Quilting – Page 4 – TooBusyForWork

Spearfish Canyon and Custer State Park

This is us at Elkhorn RV Resort. It is expensive, but the sites are lovely, as you can see. Note the wonderful steps next to the motorhome. Kevin is determined I don’t fall down the motorhome steps again! I should have taken the picture at a different angle so you could see the hills around us. Oops!

You can’t stay in Spearfish and not drive the gorgeous scenic byway down Spearfish Canyon! We spent most of Wednesday in the car, but it was worth it.

The scenery doesn’t disappoint after the byway either.

Lake Sheridan on the way to Custer State Park

You go through the old mining town of Lead, SD the way we drove. The locals pronounce is “Leed,” and it has historic sites all over the place. The Homestake Mine was the deepest and biggest gold mine in North America. It was discovered during the Black Hills gold rush of 1876, and was in production until 2002. It now serves as an underground scientific laboratory, and it was where neutrinos were discovered.

Ruins of the famous Homestake Mine mill in Lead, SD

We eventually arrived at Custer State Park. Lots of rocks, hills, and trees, and absolutely lovely.

Rocky crags similar to those of Mount Rushmore before carving

The most famous drive in Custer is the Neeldes Highway. It has six one lane, low narrow tunnels carved into the rock, restricting it to passenger vehicles only. You can get an idea in these two pictures.

There is a reason for the name “Needles Highway.”

We ate lunch at the historic State Game Lodge where Presidents Coolidge and Eisenhower spent time in the summers. They had a very nice buffet, but I had planned on one of their traditional bison burgers! The buffet was a quite acceptable alternative though. We came back through the craziness that is Keystone (just outside Mount Rushmore) and Deadwood. I try to stay away from both. I just can’t get excited about Rushmore. We have seen it, and the carvings are interesting, but I much prefer more natural sights. And Deadwood is just the definition of a tourist trap! Come to think of it, so is Keystone.

Oh, and I found a great little quilt store in Spearfish. I bought backing for my great niece’s baby quilt, and the lovely women said I could use their tables to sandwich it! Fabulous news, and I will do that on Friday.

We have to move sites tomorrow from this huge pull through site to a large back in due to their reservation mixup. I have discovered a car wash that has an oversized outside bay we are hoping to wash the motorhome in. The poor baby is absolutely filthy. So tomorrow we will move the Jeep to the new site, then take the MH for a wash. When we get back and set up, I will go sandwich my quilt.

And we are off!

It has yet again been a month since I posted. I guess I just don’t feel I do as much stuff worth of posting when I am home. I did get a few things done though.

First off, we did get the MH yearly maintenance done. It was relatively painless. We use a small town Freightliner/Cummins place in Decorah, IA. Small enough they remember me, but full qualified and certified by Freightliner and Cummins for motorhomes. Good hourly rates too!

I did attend a quilt retreat at the Newton, IA KOA and the associated Alta House event center. It was run through the RV Quilter Facebook group, and I really enjoyed it. The facilities were top notch, the price moderate for everything we got, and we even had MaryAnn Fons or Fons and Porter fame give us a trunk show! I finished all the piecing on a sweet little quilt. The blocks were appliqués by my grandmother in the 1930s using mostly flour sack fabrics. When I got them they were yellowed and filthy. I soaked them in Biz, a non-chlorine laundry additive. After the first 6-7 hours, the water was just brown! I kept dumping it out and refilling, gently submerging the blocks. After 4 days, they were in pretty well clean, and happily nothing faded! They are fragile though, so I backed them with a lightweight interfacing designed for tshirt quilts. I had to do some creative trimming since they weren’t the same size or positioned the same. I finished the quilting at home on the quilting machine. Much easier than using my domestic Bernina machine.

Hand appliquéd, machine pieces and quilted.

Mostly we have just been getting ready for this upcoming western Canada and Alaska trip. Kevin was thoughtful enough to look for a small mobility cart for me. I have a mild case of scoliosis, but as I have gotten older, the arthritis has gotten bad, particularly in my left hip. It hurts to walk more than 100 yards or so, and I knew we would be doing more than that. He also bought some collapsible freestanding steps for the motorhome. I love them! They give a great platform to stand on in front of the door, and they have a railing! I had a bad fall a couple of years ago, and it was the proximal cause of my rotator cuff repair.

