Tuesday December 24th 2024

Merry Christmas

This blog entry is an extra to my current two a week schedule. I thought I’d reflect on all the “gifts” I have been buying for myself this year, as well as wish everyone a Merry Christmas.

The transition from a full time traveler to a periodic traveler with a base camp has resulted in a lot of purchases this year. In addition to the base camp itself, I have been buying lots of things to fill up the interior. I am pretty close to finished. Some of those things like the canvas prints of some of my road trip photos are fun, others like pots and pans are just necessary. The latest purchase was another necessary one, but not an expected one. My refrigerator gave up its valiant fight over the weekend.

The twenty plus year old appliance wasn’t one of my favorites. The small side by side forced me to stack stuff and push stuff deep into the box. It was very hard to know what you had. I knew it was going to be my first replacement, but I didn’t expect it to be so soon. The last couple of weeks it has been getting noisier. Over the weekend it stopped cooling. Luckily my dislike of the old one caused me to do some early refrigerator shopping. I knew what I wanted when the old one gave up the ghost. On Sunday I bought an LG French Door with bottom freezer from Lowes for delivery on Christmas Eve.

Today was filled with emptying the old one, followed by waiting for the delivery guys. They arrived in the expected window shortly after the noon hour. Unfortunately, the type of water connection I have was not to their liking. It is apparently one that Lowes doesn’t allow them to connect up. While they were calling their dispatcher to figure out what to do I got out my tools and did what they couldn’t. By the time they put me on the phone with the dispatcher to “explain” the issue I had eliminated the problem. They brought the new one in and took the old one out. All they could do for installation was plug it in to power. I connected the water after they departed with the old unit. Getting all the food loaded up was the hard part of the whole exercise. I still need to weed out the stuff that probably spoiled and rearrange the shelves for more optimal use.

Over the last few days the park got into Christmas decorating. I thought it was going to remain rather dark, but there are quite a few decorations up now. Some sites are still dark, because the residents haven’t returned yet. Many snowbirds wait until after Christmas to head south. Some of the ones that arrived earlier have also returned north for the holidays. My neighbors across the street from Michigan were only back from a trip north over Thanksgiving for about a week and a half before heading out again. I don’t think they are going to the same place, but it is still a long road trip for the holiday.