Waiting for Electrons

Frank: It’s Wednesday and I’m supposed to be in Phoenix but I’m not. I’m still in Seattle (Kent) Washington as SOMEHOW the air ticket I bought to Phoenix is for this coming Saturday instead of yesterday. I truly do not understand how I did that as I have purchased tickets online before and not screwed up so. Oh well, it gives me time to do some work at our daughter’s house and it lets me be here today to supervise the installation of the Comcast HDTV & Internet service. It’s about Noon:15 now and the installer is supposed to be here between 1 and 3 PM. We’ll see. (Late update: He actually showed up at Noon:45 and you are reading this complements of Comcast Internet! We’re back on line!)

Here’s a catch-up. Last Sunday we met our daughter Kimberly and her kids, Rowan (11) and Hailey (6) at a “Pioneer Farm” about 30 miles south of Seattle for an afternoon of civilization decompression. The farm has a collection of actual cabins and farm building collected from the surrounding areas. For the adults there were the histories of the families and insights of how they survived in the pre-everything world. For the kids there were dozens of neat “let’s go back in time” activities like dressing up in pioneer clothing, touching and feeding farm animals, a ride on a horse, and best of all for both a grandfather and grandson the chance to operate a blacksmith’s forge and heat red-hot and pound on and bend some horseshoes! OK. I gotta admit that I had as much fun as Rowan did, maybe more.

Sunday we took the ferry to Vashon Island and had a laid-back afternoon at Michael & Shannon’s house. We took Peanut and Cleo with us and their two daughters Daalny (6) and Aine (4) had a ball “walking” the dogs and chasing them around. In the meantime their dog, Teak, a beautiful Golden Lab sat around looking bemused at the antics of the two little yappy-dogs.

Monday and Tuesday we went over to Stacie’s house and I got a chance to make myself useful for the first time in too many days. It seemed her sprinkler system blew out a section of pipe last winter (it froze) and sent water cascading out into her back yard. A neighbor crawled under her house and found the source pipe, cut it off and capped it nicely, restoring water service to her and her kids. So yesterday I learned the joys of “crawl spaces” which are great examples of architectural humor. Believe it or not the builder built the house about 18” off the ground (OK, maybe 24”) on pilings and called the empty space a “crawl space.” HA! Can you say “Slither Space?” Anyway I was able to slither in to where the pipe was cut, reconnoiter, and decide on the parts needed to repair same. Then I slithered out and did a Home Despot parts-run. I repeated this process three times and eventually was able to replace the pipe all the way from the source connector to the sprinkler valve box. That’s when I found that the original burst pipe was actually in the sprinkler valve box. I have no problem with the neighbor who cut and capped the source pipe because it would have been next to impossible to cut out and cap the broken section in the valve box. But now it is my job to replace said burst pipe. I’ll work on that part tomorrow. I think it’s gonna be “fun.”

Cheryl: There are many reasons for our lack of attention to the blog, but the biggest one got solved today. As Frank already mentioned, we now have High-Speed Internet access at the trailer though our TV cable provider, Comcast, (giving us 998 Channels of which we’ll probably watch 12),. Other reasons include laziness, going totally crazy on the Seattle freeways, and taking long languid walks with Peanut and Cleo in the various tree-lined parks in the vicinity of Circle K Mobile. Oh, yes, and playing Gin Rummy in Bonney Lake with my daughter, Stacie.

On Monday on the way to see said daughter, we saw a sign for the Meeker Mansion, so we stopped there only to find out it’s open Wed. thru Sun. each week. Hopefully, we’ll make an official visit before Frank takes off for Phoenix. Years ago, Frank stayed a night in Meeker, Colorado, while on a m/c trip with his buddies. I think he has posted this story before, so I won’t tell it again here. At any rate, we’re just interested to find out if there is any connection between this Meeker guy in Seattle and the one in Colorado. It appears not, as the little informative sign outside the Mansion tells of Meeker’s travel on and promotion of the Oregon Trail as his primary legacy. I also found the Neely Mansion on one of my walks down by Russell Road Park and hope to get a tour one day soon.

