Thursday, December 31, 2009

Happy New Year - 2010

Goodness, it seems like it was only yesterday we were all watching the year 2000 come in waiting to see what would happen when the new century and decade began. Remember the Y2 scare? Would our computers all work come the 1st of January? So hard to believe that was 10 years ago!

Can't wait to see what the next 10 years have to offer. My hope is that we are able to continue to travel as we have without any major problems, meeting up with old friends and making new ones along the way.

36 years ago, I watched the New Years Eve festivities from a hospital labor room. Very soon after midnight, I had a son and I am very proud of the man he's become.

Here he is with his wife Sarah at the Magic Kingdom at Disneyland.












And flanked by his sisters on his wedding day.




Happy Birthday, Terry. Love ya

Friday, December 18, 2009

We are no longer in Kansas

We are done with Amazon.com. We finished a week earlier than expected and didn't make as much as we had hoped, but we are done!!!

The work was harder than we expected in many ways. It was very physical work, pulling some very heavy boxes off the conveyor and on to a table. We had to scan all the contents and put into totes and put those totes on the conveyor to go to be stacked and moved to a staging area where the stowers would take the merchadise and scan it into bins. The hours were long...11 hour days. (We had one week right after Thanksgiving where we worked only 10 hour days) On top of the 11 hours days they wanted 5 days a week. If you have ever looked at the Amazon web site you can see a lot of what we received. A lot of books, CDs, clothing and toys. Household items and electronics. We were at lunch one day, when one of the guys said he'd never had his hands in so many bras!!

Freezing temps didn't make it any easier either. The past two weeks the weather has been very cold at night...sometimes down to 10 degrees. We pulled our water hose everynight and to make things worse..our water pump decided to stop working. So when we didn't have the water hose connected, we worked out of water jugs full of water.

We had a problem when we stopped for the night in Paris, Texas. For the first time since we started this lifestyle we had to use our CoachNet roadside service. Our jacks decided not to retract. No matter what we tried, we could not get them to work. They would extent, but wouldn't retract. After waiting an hour and a half for someone to come..he worked for about an hour and manually got out jacks retracted. Didn't pay for anything and they aren't really fixed yet but we were on the road around 1:30pm. Needless to say it was dark when we arrived in Livingston. We will be here for the next couple of weeks. We need to get the car and motorhome inspected and Ed will need to replace our water pump. We have some doctors appointments after Christmas.

Then we are on to Arizona and we will again be meeting friends as Quartsite. Then the fun will begin!!