Life goes on. And on. And on…

In the midst of planning our Route 66 trip we still have to live our life. Right now that life will be sans an ice maker in our (25 year old) refrigerator. Luckily, we will at least be able to have running water. That was not a given a few hours ago!

Our refrigerator water dispenser hasn’t worked for several months but we figured we could live with having to walk all the way (uphill and in the snow and into the wind both ways!) to the sink to get a glass of water. But no way could we live without being able to dispense ice from the freezer side for our martinis!

So we called a repairman, Robert from AZ Appliance Repairs. We had to shut off the house water (but not until the fitting to the refrigerator broke off and water started spewing forth from behind it. I had visions of another inside flood such as we had a few years back. Randy managed to get the water off as Robert put his thumb in the pipe (yes, just like the little Dutch boy!) to keep the water at bay.

After that debacle, Robert managed (he thought) to fix the fitting behind the refrigerator and moved it back into place (not an easy thing to do). Then Randy couldn’t turn the water back on! Robert tried and he couldn’t either. I had visions (I apparently have a lot of visions) of having to live at our cabin (tough life!) until we could get a plumber out. Well, eventually—about 30 minutes—Robert managed to get the water on but that fitting, too, will have to be replaced. Soon.

After all that, still no water to the ice maker. So Robert will have to come back; soon, we hope.

We have had a fair bit of rain over the past week, about 1.5 inches. Our Texas Rangers love, Love, LOVE the rain! All of them have busted out in profuse fuchsia-magenta blooms in both our front and back yards. We can even see them at night since we have also just fixed all our front and back yard lighting. And redone the irrigation system so maybe, just MAYBE our grapes will grow? I’m not holding my breath.

Next will be painting the house.

Oh, and my basil plants are going gangbusters! I’ll have to find a plant sitter when we go away.

36 days to go!

You can’t take the pilot out of his comfort zone…

We have about decided that we’re going to leave about two and a half weeks earlier than we originally planned. So, August 21^st rather than September 7^th. Our original plan took into account when the kiddos would be back in school which we—silly us—thought would be after Labor Day. When you don’t have grandchildren to worry about, you don’t keep track of when school is in or out. They go back to school either just before Labor Day or a lot before Labor Day. Definitely not after!

Since we were discussing our trip departure date and looking at maps, I just happened to mention to Randy that we still had his old—I mean really, Really, REALLY old (in computer terms, that is) —GPS, a Garmin GPS V. How old you might wonder? Randy used it when he was flying and his last flight was in approximately 1997; he used it for several years before he stopped flying, however. We’re guessing it is about 25 years old. Still works!

I am going to have to convince Randy that our phones will do a whole lot better job than his old GPS. But he has a sentimental attachment to it so it will probably be coming with us no matter what. But I WILL be using my phone for navigation.

The other electronic gizmo (technical term!) we’ll (that’s the royal We—I will be the one managing all our gizmos) have to make sure our dash cam is working. I still have the video our dash cam recorded of us almost being run off the road by a car passing several trucks on a two lane road. She (and it was a woman) would have run head first into us if Randy hadn’t been driving and was able to control our ‘Vette into the dirt of the angled side of the road. Glad he was driving!

I think I mentioned that we both like and depend on checklists. I’m going to have to lighten my Electronics Checklist to fit in the Corvette. There is VERY limited space in the so-called trunk. (The new ones have an even smaller trunk but they also have—drum roll, please—a FRUNK, aka front trunk.) We can fit two carry-on size bags in our trunk plus some other stuff. A fair amount of other stuff if we don’t want to be able to put the top down. Now who in their right mind would load up the trunk such that we couldn’t put the top down? I mean, really? So we’ll have to do a few practice packs.