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The RV adventures of Sparky and (the late) Jett |
The tiny stage
Chris Olson
This was another example of the park’s entertainment being very good. Better than expected. In every case – New Year’s Eve, Valentines Day or just the occasional Hump Night DJ – the music has been consistently excellent. Whoever is selecting the acts is doing a very fine job.
The New England Tour
In summers past we have picked one RV park in the Boston area and stayed there for the entire season. This has many advantages, most notably the ability to form friendships and get some significant discounts. But this year the season will be shorter as we will be leaving New England on August 1 to head out to Wisconsin for my 50th high school reunion. Also, as a result all of my genealogical research over the past year, I am keenly interested in visiting gravesites of both my ancestors and Jett’s. These two factors led to the decision to split our time among a number of campground in the three months we will be in New England. We have selected 5 campgrounds in MA and 1 each in NH and ME. We have dubbed this bit of traveling – and it is not much, travel-wise – the “New England Tour” or simply NET.
We will arrive in New England on May 5. Our initial destination will be Plymouth, MA. The full itinerary is:
We have stayed at Normandy Farms, Saddleback, Minuteman and Pine Acres previously and look forward to return visits. Pinewood Lodge, Beach Rose and Sea-Vu West will be new and we have high hopes.
The tour will consist of 6 hops, the longest being just 82 miles. Just over 300 miles total. The roads will be mostly interstate freeways or local roads that we have traveled before. the most adventurous hop will be from Sea-Vu West to Saddleback – that will traverse some local roads the we have not seen before. But not long and not difficult.
Not a big trip, but the variety of places should make for an interesting summer.
Grace, ready to roll
Jett and I put our beloved Grace down yesterday. As always, it was a very difficult, heartbreaking decision. She wasn’t in pain, she wasn’t dying. But she wasn’t living, either. Life had became a constant trial for her. She never fully recovered from her first bout of vertigo in December 2015 and became even more unstable after a second attack this past December. Two nights ago she awoke me at 2am with a panicked look in her eyes. I thought she needed to relieve herself, so I took her out, in my pajamas. She did, in fact, pee immediately, but she continued to be panicked. She fell over, twice, as I walked her. When I got her back to the RV I had to spend some time comforting her. A bad dream? A sense of impending doom? I don’t know. But it was obvious that she was living the final days or weeks of her life.
She became incontinent about a month ago. We tried a variety of diapers. None worked and she hated them all. Jett and I had, after her second vertigo attack, checked out veterinary options as we knew that her end may be near. After the 2am panic attack we talked about taking her north in April, knowing that she would have to be put down shortly after we arrived. Jett pointed out – correctly – that with her instability, having her travel 1,500 miles would be cruel.
So yesterday morning we decided that Feb 15, 2017, would be The Day. Jett called the vet and we made a final trip to the ocean, which Grace has always loved, before heading to the vet. One of my fondest memories of Grace was of her first encounter with ocean surf, in Rockport MA. She raced into the surf, barking and biting the waves, trying to herd them. She had a grand time.
She didn’t have a grand time on her final trip. She stepped in, but there was no joy. She panted, she stumbled and almost seemed to say “Yeah, nice ocean. Now let’s get this over with.”
She was, as always, a lady in her final minutes. The assistant – a total stranger – scooped her up to take her to another room to insert the catheter. She didn’t struggle, didn’t complain. When she came back Jett and I spent a few moments hugging her and telling her how much we appreciated her years of friendship and companionship. I told her to give Cha-Cha our love, should she happen to see him on the other side. She kissed me.
Then she went to sleep. Gently, quietly. Sadly.
What was it that endeared Grace to us? Well, she made an indelible impression the moment we met her. She was a 3-month-old ball of fur that we met in a shelter. She was one of a litter of seven or eight. Her siblings were all sleeping, but she was running circles around them, nipping at their paws, trying to get them to play. I was a bit dumbfounded when Jett said “I want THAT one!” I said, “Are you sure? You don’t think she is a little too… crazy?”