All in all, I’m loving staying awhile in this small suburb of Seattle called
Kent. The parks here have wonderful ball parks, playing fields, trails, dog runs, picnic tables, nice people and Green River running through them. An interesting aside: there are huge sandbag berms on both sides of the river because there is dam upstream that is about to fail and has been declared not repairable according to local doomsayers. Kent also has all the things a vagabond like me needs: Laundromat, BIG K, hair salon, MacDonald’s, Starbucks, and a Farmer’s Market every Saturday in old town. We’ve hunted down each one of them with our handy dandy Garmin GPS. It has a battery and we can take it in the trailer and program it with places we need to find next as the notion hits us. I’m set. The weather up here is delightful right now with lows in the 50s and highs in the 70s. SeaFair is scheduled for this weekend and the Blue Angels will have to fly in the rain and 68 degrees, but on Monday we’re back to sunny and the 70s again. Go figure.

I’m pretty sure this whole area runs on Espresso and Teriyaki chicken. There’s a coffee kiosk on every corner and a Teriyaki chicken take out behind every second coffee kiosk. Frank brought home two orders of Teriyaki chicken the other night, and we had at least 3 meals each out of it. This morning we followed “Jill Bitch” (back to her maiden name) to the local IHOP and had a terrific pancake breakfast (read here, two senior specials) at 10:00 a.m. This being retired shit is really groovy.

So long for now,
Slithery Sam, Gin Rummy Mamma and two pooped pups

More Photos . . .

Underground Seattle, 1200 Crappers Up a Steep Hill, the Smith Tower and Otis the Elevator

Cheryl: It sure seems like a very long time since Tuesday when we last blogged! Today screamed by as we signed on the dotted line for a mobile space at the Circle K Mobile Home Park, Space #10 right next to Jeff Pennington, a good guy who knows all the ins and outs of RVs. Christine, the park manager, gave me the scoop on the tenants of the small park. She’s nice and has three BIG cats! Oscar seems very big, glossy, and black until you see furry black and white Bear! The other one, who shall remain nameless, hides under the bed. One of the reasons I chose this “park” rests with this scrappy lady from Montana. I feel like she’s honest and has a good heart. She has been very helpful to us in our search for a spot to park Ali-the-Gator and about general area information. Tomorrow morning we make the big move. Frank will hang around here with me until Tuesday or so.

Cheryl and Frank: Another reason today seemed to scream past at light speed involves a tour through the Seattle underground. The underground tour shows you some of the original store fronts which are now the basements of some of the oldest buildings in Seattle’s City Center, Pioneer Square. Seattle burned down in 1889 so the city fathers decided here was their chance to solve the perennial flooding problems by raising the height of the whole city 16 feet. In doing so they moved more dirt down from the surrounding hills into the city than was excavated during the construction of the Panama Canal. The whole project took over 20 years! However, the business owners couldn’t wait 20 years to rebuild, so they built new fireproof buildings in full knowledge that the ground floors would be underground eventually. So they simply built their buildings with two ground floors, one above the other. Now the former second story floor is the ground floor! The old ground floors are on the underground tour.

An interesting side effect of building the buildings before raising the level of the land was that for a dozen years the streets were raised 16 feet above the level of the sidewalks. REALLY!!!!! To cross the streets the residents had to climb up ladders to get to street level, cross through heavy traffic and then climb down ladders on the other side to the sidewalk. We’re not making this up! This is true, we swear it!

