost years ago. I like having the banner. I also have the list of Pages in a right-side column and an Archives drop-down. All good. But I haven’t gotten Search, Categories or Tags filters to work yet.
UPDATE: I got Search back. No Categories or Tags, but I am happy for now. And I have started to upload some more recent banner photos. All of the existing ones were from 2012.
UPDATE[28 Apr 2020]: I found a widget for Categories. That filter now appears as a dropdown in the sidebar. It is single-selection which is not as good as a multi-select dropdown and it seems that the only way to undo a selection is to backtrack, but I am happy that it is now possible to filter by Category. Never had that functionality before.
I performed the dreaded WordPress upgrade today. It turned out to be a piece of cake. The blog backup took only a few minutes and the upgrade consisted of (1) deactivating plugins, (2) upgrading WordPress, (3) upgrading plugins, (4) upgrading themes and (5) re-activating the plugins. Each step took just a few minutes. Total time: about half an hour.
And nothing broke.
But…
I somehow expected some of the things that had disappeared over time – the graphic banner and the navigation to earlier posts being 2 key features – to magically reappear. They didn’t. So I think I have a theme change and graphic redesign task in my future.
The thing that did change, unexpectedly, is the post editor. This is my first post using this new editor. If you are reading this post then I successfully used it. It appears to have a bunch of new layout options which I haven’t investigated yet, but look forward to learning. Maybe I can make the layout a little more dynamic.
Anyway, it seems to have gone well.
So far.
Exterior faucet
Roughed-in plumbing
After 2 years of trying and failing, I finally got a plumber to appear to install the plumbing in the shed. It wasn’t much – a washer hookup, with hot water, a sink and an outside faucet. It was all done by one guy in less than 2 days. It isn’t fully operational yet because the sink can’t be hooked up until after the inspection and the hot water heater can’t be installed until the walls are finished. But the outside faucet works and I expect the carpenter to arrive next week to finish the interior work after which the plumber will return to install the hot water heater. Then, at long last, we will be able to install a washer and dryer. I am not sure that we will get that done before we head north for the summer, but it is possible.
And that is pretty damn exciting.
Apparently Mother Nature is in agreement as she gave us a nice colorful sunset last night.
Ready for a trip to the post office
With COVID-19 still raging, I now wear a mask and gloves whenever I go out to a store. This is how I dressed for a simple trip to the post office. Life is no longer simple. Every shopping trip is fraught with danger. Everyone hopes that this will go away soon.
Rusty, meanwhile, is taking his quarantine in stride. He gets his usual 18 hours of sleep each day.
Resting for his next meal
Snake in the irrigation control box
Our RV site is irrigated, meaning that our lovely bushes and shrubs are supposed to get a daily dose of water. But I have seen the system work exactly once in the two years we have been in residence – I heard the sprinklers activate once at about 2am. Somewhere way down on my To Do list is “call the irrigation company.” But it never rises very high because the flora does fine without any assistance. Everything is always green and lush.
Until this month. March was pretty much rain-free in Fort Myers. The grass is turning brown and I have been hand-watering our two new bushes. But before I called the irrigation company I thought I should take a look in the control box – buried behind our huge palm shrubs.
Surprise! A snake was curled up in there. It didn’t move when I lifted the lid and for a second I thought it was dead. My second thought was “it might be poisonous” so I carefully replaced the lid. It started to move as I did so.
It wasn’t huge – maybe 18″ and the thickness of my pinkie. But small venomous snakes can be deadly. So I wanted to identify it. After 10 minutes on the laptop I got the answer: eastern corn snake. Non-venomous.
But I think I will let the irrigation company take it from here.
Lee Memorial Park
I have several times alluded to the time I spend in cemeteries, usually looking for the graves of ancestors – either Jett’s or mine. But this season, I have taken to walking cemeteries as (1) a way of getting some regular mild exercise and (2) collecting some feel-good endorphins. No ancestors involved as neither of us have any ancestors buried in the area.