The steps actually attach to the platform, and you can adjust the height on each leg individually. He added some rubber bumpers because the raw metal edges would be bad on the paint.

We are now staying at a local campground, Big Woods Park. It is sooooo,inch easier to load the motorhome here than in the storage u it or at the house. Here we can open up all the slides, get things sorted correctly, etc. We will head out tomorrow morning to Omaha, NE. We plan to go to the incredible Henry Dorly Zoo plus some museums. We are staying at the brand new Lake Manawa State Park campground. When I say “new,” they just opened 1 June!

Expect lots of pictures folks.

Yuma and Casa Grande

We left Quartzsite on Thursday, 3 February for Sun Ridge RV park in Yuma. There was a really bad wind storm on Wednesday, so we delayed while most of our friends left on Tuesday to get out in front of the storm. We always love the Quartzsite area after most people leave; it is wonderfully quiet and empty after the crowds of the previous week. One other couple stayed at our rally spot, and we all went to the Quartzsite Yacht Club for dinner. We had ribeyes that were remarkably good, and Paul joined us. Ann had fish and chips, and she said it was quite good too. Two or three days later, the Yacht Club owner abruptly closed the restaurant. The pains of running a seasonal restaurant and bar during a pandemic just made her too tired to continue. She said the final straw was a very poor review. Be kind folks!

The RV park was where we had three sets of friends stay, so it came well recommended. It was not really set up for short timers, with lots of Palo Verde trees far too close to the road. We definitely got some rub marks, but nothing more serious. The sites are roomy, but are all 100% gravel with a small concrete patio. There was a quilting group, but I didn’t know about it in time to attend. The folks were really nice, but they had a rule they didn’t put on their website – no personal washing machines! Since one of the main things we wanted to do was laundry, this was quite disappointing. One of our friends recommended a “Don’t ask, don’t tell” approach since we were only there a week, and that’s what we did. I really, really prefer using my own washer and dryer, though there’s looked fine.

One Monday we did the main task we came for – heading to Algodones for discounted glasses. It was remarkably easy, and we ordered fancy progressive glasses with frames, mine with heavy tint and polarizing. Sadly they don’t make those in their own lab, so it will be three weeks before we can pick them up.

One of the main streets in Algodones. Medical tourism is the thing here

The process was easy: pay $6 for parking in an Indian-owned lot, walk right into Mexico after a cursory look in my purse, look for glass frames we liked, see the eye doctor, order, and pay with a credit card. Kevin also picked up some anti-inflammatories at the pharmacy next door. We wandered around a while, and I did end up with a new purse! It is a knock-off I am sure, but it is just the size I have been looking for. Getting back into the US was more effort than leaving. We had to wait in a line (of course) for 40 minutes, showed our passports to the agent, and then walked back to the car. I highly recommend going as early as you can because the lines are much shorter.

I wish I had a better picture of this little boy playing his accordion for tips while we waited for Border Control to let us back into the US.

Walkway back to the US with plantings and an accordionist

We also did some of our standard Yuma things like shopping (both of us bought shoes) and lunch at Yuma Thai (I recommend the green curry!). I also went to Bingo for the first time at the RV park. It was fun! Now I know the basics, and I may play at other RV parks since it is a common activity at the 55+ parks common in snowbird country.

I also came down with some type of gastritis with a fever, headache, and just a generally unhappy belly. Being in the times we are in, I took a COVID test twice, 24 hours apart, both negative. The fever and headache finally went away yesterday, but the belly discomfort is still there. Hopefully that resolves soon.

I did finish my donation quilt top which was good. It is hard to do a good pressing job in the limited space I have, but I finally got everything lying fairly flat. I will show a picture when I get it quilted.

After Yuma, we decided to go to Casa Grande and High Chaparral RV Park. I wasn’t nearly as impressed with this one – smaller sites and no landscaping. They have a gorgeous laundry room though, and they have a nice pool and club room. They also could only take us for 5 nights, but that long enough. Kevin has ordered a new control board for the auto star tracking on his tripod, and it is scheduled to arrive in Tucson tomorrow. We didn’t really want to stay in Tucson due to the crowds from the Gem Show, and I had been interested in the Casa Grande area for a future longer stay. It has gotten quite warm (low 80s), so having nice electricity and AC is pleasant. We will probably be heading back to dispersed boondocking, so I will use it while I can!