But Jett was in love and, of course, I had to agree. I picked Cha-Cha who was 2 months older, much larger and much quieter. At the suggestion of the shelter staff, we put Grace in with Cha-Cha, to make sure he wouldn’t be aggressive toward the smaller dog. We needn’t have worried – Grace immediately started nipping at his paws and he backed into a corner, totally cowed. From that moment on, Grace was Alpha Dog in our pack.
Jett picked the name “Grace” in honor of a beautiful Irish song. But it was totally the wrong name for her. Dynamo, Cyclone, Chaos… all would have been more appropriate. But we stuck with Grace. She and Cha-Cha became best friends and they had 12 years together. When we lost Cha-Cha we got Rusty. But Grace merely tolerated Rusty; she was never close to him. I think she missed Cha-Cha.
Back-seat driver
Grace loved to travel, so she picked the right parents. She accompanied us on all of our RV journeys to date – over 17,000 miles. She dipped her paws into the Atlantic, the Pacific and the Gult, as well as the Mississippi River. In her younger years she would claw at the window whenever we passed an 18-wheeler. Or, if there was no traffic to watch, she would look over my shoulder at the road ahead. She knew when it was a “travel day” – her eyes got brighter and she had more bounce in the step.
She loved the water, too. Salt water, fresh water, clean water, dirty water – didn’t matter. If there was water, she was in it. When we had the house in Massachusetts we would put a kiddie pool in the back yard and she would be in and out of it all day. There was joy on her face whenever she was in the water.
In the last year of her life she developed a couple of quirks. The shower in the RV became her refuge – her preferred place to nap. She liked the shower more that she liked the sofa or the bed. And tables… she developed this affinity for tables. She found ways to entwine herself in our TV tables. Odd. But endearing.
The final days were very, very sad. We will miss her. But I take comfort in that, in her final moments, she did, in fact, prove that we gave her the right name. She died with grace.
Swimming
Dog beach in Charleston
In the shower
Under the table
Her farewell photo
Delacorte Press, May 2007; Bantam Dell paperback edition April 2008
I realized about 5 pages in that I had read this book once before. But I couldn’t recall how it ended. Being unable to remember critical plot elements of a book does not speak well of it. I knew it wasn’t one of the best of the Jack Reacher series because I remember the plot details of most of them vividly. But even a mediocre Jack Reacher book is better than most, so I finished it.
No, not one of the best Reachers. But fun anyway.
The plot begins with the disappearance of four of his old Army “special investigators” unit. They are all long out of the army and haven’t seen each other in years, but, as they used to remind everyone, no one messes with the special investigators. If someone has messed with the four, then it was the responsibility of the other four to make them pay.
One of the reasons why this is a lesser Reacher novel is that about two-thirds of the book deals with the time the remaining four spend thrashing around in the dark, trying to figure out what caused the disappearance of the other four and who might be responsible. The final third is devoted to making the culprits pay.
But before the payback could get underway, two more are captured and are headed to certain death. That leaves just Reacher and one other investigator – a woman – to deal with a team of 8 vicious assassins. They were clearly outnumbered. The assassins, that is, because 8-to-2 is right in Reacher’s wheelhouse. It was just a matter of time, really, but some of the fun is seeing how Reacher makes it happen.
Oh, just to make things more interesting… the reason the investigators were killed is they had uncovered a plot to steal 650 high-tech shoulder-mount anti-aircraft missiles that a terrorist was planning on using to bring down commercial aircraft, at a likely cost of thousands of lives and a complete disruption of air travel in the USA. Just a little detail, really; Reacher was primarily focused on saving his two colleagues and getting payback for the death of the other four. If he happened to save the US air industry in the process, then all the better.
Naturally it all comes out right in the end, with a body count of 9 bad guys, 7 dispatched by Reacher and 2 by his lady friend.
Not a great plot, but great fun.
8 out of 10.
We have about 2 months remaining on our winter stay in Fort Myers. So it is time to start planning… planning the trip north and then the trip out to Wisconsin for my 50th high school reunion. But we still have 16 states that we haven’t visited. We can hit four – OH, MI, IN and WI – getting to the reunion, but that leaves 12 states, including WA. I think this is our opportunity to complete our 48 state map.