I have, in the past, tried to satisfy some “photo requests” posted in findagrave.com. These are requests for headstone photos posted by geographically-distant relatives. But there are relatively few of these and many are impossible to resolve as the headstone may be missing or the grave location is incorrect. That means a lot of walking with little satisfaction. I get plenty of exercise but no endorphins. This season I decided to go after easier prey – unphotographed graves. In many cemeteries there are relatively few of these as well. But I noticed that one large nearby cemetery – Lee Memorial Park in Lehigh Acres, just a few miles away – had over 15% unphotographed graves. Since the cemetery has over 11,500 graves, that meant over 1,800 opportunities to feel good. Finding and photographing graves on this list became a season-long goal.
I am not finished yet, but my current count of photographed graves is north of 1,200. I believe it will be over 1,400 when I finish. I think it will probably take another 6 or 7 hours in the cemetery. Should be easy to do before we head north. Because, with everything closed in the pandemic, I have plenty of spare time.
I couldn’t have predicted this, of course, when I embarked on this task, but it turns out to be a really good way to get exercise during a pandemic. It is very easy to adhere to “social distancing” rules when I am surrounded by dead people. There are, occasionally, other visitors to the cemetery, but it is a huge cemetery and it is very easy to avoid other living humans.
Copyright 2014 by Lee Child. Published by Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
There is no such thing as a bad Jack Reacher book, but some are better than others. This one, #19 in the series, is about average. It features an interesting primary plot in which Reacher is tasked – unofficially as he is a private citizen – to track down a sniper (or maybe 2 snipers) who might be gunning for one or more leaders of the western world who will be meeting in a couple of weeks at the G8 summit in London. The alarm is raised when the French President is nearly assassinated, from a distance of 1400 yards, while giving a speech in Paris but is saved by a super-strong pane of security glass on the lectern at which he was speaking. That incident turns out to be not only a close call but a key clue in figuring out whodunit.
Reacher is fingered for the task because the primary suspect – John Kott – has a grudge against Reacher who captured and provided testimony that sent him away to a military prison for 16 years. This animosity is confirmed when Reacher finds his lair in the North Carolina woods where Kott was using photos of Reacher for target practice.
But Kott, if he is indeed one of the snipers (and it wouldn’t be much of a book if he wasn’t) is being bankrolled by someone with some resources. A guy just out of prison is in no position to buy a new sniper rifle, a thousand rounds of 40-caliber bullets at $4 per and get a ticket to fly to France.
Most of the action takes place in or near London where Kott has teamed up with not one, but two criminal gangs. Reacher goes to London and tracks him down with the help of Casey Nice, an attractive sub-30 CIA agent assigned temporarily to the State Department. A relationship between Reacher and Nice blossoms, but unlike most Reacher books, this one never reaches the bed. It is more father/daughter. Is Reacher growing up? Inquiring minds want to know.
Reacher does get opportunities to bust heads, nuts, knees and spleens. The body count creeps up. It is a lot of violence for Merry Old England, but Reacher escapes any accountability. As expected. It is feel-good mayhem.
It finishes with a twist which is pretty common for Reacher books. So, all-in-all, a pretty average Reacher adventure.
7 out of 10.
Headstone
I haven’t done much genealogical research lately, though I have been getting a lot of exercise walking cemeteries. This morning I decided to catch up on some accumulated Ancestry.com “hints.” In doing so I think I solved – at least partially – one of the great mysteries in my ancestry: how George Watson Freeman, a 2nd great-grandfather who was born in Ohio, met and married Melissa Jane Freeman, born in Missouri. They married, probably in Kansas but possibly in Colorado, in 1865 and settled in Wisconsin in 1873. They are buried together in the East Pine River Cemetery in Yuba, Wisconsin. I found and photographed their headstone in 2017.
See the mystery? Ohio, Missouri, Colorado, Kansas, Wisconsin. How the heck did that all come about? That is a lot of travel at a time when railroads were just being established in the middle of America.
Today I dug into some records – both old and newly-discovered – and can now provide some details of these movements.
First, George’s father and mother, Zacheus and Sarah Ann “Sally” (Francisco) Richardson, 3rd great-grandparents, were pioneers in their own right. Both were born in the Northeast – he in Springfield VT (in the Connecticut River valley) and she in German NY, near Binghamton. Sometime before 1827 they both moved west, to Ohio, which was the “wild west” at that time. They married in 1827 in Mayfield OH, a town which he helped found. George was born there in 1840.
Apparently Ohio in 1845 wasn’t wild enough because Zacheus and Sally picked up their family then and moved even further west, to Illinois when George was just 5. They purchased 80.2 acres in McHenry County IL, just west of Chicago, on June 1, 1845. The farm grew to over 120 acres before Zacheus’ death in 1865.
