In Every Life....

The week was largely preparing for our camping trip over the weekend, back to La Pine State Park Campground, this time with the kids. We packed the trailer to pull out on Friday afternoon.

We got to the campground about 15 minutes after check-in time. The campsite had a great location and driveway length for us and an additional vehicle. However, it required backing uphill. It was a challenge.

We managed, though, and then unhooking the trailer was an additional problem, caused, of course by the slope of the driveway.

This is what our campsite looked liked from the street.

Some of the trees in the site are amazing!

We managed to fit the RPod, the truck and the kids’ car all in the driveway. There was plenty of room for the tent.

I had installed the toiletries storage pockets in the wet bath of the trailer. It worked out well.

I’m still having trouble with the convection features on the oven, but I got it to cook the food.

The first night’s dinner was pizza. We made three. This was the dairy-free version, a requirement of two of our party.

We got in some knitting.

We went on hikes each day. It was great for the dogs and the boys.

The dogs watched the ground squirrels. This one helped himself to three pieces of kibble before being startled into leaving by one of the dogs.

Among the wildlife seen during hikes were these geese.

The boys had lots of craft activities to keep them busy.

We had a fire a couple of nights and the final morning.

One of the sights we saw over the weekend was the “Big Tree.”

It was indeed big; mostly fat, but also tall, but since a storm no longer the tallest in the park. It may be the oldest, however, at an estimated 500 years.

The boys hadn’t seen the off-leash area before, so we went there to let boys and dogs run. We met some other people and their dogs. (That cloud of dust to the right is, of course, Dusty!)

The “men” in my family needed a nap each afternoon.

The rainy Sunday found us feeding all six people inside the RPod. It was…um…cozy. (I put some cushions on the step stool to sit on at the end of the table.)

Sunday it rained. We thought the boys needed to have some time away from each other. Johan watched “The Secret Life of Pets” on my iPad in the RPod.

Soren watched “Ice Age” on Alexa’s iPad in the tent.

Later everyone came back into the RPod to play games.

The pups hung out in the bed.

All weekend, we enjoyed close interactions with the ground squirrels. I snapped this photo of one of our neighbors in the doorway to his townhouse.

I thought this was the best photo taken during the camping trip.

The last night, I lay in bed with the pups while Charlie brushed his teeth and changed into his PJs I snapped this photo of our by now messy but still cozy RPod, as seen from the bed.

That's the fridge with stuff piled on top (we need to put up some shelves) and you can see the oven in the galley area. That cord went to the small heater (that of Winnemucca days) we used to keep warm during nights that could dip into the 20s.

Monday we packed up and checked out. It was shockingly east to hook up! We did it before our hike, so we would be ready to head out by 1:00 PM. The sloped drive, which had so vexed us when we were trying to unhook seemed to work to our advantage when getting hooked up again!

While Charlie was at the dump station taking care of the dump process, I went across the street to the trash/recycling area to dump some things we didn't want to take home, a good use of my time. Otherwise I'm not needed until the end of the dump procedure, when I apply hand sanitizer to Charlie's hands and hand him a paper towel. (He uses gloves, but there's always a risk during the dump procedure.)

We arrived home about a quarter after two Monday afternoon. The next couple of hours were spent unloading the RPod and leaving the fridge turned off with its door open to defrost. This is most likely our last camping trip for the season, so everything had to come out.

The camping trip wasn’t all that happened this past week, however. Earlier in the week was Charlie’s birthday. He was somehow able to blow out his candles, in spite of his advanced age.

It was (as it is every year) "Talk Like a Pirate Day," and I had adopted a pirate theme, giving him a scroll with directions to follow to find the treasure (his present), although he got to choose from the options of keelhauling, walking the plank and feeding the fishes. He chose the present.

That night, we had a Madroña pop-up meeting (basically a wine-themed online party with some instruction/background given by the host and vintner.) We surprised Charlie with a big happy birthday, with decorations and party hats. They're a great bunch of people with a common interest in wine and a shared appreciation for this particular winery.

While I was getting ready for the trip, my new phone arrived. I had to set it up, but the Apple people helped me do that, and the CREDO people helped me transfer my eSIM so I could get calls and use the other services offered by my phone carrier. It's a little bit bigger than my old phone, but I've been using it for nearly a week now, and I'm seeing some advantages with the iPhone 14, including consistent cell reception at the campground, where I couldn't get a reliable signal during our previous stay.

While we were packing for our trip, Sandy was finding things to take out to the yard, because…why not?