Big Tent show is over and we can relax

We are still in Quartzsite until tomorrow morning. We have reservations for a full-hookup RV park in Yuma where we have friends staying. Laundry will be first on the list!

Back to what we did in the last week. We did take a nice day trip to Lake Havasu City. Kevin had finally ordered a telescope and some accessories, and the only place we could find for Amazon to deliver it was LHC. Odd but true, due to the size of the package. He got excited, and when the app showed the package was out for delivery, we headed up. LHC is about an hour and a half north of Quartzsite, and we wanted to get dinner and do some sightseeing too, so we thought the timing would work. It didn’t, and the package didn’t get delivered until around 8:00 pm after we left! We did enjoy the trip though.

We saw this Osprey take off from the LHC airport! He flew right over us.

The small community of Havasu Lake across the Colorado

Lake Havasu City from a peninsula into the lake

Looking kind of north-ish across the lake.

We also went looking for boondocking opportunities in the area. We had stayed before in Craggy Wash, a BLM dispersed camping spot, so we went there first. Way too crowded for me, and the spots suitable for bigger rigs were mostly taken. The rocks are cool though!

There were some promising sites closer to I-40 that we might use some other time. The advantage of these sites is that there is good cellular internet service, a big plus in my book.

Poor Kevin had to return for the telescope on another day, but we enjoyed the trip back to Quartzsite. These were taken from an overlook along the Colorado River north of Parker.

And the telescope did finally show up, though Kevin took another trip to get it. It works well, but a control board in his tracking system is having issues. He can do some pictures, but it requires more manual work than he wants to do. You can see how close we are parked to our friends in the fifth wheel. Just for the rally, we all parked 30’ or so apart, awfully close for dispersed camping. The sites allows for much wider distances most of the time.

Speaking of cellular data, the reason I haven’t updated is because there has hardly been any until yesterday! When the hundred thousand or so people show up for the big RV show, service goes to hell. You can generally make calls and text, but internet access becomes almost nonexistent. Now that the show is over and the masses are gone, I have good service. I even streamed some television tonight. Our nearest neighbors, rally friends who also stayed put, are about 100’ away, just about the right distance LOL! I don’t like being right next to even friends if I can help it. One of the major advantages of dispersed camping is you can space yourself out.

Most of the folks left Monday or Tuesday morning ahead of the bad wind storm we had today. It had gusts of 50+ mph and sustained winds of 30 mph for a long time. We just hunkered down and brought in some of the slides. It wasn’t that they were in real danger, but the slide toppers were making a big racket! Before the storm we had some visitors nearby. Quail are my favorite desert bird.

Another picture before the storm.

We also have a Gila Woodpecker making busy in a nearby saguaro, but I never did get a good picture of it.

I visited the Quartzsite Quilt Guild a couple of times on this trip. Nice group of women, and I got a lot done in their free-sewing time. I sewed 10 new microwave bowl cozies to use as presents, and I finished all the rows of my triangle donation quilt. The plan had been to finish it today, but there was t room with the slides in. In fact, my sewing table is turned upside down on the bed right now! I can get the top finished next week for sure. Oh, and I forgot to mention that I did Dutch Oven dishes for the rally potluck – layered green chili chicken enchiladas and peach cobbler. The cobbler was such a hit I made an apple version on Monday evening, but still no leftovers. Sigh. It all went over well though, and there wasn’t much scraping needed to clean the pots!

Quartzsite, visit #7

We arrived at our campsite in Quartzsite, AZ after a 4 hour drive from Organ Pipe. We stay with a group of friends from an online forum, RVForum.net. As our seventh trip here with them, we don’t go running around as much as we did the first few years. There is a lot more just relaxing, talking by the fire, and doing hobbies. I have the sewing machine out, and I am trying to work on a Drunkard’s Path quilt made with 4” blocks. I am finding it much, much harder than the 7” block version I did a few months back! I also go my sewing machine adjusted so the needle bar was exactly in the hole of the needle plate, but the tiny adjustment has thrown off some of my measurements. I will get used to it, but it is a bit of a struggle. I did cut a bunch of triangles, and I sewed those without a problem. It is always nice to have “mindless sewing” available, something I can just enjoy instead of fussing around.