So I am now in the process of planning the trip north, the 3 months in New England, the trip to Wisconsin, the trip to Washington and Oregon and the trip back east. And, of course, we need to decide where we will spend the winter. That discussion includes options to spend between 3 and 6 months outside the US – perhaps in Panama or Costa Rica – to see how we might like living there if we decide to turn in the RV.
The three months in New England will actually take more planning than usual as we intend to do a “New England Tour” this year, spending no more than 3 weeks at any one RV park. The tour will include MA, NH and ME.
I booked one stop on the trip north yesterday and plan to book some of the summer sites today. The planning is underway! I will provide more details as the plans stabilize.
I think John Grisham is a very talented writer. I love his legal mystery/suspense/adventure yarns. They always keep my attention. They even keep me awake when I read late at night, which is high praise indeed.
Except this one.
In a nutshell, this is the story of a dying southern judge who summons his two estranged sons to a meeting to discuss his estate. One son is a law professor while the other is a ne’er-do-well addict and playboy. When they arrive they find their father dead, with a hand-written one-page will that splits the estate evenly between the two. As his estate was paltry, consisting of a run-down house and a few thousand dollars in the bank, the division of the estate hardly mattered.
But some things were puzzling. Why had the man left a hand-written will when he had a perfectly valid one, written just a few months before, on file with his lawyer friend? Why summon the sons at all if there was really nothing to discuss?
Moot questions, if would seem. Until the professor son discovers $3.1 million, in cash, in boxes in his father’s home office cabinets.
Where did it come from? Was the purpose of the summons to discuss this cash? What should be done with it?
That is the central question in this book: what is to be done with the cash? The “right” thing would be to declare it as part of the estate. But then the public would ask the same question: where did it come from? As the judge had a reputation as a scrupulously honest and fair judge, his legacy would be tarnished with rumor and suspicion. Maybe he won it gambling and the son spends a quarter of the book trying to decide if that was possible. It wasn’t.
So maybe just keep the money and, over time, launder it and spend it on his cherished dream: a nice private aircraft. One decision was easy: he would NOT share it with his brother because he would just use it to buy drugs and that would kill him.
One rationalization follows another. He hides the money in a storage locker, then visits the locker nearly every day to make sure the money is still safe. He begins to obsess about the money. Can’t sleep. Can’t focus on his work. He starts to look a bit insane, like Humphrey Bogart in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. His obsession turns to fear when notes begin to arrive which makes it apparent that someone – no idea who – knows that he has the money.
The rest of the book is about how he tracks down the source of the money and what happens to it. As I write this I realize that it sounds better than it was. For a Grisham novel, the plot was very thin and the characters were not very interesting. This was probably my least favorite of all the Grisham novels that I have read.
3 out of 10.
Eagle at sunset
Our RV site at Gulf Waters RV Resort is right on a man-made pond. It is a beautiful site which we are enjoying very much. We knew that the view – of the pond, the clubhouse and the fountain – would be a constant source of pleasure and serenity. But we didn’t expect to have a front-row seat to some pretty exotic bird-watching.
A few weeks back we went to the Ding Darling Wildlife Refuge on Sanibel Island, which bills itself as a great place to see exotic waterfowl. We enjoyed the trip, but didn’t see many memorable birds. Our little pond, on the other hand, has been a stage for frequent, surprising appearances of birds that I have either never seen before or never seen so nearby. The stork (at the right) is one of the most surprising. I didn’t know that storks inhabited this area. In fact, I kind of believed that storks were mythological creatures that only existed in stories to deliver babies.
Just in the past week we also had egrets, cranes, ducks, pelicans (both white and gray) and cormorants in our little pond. But the most surprising bird of all was a bald-headed eagle. It appears to be an adolescent, not huge but very beautiful. He is in the park nearly every day, sometimes fishing from the pond. One morning last week as I exited the RV with the dogs to take them on their morning walk I was surprised to see the bald eagle on the grass near the edge of the pond, eating a fish. He was no more than 100 feet away. He flew off, fish in talons, when the dogs got too close, but honored us with a fly-by: he circled the lake, then flew directly over us at a height of 20 feet. He gave the dogs the evil eye.