I have a lot of difficulty responding to comments to my blog posts because of technical issues beyond my control (my lack of understanding of how things work). Message me on Facebook, Ravelry or Spoutible if you need information.

If you have a few minutes and are willing, please go to Amazon and B&N and search for "Our Favorite Verses: Poems from The Doll's Storybook by Peggy Stuart". Every click on the page for the book makes it more likely they will keep a good supply in their warehouse and stores. If you are outside the US, you may have a separate website for these retailers. If you have a copy of any of our books, including Emil, Mariah or Classic Tales Retold, please leave an honest review on the websites, especially if you bought from them.

Where's my blog: If you want to follow my blog, go here and sign up to follow.

What's on my needles: Still the Kultainen käki cardigan with a little more progress.

What's on my loom: I didn't make any progress on the placemats.

What's on my sewing machine: Back to the quilt.

What's in The Doll's Storybook: In Scary Things, the girls find something definitely not Christmassy among the Christmas decorations.

What's on my iPad/iPhone: Still listening to Die Unendliche Geschichte by Michael Ende. I got a little more listened to.

What's in my wine glass: Prayer Rock Vineyards' Reustle Syrah 2020. Another new one for us.

What's my tip of the week: This may seem obvious, when camping with shore power (a hookup for electricity) and have a microwave, meals can be precooked at home and microwaved at the campsite.

Where are my books: The stories in each book first appeared in the blog and they are reproduced with a few changes. 

Our Favorite Verses: Poems from The Doll's Storybook is available from the BookBabyBookshop and other booksellers worldwide. Poems included are Valentine's Day, Keeping Pets, Back to School, Victor the Vulture, The Week Before Christmas, Insomnia and Veronika's Vocabulary Verses.

The stories in Classic Tales Retold: Stories from The Doll's Storybook are Little Green Greatcoat, The Boy Doll Who Cried Wolf and Lost in the Woods.

Emil: Stories from The Doll's Storybook and Mariah: Stories from The Doll's Storybook are also still available from booksellers. The link for Book Baby is here. The three stories in Emil are Best Buds, Getting What You Want, and The Boys Cook Dinner.

The three stories in Mariah are Being Little, Besties, and Distraction.

If you don't get free shipping from Amazon or B&N, buy from the BookBabyBookshop, because 50% of the price goes to St. Jude. Other booksellers pay much less. 

Note: This blog post was produced on the iPad and the MacBook, using the iPhone for some photos and some photo processing. No other computer was used in any stage of composition or posting, and no Windows were opened, waited for, cleaned or broken. No animals or dolls were harmed during the production of this blog post.

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Challenged!

Sandy wasn't the biggest troublemaker in my life this past week for a change.

He still finds things to get into, but we got him a toy to challenge his brain. A pet store chain that has a store near us has a special coupon for 25% off our entire purchase, including sale items. We needed some kibble, and with the discount, it was cheaper than we could get anywhere else. The dog puzzle toys were on sale, and the discount applied. We asked a store employee which one we would start with for a puppy too bright for his own good. She suggested the Outward Hound Casino. When we got it home, I discovered that it was a Level 3 puzzle. I was afraid it might be too challenging, and he would give up before it started being fun. I put a Cheerio into each drawer. He could smell it and figured out quickly how to open the drawers. The next time I locked some of the drawers. It slowed him down a bit. (Maybe if I had loaded it with Vitamin D capsules, he would have been faster.)

He's still growing but starting to fill out. On Friday he hit 20 lbs. The checks are coming in from Trupanion to help us with the vet bills related to his "dietary indiscretion" of three weeks ago. Sandy didn't give us too much trouble for the past week.

No, the biggest troublemaker during the past week was my iPhone.

This phone has rendered reliable service for the past nearly six years. Virtually all of the photos in my story blog and books were taken with this phone. I've used it to get Siri to tell me how to get to where I wanted to go. I've used the Walk for a Dog app to record my walks with the pups. I've used it to adjust my hearing aid and to listen to audiobooks and music. It's my calculator, banking branch and phone-call monitor, screening those annoying telemarketer and scam phone calls. I've used it to text photos of what I wanted Charlie to buy at the store.

Now it needs a new battery. It had been trying to tell me for some time, but when I tried to use the Walk for a Dog app during our hike at Timothy Lake last week it lost all battery power and died, after recording only 0.01 mile, even before I took any photos. A hike of nearly four miles didn't register enough distance to qualify for any points, which was disappointing. Not being able to take photos of the boys and the pups playing was an even bigger loss. Fortunately, our daughter-in-law took some photos on the hike and shared them with me. These treasured memories would have been only slowly fading memories without the photos!