Kevin discovered why our generator wasn’t charging the new LiFePO4 batteries very quickly. Turns out there was a switch that limited it to 30 amps, and once that was updated we started getting 90 amps charging. That makes the entire process so much faster. We have had quite a few cloudy days here, and the solar just can’t keep up between the clouds, low sun angle, and shorter days. Our 900 watts of panels are flat mounted, and they don’t get more than 300 watts some of the time, and mostly less than that this time of year. That only gets us 18-20 amps from the solar.

Kevin put up our weather station, and I just love knowing the outside temp and humidity. We will eventually get the wind sensor working, but right now the mounting pole moves in the bracket. Kevin is 3D printing a clamp for it now. Hopefully that will correct the pole rotation.

I don’t have many pictures right now, but here is the last picture from Organ Pipe showing the motorhome and our campsite.

Note the generator access panel open on the front. We heard rumors of pack rats, so we kept all the hoods open to discourage them.

I also have a beautiful sunset picture from Quartzsite.

This shows not only the pretty colors, but also how people spread out here in the BLM area. We are in the southwestern Long Term Visitor Area (LTVA) at La Posa Tyson Wash. It is the least crowded of the four LTVAs, being about 3 miles from town. It is still an easy bike ride though, and I prefer the space. Kevin went to town twice, searching for bolts and a new sunscreen for the awning since he somehow managed to crush the zipper pull on the old one. I am staying at the camper, away from the crowds. He is good about wearing a KN95 mask, so he is as safe as a triple vaxed person can be.

Mostly Woolaroc

After Hamilton, MO we drove to northeastern Oklahoma and Copan Lake, a relatively small Corps of Engineers lake just at the OK/KS border. Site was fairly unlevel but lovely.

Copan Lake at sunset. Lots of trees in the water.

I set up the sewing machine since we would be here a few days. This is my current setup. I got a bunch of appliqué done, but it was so slow!

I also experimented with our newish Air Fryer from Gourma. I took a “just add water” muffin mix and added some gorgeous blueberries. I reduced the recommended temp by 25 degrees and the time by 15%. It worked!

We found this grumpy snapper trying to cross the road. He was big; his shell was close to 12” long.

Moved this very irritated snapping turtle across the road

We were primarily here to visit some places neither of us had been to since we were kids. The first spot was Woolaroc Animal Preserve and Museum near Bartlesville, OK. It was the retreat of Frank Phillips of Phillips Oil Company (Phillips 66 fame). There is a LOT of old oil money in this part of the state, and they spent lavishly. Frank decided he wanted a large ranch with exotic animals, space for his friends to come out and play cowboy, and to show off the early American artifacts he had. As you enter the attraction (now owned by a foundation), you drive through a series of large animal pens.

Eastern Oklahoma is known as “Green Country” for a reason. The small building is the Phillips family mausoleum.

This year they had a fur trader’s encampment set up with two re-enactors. We are close to the Arkansas River, and fur traders travelled up the river to the mountains.

The older re-enactor was voluble and knowledgeable. He even let Kevin fire his muzzle loader! Kevin didn’t hit the target, but he did get close!

We finally got to the museum. The entry is definitely old school “Noble Savage” style, and much of the interpretation inside is similar. The artifacts make up for it though!

A tiny piece of the outstanding pottery collection at Woolaroc

Hand made birchbark canoe made by an Ojibway woman in Minnesota. They didn’t think she was worthy of identifying by name 🙁

My normally very sore back let me walk through the entire thing, though I didn’t get to dawdle much. All the physical therapy I have been doing seems to be (finally!) working.

Not everything was old. There is a scale model of an oil field and a lot of equipment. The airplane was one of many built by small companies in the heyday of early aircraft. The company that built it no longer exists.

A few miscellaneous things to note:

The restaurant is just a concession stand in these COVID times, but the BBQ bison burger was pretty good. We at dinner at a local diner, the Cohan Restaurant which just happens to be the only one in the very small town. Mediocre, but edible.

Next post will be about the Gilcrease Museum, another incredible place we visited on this trip.

And it is almost summer!

