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The leaves here in the Minneapolis Metro Area are beautiful colors. Which means we have been having warm days with cool nights.

The forecast for the next few days have the temperatures dropping some more with most DAYS being good sleeping temperature while continuing to have at least some rain. Which means my solar panels are getting not quite fully charged every day.

No, I’m not living in my RV yet but I have been stocking the freezer in preparation for departure and my refrigerator draws its energy from my solar panels.

The freezer in my 7 cubic foot refrigerator has one shelf. On it are two bags of frozen fruit for making smoothies and two trays of ice cubes. Below the shelf I have placed two double retainer bars making a cage of the lower section. That section is full of precooked meats in individual serving size packages and I doubt I could get much more food into that freezer.

The forecast last night said our liquid sunshine could turn into the white flaky stuff Saturday night.

Tomorrow the rain here is  supposed to start in the afternoon. The rain in Mason City, Iowa, is not supposed to start until evening. So I should be able to drive at least that far tomorrow without having to drive in rain.

It is time to go.

TTYL,

Linda

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