OOOOO…THOSE PESKY WASPS!

Monday, December 13 – Brrrrrrrrrrr!!! Woke-up to 32 degrees this morning in Houston. How cold was it where you live? I see on my weather watch that it was 16 degrees in Canton, OH (our former hometown) and 45 degrees in Mission, TX are next destination. Much of the Nation is firmly in the grip of Old Man Winter....pretty early I would say!

Last night Paul turned on the rear furnace. When the forecast calls for COLD weather, we turn on the rear furnace. It distributes heat to the holding tanks and the basement storage areas. Don't want pipes and such freezing now do we! Well, much to his surprise it sounded like the furnace fan was full of rocks! Ahhhh.....those darn mud-dobber wasps were at it!!! This morning, Paul raised to door covering the furnace area and removed the furnace blower fan and cleaned it out. Just a small nest, but what a racket it made.

In the pictures, you notice the furnace on top.

Below the furnace on the right, the smaller of the two black tanks, is called the “black-water” tank. It is for holding waste water from the toilet and holds about forty gallons of.....enough said on the subject... :=)

The larger of the two black tanks, is called the “gray-water” tank. It is for holding waste water from the three sinks and shower. It is approximately sixty gallons in size.

Finally, the largest tank, the white tank on the bottom, is our fresh water tank. It is for holding our “on-board” fresh water supply. We use this when NOT hooked up to city utilities. It holds approximately 100 gallons of water. Look closely and you might be able to see we have about a half tank of water.

Hope you enjoyed the tour of our holding tanks. When full, there is quite a bit of weight here. That explains why they are located just in front of the dual rear wheels.

Let’s see. It is December 13…8 days until the first day of Winter. Look at the pictures below and see what is going on here in Houston.

Your eyes do not deceive you. THEY ARE MOWING! It doesn’t matter how long we are here or how many times, we just can’t get over the weather.

Thanks for stopping by. Hope to see y’all again. Have a great day!

JUST HANGIN’ AROUND HOUSTON…

Friday, December 10 – We've settled in here at the Houston Elks (actually in Stafford). We are busy with normal day-to-day activities.....going to the grocery store, shopping for Christmas, completing some maintenance projects, doing laundry,

Does it look like we need to do some laundry?

and so on...

Each morning the sun shines through our front window. We think this is Bella’s favorite time of the day. Can you guess why?

We visited with the folks at the Elks Club this evening for a few Christmas “cheers”. Tomorrow night is their annual Christmas dinner/party. We may attend if we return early enough from Kelly's house.

Saturday, December 11 - Love this Houston weather. High today in the 80's.......AWESOME!

Did some additional hanging around the MH today. Paul did purchase a computer table/desk to tryout in the MH. Thinks he found the type of desk he liked, but returned this purchase with intentions of finding one that matches our interior.

Have to postpone our trip to Kelly’s until tomorrow. Carrie had her “Second Annual Extravaganza” party. As we understand, it went rather late and someone had to get some additional rest time…LOL.                            

Sunday, December 12 - Heading to Katy (suburb west of Houston) today to do some shopping with our daughter, Kelly. We did quite a bit of running around.....think we're done shopping for this year. I must say....compared to a couple weeks ago, the stores and malls were PACKED! I sure hope that spells some economic relief to so many unfortunate Americans. We're did our part today.....we came home with a trunk full of packages!

One of the streets in Katy…so pretty.

They are actually replacing sod on some of the mediums in the center of the highway. It is DECEMBER. Canton, Ohio has SNOW, WIND CHILLS OF ZERO…what the heck! Gotta love this weather.

One of our stops was to see the Giant Playmate Igloo Cooler. It is located in Brookshire, TX. We stayed there on our last trip to Houston and didn’t even know it existed. It is the guard house at the Igloo Products Corporation on I-10 W.

