Sunday, May 10, 2020

Week 5 of hiatus

Monday, 4 through Sunday, 10 May 2020

My time
Other than it taking me all Monday morning to figure out the errands I wanted to run and the route I wanted to take on Tuesday's Weekly Cleanliness Trip, I've spent all week working on my post about the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis.  The museum presented an extraordinary amount of information and, as I've said before, they didn't present it in a way I could follow easily.  Trying to understand it myself and pulling all that together coherently is just time-consuming.  But I'm almost through 1963, so onward and upward.

Weekly Cleanliness Trip
I went back to the TA Travel Center in Rockwall I went to several weeks ago because it was the closest one.  At all my stops today I wore a mask and gloves.  I was glad to see that in many stores, everyone else was wearing masks, though in others quite a few weren't.  But still, I did my best and I was glad to see others doing the same.

Garland
The Dallas-Ft. Worth Metro area is packed with smaller towns, many of which I drove through during the day.  From Richardson, I went through Garland, passing a large Kraft (as in cheese) plant and a huge 1st Baptist Church.

Rowlett
Then there came Rowlett (1st syllable pronounced to rhyme with ow (as in I stubbed my toe), and the emphasis on the 2nd syllable.  It sits on the shore of Lake Ray Hubbard, a very popular site for any water-related activities, named for the man who was head of the Dallas Parks and Recreation Board for 30 years.  (The City of Dallas owns the lake.)

Rockwall
Just to the east of the lake is Rockwall, where the Travel Center is.  This time when I pulled up to the dump station, I noticed the padlock was unlocked.  When I went in to pay I told them so, and said they didn't have to come out because I'd leave it as I'd found it, but they asked me to wait a couple of minutes for a staff person.  I went out and waited a couple of minutes and went ahead and dumped my waste tanks anyway.  I was finished with that and had my hose put away in the RV's storage area and was throwing away my gloves when finally an employee came out, carrying a soda, saying sorry for the delay in a perfunctory sort of way.  When I told him what the other staff hadn't, about the lock being already undone and that I'd left it just as I'd found it, he was quite disconcerted.  And I sure was glad I hadn't bothered to obey instructions.  I understand their concern - lots of people don't know what they're doing (just as I didn't at first) or are sloppy about doing it (leaving a yucky mess).  But I've been emptying these tanks at least once a week for more than 2 years now and no longer need adult supervision.  Especially not the kind where my convenience isn't as important as his soda.

I drove from there back west on I-30, then on I-635, over to the northwest part of Dallas.  First time on interstates in a while.

Mesquite/Garland
I passed through Mesquite and must have gotten back into Garland without seeing a sign when I passed something called Amberton University.  The name of this Garland school sounded a little hokey to me, so I looked it up.  They started in 1971 as a part of Abilene Christian College (now University), and separated in 1981 as Amber University; in 2001 its name changed to Amberton Univ.  It's the only private university in Texas that allows concealed carry (of guns) on campus.  It caters to working adults and all students are age 21 or older.

And as a by the way, Abilene Christian University (in Abilene, duh) is one of the few US colleges that has chapel each class day, and it's mandatory for all full-time undergraduates.  Missing chapel without an exemption may result in the student being suspended.  I don't know what qualifies for an exemption.  In contrast, offshoot Amberton University, while still being affiliated with the Church of Christ as the mother school is, promises students complete freedom of conscience in pursuit of their education.  Maybe they mean it.

Farmers Branch
Then on to the town of Farmers Branch, for some years the home of Robert Tilton, a televangelist in the 1980s and '90s who taught that all the bad things in life, including poverty, were the result of sin.  He preached that when people made financial commitments to his ministry, God would reward them with vast wealth.  He preferred commitments of $1,000, occasionally asking for $5,000 or $10,000.  He said when people would send him these commitments along with a prayer request, he would personally pray over each request.

Diane Sawyer and her show PrimeTime Live on ABC, and later the Texas and US governments, did some investigating.  They found all the mail was sent directly to the bank, which opened the mail and deposited the money.  A lot of this mail was found in the bank's dumpsters; 10,000 pounds of these prayer requests were found in a recycling bin in Tulsa, where Tilton had a PO box. 

Tilton sued ABC for libel; a federal judge dismissed the case; the appeals court upheld the dismissal; the US Supreme Court refused to hear the case (effectively upholding the dismissal).

Then some of the private donors/victims sued Tilton for fraud; eventually the Texas Supreme Court ruled that the victims couldn't prove damages because they couldn't show that, even if Tilton had prayed over their prayer requests, God would have granted those prayers.  (With examples like these, I wonder how anyone could think of the study of law as boring.)

And as for Tilton, he left Texas, tried a few other places, and now is starting his whole set-up again in Florida.

