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 29^th 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 21^st. The summer season starts on April 1^st. 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 1^st 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 2^nd 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.  

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