After shopping, we stopped back at Kelly's place to visit for awhile and see the pictures of Carrie's Christmas party. Everyone either dresses up or wears a tackeeeeee Christmas attire. Of course, the girls always dress up. We didn’t go but Kelly was kind enough to share her picture with us. Looks like the youngin's had a great time Friday night celebrating the Christmas Season.

                             Carrie                Kelly

 

After visiting at Kelly's apartment we headed home for an evening of relaxation.

One of the things we did recently was have our first year of blog posts published in book form. We had Blog2print do the job. We had so many posts that we had to have it done in two volumes. We also had to break all the links to Picasa Web Album on line. We actually had to copy all our posts and put them in a new temporary blog and do the revisions. We had the books shipped to Kelly's house and picked them up while we were there. They really turned out nice!

Front Cover

Back Cover

 

Unfortunately, one of the volumes was damaged in shipping. It appeared like a sharp object, like a nail, pierced the box and the front cover along with about 50 pages of Volume I.

Marsha emailed the company this evening, telling them what had happened and included pictures of the damage. They got back to us immediately with a pledge to ship us a new book – at NO COST! We also received an email from the production department that it was processing the book immediately. Now how's that for service. Not only are we pleased with the appearance of the books, but this company stepped up to the plate and hit a homerun with service after the sale! Our hats off to Blog2print.

  Thanks for stopping by. Hope to see you back real soon. Have a great day!

FOOD, SHOPPING AND FOOTBALL

Friday, December 3 - Went out to eat with our daughters this evening to Razzoo's.

The restaurant is located on large reflecting pool.

It's a Cajun style restaurant only a few miles from where we are camped.

Paul had Alligator Tail on a bed of Jambalaya Rice and Marsha had the Cajun Sampler...... SPICEY!!! Very delicious though. We don't eat out often so it was a nice treat.....especially since Kelly paid for our dinner.....thanks Kelly!!! We had a wonderful time with our daughters at the restaurant, and afterwards they came back to the MH for a couple of hours. A nice evening!

Kelly, Marsha, Paul, Carrie

Saturday, December 4 – Woke up this morning to some “Spooky” fog.....looks like Halloween instead of the Christmas season....lol. Has a lot to do with being 60 degrees here in Houston! Going to be a high of 80 degrees this afternoon..... WOW

We went to Trader Joes this morning. It's like a flea market. We weren't very impressed. Ninety percent of the booths were of little or no interest.

Too bad we just bought a new chair…these look pretty comfortable.

We thought about buying one of these for the front of the motor home.

Paul couldn’t pass an opportunity to have one of his favorite festival foods…funnel cake.

Now you see it…

Now you don’t.

 

We did buy one item....a gift for one of our daughters.

Lots of traffic for the drive home.

It was HOT out as we relaxed on the patio outside the MH. We did get a new neighbor......the first new RV since our arrival here two weeks ago.

We went to the sports bar this evening with Carrie's Virginia Tech gang to watch VT play Florida State for the ACC Championship. A great game and a fun time with the youngin”s.....VT played their best game of the season, easily beating Florida State. It looks like they will be playing in the Orange Bowl.

Sunday, December 5 – Now that we have had the motor home for over a year, we have decided to make some changes. We already shared that we sold one of the sofas and purchased a chair. Paul plans to build some cupboards for storage and a desk area. Marsha has decided that she doesn’t use the washer/dryer enough to haul it around. We put it up on the Escapee’s website, and it sold today. More storage space to come. This doesn’t break Marsha’s heart at all.

We actually had time to hit the Elks tonight. We met some very nice people and even learned how to play a new dice game, called something like Captain, Mate and Crew. Neither one of us can remember, but we remember it was fun.

We watched the Bowl Matchup announcements. Yep, VT will play Stanford in the Orange Bowl. Ohio State will play Arkansas in the Sugar Bowl. Looks like there will be lots of good football beginning on the 18th.

Monday, December 6 and Tuesday, December 7  - Lots of running shopping and running errands. The mornings have been very chilly but by 10 the sun is out and it is very nice.

Thanks for stopping by. Hope to see y’all back real soon. Have a great day!