And Farmers Branch, by the way, was the first town in Texas to pass anti-illegal immigration laws, such as fining landlords who rent to illegal immigrants.  The federal district court said they were unconstitutional; eventually the US Supreme Court refused to review the judge's ruling.  The court process took 7 years and who knows how much money in legal fees.  Farmers Branch has fewer than 25,000 residents.  I would have thought they could find more constructive uses for their money, since they were bound to lose that argument.

Addison
David had warned me that I might run into traffic problems in Addison; he said it's geared more for smaller cars so has small parking spaces and crowded streets.  My high school memories of Addison are of a country town, so I was curious and didn't take his advice.

Turned out that the virus has so many people not getting out that there wasn't a traffic problem.  And I stopped worrying a long time ago about not fitting into parking spaces - I just park far enough from the door that I'm not blocking off most shoppers by taking up extra room.

Richardson
The Addison stores were all along Belt Line Road, which is a loop road around the outer edge of Dallas County.  From Addison, Belt Line runs into Richardson and was always the main road (though there's a separate Main Street) through town.  The city's recycling center is just off Belt Line, and that was my next-to-last stop.  David offered to give me some of his official recycling bags for weekly pickup by the city, but I don't mind going to the center, which is free; the bags cost a little money so why bother?  I'm just delighted to have a recycling center that will take glass, after all those months of trouble.

I swung by a Kroger near home because I hadn't found everything I wanted in Addison, and Anna and David surprised me by showing up there.  They brought me an envelope that looked like it was from the IRS and thought I might want to get it in the bank while I was out.  It turned out to be my $1,200 stimulus check, which is certainly a nice addition to a bank balance, but by then I was just exhausted and wanted nothing more than to drive the one more mile back to my parking place in front of their house.

Weather
Monday the "feels like" temp was 95°, but I could feel a storm blowing in when I walked the dogs late in the day and, sure enough, from midnight on we got thunder and rain, and it was much cooler in the morning.

It warmed up but still, cooler weather - like daytime 70s and low 80s - was the norm for the rest of the week.  That was a help because last week it was so hot I had a hard time sleeping at night.  In fact, I haven't had more than about 4 hours of sleep any night in several weeks.  An extra hour or two of dozing each night helps but doesn't replace the lost hours of sleep.  I end up feeling groggy a lot more often than I want to.  But oh well.  It happens.

Another storm blew in Friday with strong strong winds all day.  Friday was trash day and this whole end of the neighborhood was coated with bits of trash from one of the neighbors down the street.  I finally went out myself to pick up some of the trashiest of it but was limited because I don't have a lot of storage space and the trash truck had already come and gone.

And so forth
We were really lucky to have the Blue Angels do a flyover all around the Dallas area, buzzing the area hospitals.  Because there's a hospital pretty close to here, we got a good view of them, though at the speed they were going it was a really quick view.  Super nice of them to do.

Because I like routines and think the dogs need something to count on, I take the same routes for several of our daily walks, and switch around another one of them for variety.  But I end up seeing many of the same people on these walks.  One older couple living the next street over walk to the end of the block and back to their house most days, and then the husband does some exercises in the garage.  When I passed them one day this week, I asked how they were doing and the wife said, in a strong Texas country accent, "We're one day closer to being out!"  Given the frustration of not having an ending date to this sequestration we're all going through, I thought that was a real positive way to look at it.

Despite all that spraying I did last weekend, I still have ants.  Not in the trash any more, because I spray the inside of each fresh bag I use, and spray inside it again a day or two later.  But I'm finding them all over the RV - on my bed, on the table, on the kitchen counter and in the sink and on the stove, on the upper bunk - I've seen them everywhere but on the floor.  And I can't for the life of me figure out where they're coming from.  They just suddenly appear in a spot where they weren't the split second before I saw them.  I don't see them coming from the walls or the windows or the door.  There's not a trail of them anywhere.  I just see 5 walking on my bed in the 3 minutes it takes me to get dressed.  Or 10 walk across the kitchen counter when there's nothing going on.

I'm now washing the pet dishes twice a day, wiping everything off all the time.  I only have about 3 or 4 more Clorox wipes so only use a clean sponge or paper towel to do this wiping, but I'm sure there's nothing available for them to eat.  Everything that's at all edible is either still in its original, unopened packaging or it's in a Zip-loc bag or it's in the frig or freezer.  Everything.  Including the pet food.

The only thing more I can think of to do is call a pest control company, but I'm not sure I'm ready for such an extreme measure.  At least, it seems like it'd be extreme, an RV not being much at all like a house.  Well, if this keeps up, maybe I'll at least call them.

Still want very much to get back on the road, but since today's only the 10th, I'm going to wait and see what happens later this month to the number of infections now that the governor's reopened the state (way too soon in my opinion).

I sent emails to my 3 cousins, who are all older than I am so I was worried about their health.  All 3 wrote back that they're sticking to their homes and staying away from just about everybody.  I sure wish the rest of the country were following their example.

For everybody reading this, I hope you're able to stay safe and healthy.


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