If your mental image now is of dusty glass-fronted stores filled with antique mercantile items, then it matches what were our expectations. The actual store fronts underground are not that pristine, but the dusty brick, twisted plumbing and generations of reinforcing supports still make the tour both creepy and fascinating. Besides, the guides are excellent storytellers and funny as all get out. They kept us regaled with stories of shady ladies who called themselves seamstresses, mayors who stole the city blind yet were reelected multiple times, and business leaders who would literally do anything to make a buck. Add to that mixture the rudimentary sewer system that was fed by 3000 of Thomas Crapper’s modern sanitary toilets feeding one wooden sewer box down the hill, through the center of town and directly into the bay. The fact that reverse pressure from unexpected high tides backed the whole system up regularly, created a recipe for people being blasted off their toilet seats on a plume of poop. To avoid the back surge, and we’re not making this up, some people put their “Crappers” on pedestals as high as 15 feet above the floor. All and all we had a ball walking through these ghostly corridors from the past, and listening to a bright young man telling us incredible stories.

We topped off the day by taking Otis the elevator to the top of The Smith Tower which is just up the hill from Pioneer Square. The tower was built by Mr. Smith (of Smith-Corona Character Processors) in 1914, and at 42 floors was the tallest building west of the Mississippi River for almost 50 years. The building even included six of the new fangled Otis elevators which are still operated by real live human beings and are still smoothly powered by their original DC motors.
Well, it’s 10 o’clock at night and we’re tired, so good-night.

Drowsy Frank, nodding Cheryl, and already asleep Peanut & Cleo.

KOA Sux, Garmin Sux, Cricket Sux .....

Cheryl: It’s almost 10:00 p.m., and we’re safe and snuggled in at the KOA in Kent, Washington. The price here is outrageous, up $30 from last summer! The sign out front says UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT. Well guess what, they just lost a couple of good customers. We’re here for a couple of nights because I’m looking for a RV Park with monthly rates where I can stay for a month or two. I want to be with my daughter right now as she goes though a family crisis and I can use our camper as my home base if all goes well with the RV Park search. Hopefully we’ll find a spot tomorrow and move into it on Thursday. Then after we do some sightseeing and visit with kids and grandkids, Frank will fly home to Phoenix leaving me, truck and camper here with the two puppies. He’ll use my truck back in Phoenix and fly back to pick me up . . . eventually.

We’d like to do the Seattle underground tour while Frank is still here and make more visits to kids in Carnation, Bonney Lake, and on Vashon Island. With six grandchildren among the three families, we keep very busy when we’re in town!

Today we drove here from Leavenworth over some staggeringly beautiful terrain. Of course, Leavenworth looks like an amazing Alpine Village, and the mountains around it make that idea seem very real. We gasped at the craggy snow-capped mountain next to a rushing river on our way out of town. Then we drove miles through very lush conifer forest. It was a lovely, read NOT BUMPY WITH POTHOLES, road, it seemed newly paved, and there was room to pass other cars and trucks. We love the USA!!! Ok, so Canada was amazing, but so is home. God bless America.

Frank: Our old Garmin GPS died last year so we bought a new one. It’s a Garmin “Nuvi something or other.” Naturally it was the top of the line when I bought it. We used to refer to the old Garmin as “Jill-Bitch” after she took us 10 hours and about 400 miles out of our way. Today we adopted my brother’s name for his Garmin as our name for the new unit. It’s “BIB” and stands for “Bitch in the Box”. That’s what I called her after she took us within spitting distance of a requested Walgreens Drug Store while carefully guiding us into the far left traffic lane with four lanes of rush hour traffic between us and the Walgreens over on the far right side. It all had to do with our requesting that she take us from point “A” to point “B” “via” “point C”, where the Walgreens was point “C”. It’s a new feature where you can add a “via” point to an existing stored route. What we didn’t realize that “via” doesn’t mean (to her) that we wanted to stop at the mid-point. To her it just meant we wanted to drive past the mid-point. So I guess we’ll try to get back to that Walgreens tomorrow, and do it as a direct one-stop trip. Gosh, ain’t technology grand!