I am definitely in the mood for getting out again. We haven’t bee out since the last trip at the end of April. For Mother’s Day we had most of the kids and grandkids come over for dinner. It was nicer than just the two of us going somewhere, though I did do the cooking LOL! We had pot roast, carrots, and potatoes so it wasn’t too hard.

The kitten are growing like weeds. They are so well behaved! Never any scratching even when being held against their will. They don’t scratch anything except their scratching post except for my big rolls of batting downstairs. I have had to move them all to an inaccessible spot since that soft batting seemed just right for little kitten climbing. We kept them on kitten food since they were so small, but we are transitioning them to adult cat food now. They seem to like it just fine.

It is hard to get a picture of them playing without it being fuzzy! They were chasing the magic red dot (laser pointer).

Minerva was particularly fond of the doll bed we got for my granddaughter’s birthday

I have been sewing some. The king sized quilt for our bedroom at home has the main center part completed – 80” square. I need to add borders, but I haven’t gotten in the mood. I did finish quilting three quilts for my quilt guild though. As before, just utilitarian meandering, but it keeps me in practice. I am not a person comfortable with completely scrap,quilts, particularly in big pieces. I find these dreadful, but the people who donate fabric to the guild should have no doubt every inch of useable stuff they give to us will be put to good use.

The last one, just before I started quilting it.

I also have made Kevin a pillow case for the travel pillow he uses for his knees at night. We found a little pillow at a truck stop this winter, but it has a satin cover and slips off the bed during the night. A cotton cover keeps it in place better. I am also just finishing up a bunch of bowl cozies I am going to use as small gifts on our upcoming trip.

I modified my fabrication process to pre-wash both fabric and the batting. Then I made sure all three layers (fabric/batting/fabric) are quilted together. Hopefully that help them keep their shape after washing.

We do have the first part of our summer trip planned. In a normal year we would just take off, making reservations only at destinations. This year we are slightly spooked by reports of massive numbers of people on the road, so we made more reservations than normal. We leave on Tuesday, 1 June, to go to Hamilton, MO, home of the Missouri Star Quilt Company and their multiple shops. We will stay there a couple of nights then off to eastern Oklahoma to visit some tourist locations we haven’t seen for 30 years or more. Then we head to Canton Reservoir where I worked as a seasonal park ranger before my senior year in college. I haven’t been back since, so it should be fun. We have reserved a Boondocker’s Welcome site in far eastern Texas off I-40. I figure I will give the hosts a couple of bowl cozies as a thank you. We are hoping for good enough weather to hit up a bunch of Native American sites in New Mexico. Eventually we will head north to Cody, WY for an FMCA chapter rally followed by Gillette, WY for the big FMCA national convention. We then have reservations at Badlands NP during a new moon for Kevin to get some astrophotography done. We will gradually head back to Iowa then, time TBD.

I will be getting some shoulder surgery done when we get back. I have a bone spur that is giving me grief. I have been using cortisone shots to manage it, but I figured it will only get worse. Hopefully there isn’t much rotator cuff involvement. Rehab is something between 2 and 12 weeks, depending on what they have to do. Sigh. Even with an MRI they can’t tell until they get to look inside.

Kevin has been busy making even more modifications and updates to the motorhome. I will post those after we get on the road so I can take good pictures. The expensive one was 600 amp hours of LifeBlue LiFePO4 batteries with internal heaters. I am really looking forward to off-grid camping with those! Some of the less expensive modifications are woodworking and others are 3D printing, and they are quite cool. We even got our yearly diesel maintenance done, this time at the Decorah Truck Country shop. Nice folks. It was a more extensive list than we had for previous yearly, so it also cost more. Sigh. Just the price of owning a diesel motorhome.

And we are off to start packing!

Not much going on

I just don’t post as much when we aren’t traveling. I actually haven’t been doing much, giving in to a really bad back probably more than I should have. I am now back in PT and taking acetaminophen three times a day. It has helped a lot. I also got a Nursal brand e-stim unit. It helps a lot to loosen sore muscles that have just been overwhelmed with pain.

The big news is we have two new kittens in the house. Luna (black) and Minerva (tabby) came home with us two days ago. They are sisters, six months old, and they are still restricted to our bedroom and bathroom until they get a bit more comfortable though. We decided to call Minerva by a nickname – Minnie. She is just a tiny little thing just over 4 pounds. Her bigger sister is at an average weight of 5.5 pounds. They are really well socialized, very healthy (our vet has already done a checkup), fully immunized, and they have already been chipped. They spent three months in a foster home, so their behavior has been very good.

