Yummy meals

We are trying to be a little more cognizant of what we're eating. A few days ago, this was our dinner...

A caprese salad with fresh mozzarella, tomatoes, basil, and a balsamic reduction...

Along with an experiment that Carl tried in the air fryer -- Chicken Croquets -- a mixture of rotisserie chicken, cream cheese, seasonings, and rolled in Parmesan cheese on the outside.

The air fryer made them nice and brown -- and they were tasty except we decided a few more seasonings would be appropriate in the future.

Carl is really enjoying the air fryer!!!

Electronics Club

There are numerous clubs and groups at Venture Out, the resort where we own a lot (and a park model). Since Carl is involved with Ham Radio, and that falls under the Electronic Club, we went over to the Electronics Club last week to pay our dues for the year.

While there, we looked at information on the bulletin boards -- one thing of interest was the list of classes that are going to be offered...

Quite a number of "Tech Talks" -- all free to Electronic Club members (and a friend).

Check out the wide variety of topics available!!!

We may be taking advantage of attending a couple of them!

Know your why

Facebook reminded me that I posted a link to this video 5 years ago -- it had been shown in my Perspectives class in the fall of 2019. I enjoyed watching it again so I thought I should share it here:

A couple of "house" projects

Since it is hot outside, we've Carl's been working on inside projects...

A few months ago, I blogged about us replacing the stove top in the rig with an induction stove top (https://journeyinamazinggrace.blogspot.com/2024/05/replacing-stove-top.html).

We still needed to close the holes along the sides of the stovetop -- Carl did that last week:

Stove top in place with gaps on each side

We ordered some material from Amazon that we could cut to fit the space and stick down. Measure to be sure of the size we need...

Miss Kitty was supervising from across the room, adding input for us to consider (she loves to sit on the arm rests of our desk chairs).

Finished sealing pieces in place -- we hope that they will work and stay in place for a long time.

We probably won't actually use the built-in stove top very often -- it requires us to remove part of the counter top, reducing our already small counter space. We also have found that with a two-burner induction cooktop, each burner impacts the other -- so, for example, you can't actually get "high" power on both at the same time. We use a single-burner induction cooktop on top of the counter most of the time. There are few times that we actually need to have two burners working at the same time. However, with this installed, we now have the capability to have three burners -- the two built-in plus the separate single burner -- in use at the same time.

Carl then started working on the spice rack project.

Way back in 2020, we removed a TV that was in the front room of Gracie (we had two TVs in the room, one at the front over the windshield, and the other at the back between two cabinets) - we removed the back one. We put a medicine cabinet in the place its place which I've been using for spice storage. 

Unfortunately, the shelves were held up with plastic shelf clips, and, over time, with the spices bouncing up and down on the shelves as we drove down the road, several of the clips had broken. (The picture is of one of the few that still were whole.) I had resorted to putting taller spices at the two ends of shelves to hold the shelves up.

Carl got metal shelf clips to replace the plastic ones - and he put a clip at the back middle of each shelf too. Some of the plastic clips had broken off in the hole where he needed to put the new metal clip, so he had to get those plastic pieces out and make a hole the right size for the metal clips.

Here's a view of one end of a shelf with the metal clips holding the shelf up.

And here's the cabinet with all the spices in place -- we have a lot of spices!!! There is another narrow cabinet above (with mirrored doors) and one below as well -- these were both installed when the coach was built. The one below has canned goods; the one above has softer and lighter items -- vitamins, small packages of loose tea, etc. -- so if an item happens to try to fall out upon opening the doors, it is less painful!

It is nice to get these two projects completed!

Random pictures

Some random pictures from the last week or so...

The full moon rising over the palm trees last week...

... and some pretty clouds over our park model.

"Shopping" at the "VO Mall" -- the area outside the dumpsters where people leave stuff that they no longer need but which others might be able to use.

Traveling amateur radio equipment -- at Carl's ham meeting last week, one of the presenters shared about his set-up for going mobile -- to be able to set up at a park or in an emergency situation...

... he has built a 3-shelf stand from PVC piping and can carry and assemble his radios, batteries and assorted peripherals, hook them up, and have them working relatively quickly.

Another day, we were driving to do a few errands and enjoyed the view of the Superstition Mountains which are east of us.