While I’m complaining about Garmin, I wish they had three additional buttons on the main display. The first one would be a “Mute” button so I can shut the BIB up easily when she gets to being obnoxious about me being off course, the second would be a “Speak” button that would cause her to speak a course update, or repeat the last direction she gave, and the third button would be a “Reassurance” button that would make her reassure me that everything is OK and that we are on the right path to our destination, with words such as, “You’re OK big guy, you’re right on track and right on time, so just relax and I’ll get you there OK.”

Yeah, that’d be nice.

Oh yeah, about my Cricket 3G "go anywhere" modem. Doesn't work. No service anywhere, not even here in Seattle! Cricket Sux and I can't find a way to contact them to cancel the service! Clever! They let you buy and sign up but don't have any way to complain or cancel. Ya gotta love those marketing guys!


‘Til later,
Love, Grams, Pop Pop, and the Kissin’ Cousins Peanut and Cleo

Folsome or Leavenworth, six of one, half dozen of the other

07-26-2010 Monday 6PM

Frank: We’re in Leavenworth. Not the prison, but Leavenworth, Washington. We took the much-talked about ferry ride (ho-hum, small open ferry, short ride, and boring) and ate at the Mushroom Restaurant (totally underwhelming, terrible food, but interesting photos on the wall.) We left Lumby, followed a circuitous route, drove for what seemed forever, and finally found a spot in Castlegrub or Castledorf or some small town like that. We left Castleding this morning, crossed back into the US in Oroville, had Customs confiscate two tomatoes from our refrigerator, picked up the guns from the pub where we left them, had two terrible hamburgers and greasy fries at said pub, and found our way to Leavenworth. The roads are great, the signs are in American, the scenery is beautiful with lots of ABL’s and ABM’s so I’ll let Cheryl add some pretty words here.

Cheryl: The little town was Castlegar, a nice town I’m sure, but we were both tired and grumpy. Tonight we accidently zipped past a KOA – “missed it by that much.” - and landed in Alpineland – not so good.. Anyway, did you guess the movie from yesterday or will I have to wait until Madison gets home from Paris to get a winner for the Name that Movie game? Ok, here’s another one for you – “Ees for goat” – a Tom Hanks winner of a movie called ____________.

I saw mountain goats today on a hillside just above the highway – Mom, Pop, and several little ones! What a sight. Frank missed the whole family show, but he was trying to drive the truck and trailer around a curve at the time. To be fair he saw a deer I didn’t see out of several deer we spotted on this trip. Canada seems to have more than its share of deer who just HAVE to get to the other side of the road. Really, we must have spotted at least a dozen or more deer on our trips from the campground to town, but the biggest thrill of all was seeing a big black bear cross the road about 200 feet in front of us. Wow!

It was my first time to see a bear outside of a park or zoo and Frank’s second time to see one. The first time, Frank told me, the bear was coming toward him, and he was on his motorcycle in a long line of traffic caused by people feeding the mama bear and her two cubs. He and his buddies finally pulled into the oncoming traffic lane to get away – better to be flattened by a Greyhound than a black bear, right? Right! We enjoyed seeing all the wildlife we did, including the friendly squirrel in the campground and the big hawks perched in huge nests made of sticks on top of electric poles with parallel crossbars at the top. It made me sad, however, that I didn’t get to see a Canada MOOSE. Oh well, next time, and I intend to get my tomatoes back, too!

And now we must require you to fill in the blue form, hold up your right hand and promise to really, really love your goat.

Mr. & Mrs. Navorski and our two goats

PS You can never count on having TV in the remote places where we travel so we bring along our own DVDs of old movies. “Ees for goat” has been our favorite phrase for the last couple of days after watching __________________, everything good “Ees for goat” and everything bad “Ees not for goat.”

Answers to the last two movie quiz questions will be forthcoming, but only if you email and ask what the answers were.

Darth Vader's RV, and Nortons

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Ferry, ABL, Pioneer Home, and Politics. #1

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