Luna (left) and Minerva aka Minnie (right)

They each slept on the bed some last night, though they also decided to play with the blind cords at 4:30 in the morning! We haven’t had kittens in a long time, but we knew what we were getting into. That included interrupted sleep.

I have also been playing with my sewing machine some. I ordered a Sew Steady inset for the sewing machine table I keep in the motorhome. Then I started thinking about using that inset as a stand along table for when I go to retreats or just want to sew outside. The inset has no legal, so I asked Kevin for some 3D printed adjustable legs, and he delivered!

Each leg slips onto the suction cup and has adjustable feet to accommodate different surface heights. I love them! I am now going to out the small, old wobbly table that came with the machine into the storage room some place.

I have also been cooking some. I have watched way too many seasons of The Great British Baking Show, and I wanted a lovely desert for Easter. I practiced making a pavlova, and it was wonderful! I even made a home made lemon curd to go with it, but some of my grandkids got sick so no big Easter meal. My son Mark did come up, but he doesn’t really do deserts, so we just had little pastry cases with some lemon curd. Well, and a pot roast, carrots, and potatoes.

We have been planning our summer trip. We will leave the day after Memorial Day, heading to Hamilton, MO where Missouri Star Quilt Company is headquartered. They open in early May after 14-15 months of closure due to COVID, and I am looking forward to it. We will have 2 nights at the campground which gives us one full day in the town. Then we are going to head south to the Bartlesville and Tulsa, OK area. We hope to spend a couple of days at Woolaroc Museum and Wildlife Preserve, a treat we both remember from our childhood. I also want to see the Philbrook Museum of Art and its trove of impressionist paintings. We don’t know how long we will stay in the general area, but probably about a week. We have a Corps of Engineers site reserved at Copan Lake for the Woolaroc visit, then we hope to stay 2-3 days at a Boondocker’s Welcome site nearer Tulsa. After that we don’t have any firm plans, but intend on staying in the northern Oklahoma/southern Kansas/eastern Colorado areas for a few weeks. The next firm commitment is Cody, WY for a FMCA Diesel Club chapter meeting for a few days during the Independence Day holiday. Then off to Devil’s Tower followed by Gillette, WY for the FMCA convention. Then it is to Badlands NP for dark sky photography around the new moon. We intend on being back to Iowa sometime in August, but nothing firm.

We both finished our COVID vaccination series 3 weeks ago. It sure feels good to be back in society again. We are shopping and eating at restaurants again, a lovely treat. Hopefully we can put this nasty disease in our nationwide rear view mirror soon.

I am off to sew. I still need to finish a quilt for our bed, and I need to make a little bag to put the legs for the Sew Steady inset.

Death Valley catchup (plus Iowa things)

Warning – this has a lot of time and variety in it!

To catch up on Death Valley and surroundings, we stayed at Sunset until the morning of 20 February. Since the cellular data service ixps extremely limited there, we were pleased to make full use of the monthly WiFi pass at the resort. $60 gives you 30 days of high speed Internet on up to two devices! I tried to get some pictures from Kevin’s fancy camera of the Funeral Mountains to the east of us, but I wasn’t terribly successful. The mountains are made up of rocks so old and confused they are called “Funeral Chaos”. Twisted, faulted, squeezed, faulted again – they show amazing patterns. I just couldn’t get a good picture though, so I guess I will try again next time.

Searching for phone service and a place to hunker down to care for Lily, we ended up at the Needles KOA. We have stayed there a few times before. The sites are big enough, and there is a resident group of quail that I find adorable. I tried to get a picture of the 20 or so who ran across the road as we were checking in, but they were too fast for me. You can hear them clicking away in the mornings if no one has taken their dogs out yet.