We had a couple of days of more moderate temperatures, followed by high 90s again. This next week is supposed to have more moderate temperatures again.

It's *supposed* to be a hummingbird feeder!!!

We put out our hummingbird feeder a few days ago. While we *have* seen a hummingbird or two there, we're also seeing others using it:

One of the birds eyeing it from the palm tree...

... yep! It's a good place for a snack!

Not sure what this little one was -- he wasn't much bigger than a humming bird!

The hummingbirds are so quick that I haven't gotten a picture of any of them.

I wonder if the other birds are looking for water as much as the sweetness of it... maybe we should have a bird bath or something for them...

Our mail arrived!!!

I posted a few days ago about the saga of our mail's travels from Livingston, TX to Mesa, AZ (https://journeyinamazinggrace.blogspot.com/2024/10/where-is-our-mail.html)... in our last installment, it was in Massachusetts -- here's the rest of the tracking information -- remember, read from the bottom...

Amazing, it went from Middlesex-Essex Massachusetts on Monday evening all the way to Phoenix in the wee hours of the morning on Wednesday -- I don't think it could have come by truck that quickly, so they must have put it on an airplane. It also made no documented stops on its way across the country -- since we are missing Kentucky and Colorado on our "visited states" map, we were considering checking them off if our mail stopped there for a significant amount of time! It then only took 9 more hours to get to our Post Office box -- except, it wasn't in the box (it was too large), so we had to be sure to go to the Post Office (located within Venture Out) during the single hour each day (M-Sa) that the Post Office is open!

We managed to get to the Post Office on Wednesday, pick up our package notification tag from our box, *and* get our well-traveled package of mail.

We even managed to process through *most* of it by Thursday late morning! Whoo hoo!!!

A family visit

This time, we had family come to visit *us*!!!!

Carl's oldest son, Scott, had let us know that he had a business trip to the Phoenix area scheduled in October, and asked if we might be able to host him at the "Casa" -- we were excited to be able to have our first guest for this season (daughter Kim and her two girls had come in the spring, so they were actually our first Casa visitors).

One evening, Carl and Scott went out on our e-bikes to tour the community (Venture Out) where we live.

Another evening we went to Organ Stop Pizza for dinner and to hear the organ music -- before we went inside, Carl took Scott to see the huge pipes that can be seen through the windows on the outside of the building.

Inside Organ Stop Pizza

We sat very near the stage so had a good view of Brett Valliant as he played "the world's largest Wurlitzer Organ"!

After we finished eating, we decided to check out the view from the balcony seats...

We decided that we liked the view from the balcony even better...

... and it seemed that the sound quality was better too!

The organist not only plays the organ, but also controls the lighting -- it is quite an enjoyable show -- and included with the price of your dinner, which is decent pizza at a reasonable price!

Check it out at https://organstoppizza.com/

We were sad to see Scott leave on Wednesday morning -- it has been great to have family come to visit.

The Casa is currently not booked again until the first weekend in December -- anyone want to come visit during November?!?!? Please let us know!!!

Pole raising

Since we're going to be at Venture Out a while (we think!), we are putting things up and out that we might not do otherwise -- specifically, 

... we've put our flag up -- we actually have a new one -- the wind really tears up the flags here. The pole has a light that shines down from the top so we can leave it up day and night. Carl also has put one of his ham radio antennas up -- he plans to put at least one additional one up, but it will be attached to some other items on our lots. (Note: the satellite dish is on a park model home that is on the street behind us -- our lots are very close together here at Venture Out.)

We have the flag and the current antenna attached to the ladder on the back of Gracie. We have flag / pole mounting brackets called "Flag Pole Buddy"(https://flagpolebuddy.com/). It is a system that allows us to put a pole up without needing to climb the ladder -- a good idea to stay on the ground as much as we can!

Oktoberfest street dance

Our resort had an Oktoberfest street dance last week... some people dressed up in German "Oktoberfest" garb... we went to listen to the music and dance!

Dancing outside

Nice patio area, though the surface is rather rough to be used as a dance floor

Music provided by "Uncorked, the Band" -- they are also booked to do our New Years Eve Dance at Venture Out

Line dancing during band break

We had a good time!