(Just a side note about the dogs off-leash. This campground allows them to be off-leash when playing in the water or swimming. They were otherwise leashed up all the time they were outdoors.)

I would happily replace the battery and continue on with the same great phone, except for a couple of things. First of all, I would have to send my phone in to Apple and be without it for a week or drive to Tigard (close to Portland, 169 miles) to get to an authorized dealer who could deal with it. (Simply Mac closed down during the pandemic.) While trying to find someone local who could change the battery for me, I was told that that older phones like my iPhone 7 are vulnerable to hackers, if I do any online banking with it. The person told me she recommended getting a new phone instead. Less important, but still a consideration, the new Spoutible app doesn't work as well with the older phones. I can like and echo a spout I like, but the only spouts I can send are emojis, no text. That's really of minor significance, because I usually use my laptop or iPad anyway, when I have to type anything beyond, "Yep!"

To make a long story even longer, I've ordered an iPhone 14. (Photo from apple.com)

Many thanks to Jennifer at Apple for helping me figure out which phone would work best for me within what I could afford. She spent the time needed to find out what I do with the phone, so she could advise me. The phone should arrive later today. A very nice person at CREDO said they will help me transfer the SIM electronically if I can't figure it out, and an Apple Advisor already had me update the software and back up to the cloud, in case I decided to send it in to them. I will do that again, just to be sure, before making the transfer. 

Also this week, I wrote a new story for #TheDollsStorybook and took the photos with my iPhone 7, which still works, even though I never know how long the battery will hold the charge. I'm going to try to do one story a month for now. I sent off some copies of my most recent book to people who wanted an autographed copy, including two copies to the Wisconsin grands. Their dad was one of my editors and a great help with the poetry. Now that I've mailed two in an envelope, I know how much the postage will be, in case someone orders two.

I'm still working on getting the R-Pod organized. We're going out again with the Oregon grands and their parents next weekend. We're going back to LaPine State Park Campground. Our daughter-in-law has put in a request for a rug to catch the dirt and sand at the entrance to their tent. (Camping in Oregon always seems to come with dirt or sand or both!) I offered her the second of the two smaller rugs I had woven on my loom.

Consistent readers of my blog posts will perhaps remember that I originally made the rugs for the old fifth wheel. There was a lot more floor space in the old trailer.

When we sold it and bought the R-Pod, the rugs didn't fit as well. The larger one fit in front of the door just fine, but the "hallway" (put in quotes, because calling it a hallway is like calling a VW Bug a limousine), was too narrow for the rug to fit. I trimmed one of the two smaller rugs to fit and bound the raw edges with fabric. I had planned to do the same with the other smaller rug, but now I won't have to.

The trimmed rug fits nicely now.

That's the door to the wet bath on the left, the fridge on the right, and you can just make out the internal vacuum in the lower right-hand corner. You heard me: the internal vacuum. I can plug in the hose where that circle is and reach every corner of the pod, or, if that's too much trouble, I can just sweep everything in the general direction of the internal vacuum, give the little panel next to the hose opening a kick, and swoosh! No more dirt or sand, even in Oregon. At the top of the photo is the area under the bed, with things stowed away for travel: from left, the poo can (if you have minipoos, they will live up to their name), the stool I use to get out of bed or to reach into cabinets, and a plastic storage box with my clothes.I would have had to slide the other rug partway under the bed if I kept it. I plan to weave two more rugs to fit the space in the new R-Pod. Sometimes you have to pick one up and put down another, so having spares is good.

In the old fifth wheel, we had one of those hanging sacks you can stick plastic bags into to reuse later. It was large and bulky, and the colors weren't compatible with the R-Pod, so I copied it and made a smaller version. It's about half as tall as the old one, but just as big around. It took a fat quarter, some elastic and a little cotton rug yarn.

Now I've been working on some toiletries storage pockets for our wet bath. When we bought the pod, we thought this set of three mesh pockets was supposed to be for toiletries. Then we discovered that if you put anything in the middle or lower pockets, the lid to the toilet wouldn't stay up. (In the photo, there's a pair of flip-flops in each of the upper pockets, but that was marginal.) So what's it for? Magazines? Why have a mesh magazine holder in a wet bath? Mesh implies it won't collect water. Magazines would get wet and be hard to read. It's still a puzzle. I thought about cutting off the bottom pocket and tying the bottom corners to the lower fasteners with some kind of waterproof string, but the middle pocket is still too low for the lid to stay open. 