As I said in the previous post, we headed back to Iowa as soon as we knew about Lily’s condition. We stayed at Lavaland RV Park in Grants, NM the first night after we left Needles KOA, Tuesday 23 February. They had a nice brewery that concentrated on porters and stouts, my favorites. Sadly their kitchen was closed, but we did order some pizza delivered to the brewery. Nice to eat pizza and beer inside an almost empty place. Our next stop was Big Texan RV Park in Amarillo. It is a mile or so away from the famously advertised restaurant, but it was an easy in and out spot. We made it to the Wellington KOA on Thursday, much nicer than the dreadful place we stayed heading to Arizona in December. We then headed to the Lakeside Casino RV Park in Osceola, IA for our last night. It isn’t very suitable for big rigs since the turns are tight and the sites pretty short, but we found a spot we could fit into. It wasn’t the one the check in folks had us in initially, but with only 5-6 other rigs we had our choice. It is close enough to home to make it a good spot to winterize the rig, and thanks what we did on Saturday morning before heading out. We are pretty good at it these days, and it too, less than an hour. The ice maker is always the hardest!

We had gotten COVID vaccination appointments on Sunday, 28 February, and we had our follow up vaccination yesterday (Pfizer). I am anxiously awaiting my 2 week time for feeling comfortable again! We are having two of the kids and their families over for Easter (another son heads to his cabin every Easter), and I am soooooo wanting to hug them all!

Kevin’s big job this time was installing new LiFePO4 batteries. He chose three 200 amp hour LifeBlue batteries with their integrated heater. Lithium’s don’t charge below 35 degrees or so, and we stay in those temps too often to not get the more expensive heater version. He needed a new solar controller, and luckily this one has Bluetooth so it is much easier to see what is happening. They see to work fine, and I am anxious to try them out on a real trip, not just sitting outside the storage unit. Our solar system will be able to punch more power into the batteries because it won’t be throttled by the lead acid charging curve.

We have been doing work on the house too. We bought a pergola to go on our very hot west side deck. It has a nice adjustable shade cover that will help with keeping the house cooler too. We even bought a propane fire pit to put under it!

i also finished the three quilt tops I sewed while we were out. I got them quilted pretty quickly, but I procrastinated on the binding because it is the task I like least. I got them into the wash yesterday though.

The first two were made from a layer cake I bought on sale. I love the water lilies and dragonfly theme.

Bound and backed with a green Grunge fabric

Bound and backed with a light turquoise fabric with yellow dots

This one was way outside my comfort zone! I just don’t “do” scrappy well. It will make a fun ”I Spy” quilt for some child though.

Enough for now. More going on at home, but I will leave that for later.

At KOFA for a bit longer

We spent yesterday afternoon probably like everyone else in the US – glued to the TV. I am still enraged at the domestic terrorists and their instigator, the man who is still the President of the United States. We had to turn on the generator for quite a while since we had the entertainment system on for so long. It is a real power hog, equivalent to the domestic refrigerator we have. Part of it is just the way Tiffin sets things up, and part is the way the satellite system keeps track of the satellites. The TV itself doesn’t use much power. By 4:30 we decided to go to Quartzsite again to pick up a switch for a 12v power distribution system Kevin is working on for the GPS and dash cam. Now we have cords running all over the place. Pictures will come when he gets it done. He’s been having fun with the 3D printer to make the packaging.

While we were in town, we picked up a pizza at Silly Al’s, a great pizza place in town. It is usually very, very busy so we called our order in. They have a great Philly Cheesesteak pizza, something I have never been able to get anywhere else. When I went inside to pick it up (masks required – nice!), we also got a growler of their Irish Red Ale.

Today I finished up a quilt top. It was so, so hard! Not for the design, but because it was a scrap quilt. I had to force myself to randomly pick a piece out of a box without making any selection except not to have the same fabric next to each other. I have decided I am not suited to scrap quilts! It drove me batty.

I used a 4” tumbler die with my Accuquilt to cut them. Sadly, I still have a 100 plus pieces! I am sure it will be loved by some child as a “I See” quilts since there are so many designs and colors in it. I also forced myself to sew the rows together randomly too, so you will note a few of the same fabrics in adjacent rows. Luckily the next two quilts I am working on are more more orderly and planned.

We did sit outside a bit today. While there were enough clouds to filter the sunlight, I still got one good picture of the hill behind us.

I am not sure how the data service will be in Quartzsite. Usually it is absolutely horrid because there are sooooo many people. However I had really good service there a few days ago so we will see. If I have good service I will try to post every 2-3 days. If not, it might be 5-7 days. We will see.