Saturday, June 30, 2012

Up at the property again.
Came up yesterday after work, get here around 5:30pm, said hi to mom, talked about and then disappeared into the trailer.
This morning, while still cool, I took the dogs for a nice, long walk. They loved it and I totally wore them out.
It's warm out now, in the 90's.  It's going to be 113 in the valley today, so take the 90's and anyway, the AC in this trailer works very well, keeps it as cool as I want it to be.
I absolutely love it up here.  No constant interruptions and people asking for this, that and the other thing.  They all have my phone number - tenants that is - if some emergency comes up, I am definitely available by phone.

Since I am waiting for a card for my receiver from Direct TV, I brought up my bedroom receiver instead.  It was VERY easy to find the satellite this time - with one that works lol - and I have had DTV since shortly after I started setting it up.

I am going to have to ask, I guess, as to whether I am getting Thursday and Friday off this coming week. If I do, I will probably come up here on Wednesday and leave sometime Saturday.  Probably - I pretty much never say my plans are set in concrete and stone.

But...........the fire danger is so incredibly high up here, they have signs at the entrance to the forest service road that gets you here saying "Entry by permit only".  I did not have a permit, but then again, there was no-one stopping anyone to ask for one.  Mom says they simply ask you for the address of where you are going and your picture I.D. at that entrance - if - they are manning it.  A very popular place to camp, all the campgrounds along the road are not only closed, but they have the yellow caution tape prohibiting entrance into any of them.  Obviously, Forest Service personnel must be cruising by periodically to ensure no-one has taken down the tape and decided to camp anyway.

However, it's really too warm up here right now to be camping outside.  Sure, it cools down at night but it was getting warm enough to be uncomfortable by around 10:00 am.  Anyway, these forests are so dry that it wouldn't take much to start up another half million acre blaze that would take out not only a lot of trees, but a LOT of homes/cabins.  I applaud the Forest Service to be on top of all of this in attempt to keep - stupid people - from starting up another major forest fire.  I call them stupid because if people were responsible and knowledgeable, you could camp just not have the camp fires.  Cook on propane stove instead.  But, the city dwellers - some of them don't know, many of them don't care.  These are the same people that throw trash everywhere and could care less.

At the same time, there are many that pull trailers up to camp out in - but they still want to have that campfire.  Just can't do it.  An errant spark floating around from the flames could easily start a fire.

Well, I took Caleb's laptop up to him this morning.  He was in very good spirits and VERY focused on the reason he wanted to go there. It has nothing to do with money, either.  He wanted to be able to minister to kids and that's exactly what he's doing.  So, we talked for a bit, but I didn't want to eat too much into his free time so I left after maybe 20 minutes.  He wanted to watch some movies - he has a Netflix account and can watch them on line and apparently the camp has high speed internet and the staffers are allowed to use their computers on the weekends when the kids aren't there.

I also skated a speeding ticket.  I wasn't paying attention to my speed coming off a hill going into heber and realized - after seeing the DPS officer going the other direction who spotted me and immediately pulled over to, I am guessing, turn around and chase me down - I was going 20 mph over the limit. Well, a guess, anyway, my speedometer doesn't work.  Fortunately for me, there was a line of cars behind me, a couple of turns in the road and then? The turn-off down a dirt road to get to the camp.

Umm,, so I was paying much more attention to speed coming back.  I saw that officer on the way back, too, he had another vehicle pulled over and was eyeballing me as I passed by.

I'm still amazed that a trailer this old can look this good inside.  I mean, yes, we did replace the wall paper, but the wood work in this trailer is in amazingly good condition.  I do believe I will be coming up here in the winter.  I won't be able to use the water system in the trailer since it will have to be winterized before the first freeze, but, I can handle a day without a shower. Bring paper plates and cups instead of using the "real" thing and just "tough" it out.  Plenty of heat in this trailer : )

Had a candid conversation with my manager yesterday - the likes of which I really cannot go into here - but it was a good discussion.  The ops manager - well he used to be our ops manager, now promoted to ops manager of the entire western United States - had a road rage incident yesterday.  Not going into all of it, but amazing how frequently that goes on around the Phoenix area.  Is it the heat that gets people so incredibly angry in traffic?  I dunno.  He said the same thing that I did when I had my episode a few weeks ago:  People are CRAZY to go after someone else around here. There are a LOT of people in these parts that carry guns with them in their cars, some person getting all enraged in traffic and threatening physical "revenge" against someone is really, potentially, taking their life in their own hands.

Oh, and finally: this TV I bought on Black Friday last year? No thanks. Screen is way too small, but I thought when I bought it I wouldn't have room for anything else. Not true at all.  I will eventually be getting something like a 27 inch screen instead of the 19 I have here.

Well, time for a lazy Saturday afternoon nap.

G'day.

ben

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