Old Project (still not finished)

Here are pictures of the plate racks I have been working on hanging up in my kitchen for about 3 months. Jen and I bought some plates at Pier 1, but I wasn't really happy with the way they fit in the racks. They were a little too big. But I'm using the 4 solid color ones along with 4 decorated ones I found at Marshalls. What I want now is something to put in the middle of these plates. As I said, the square plates are too large to sit next to each other, but the small ones are too small to look good in the rack. Oh the crazy things that I get into when I try to decorate.

10 days on the road and I'm a gonna make it home

tonight. I think in the song it might have been 6 days. I can't believe it's been 10 days since I was here. I guess I should say the fish from my last post were delicious. We bought some fish fry coating that was Louisiana brand and it was so good. I don't know what kind of spices they used in it but I'll certainly buy it again. They've been fishing once since then and didn't get anything.


Today I am all about getting a new cell phone. Our old phone fell or was dropped and the top broke off so we get a signal sometimes and other times we can't get one. We have to wiggle the broken piece and then hold the phone with both hands to keep the top from moving while we are trying to talk. It reminds me of the old days when we had an antenna on the TV and we would try so hard to get a good picture. One of my friends in high school told me she used to sit behind the TV and watch it with a mirror her dad put on a chair in front of it so that she could keep her hand on the antenna and wiggle one of the old tubes. I'm sure most of you don't have any idea what a "tube" looked like. It was a glass dome about the size of a drinking glass with metal plugs coming out the bottom. Several different kinds were plugged into the back of the TV to make it work. I remember my father spending hours replacing tubes when I was growing up. The invention of the transistor is still changing our lives today, but look at how big the first one was!!! Imagine a computer with a few dozen of these inside it. Can anyone say HUGE!!! Forget a laptop. It would have squashed you like a bug.


So, I will appreciate my new cell phone all the more for thinking about how big things used to be!!

Something smells fishy!!

Guess where Kirby, Rusty, and Charles spent the afternoon!! I hope I have some tartar sauce in the fridge!!

Views from the Condo

Our creek at Whitman just doesn't compare to this view of the ocean. Too bad we have to go home tomorrow.

Bike Week with no Bikes!!! Yikes!!!

We have been planning our trip to Myrtle Beach for Bike Week for months, but at the last minute, our plans had to be changed. Kirby's biker buddy had a doctor's appointment and some medical tests that he could not miss and they scheduled them for this week. So, Kirby decided to stay at home with his buddy and his brother and his son. They were supposed to go camping and fishing, however, the weather hasn't been very co-operative. WV has had a lot of rain this week. Since we already had the condo rented, my sister, Claudia, and I came to the beach without any bikers or bikes!! It seems strange to be here for bike week and not have a trailer or bikes to worry about. Of course, it's been one long shopping trip for us, broken up by a few hours of working jigsaw puzzles or reading mystery novels. Veda came down today and went to Hamricks with us. We all took a bunch of clothes to the dressing room and actually ended up buying a couple of things. It was fun to model for each other and help each other decide on which outfits looked good. Everything that didn't fit was pronounced "too big."

Every condo we've ever rented has been nice. This one is no exception. Here's a picture from the living room that shows the table, bar and kitchen. Tomorrow I'll take some pictures of the beach from our balcony. We're on the 9th floor, so the view is great.


The two bathrooms both have unusual wallpaper. Claudia's is pink and blue fish as you can see in this picture. Whoever did this paper did a good job of covering the medicine cabinet and matching the fish pattern.

My bathroom is even crazier with seashells of all kinds. It almost makes me dizzy to go in there.

Can you see the medicine cabinet?? It took me two days to notice it.

OH, CANADA!!

Kirby and I used to go to Calgary pretty regularly when we worked for a different company, but for the last 4 1/2 years, we haven't been to Canada at all. This week, we got a load going to Creighton, Saskatchewan. We picked up the load in Baton Rouge, LA. We had no idea where Creighton was located until we got our handy road atlas out, and then we got quite a shock. Creighton is about 600 miles north of the US border. We immediately went to weather.com to see if we were going to have a problem with winter driving conditions (otherwise known as snow). The forecast said Monday's temperature would go from 2 up to 8 degrees. Thank goodness that was celcius. Several celcius to fahrenheit converters are available on the internet, so we ran the numbers and felt much more comfortable with a temperature range of 35 up to 46 degrees. The weather forecast actually called for snow on Monday morning, turning to rain, but thankfully, it was only cloudy while we were there.

Off we went, crossing the border from North Dakota into Manitoba with no problems. Our paperwork had a bar code on it and the Canadian border person scanned it and asked us a few questions, then sent us on our way. We had a little snow as we drove through Winnipeg, but nothing sticking to the ground, so we were just enjoying the scenery and heading north (or nord as the Canadian signs say).

It took a while before we realized that the scenery for the past hundred miles or so hadn't changed from a two lane road with no shoulder, lined on both sides with pine trees. Apparently, Canadians have very large bladders because they don't seem to realize that people appreciate a rest area every once in a while. We went through two or three small villages during the next 500 miles, but none had room for a truck to pull over to get food or fuel. Lucky for us, we always carry some sandwich fixings and lots of bottles of water. Unfortunately, we don't carry extra fuel for the truck.

The good news is, the farther north you go, the more frozen lakes you get to see. That sort of breaks up the monotony of a two lane road with no shoulder, lined on both sides with pine trees. Until about the 25th frozen lake, then that becomes the new monotony.

By the time we arrived in Creighton, we were down to about 1/4 tank of fuel. We can usually go about 150 miles on that much fuel, but we were 600 miles from the border!! It was a bit of a dilemma. At one point we thought about simply settling down in Creighton, because not only can you not get fuel in Canada, you can't get a cell phone signal to call for help either!!!

Then things really got bad. We saw a service station that had diesel fuel, so we pulled in. But we learned that you had to be a member of the co-op to fuel there. No one in Canada was being co-operative. On top of learning that we could not get fuel, we were also told that the sand plant to which we were supposed to deliver our load was actually not in Creighton, but another 80 kilometers north (that's 50 more miles!!!). Now we're thinking "this is not funny anymore."

We travel the extra 50 miles. Our turn off was clearly marked. We made the turn. Now we are on a dirt road. I am not kidding. It was 10 more miles on a dirt road. We arrived about midnight, so we got into our cozy sleeper to spend the night and wait to deliver our load. However, being low on fuel, we didn't want to leave the truck running for 8 hours. Remember that weather forecast?? It gets cold in that bunk when the outside temperature is 2 (even if you keep telling yourself it really is 35). I think that's the first time I ever saw Kirby sleep with a jacket on. Finally, the sun comes up and we check in and we deliver our load. We're almost as good as the post office - "Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds."

We have just enough fuel to get back to Creighton, but now we have new information about a place where we can actually get fuel with American money. Armed with a credit card and directions to Petro-Canada, we squeeze into the station with our big truck. But wait, how many liters of fuel does it take to go 600 miles at 7.5 miles to the gallon??? We're back in algebra class only it's metric!! We must have made a pretty good guess at the fuel, because our low fuel warning light came on as we crossed back into the US.

It was quite an interesting trip. I'm sure we would do it again, now that we know what to expect. I did take some pictures with a disposable camera, but I haven't had them developed yet. If they turn out OK, I'll post one. More than one isn't necessary, because they are all alike. It's a two lane road with no shoulder, lined on both sides with pine trees, and occasionally you get to see another frozen lake.