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One of the advantages of living in an RV is, if the neighbors do something that keeps you awake when you want to be sleeping, you can move to a different spot. That’s a bit harder to do when you live in an apartment.

That’s one of the reasons we chose a top floor apartment this time around. We no longer appreciate the pitter patter of little feet overhead.

Now, don’t get me wrong. The apartment we live in is well insulated. We rarely hear anything from any of our neighbor apartments. If I happen to be in the bathroom when the folks below are bathing their little ones I hear happy voices coming up the vent shaft but that’s not a sound I would complain about.

Now we do hear sounds outside that come in through our windows. Like when they mow the grass in the mornings before I get up.

But, can you imagine my puzzlement when I woke up in the wee hours of the morning a couple of nights ago to the sound of snow shoveling? It’s September! But it sounded to me like a metal shovel scraping on a concrete sidewalk. But, we have no concrete outside our windows. The emergency vehicle access drive is asphalt and everything else is grass or brush. Then the noise stopped and I went back to sleep.

The next day Dave and I talked about the noise. He said he thought it sounded like someone plastering a wall. And he heard vacuuming, too. And we both heard some thumps and bumps as well.

Yesterday Dave went down to the office to pick up some packages delivered there for me. And he got the story of the odd sounds.

It seems someone in the apartment below us flushed a toilet then went back to sleep. And slept soundly enough to not realize the toilet was still running–from the tank into the bowl. And right on out of the bowl. Running enough that when someone from the apartment below them went into their bathroom they found it raining in there.

Those odd sounds were maintenance coping with the mess. Walls, floors and a ceiling need to be replaced. The occupants are temporarily in a different apartment. And the fans are running day and night.

Still the sound of the fans is better than the sounds of snow shoveling. Or having it rain in your bathroom. Another reason we are glad to be on the top floor.

TTYL,

Linda

In 2007, after Dave retired, we decided we would try being a one car family. We sold our 1998 Honda Accord to a former co-worker. He just emailed us to say he sold that car to the daughter of another former coworker. That makes it feel like it has stayed in the “family”.

 

About a year after we sold the Accord we decided we’d sell everything else and move into an RV. So we sold our PT Cruiser to other friends. We met those friends for lunch the other day and they arrived in the Cruiser.

It feels good to know we helped friends as we downsized. Just as they helped us fund our travels. Win-win, right?

TTYL,

Linda

Whoever you are.

Wherever you are.

Whatever you believe.

We all remember.

TTYL,

Linda

Blogs I’ve been reading lately have been about the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s famous speech. I wrote a comment on one of those blogs then decided I needed to post that comment here.

“When my daughter was young, back in the 70s, I did a program for mostly white kids using Fisher Price people to show how they were all kind of the same but kind of different–clothes, hair styles, skin color, etc. The mother of an adopted Korean daughter thanked me for that program. Then I did that program for kindergartners who were mostly black–they didn’t get it. There were so used to seeing the differences they couldn’t see the similarities. Broke my heart.

As an adult I was with a group of friends one day when one of the guys made a comment about us not all being caucasian. Surprised, I asked who wasn’t. He said he was Eurasian. I had never noticed.

Apparently it is easier to not notice if you are a member of the group not often discriminated against.”

When my brother was in third grade he had a birthday party to which he invited his best friend from school. The child said he could not come. My brother was heart-broken. My Mom called the boy’s mother to reinforce the written invitation. Finally, the mother said my Mom did not know that her son was a Negro. Mom said of course she knew but he was my brother’s best friend so we really wanted him to come to the party. His mother said in that case he could come. How sad to be afraid to let your child go to a friend’s house for fear of discrimination.

It was years later before I realized that incident may have been the catalyst for me being invited to visit my black school friend’s houses. I played with everyone so I didn’t know there might have been something special about those invitations.

I am so glad I was raised to be color blind.

TTYL,

Linda

Here in the apartment during the summer I eat a fresh tomato most evenings. For storage they just sit  on the kitchen counter. Visualize, if you would, what would happen to a tomato left to sit on the counter in my RV while I changed camps.

Right.

Now I could put tomatoes in the fridge in my RV but that kills the taste of them. And I could put them in my pantry with the canned goods but the cans tend to shift if I have to make any sudden moves including tight turns so I would soon have smashed tomatoes.

And the same thing would happen with bananas.

So, I’ve been trying to figure out how to safely store and transport delicate produce like tomatoes and bananas.

My first thought was to buy a metal basket to hang someplace to put these items in. So when I was offered a free wire chicken-shaped basket I took it. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any place to hang it where it would not be in the way of something else.

Then one of my Yahoo groups started talking about hammocks. This group is mostly people who have converted a cargo van to something in which they can live. Someone suggested you use a hammock for a bed so you can take it down during the day and have full access to the space. Someone else said they put a hammock along one wall above their regular bed and they store clothes there. Someone else said you can store all kinds of things in hammocks. Someone said they didn’t have room for a hammock but they did use a gear loft for holding things.

I have a gear loft. It came with my roll-up table. I think you are supposed to hang it under the table to put the table’s storage bag in so the bag won’t blow away. I just leave my storage bag in the van when I take the table out. Plus, when I did put the gear loft under the table it tickled my knees so I didn’t like it there.

I got the gear loft out and held it up under my kitchen cupboards to see if it would fit there. Yes!

So off we went to the local hardware store. We have one not far down the road from us in the neighborhood where Dave lived as a child. One of those old-fashioned hardware stores where they have everything. Including helpful clerks.

Dave showed our clerk a picture of the tie downs in my rig and said we wanted something similar. We looked at u-bolts and similar items but they were all too big. Then, as these clerks usually do if they can’t find what you want, he asked if we would be willing to assemble something from pieces parts. He found us some flat plates to be the cross piece and some wood screws to be the uprights and we headed back to the RV to begin installation.

Dave was hoping to be able to just screw into the bottom of the cupboard but the wood was a bit too resistant so here he is with his huge drill in my tiny space drilling pilot holes:

 

And here’s my new banana hammock:

 

We tightened it up enough that the front and back of the hammock are right up against the ceiling but the ends are open for inserting and removing food items.

 

So when I leave this fall, I can stock up on fresh produce and it won’t become mush before I can eat it. Let’s hear it for fresh tomatoes. And hardware store clerks who really do help their customers.

TTYL,

Linda