Weekend at the Trailer
Jul. 24th, 2006 10:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bjarvisOn the whole, it was a good weekend.
We left for Roseland Campgrounds in West Virginia early on Friday, once I cleared away some last-minute work-related issues. (Seriously, what kind of twit sends me an urgent data collection request at 8:30 PM Thursday when they know I'm going on vacation Friday?)
Traffic was mercifully light to moderate. While the heat & humidity were brutal, we were cheerfully comfortable in the air conditioned comfort of the minivan for the entire trip. Even better, it appears that we didn't forget to pack anything for this particular trip!
Brian K, Mark and![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
cuyahogarvr were already at Roseland when we arrived. In less than an hour, we had our stuff unpacked, the water turned on to the trailer and the AC chugging along at maximum. And that's when we started making little discoveries...
It seems our trailer now has a mouse. As near as we can tell, it's just one and he's a relatively new resident so he hasn't had the opportunity to do much damage yet. Still, he had clearly stuffed shredded bits of kleenex into the air conditioning ducts into the main bedroom area, causing a flurry of tissue confetti when the AC was turned on.
We also noted very, very small ants on the counter top near the front door. Not good. And in the process of clearing the counter to examine the extent of the problem, I knocked the coffee maker onto the floor, shattering it. Figures.
A quick shopping trip into town Saturday morning replaced the coffee machine with a smaller model and gained us a number of ant bait stations, mouse traps & ultrasonic rodent repellers and Round-Up to take care of some excess weeds. (BTW, what kind of store keeps their mouse traps & rodent repellers in the "animal health" portion of their display floor?) We never saw the mouse again, although we can't say if the ultrasonics or the presence of three large meat-eating primates scared him off... the traps lay ready should he return. The ants found the bait stations on Saturday and were not seen again on Sunday. Andcuyahogarvr declared the coffee maker to be a success.
On the good side, our experimentation in ice cream making was much more successful this time than last. Last year's attempt turned into cream soup: at the time, it wasn't clear if the issue was our recipe, the ingredients or the machine but it wasn't pretty. This time, we had very good vanilla ice cream for dessert Friday night, although it clearly needed more cold freezer time. The following day, the remaining ice cream was frozen solid and was well received by all who sampled it.
While attempting to grill burgers for lunch on Saturday, we discovered we hadn't turned off the barbecue after grilling the marinated chicken breasts Friday night. Doh! Ah, well... we improvised: we took one of the propane tanks off the trailer and hooked it to the barbecue as a temporary replacement. The trailer tanks are too large to fit inside the barbecue itself but we were able to cook lunch & dinner for the rest of the weekend without using the trailer's interior stove & oven. We'll have to refill the tank in our next visit.
The heat on Friday was crippling: I stayed indoors the entire time. Saturday was ugly in the early part of the day but improved steadily as the temperature & humidity dropped. Sunday's weather was delightful. Despite the improving climate, I wasn't overly social the entire weekend: I rarely left the trailer and was content to nap, read and label photographs.
I've been delightfully immersed in "Happyland," a serialized novel which began in Harper's Magazine's July issue. I won't go into a lot of detail --those reading it will already know, while those not probably won't care-- but I'll say that it's quirky, funny and well composed. Hats off to J. Robert Lennon for this work.
The huge batch of photos I sent off to Clark Color for printing last week arrived on Thursday. Alas, they were not printed in any particular order. In fact, it took an hour of work to sort the photos into approximately 15 different stacks, arranging them by event: DC Pride in this stack, Vancouver trip in this stack, aunt's funeral in this stack, etc.. Grrr. Another gripe: if they could print the date uploaded and batch code on the back of each photo, would it hurt so much to print the name of the original JPEG file uploaded? While I like their low price and good printing quality, I do want to shop around to find a place which would let me snail-mail a CD or DVD of photos and possibly print the file names on the back for easier cataloguing.
Anyway, I write names, dates & locations onto the back of each photo before they are arranged into chronological or thematic order and inserted into the photo albums. As of the end of this weekend, I've caught up on the photos I sent off for printing last March: I haven't started on the recent ones yet, but I'm hoping to allocate a block of time to that in the next 7-10 days. I'm keeping a large envelope of Portland, OR, photos from late June in my backpack to work on in spare moments.
We returned to civilization on Sunday afternoon, stopping in to visit withkent4str's parents on the way home. (They're fine and will be staying close to Maryland until November.)
Once home, we were unpacked within a half-hour and I had laundry started almost immediately. The backlog of email will take longer but I'll get to that when I can.