We took down the pocket thing, leaving the four fasteners. (I was inside the wet bath without a wide-angle lens, so only the top two fasteners show, but you can see the top of the lid to the toilet.)

It's too wide to fit on the other wall of the wet bath. We're still trying to figure out a way we can use the thing. In the meantime, I put a tension rod up along the side of the wet bath just above the enclosure and just under the ceiling.

There's 12" from the top of the enclosure to the hand-hold things. (I thought those were supposed to be shelves at first, silly me!) I'm thinking of making some kind of holder for toiletries to hang from that tension rod. I picked up some grey mesh to make it.

I was thinking of having a pocket for the tension rod to go through at the top of the unit, like a curtain. The grey mesh is quite a bit thinner than the set of pockets that came with the trailer, but I think it's strong enough to hold the little airline bottles of shampoo, hand sanitizer, toothpaste, deodorant and other things we would need to store there.

I did get some knitting done during the week. The straight stockinette is moving along, although it isn't as interesting as the stranded colorwork. Time to get back to my audiobook!

Our anniversary was on Friday. We didn't do anything special this year. We've had enough excitement with the new puppy, the R-Pod and camping trips. It's hard to believe it has been 58 years. The anniversary gave me the opportunity to look back on the various things we have done and the adventures we've had. We're still in touch with all of the people in this photo from our wedding except for the young man on the right. 

Choir has started up again, and we sang yesterday. I was a little nervous about losing Christian, our director for the last four years, and his replacement seems so young, but I think it's going to work out fine.

I have a lot of difficulty responding to comments to my blog posts because of technical issues beyond my control (my lack of understanding of how things work). Message me on Facebook, Ravelry or Spoutible if you need information.

If you have a few minutes and are willing, please go to Amazon and B&N and search for "Our Favorite Verses: Poems from The Doll's Storybook by Peggy Stuart". Every click on the page for the book makes it more likely they will keep a good supply in their warehouse and stores. If you are outside the US, you may have a separate website for these retailers. If you have a copy of any of our books, including Emil, Mariah, Classic Tales Retold or Our Favorite Verses, please leave an honest review on the websites, especially if you bought from them.

Where's my blog: If you want to follow my blog, go here and sign up to follow.

What's on my needles: Still the Kultainen käki cardigan. Some progress made.

What's on my loom: I didn't make any progress on the placemats.

What's on my sewing machine: Toiletries pockets for the R-Pod.

What's in The Doll's Storybook: In The Arithmetic Problem, Pippa finds out that sometimes there are better ways to help than the first thing you think of.

What's on my iPad/iPhone: Still listening to Die Unendliche Geschichte by Michael Ende. Just when you think the story is over, it continues on. Well-named, but it's fine that it goes on, because I'm enjoying it.

What's in my wine glass: Shannon Ranch Big Horn Red Blend 2020. Very nice!

What's my tip of the week: You can extend the lifespan of an iPhone battery by following these tips. I'd be willing to bet these same suggestions would work for other brands of phones as well. I did some of these things. Wish now I had done them all, but maybe it's good to have a new phone.

Where are my books: The stories in each book first appeared in the blog and they are reproduced with a few changes. 

Our Favorite Verses: Poems from The Doll's Storybook is available from the BookBabyBookshop and other booksellers worldwide. Poems included are Valentine's Day, Keeping Pets, Back to School, Victor the Vulture, The Week Before Christmas, Insomnia and Veronika's Vocabulary Verses.

The stories in Classic Tales Retold: Stories from The Doll's Storybook are Little Green Greatcoat, The Boy Doll Who Cried Wolf and Lost in the Woods.

Emil: Stories from The Doll's Storybook and Mariah: Stories from The Doll's Storybook are also still available from booksellers. The link for Book Baby is here. The three stories in Emil are Best Buds, Getting What You Want, and The Boys Cook Dinner.

The three stories in Mariah are Being Little, Besties, and Distraction.

If you don't get free shipping from Amazon or B&N, buy from the BookBabyBookshop, because 50% of the price goes to St. Jude. Other booksellers pay much less. 

Note: This blog post was produced on the iPad and the MacBook, using the iPhone for some photos and some photo processing. No other computer was used in any stage of composition or posting, and no Windows were opened, waited for, cleaned or broken. No animals or dolls were harmed during the production of this blog post.

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