RVing

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Tip: Don’t Be Born In Quebec

The lady at Lethbridge Vehicle Licensing and Registry who processed my driver’s license application personally emailed me today to apologize for not explain the transfer process to me. Apology accepted on her end.

The reason Alberta did not give me a full license is that according to the records they could get, I only have two years of driving experience. Alberta will trade a full driver’s license from another province for a full Alberta license if you have three years of verifiable driving experience on a full license. Yukon provided this information for the last two years but Quebec doesn’t reciprocate with the other provinces.

Feeling pretty bad about the whole thing, the gal at Lethbridge Vehicle tried to make it right by calling the SAAQ, the Quebec DMV. The bastards conceded to providing her with my file number there, but would not give her any further information, stating that I had to request an abstract in writing… and provide $65 for an English translation!!!!!!

When I got home, I dug through my files and found a copy I made of the abstract I bought in 2009 (I forgot about the fee, but the receipt was stapled to the copy!). I’m getting smarter in my old age! I will bring this copy to the licensing office on Tuesday and see if that is good enough. Hopefully, Alberta won’t insist on an abstract printed this month since there would not be any additional information.

Quebec’s never-ending and completely pointless bureaucracy never ceases to amaze and infuriate me. Things don’t have to be so complicated, take so much time, or cost so much money!!!!!

Let’s see… I have both my large and small birth certificates and my full driving and insurance records from back there. Hopefully, I will never have to deal with Quebec bureaucracy again.

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Busy Managing

I have to confess that I am absolutely in love with my job! I thought that I never wanted to work for someone else again, but I’d never been a manager before! I have a lot of the freedoms I enjoy from working for myself, but I also have a steady pay cheque.

This apartment complex managing position is an excellent fit for me. It combines all my past work experience, from bookkeeping support to security clearance processing to customer service, and more. I feel valued and appreciated and I am discovering that I have a backbone!

This week, being the last of the month, is incredibly busy. I am presently at the office waiting for two tenants to move out!

While this job is slowly taking over my life, I am still drawing a firm line and continuing with my own business and clients. It’s really the best of both worlds.

Now, someone pinch me. Tomorrow is September?!

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Privacy When Having Someone Else Handle Your Mail

My friend Sarah is back home in Dawson City and cleared out my PO box for me. The only worrisome thing was a letter from the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA). I gave her permission to open it so that I wouldn’t have to stress unless absolutely necessary.

She emailed me back straight away (thanks!) and had this to say: “Bloody hell! It’s in French!”

So a great way to maintain your privacy when having someone else handle your mail is to make sure the person doesn’t read the language in which you get your mail! 😀

 

 

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Another Way of Emptying RV Holding Tanks

Disclaimer: this is a post about dealing with sewage. Read at your own risk!

This is one of those posts I really hesitated to write. I hadn’t found anybody else who deals with their holding tanks this way. Then I realised that just because no one else has done it doesn’t mean it can’t be done! So, I did it, and it worked, and it saved me a huge amount of time, hassle, and money, and I’m going to share it with you today.

I’m parked for about six months with no sewer hookup. Even if I had a macerator system to pump into a toilet ($$$) I don’t have a toilet to pump into. So, I planned on pulling out every six weeks or so to dump. The problem is that the dump is 20km away round trip and getting in and out of this spot is quite a bit of sport!

I decided after that one trip that pulling out was no longer an option. That left toting waste. I don’t have a blue boy and there’s another reason I’m hesitant to go that route: not being able to control the flow of the waste out of the tank. ‘Nudging’ a holding tank valve just doesn’t work, at least not with mine.

The main piece of the puzzle, then, was to figure out how to control the flow of waste out of the tank while minimizing the potential for making a mess.

The solution was quite obvious: empty the the tank from above, right in the bathroom.

The house that I owned really taught me to think outside the box. I remember one night when I had to empty the toilet to be able to remove it so that I could get a mechanical auger into the drain (fun times). That night, through a combination of trial, error, and conversations with my dad, I accidentally ‘invented’ the siphon. And that’s what I decided to do with my current holding tank situation.

Now, I have to say that since I went to dump I haven’t been putting paper in the tank so that I could prolong the tank getting too full. So I was dealing with a fairly liquid sludge, for which the siphon would work just fine.

These are the tools I gathered:

-newspaper for protecting the floors;

-disposable gloves;

-a large (6 gallon) bucket with a screw on lid;

http://www.321galaxy.com/6-gallon-bucket-w-screw-on-lid.html

-a piece of hose long enough to hit both the bottom of the tank and that of the bucket;

-paper towels;

-a garbage bag;

-a disinfectant;

-a wet/dry shop vac

First, I turned off the water pump, then I put newspaper down in both the dressing room and the toilet room to contain spills (unnecessary) and put the bucket into a garbage bag in case it leaked (unnecessary).  I then inserted the piece of hose into the tank, leaving enough out for it to rest on the bottom of the bucket.

A siphon is quite easy to make. The trick is that the liquid levels in the recipient container have to be lower than those in the donor container. So the ideal thing would have actually been to have the bucket outside, below the rig, and the hose snaked out the door, but I wanted to be able to keep my eye on the whole operation. So, I decided to siphon as much as I could and see where I got.

The other thing a siphon needs is a primer. In some cases, sucking on the hose would work, but not in this one! I used my wet/dry shop vac to create the necessary suction.

My set up worked perfectly and I was pleased to be able to fill up just a bit more than three quarters of the bucket before my siphon stopped working. The tank hadn’t been full to overflowing to start, so that freed up plenty of space. I made a note of how full the tank was when I siphoned it so that I’ll know when to repeat the exercise.

I screwed the lid on tight, brought the bucket outside for disposal at the dump station on the way to work tomorrow, cleaned the the shop vac, and then cleaned the bathroom and dressing room thoroughly for good measure. Done in about ten minutes with no mess.

Now, I can’t wait to hear from all the horrified people who will tell me that I shouldn’t have done that! 😀