We left for Roseland Campgrounds in West Virginia early on Friday, once I cleared away some last-minute work-related issues. (Seriously, what kind of twit sends me an urgent data collection request at 8:30 PM Thursday when they know I'm going on vacation Friday?)
Traffic was mercifully light to moderate. While the heat & humidity were brutal, we were cheerfully comfortable in the air conditioned comfort of the minivan for the entire trip. Even better, it appears that we didn't forget to pack anything for this particular trip!
Brian K, Mark and
cuyahogarvr were already at Roseland when we arrived. In less than an hour, we had our stuff unpacked, the water turned on to the trailer and the AC chugging along at maximum. And that's when we started making little discoveries...It seems our trailer now has a mouse. As near as we can tell, it's just one and he's a relatively new resident so he hasn't had the opportunity to do much damage yet. Still, he had clearly stuffed shredded bits of kleenex into the air conditioning ducts into the main bedroom area, causing a flurry of tissue confetti when the AC was turned on.
We also noted very, very small ants on the counter top near the front door. Not good. And in the process of clearing the counter to examine the extent of the problem, I knocked the coffee maker onto the floor, shattering it. Figures.
A quick shopping trip into town Saturday morning replaced the coffee machine with a smaller model and gained us a number of ant bait stations, mouse traps & ultrasonic rodent repellers and Round-Up to take care of some excess weeds. (BTW, what kind of store keeps their mouse traps & rodent repellers in the "animal health" portion of their display floor?) We never saw the mouse again, although we can't say if the ultrasonics or the presence of three large meat-eating primates scared him off... the traps lay ready should he return. The ants found the bait stations on Saturday and were not seen again on Sunday. And
cuyahogarvr declared the coffee maker to be a success.On the good side, our experimentation in ice cream making was much more successful this time than last. Last year's attempt turned into cream soup: at the time, it wasn't clear if the issue was our recipe, the ingredients or the machine but it wasn't pretty. This time, we had very good vanilla ice cream for dessert Friday night, although it clearly needed more cold freezer time. The following day, the remaining ice cream was frozen solid and was well received by all who sampled it.
While attempting to grill burgers for lunch on Saturday, we discovered we hadn't turned off the barbecue after grilling the marinated chicken breasts Friday night. Doh! Ah, well... we improvised: we took one of the propane tanks off the trailer and hooked it to the barbecue as a temporary replacement. The trailer tanks are too large to fit inside the barbecue itself but we were able to cook lunch & dinner for the rest of the weekend without using the trailer's interior stove & oven. We'll have to refill the tank in our next visit.
The heat on Friday was crippling: I stayed indoors the entire time. Saturday was ugly in the early part of the day but improved steadily as the temperature & humidity dropped. Sunday's weather was delightful. Despite the improving climate, I wasn't overly social the entire weekend: I rarely left the trailer and was content to nap, read and label photographs.
I've been delightfully immersed in "Happyland," a serialized novel which began in Harper's Magazine's July issue. I won't go into a lot of detail --those reading it will already know, while those not probably won't care-- but I'll say that it's quirky, funny and well composed. Hats off to J. Robert Lennon for this work.
The huge batch of photos I sent off to Clark Color for printing last week arrived on Thursday. Alas, they were not printed in any particular order. In fact, it took an hour of work to sort the photos into approximately 15 different stacks, arranging them by event: DC Pride in this stack, Vancouver trip in this stack, aunt's funeral in this stack, etc.. Grrr. Another gripe: if they could print the date uploaded and batch code on the back of each photo, would it hurt so much to print the name of the original JPEG file uploaded? While I like their low price and good printing quality, I do want to shop around to find a place which would let me snail-mail a CD or DVD of photos and possibly print the file names on the back for easier cataloguing.
Anyway, I write names, dates & locations onto the back of each photo before they are arranged into chronological or thematic order and inserted into the photo albums. As of the end of this weekend, I've caught up on the photos I sent off for printing last March: I haven't started on the recent ones yet, but I'm hoping to allocate a block of time to that in the next 7-10 days. I'm keeping a large envelope of Portland, OR, photos from late June in my backpack to work on in spare moments.
We returned to civilization on Sunday afternoon, stopping in to visit with
kent4str's parents on the way home. (They're fine and will be staying close to Maryland until November.)Once home, we were unpacked within a half-hour and I had laundry started almost immediately. The backlog of email will take longer but I'll get to that when I can.
