Books and movies
We’ve continued to enjoy our abundance of books and movies from the library, and Alex completed my Sue Grafton collection with a gift of her latest book. We found a set of four Humphrey Bogart movies at Costco, and for sixteen dollars we couldn’t pass it up. We’ve loved watching them – we got “Key Largo”, “To Have or Have Not”, “Dark Passage”, and The Big Sleep”.
Alex also brought home seasons three and four of House, so Chelsea and I have stayed up too late a few nights now getting caught up on those. We’ve already told Alex he’s going to need to get season five before we leave.
We’re going to very much miss easy access to English language books and movies when we cross the border, so we are taking maximum advantage of our opportunity now.
Pool
Our pool saga is a much better story now. After my massive upset with the pool supply place we’d been going to, we found another location in the same chain of stores, but what a difference! The new folks are very friendly and knowledgeable; we’ve made great progress. The pool is now a pretty, though cloudy, blue instead of deep algae green.
We discovered that the dissolved solids aren’t getting filtered out properly because our filter has a broken piece. Chelsea and I got some marine glue and had a mini art project one afternoon putting the pieces together and gluing them. Despite our best efforts the glue didn’t hold, but we found a temporary workaround until we can afford to buy a new piece.
More good news is that I found a replacement piece online at a wonderful price – our system is a Jacuzzi and they went out of business some years ago. We’re now just waiting for the opportunity to buy the new piece and our pool will be gorgeous once again. Meanwhile it looks pretty good, and though the chemicals are in good balance, it’s just not swimmable.
The color and dissolved solids didn’t deter a visitor we had recently. Chelsea called out one afternoon, “Mom, come look at Cassidy (our cat) drinking from the pool!” Something in her voice made me get up and run to look. We both realized in the same second that it wasn’t our cat – it was a raccoon! In our nine years here we have never once seen a raccoon, and here we had a fat happy raccoon calmly drinking from our pool. Check out a picture of it in our photo gallery.
Guitar
I played the guitar for about six months some years ago, and have been wanting very much to get back into playing and bring a guitar on the trip. We finally dug out the old guitar I had all those years ago, but it needed new strings. It’s been a bit of a go-around, but I have new strings and a borrowed tuner. I still can’t get the strings to tune, so tomorrow it goes back to a music shop and I’ll find out what’s wrong.
My goal is to be an accomplished guitar player by the time we finish our trip in the next seven years. Imagine the stories we’ll have about playing in all kinds of exotic locales…
Technology
Alex’s phone broke in early December – he’s a heavy texter and hard on his phones – and mine partially broke only a week later. He made the decision to get the new Motorola Droid from Verizon to replace his old phone. I was online while he was at the Verizon store and saw that I could get a free phone with his purchase. What a good deal it was… He’s totally in love with his Droid (so are we) and I love my new phone – it’s much improved over the first generation LG Chocolate I had.
I’ve been waiting for a phone I like well enough and that will do the job for us south of the border, but haven’t come across anything that I like. After seeing how much I like Alex’s Droid, I went online and discovered that there’s a GSM version of the phone that has just become available in Canada. I’m ecstatic. Now all we have to do is pull together the cash to buy it – but at least what I want is now available.
More big news for us is that we now have DSL at home, with a wireless router, so after five years of using and loving our Verizon Air Card, we canceled it. We were among the first Air Card customers. Our technology on it was from around the time of Noah’s Ark, and to upgrade meant a new two-year contract. We’ve made a commitment to get a rideshare right to Corpus Christi and head immediately down to Matamoros, so we won’t need our Air Card.
Office tasks
Feeling out of sorts in mid December, but wanting to do something, I tackled my Gmail inbox. Over time my inbox had built up to over two thousand two hundred (2200) unread emails, and for some reason it just seemed important to get rid of all those. I embarked on a three-day journey over the last five years or more, reading those emails, deleting, filing, and most of all, following the progress of my life over the years.
It was quite an emotional journey, and seemed very fitting now that we are taking another huge journey in our lives. I got rid of an amazing amount of old junk, and ran across some very funny jokes.
Chelsea continued plugging away on the website changes and we’ve just gone live with the new system tonight. In the process we updated a number of our static pages and did some reorganization. We are very pleased. We will no longer have the security fears we had with being unable to update our Drupal system.
Trip related purchases
We got an incredible deal on eBay in October for Chelsea – we got Keen Presidio shoes for only $20 – they normally run around $80. I’ve had a pair since 2006, but Chelsea hasn’t had any. For our winter weeks in California two years ago we’d each wear one of the warm shoes and one sandal around the campgrounds, and last year in Louisiana I just let Chelsea use my shoes while I wore my Chaco sandals with wool socks.
The other night we had to do errands in cold, soggy rain, with the temps around forty degrees, and for the first time ever we each had our own pair of warm shoes. Life is good…
We also returned some items to REI and used the resulting refund to get some items we’ve wanted for a long time. We now each have a heavy-duty six-liter “dromedary bag” from MSR to hold additional water when we are in arid areas or areas where there’s a long distance between stops. That means we can now carry two water bottles each for about 48 ounces, our Camelbaks for another 100 ounces and the dromedary bags for about 203 ounces. All told we can carry about 2.7 gallons of water each.
With our new water filter we bought last May, we are much better prepared now.
The next big deal is that we finally got a bear canister for our food. Chelsea is over the moon about it. No more birds, squirrels, raccoons, ants, bugs, or mice can get into our food. It’s pretty bulky, but it doubles as a great seat for short-term sitting, and our food will finally, finally, finally be safe from marauding animals.
The third major purchase is called the kitchen sink. It’s a waterproof, leak-proof bag with handles that holds up to 20 liters. It is used bring water from water sources back to camp so we can filter or use it for washing; we can use it for doing dishes away from water sources; and we can use it for doing our laundry away from water sources. When folded it fits neatly into a very small lightweight package with its own carry case.
I’ve already tried using it, and it will definitely take some getting used to, but the advantages are wonderful.
We are really pleased about the purchases. We love the gradual improvements. When looking back at our systems in June 2007, we are in awe about how far we have come.
Adventure Cycling
Adventure Cycling maps were our lifesavers on our cross-country trip of 2006 and we’ve been big fans of Adventure Cycling ever since. In a major first for us, the executive director is in Florida, and will actually be speaking here in South Florida. We are headed up to see him tomorrow morning in West Palm Beach, and we have agreed to get food and to help set up the meeting tomorrow night in Miami.
We’ve gotten Alex to let us use the car, and we’re quite excited about our outings tomorrow.
Adios
I’ve been writing and doing tasks until much too late. Chelsea is still in “her room” working, and I’m now very ready to eat – it’s almost nine p.m. and we didn’t have lunch yet, never mind dinner. Time to sign off and get ready for tomorrow.