I think he was trying to decide if he could carry Rusty off.
Crane
Pelicans
Stork
Egrets
Before
Dirty/clean line
So we decided to replace the flooring in the lower level. Jett would have liked to have replaced the upper level (bedroom/bath) flooring as well, but that meant devising some way to cover the edge of the steps and no good option was available (we know because we asked a flooring expert). We did, however, ask the flooring guy to stretch and tack down the carpet in the bedroom as it was beginning to ripple. Why? Because RVs are built with the flooring in place when the walls are attached, so the walls are built on top of the flooring. The assumption – not a particularly good one – is that the walls will keep the carpet from rippling.
We had a lot of choices for the new flooring. We could have gone with linoleum, like the existing flooring, or real wood. But the wood option was risky (it had to be thin enough to let the slides ride over it) and we didn’t much care for vinyl – especially since it would have been impossible to install it as a single piece with no cuts. So we opted for a durable fake wood plank flooring that, we are told, will be very durable and very washable. Then it was a matter of choosing a color. We opted for a planks that look gray in sunlight but show more of a light oak color in artificial light.
I wasn’t sure I was going to like the change. Being a guy, living with dirty carpeting bothered me less than it bothered Jett. And as it was being installed I continued to be unsure as it looked too gray. But once completed, I liked it very much. The RV now has a brighter and definitely much cleaner feel to it.
We followed up the flooring installation with a cleaning of the remaining carpeting, specifically targeting the stains on the bedroom carpet. So we now have some very clean flooring.
For a few days.
After
Rippling/stained bedroom carpet
The kitchen area
There are books where the genesis of the title is obvious, like Green Eggs and Ham. There are books where the title is not immediately obvious, but is revealed in the reading, such as The Hunt for Red October or The Red Badge of Courage. Then there are books which, when finished, you are left scratching your head, wondering “where the heck did THAT title come from?” like Cry, The Beloved Country. Taming the Sea-Horse is one of those.
This is one of the series featuring Spenser as the very masculine PI with a heart of gold. This is the 15th in the series. If you love Spenser you will enjoy this one because he does all the Spenser-esque things that you love: punches the lights out on some bad guys, stands up to mobsters and other assorted cretins (example: he overpowers two would-be assassins, spray-paints their hair pink and sends them packing), wise-asses his way through some incredibly dangerous predicaments and, in the end, gets the girl. If you know Spenser you know that “getting the girl” does not involve sex as he is 100% monogamous and totally in love with his psychologist FWB, Susan, who he stumpfs innumerable times (which is the other reason he keeps in great shape). No, in this case the girl is a young hooker that he snatches from the clutches of some bad guys in New York who happen to have some Boston buddies. It is just the kind of thing a PI with a heart of gold would do.
The Spenser novels are all set in Boston, so if you like reading narratives involving real Boston locations and institutions, then you have another reason to like this book.
I like all those things so, despite my puzzlement over the title, I enjoyed this book very much. Not a deep plot, but a fun ride.
7 out of 10.
s
Pickle ball
Pickle ball equipment
Which is not to say that you don’t get plenty of exercise. After my first 90-minute pickle ball session my shirt was so wet I could wring it out. I lost 3 pounds. And my legs cramped up on my for the next 24 hours. It was a workout.
The equipment consists of a paddle – usually composite but sometimes wood (if you are cheap like me) – and a ball which more closely resembles a wiffle ball than a tennis ball. A game is up to 11 and a team can score only if it is serving. Service changes if the volley is lost – to the second person on the team if the first person was serving and to the first person on the other team if the second person was serving. Figuring out who is serving is the most complicated part of the game.
I am not very good yet. I held my own on the first couple of days, but then the good players returned from Christmas vacations and I have been toast ever since. I lost 9 straight games this week. Humiliating.
But it is fun even when losing. And I will improve. Eventually.