Bob Down Under

Tuesday, December 22, I wake up at 5:00 a.m. and get up to read for a bit while my stomach rebels against my junk food binge last night. After an hour I take a little nap on the couch. Bob gets up with a burst of energy and goes out to work on his 'down under' storage area. There is a wet mist in the air but it is warm.

I get out the instruction manual and the remote for the CDPlayer/radio. Now we all know that this can be very dangerous. But I have a hi-tech kind of morning and figure out how to preset the radio channels and how to navigate among the selections. Now that is progress. I'll have to have Bob check out the antenna because I should be picking up way more stations. KGSR, my fav here in the Austin area, is barely coming in and they are a Bastrop station. At least I made some progress.

Next I take some time to add up our total miles traveled for 2009. We towed our old and our new RV a total of 3,666 miles (1,815 miles for our old Lakota-The Beauty-January thru June; 1,851 miles for our new Titanium-The Titanic-June through December!) We drove our old and our new trucks a total of 13,495 miles (4,883 miles for our old truck-The Beast; 8,612 miles for our new truck-Big Bertha.) We usually put about 20,000 miles a year on the truck so this was a slow year. But we kind of figured that after we waited around for warranty work so long in Ohio.

We break for a light breakfast and both get back to our chores. Bob calls on the two-way radios from down under. He has discovered a plumbing leak near the water heater. What a bummer! He shuts off the water, tightens up the fitting and I turn all the water back on slowly. Yahoo! There's no leaks. He thinks it has been dripping slowly for a while, but only when the water heater is on, thus increasing the pressure on the line. He reroutes the line that they have in a bind and we should be good. What a relief. It seems like the Evil Eye is watching out for us again. I take a break and call Joyce and Dan to see how they are doing. Dan answers and says Joyce is feeling a bit better. He says if we're up that way to stop in during the afternoon on Christmas Eve. I hope it works out that we can see them for a bit.

I have a housecleaning frenzy except for the vacuuming as I would blow Bob's eardrums out since he's stuffed in the down under compartment where the Dirt Devil whole-house vacuum motor is located. We break for leftovers for lunch and get back at it again. Now Bob can get to the bathroom floor squeak which is what he was trying to fix when he discovered the water leak. In order to do all of these things he has to take everything out of the underneath storage compartment, crawl way back in there and remove the access panels that line the back and side walls. You need to be a contortionist to do this. He says it wouldn't hurt to be a younger contortionist!

I'm twiddling my thumbs waiting to vacuum so I decide to do my nail! He's still down there so I download pictures and work on journal pages. It's 3:30 p.m. and 70 degrees, the high for the day so far, with 57% humidity after a low of 53 degrees.