Wednesday, April 30, 2014

Friends, Fried Pies and Horse Races

Lavon, Texas
Weather Conditions; Sunny, 65 degrees

We had friends stop in and visit with us on their way home from Rockport, Texas. Bud and Betty spent a week with us. We unfortunately had stormy weather while they were here.

We were able to have dinner out one evening and Dawn cooked up a nice dinner on another evening.

Dawn spent the afternoon cooking. We had smoked beef brisket, smoked pulled pork and sausage. We had baked beans, slaw, rolls and cake. Betty brought apple pie and Maxine brought German potato salad.


We invited our friends Jerry and Billie, Jim and Maxine, my brother, niece and niece’s boyfriend too. The weather was a bit windy but we were able to enjoy dinner outside.


It was great to spent time with our friends and family.

We came home one afternoon to find fried pie wrappers all over the floor. Seems a few fur kids found the tote where we keep our snacks. They helped themselves to coconut, chocolate and banana cream fried pies. It appeared that everyone was in on the feast. The wrappers were all over the floor and dried fruit filling was everywhere. They all laid low as we picked up wrappers and moped the sticky mess from the floor.


There was this one fur kid that seemed to be very proud of himself. He was grinning with pride!


The following day I was cutting the dried fruit mess from their faces and paws. Luckily no one got sick!

Last weekend we spent time with friends Ginny and Dena. We spent the afternoon at Lone Star Park. We watched the horse races and enjoyed the buffet.


None of us are big gamblers but we did place a few $2.00 bets. I won $18.00 dollars on a $2.00 bet. I sure felt rich!


There were 9 races for the day. Dawn and I went all out on the last race of the day. We bet on a horse with 25 to 1 odds and several other horses to Win, Place or Show. That decision really paid off. We won $135.00 on the 25 to 1!!!

 We all had a great time.

Monday we ran errands and did laundry. Monday night as we were getting ready for bed, I fell down from the second step in the trailer. That’s right; I fell from the second step.

It doesn’t sound that bad and it I wasn’t that far to the floor. The problem however was that I fell landing on my left side.

I guess I need to explain. I’m recovering from a sinus infection and also have fluid in my inner ear. If I bend over or turn too fast it causes me to become dizzy.

Anyway, I was standing on the second step talking to Dawn, who was in the bedroom. I turned to come down the stairs and became dizzy, lost my footing and fell sideways on my left side hitting the floor hard enough to knock the breath out of me. I came to with Dawn asking me if I was all right and the dogs staring at me.

It took me a few seconds to get my composer and a few minutes to be able to get to my feet.     

I didn’t break any bones, Thank God. I am very sore however.


Today we are back to work as gate attendants.

Copyright Notice All text and photos found on cruzin2some.blogspot.com is copyrighted and may not be published, rewritten, distributed or downloaded without permission of the owner of cruzin2some.blogspot.com. All Rights Reserved. ©cruzin2some 2010

Friday, April 18, 2014

Spring has Arrived

Spring showers


Blanket of Blue Bonnets in our front yard


Copyright Notice All text and photos found on cruzin2some.blogspot.com is copyrighted and may not be published, rewritten, distributed or downloaded without permission of the owner of cruzin2some.blogspot.com. All Rights Reserved. ©cruzin2some 2010

Saturday, April 5, 2014

Life gets Crazy!

Lavon, Texas
Weather Conditions; Cloudy, 55 degrees

We’ve been BUSY!

We’re still working as gate attendants. We’ve been trying to get all the loose ends tied up because our gig ends here on the 29th of this month.

We’ve really enjoyed our gate attendant gig and have decided at the last minute to bid on the summer season too. The Corps of Engineering Bid process is NO easy feat. The bid consist of 191 pages. One page of this bid packet includes reduction of paper act!!!!

This bid packet also included a checklist. The checklist included everything that needed to be attached to the bid. We needed an evaluation form completed by someone we had worked recently for. That person would complete the evaluation and submit it to the contracting office.

Another requirement was to complete a questionnaire regarding our business type. This questionnaire was at least 10 pages of redundant questions.

Also a resume and a solicitation form. That was the easiest part of this bid.

It then all had to be scanned to a PDF file and emailed to the district contracting office.

The deadline was March 21st. The summer season starts on April 1st. In my opinion, they are cutting it kinda close!

We didn’t know when the bids would be awarded. They didn’t given us that information. We suspected it would be before the April 1st start date.