Where is our mail?!?!?!?

As many of you know, we have a mail forwarding service that we've had for many years -- our mail goes to Texas and we ask for it to be forwarded to us on an infrequent and irregular basis.

Since we're going to be at Venture Out for a while, I ordered our mail to come -- I sent the email requesting that our mail get sent on Wednesday, 10/9 -- when I realized that they had not responded on Thursday, I checked the email address. We have our mail service through Escapees, and some changes are happening with Escapees, including that the mail service email address has changed (as far as I can tell, no one has told us that the email address changed, but we have gotten emails from a new address, and I guess the old address goes to the "dead letter email department"). I had sent it to the old address; I sent to the new address, and, because there was a Monday holiday, our mail didn't get scheduled to go out until Tuesday 10/15. Oh well, that will be okay - the tracking indicated that it should come by Friday.

Well... I noticed that, although tracking still indicated it should come by Friday, on Friday morning, it was still in Memphis. Things got worse over the weekend... read this from the bottom up...

... it left Livingston, went to Houston... then (next picture)...

... reading from bottom up, it went from Houston to Georgia (seems the wrong direction to me if it is on its way to Arizona), then to Memphis, where it appeared to spend quite a bit of time (possibly on a tour of Graceland?), and then this morning, it made it to Massachusetts?!?!?

Oh my... 

At least they aren't giving me any guesses as to when it may arrive -- who knows how many other tourist stops our mail might make before it arrives!!!

We don't anticipate that there is anything critical in the mail... we get most bills and correspondence electronically. But, it would be nice to eventually receive it!

Cleaning the grass

First - apologies for the lack of postings - we have been busy doing things at our lots in Venture Out, but either we haven't gotten pictures or we just haven't done many interesting things each day.

You may remember that we had artificial grass put down at our lot last year (https://journeyinamazinggrace.blogspot.com/2024/02/continued-work-on-lot.html, https://journeyinamazinggrace.blogspot.com/2024/03/more-about-grass.html). We had the opinion that this would reduce the requirements for maintenance on our yard... and, for sure, we did not have any weeds grow in our grass over the summer.

However, our grass was dirty... We called our sweet neighbor, Barb, who had gotten the fake grass before we did and asked her what was recommended to get it clean -- she let us know that she had a carpet rake in her house and invited us to borrow it. We headed out to see what we could do.

Once again, we did not get a "before" picture of our yard...

...this was after Carl had used the leaf blower to get the big stuff off our grass -- you can see what looks like browned-out grass at the edge -- that's various stuff pollen and dust and stuff collected in the edge of the grass.

Carl changed the blower to a vacuum and worked on vacuuming up the stuff that he had blown from the yard into the street...

He then came back and used the vacuum on the grass too. I had used Barb's rake to loosen up the stuff on the edges so it would be easier to pick up.

This is the "grass" in front of our park model - "before"...

... another view of "before"...

On this yard, Carl used an upright vacuum and beater-bar to try cleaning it -- he totally filled the container in the vacuum and it cut out. He also thought that it may have overheated.

Meanwhile, I was working on the edges... with a broom...

... and with Barb's carpet rake. You can see all the "stuff" that is coming out of the "grass".

This was after we were finished -- a lot better!

Now, we're only working outside about 2 hours each morning, until we get so hot and sweaty and the heat gets beyond what we are willing to work in... so we only get so much done each day...

This morning, we worked on Barb's yard -- I remembered to get a "before" picture...

... and then this is the "after". We just used the rake and a broom on her yard.

We also have worked on getting our outside spaces set up. We had all our outside patio furniture stored in the Casa next door, or on the covered patio of the Casa. We moved the appropriate furniture the each patio, and got the chair pads out of the sheds where they were stored.

Patio furniture out and patio carpet next to Gracie. We also have the awning out to keep the side of Gracie a little cooler.

The forecasts indicate that we should have cooler temperatures (90s today, 80s tomorrow, 70s Friday -Sunday). Maybe we will be able to work on outside projects even more than 2 hours in the morning!

Note that we have also been working on making the Casa ready for guests, as our first guest for the season will be arriving on Sunday! We have not yet turned on the air conditioning in the Casa, so it gets warmer as the day goes by too.