Category: Uncategorized

Some things I find myself thinking about.

I’m glad we have bug-out bags. It was easy to grab them, throw my computer in one, and head out the door knowing we had all the important papers and data we would need if we had to start over. I was surprised at how many people left without a purse or phone or anything.

It’s good to have a plan. We know where our fire extinguisher is and how to use it. We know where our stairs are and where they exit the building. We know to test the apartment door for heat before opening it and, if it is hot, to go to plan #2. Plan #2 is to head out onto the balcony. With wet blankets if we think we have time to get them. There is a water hydrant below the master bedroom window so we are confident we would be found quickly if there was a big fire even though we would be on the back side of the building. We live on the top floor but we chose a building that is only three stores high so the fire rescue ladders would reach us. We have a good fire department that wins awards so we trust them to serve us well. We are as prepared as it is possible to be.

The thing I worried most about was the car. We park in the underground garage. It did not feel like a good idea to go down there to retrieve it since we didn’t know where the fire was and we were not sure the automatic garage door opener would work; it’s one of the old gas station cable type things you drive across and the door opens.

While I like having new things, I would not like having to buy absolutely everything all over again. Most of our things are relatively new anyway since we bought all our furniture less than a year ago and I’ve had to buy new clothes as I lose weight.

I’m glad my new van will not fit in the garage. In the future we will have an escape vehicle with the basic necessities of life on board if we should need it.

How prepared are you?

TTYL,

Linda

We got to spend some time outside today meeting some neighbors.

It sure was a noisy experience, though.

The building fire alarms went off, all the fire doors closed, and I got to prove I can walk down two flights of stairs. Carrying our bug-out bags just in case this was real. And worrying about our car being parked in the underground garage.

Then a fire truck showed up. Only one, though, and they didn’t seem to be in a hurry so we thought it was probably a false alarm.

Not.

It seems someone near the center of our building had a small kitchen fire.

Made me glad we have fire extinguishers in case that ever happens to us.

And that I can still walk down the stairs.

Sorry about no photos. That was not what was on my mind until we got safely back inside.

TTYL,

Linda

 

Being under the impression that I am sleeping better I decided to use my FitBit to check it out.

Time it took me to go to sleep: 6 minutes. Times I woke during the night: 10.

Those feel like good numbers for me.

So, imagine my surprise when I went back and looked at my weeky averages for those weeks I measured my sleep and found those number to be typical.

It’s all perception, people.

All of life is just perception and interpretation.

TTYL,

Linda

We’ve been asked to post as much as we are willing to do about our new GPS for the benefit of those in the market for a new one. So here’s today’s trip.

We live in a suburb on the west wide of Minneapolis, Minnesota. Today we had several errands to run which included a stop at our favorite Denny’s which is far from home but on the way to the outlet mall which was one of our destinations for today. So, after making the close to home stops, Dave entered Denny’s as a name search. But this GPS only finds points of interest that are fairly close to where you are at the moment and we weren’t close enough for it to find it. Since we knew it was near the intersection of I-94 and Hwy 101, we put those as the cross streets in the intersection search and it found that.

Normally, from where we were at the time, we would have backtracked to the freeway and taken a couple of them to Denny’s. But, our GPS took us on a pleasant drive through the country on two lane roads and past a KOA we’ve stayed at many times so we arrived unstressed by the drive. Nice!

When we were ready to leave Denny’s we wanted to enter the outlet mall as our next destination but we weren’t sure of the name of the mall. No problem. There is a POI section for shopping so I chose it then selected shopping mall as our category. And it found the one we wanted in a town about 6 1/2 miles on down the road.

We are enjoying using this GPS in territory that is familiar to us because it is helping us learn how to use it when I get into unfamiliar territory. And Dave likes it so well he is talking about buying one for him to use in the car when I take this one with me in my RV.

I don’t know how we can recommend it any higher than that.