The last day of our current contract was March 27th. That gave us 2 days to get packed up in the event we weren’t awarded the bid.

We waited for over a week to find out the results of our bid. On April the 2nd we received an email saying we were awarded the bid.

We heard that a couple of the area lakes don’t have enough gate attendant bids to open the parks. That is really sad. Seems that someone dropped the ball and the bids went out too late. There are a lot of RVers that count on these gate attendant jobs to sublimate their incomes. They bid on attendant jobs elsewhere in order to stay in the game. They didn’t want to wait for the late bid process in this area.

We know we’re full-timers and aren’t getting much traveling done by being gate attendants. But with that said, it has afforded us the opportunity to take care of some business.

Our toilet broke! This is NOT a good thing. I had to drive to Holiday World of Dallas to get a new one. That took an hour and a half to drive over there. It took me less time then that to install the new one. This was my first RV toilet installation. It wasn't bad at all.

The Rangers did a control burn and that caused a real stir. We were overrun with people driving up to the gatehouse and asking what was on fire.

Later in the day, there was an accident on the highway. There was a fuel spill and the highway was closed down for several hours. The police detoured traffic across the lake dam. This brought traffic thru the park entrance. It was crazy around here for several hours.

We’ve spent our extra time off doing some much needed spring cleaning.

Our family has a new addition. My niece had a beautiful baby girl. Ellie Mae...

March 24th we took my mother out for birthday lunch. Mom is now 70. We had a great lunch at the Cotton Patch restaurant and then we took mom the New Balance to get her a good pair of tennis shoes.

One morning we also drove to Durant, OK for an afternoon of slot play. Durant is only about an hour and a few minutes away. We played for several hours and left with a little more money then we went with. That’s a GOOD thing!

I also repaired the slid-out roof. We noticed a leak during the last good rain we had last summer in the ceiling of the living room slide out. I haven’t made much effort to repair it since we arrived here because we have a metal roof over the trailer here.

Anyway, the problem was with the EternaBond tape that is used on the roof of the slide to seal the area where the roof and the wall meet. When I climbed up and took a good look at it, I noticed the tape had peeled back in one area. It appears that a small twig had been forced under the tape when the slide was retracted.

I got on-line and did some research. I found a place on Amazon that sold the EternaBond RSW-4-50 RoofSeal tape 50 foot length and a 4 inch width at a reasonable price with free shipping.

This tape is mostly used for leak repair, on virtually all roofs and features a UV stable backing. One step permanent repair system for all roofs including EPDM, TPO and most PVC´s Hypalon and all roof accessories. It creates a waterproof, moisture and air tight barrier and will stick to itself. Great for sealing around roof penetrations like vents, refrigerator vents, skylights, and air conditioners.  It also works great to seal accidental punctures, or holes left by other maintenance.

I watched a YouTube video and was good to go.

I cleaned the slide-out roof and cut off the existing tape that peeled back. I then rolled out a few inches of the new sealing tape at a time and then used a roller to make sure it was rolled out to make good contact. This stuff is very sticky and when it makes contact, it’s there to stay!

I did the entire living-room slide and it looks great. It didn’t take too much time to do either.

Once again, it’s the time of the year for spring storms. We had a whopper of a storm Thursday evening. A good friend text us and told us we were welcome to take shelter at their house. We watched the weather forecast. The storms were intensifying as the got closer. Dawn and I grabbed the dogs and drove the twenty minutes to our friends home. We weren’t there long before the weather turned real nasty. The strong wind blew in rain, hail and lighting. We were all glued to the TV as the weatherman was warning people of tornados and flash flooding.

The nasty weather only lasted a couple of hours. The worse of the storm went over us and hit a couple of small towns a few miles east of our location.

The drive home was interesting. We noticed that one of the towns we drove through was without power. Further down the road we noticed several power poles lying to one side overhanging the roadway. We made it home a few minutes before 10:00 P.M. We were relieved to find everything was fine at our place.

The 10 P.M. news was still issuing warnings of severe weather moving east out of our area. They said 3 none tornados had touched down and did damage to homes and other structures in the area. There were some injuries but no know deaths. Many people were without power.

Thank God for looking after us.

Today were back to work as gate attendants.  

Copyright Notice All text and photos found on cruzin2some.blogspot.com is copyrighted and may not be published, rewritten, distributed or downloaded without permission of the owner of cruzin2some.blogspot.com. All Rights Reserved. ©cruzin2some 2010