George inherited his parents’ pioneering spirit and as a young man of 19 became a miner, first in Utah and then in Colorado. In 1862 he enlisted in the US Army, serving during the Civil War in Company G, Second Regiment of the Colorado Volunteer Infantry. He served there 3 years, after which he reenlisted in Company E, Second Colorado Cavalry. It was between those enlistments that he married Melissa Freeman. She must have been with him, based at a frontier fort in the west, until he mustered out, probably after 2 or 3 years. They lived for a while in Lawrence, Kansas, before moving to LaFarge, Wisconsin, in 1873.
I found a note that described the Second Regiment as “being raised by ‘Buckskin Joe.’” This apparently refers to Joe Higgenbottom, a miner who discovered gold in Colorado in 1860, leading to a gold rush. It is pretty likely that this gold discovery is what brought George to Colorado from Utah and why he later joined Buckskin Joe’s regiment.
I found the following account of his time in the infantry:
He served principally in the west and southwest, having first proceeded with his command to New Mexico, and later having been at St. Louis, Fort Scott, Kansas and Fort Smith, Arkansas, hunting for bushwhackers. He finally returned with his command to Colorado and at Fort Riley he received his honorable discharge May 12, 1865.
Fort Riley is actually in Kansas. He married Melissa Freeman in April 1865, just prior to his discharge, probably at Fort Riley. She was probably living in or near Fort Riley at that time.
I don’t have any description of his time in the cavalry, but I can imagine that he was involved in protecting the pioneer settlements in the west from Indian attacks. If he spent any time at Fort Riley then he probably met Major General George Custer who was in command of Fort Riley for a time starting in 1866.
So this answers the basic question of how a woman born in Missouri got into my family tree – she met a gold miner and soldier in the wild west. This is one of the more colorful leaves on my tree and Melissa Freeman is a critical link to our Virginia ancestors; all other branches came through New England or New York.
I bought an air conditioner for the shed on March 3, 2019 – just over a year ago. The intent, at the time, was to get it installed to keep the shed cool through the summer of 2019. Didn’t happen. And attempts to get it installed this year hadn’t gotten anywhere. But, finally, it got installed this week.
Ribbing
The major icebreaker was reaching agreement with the contractor on the cost of plumbing, insulation and carpentry – including installation of the air conditioner. A construction permit was pulled last week and a few days later two workmen showed up at my door (but stood 6 feet away) offering to begin work. The first step was to install “ribbing” in the ceiling, to make room for the required R-19 insulation. I dutifully cleared out some of the stuff to make room (most was on the shelving in the middle of the room which they said I could leave). I asked if they would be installing the air conditioner and they said they would. But not that day.
But they surprised me. I guess the ribbing work went faster than expected and by the end of the day the air conditioner was installed and operational.
But not remotely controlled.
After I bought the air conditioner I tested it to make sure it worked and configured it for remote control in the (vain) hope that I could get someone to install it while we were north last summer and could then monitor and control it from there. But when I took a look for the remote control app on my phone it was nowhere to be found. Don’t know why it disappeared, but it was gone. I would have to download and configure it again. Frustrating, but no big deal. It didn’t take much effort the first time and the second time should be even easier. Right?
So I downloaded the app and almost immediately hit a roadblock: I needed the password from the label on the right side of the air conditioner. But, now installed in the wall, the label could no longer be seen. So I had to call for technical support. That took three phone calls before I found a person who could help. Then I had to download a second app to get the MAC address of the air conditioner. But the tech support guy was able to use that to look up the password and I was then able to finish the configuration. I can now monitor and control the air conditioner from anywhere in the world where I have cell phone or WiFi access.
Yes, I wrote down the password in case I need it again.
All of this was done during mounting concern over the COVID-19 pandemic. I made it a point to keep as distant as possible from the workmen, to never touch them and, just once, when I was inspecting the air conditioner installation, getting within 3 feet of either of them. Later that day, when walking Rusty, I stopped by the newly-closed pool. If there is a photo that captures the impact of the pandemic in the RV resort, this is it. An empty pool on a beautiful “in season” afternoon. Sad.
Air conditioner, installed
Shuttered pool