Thursday, 10 through Monday, 14 November 2022
I went into town twice during this period but otherwise stayed in the campground.
This campground must try to sell itself as a tropical holiday resort in the summer, because it's decorated with thatched roofs on the cabins and tiki carvings scattered around and bamboo facings on the outer walls of the buildings. It's got about 150 campsites, and the campground had closed all but 9 of them. It was weird to have all this room and none of it being used - like a ghost town.
But a very healthy population of very healthy Canada geese lived here on the lake. I never saw them near the campsites but they left evidence that they'd been there. In fact, I couldn't find anywhere in the whole campground where I could walk Dexter and not worry about what he was trying to put in his mouth. I kept wishing I could use that sour apple spray I'd bought, but I was wearing mittens every time I set foot out the door because it was so cold and windy, and I couldn't see any way I could operate that spray in time to do any good. But all that goose poop made this place really unattractive to me.
On our last walk one night, I tripped over an uneven section of pavement and fell right on my glasses. I hit my cheekbone on the pavement, broke off the earpiece of my glasses, got a large scrape on my right knee and a smaller one on my right palm and jammed my left thumb. I guess I should be thankful that these injuries could have been much worse if I hadn't been wearing so many clothes. But I felt disoriented and may have gotten a mild concussion.
Luckily I had a second pair of glasses with me, because otherwise I'd have been in real trouble. Still, various parts of my body felt stiff and sore at intervals over the next few days, even the ones I hadn't thought had been injured. My shoulders, for instance, must have taken a lot of shock absorption and they told me all about it for days, as did my upper arms from taking my weight when I fell. But it could have been much worse.
One day here, Dext and I walked all around the little lake - maybe 3/4 of a mile around. There was an official walking path there, complete with a bench and a dispenser of doggy poop bags half-way around. Nobody else was crazy enough to be out when we were - the sun was shining but the wind was really blowing so the wind chill must have been lower than any sensible person would welcome. But we needed the exercise and it was nice to have sunshine.
One day I finished the last posts for Nebraska, which was late but at least it's earlier than I have been lately. And I got started on my posts for Iowa.
One day I took the kittens in to a vet's office for their 2-month-old checkup. He told me they could now tell me definitely that the kittens were both males (seems odd it could take so long to know for sure) and gave them a distemper shot (or one of those vaccinations cats have to have) and changed Jimmy's medicines. This is the 3rd vet I've seen and I'm getting the clear message that vets don't always agree on the right way to do things. They've all told me different things about Jimmy's eye and his congestion.
When I got back to the KOA, I bought propane and apologized to the young woman for dragging her out of the office into the wind. Today's temp wasn't supposed to go higher than 35° and with the wind so strong, the "feels like" temp was down to 5°. Amazing what an effect wind can have. Anyway, she said that's typical here because they'd built this KOA in a little cove on a hill that routinely caught the wind. Probably really nice in summer but not so much now.
I made campground reservations for part of the time I expected to be in Texas - I go to Austin to see my doctor after I leave Dallas where my eye doctor is, and I have driving directions for all the upcoming trips I expect to take.
Bucky tries to steal food from everybody. If I try to eat when they do, I'm constantly interrupting my meal to yell at him. He can't get to Dext because he's always finished before anyone else. But Jimmy is a slow eater and Bucky tries to force him over to give him access. Lily's used to being the only cat in the house - I guess it was that way for her first 11 years too - so her habits are a bigger problem. She's usually an intermittent eater, especially with dry food. She'll eat a few bites and then walk away; come back in a little bit, eat a few more bites and then walk away. And repeat and repeat - this will go on for hours. Except now it can't. Not with Mr. Vulture on the prowl. Often he doesn't bother to wait for her to finish but sits right next to her while she's eating, or sticks his head in her bowl without waiting for her to leave. So I have to jump up and swat him away and grab the bowl and put it up - until Lily comes back a few minutes later and says she wants her food back. At which point she'll eat a few mouthfuls and walk away. It's driving me nuts.
I heard on the radio that people were still saying covid wasn't any more deadly than the flu. The answer is that 35,000 people die each year from the flu, and there are still 300+ people dying every day from covid. Three hundred times 365 days/year gets us to 109,500 deaths per year from covid. So no, covid and flu aren't even in the same ballpark of deadliness.
One day we had a little thunder and then a little rain, but not much of either. Another day it was supposed to snow but didn't - we just had wind. On still another day it started snowing while it was still dark - by 7:00 when it got light, I realized it had been snowing long enough for the road to be completely covered. It was fun to watch Bucky sitting on my bed watching the snow come down. Lily did that too, though she used a different window. By 10:00 it had been snowing continuously, but it must have been warm enough because the road cleared itself. In fact, by later in the day, much of the snow had dissipated.
I went back into Waterloo a second time for errands - groceries, gasoline, liquor, PetsMart (for kitten food - this was the main reason for the trip), and a park for Dexter to walk in. I also stumbled across a recycling drop-off on our way back, so I got to lighten the load a bit.
When I got back to the campground, I tried to empty my waste tanks and had two real problems. For the black water tank, either I was too cold or the hoses were too cold, but I didn't make good connections at either end of the hose and ended up getting some of the detritus spread around a small area of my campsite. But I got the connections put together right and got that tank emptied and than ran into another problem: the grey water tank was apparently frozen - nothing at all came out. I've got heaters attached to both tanks and I'd turned the heaters on several weeks ago, but I guess the one for the grey water tank wasn't working.
So here were my 2 real problems. First, I still had a little black water discharge on the ground. Normally, I'd've hooked my hose up to the water connection and just diluted it and cleared it away - which is what I've been told to do. But I didn't want to do that here because there was still snow on the ground, and the forecast was for more to come overnight and tomorrow, so I figured any water I sprayed around would turn into a sheet of ice.
Second, just because nothing came out of my grey water tank didn't mean there wasn't anything in there. And I knew there was still room for more, but I couldn't continue to dump in more water without having to deal with it at some point.
What's more, there was a solid prediction for at least an inch of snow tomorrow, so nothing was going to warm up any time soon.
So I went up to the office and explained the yucky mistake I'd made and asked what they wanted me to do about cleaning it up. And they looked blank and said they didn't know - one of them said she'd been there 5 years and she'd never confronted this before. (And I thought, she just didn't know about it, because I know I'm not the only one this has happened to and this wasn't my first time making this mistake. But I didn't say that.) I told them about my grey water problem and said I was seriously thinking of leaving a day early and driving south somewhere warm enough where my tank would thaw out so I could dump it. I said if I was still there tomorrow to just let me know what they wanted me to do but that I might be leaving early.
And the more I thought about it, the more I thought that was exactly what I needed to do. I went back to the RV, fed the critters their supper, and got on the internet. I never turn on the computer after about 5:00 because of what they say about the blue light keeping us awake or something. But tonight I did. First I looked for KOAs that were close to here but farther south. And then I looked up the weather forecasts at those locations to find one that looked like it'd be warm enough for long enough to thaw out what must be a block of ice under my RV. And then I looked up campsite availability at those places, and then I came up with driving directions to get me there, and then I took Dexter out for one last walk before bed.
I didn't know what else to do to thaw myself out, and I figured the day of site rental I was forfeiting here would compensate them for any mess that was still left after the predicted snowfall cleaned it out.
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