For those of you who might be just tuning in it is a Garmin dēzl 560LMT and, if you search this blog for that term, you will find my first review of it with details of using it in following blogs.

Happy travels.

TTYL,

Linda

Walked out of the motel this morning and thought about jackets. How long has it been since I last thought about wearing a jacket outside? Then again, how long has it been since I was outside at 8:20 am? The hours I’ve been sleeping this week you’d think I had to get up and go to work in the morning. Is riding in the car work? I’ve been doing it for most days from about 9 to 5 for a week now. I wonder if I’ll stay on this sleep schedule when we get home. Wouldn’t it be odd for us for me to go to bed and get up before Dave?

We learned more about our GPS again. Last night Dave used the “trip planner” feature to plan today’s trip. It will now lets us list rest areas without actually stopping at them. Yay! Plus, using that feature adds items to the end of the list instead of the beginning so you don’t have to drag to sort. It also offers an optimize option so, if you add things out of order, it will resort them for you. This GPS  just keeps getting better and better.

False advertising? Only sort of. When you enter Iowa from the south on I-35 the first rest area is at mile marker 7. The state has it’s official welcome center at this rest area. But, as you approach exit 4, three miles before the rest area, you will see a blue & white information sign telling you there is a Welcome Center at exit 4. And there is. Run by the local Chamber of Commerce. Do they offer free information about the state? Yes. Do they have public restrooms? Yes. Do they have a cafe? Yes. Is their status ambiguous? Yes.

Des Moines exits are confusing. In this part of the country the exit numbers match the mileage markers on the highways. But Des Moines has too many highways passing through it. At one point I-80 and I-35 run together. So exit 125 and exit 72C are right next to each other. If the gas station and the restaurant are one each at those two exits would YOU expect them to be one right after another?

There used to be a Flying J station just north of Des Moines but we couldn’t find it this trip. So I went on-line to their website and discovered there’s now one in Williams, IA. That was in reach on the current tank of fuel so we headed on there.. Guess what? No station. A bulldozer and a pile of rubble under the Flying J sign. At least it was was easier for us to do a u-turn than it was for the semi ahead of us that planned to stop at that same station. Why do websites not keep their listings current? Especially those wanting semi-truck traffic. I sure am glad we were not in our former Class A RV towing a car. It’s a long way around the block out here in farm country.

Do you remember me telling you about the two car symbol on our GPS that changes color? I though it was telling us if we were in the right lane or not. I guessed wrong. It is a traffic density indicator. It is construction season here in the Midwest so we are having intermittent lane closures. There are no traffic cameras where the work is being done so our GPS assumes traffic is backing up in those reduce speed and reduced lanes areas. Fortunately, it has stopped trying to route us around them on roads that would actually take longer than the minor slowdowns we are experiencing. It’s not a perfect world, even in our GPS.

When we were full-time RVing I kept a pencil and small notebook by the passenger seat so I could make notes on things I wanted to remember to blog about when we reached camp. On this trip, I’ve kept my iPad handy and am writing as we go. It’s very challenging. Where will the bouncing finger land and what will the result be? Once it hit something that made an entire blog disappear. Fortunately, I was able to use my browser’s back button to find it still existed. Each evening I spend time correcting all the errors before posting that day’s blog. Dave reminded me I won’t be able to do either type of writing when snowbirding. Guess I’m going to have to learn to dictate into a recording device.

Boy, that comment took me a long way back. I studied shorthand in high school. I learned more about punctuation in that class than I did in any English class. But, if I’m dictating to myself do I have to include all the punctuation and everything?

I don’t usually talk about politics but this is more about my zany brain than it is politics so I decided to share it. I saw a clip on TV where Romney introduced Ryan as “the next President of the United States.” Which made me wonder what Romney is not telling us. Is he planning to win the election but die before inauguration? Just in case it happens that way, remember, you heard it here first.

HOME! Collapsing now.

TTYL,

Linda