Haven

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Double Town Day

I hadn’t planned to go to town today, but my second warranty replacement for my Western Digital drive was waiting for me at the post office and I needed some things at the home store, so I had ample reason to go.

I’ve had a Western Digital drive for five years now that has never failed me, but haven’t had any luck with the My Passport brand. My first one crapped out on me in Mexico and I got it replaced while I was traveling through the US last month. A month later, the replacement failed! I asked them to send me something different and they sent me a My Passport Air specifically formatted for Mac, a significant upgrade. If this one lasts, it will have been worth all the money I’ve spent in returning the old drives!

Since I’ve been craving a hamburger since I got home and have made some more weight loss progress, I decided to go to 121 Steakhouse for lunch. I went all out and ordered a bacon cheeseburger with sweet potato fries! The kitchen goofed and sent me curly fries instead, which are just as good, so I told the server not to send them back, but to please remove the substitution fee. That fee has jumped to $2! No more substitution, even to salad, for me! But because it was a mistake, they actually reimbursed me $2.79, not $2. So I picked a good day to have lunch there. 🙂 Their coffee is absolutely mindbogglingly amazing, so I pretty much had a huge pot of it, too. I need to remember that and get a to go coffee from there instead of at the gas station!

After lunch, I went to the home store to get some things for my cell phone booster antenna project (thanks, Croft!). More on that when I do the project on Sunday.

Then, it was off to the grocery store to get what was on sale this week. I really like that when they are having a good deal on avocados, they put the limes on sale, too!

I also stocked up on almond milk, which was surprisingly inexpensive ($2 regular price for a container that will last a week!). Friends in Mexico left me a bunch of almond milk that they didn’t want to bring on the plane and I’ve just finished using it up. I never thought that would be something I’d need or want in my diet, but it’s fabulous! It’s low calorie, tastes great, has protein, and is wonderful in smoothies. I’ve also been using it with a high protein cereal topped with a banana for breakfast, which is funny because I normally turn my nose at Western breakfast foods. But this really works for me. I can have it at 7AM and go all the way through to lunch (between 12:00 and 1:00) on just 300 calories! Wow!

No sooner had I arrived home than I got an email from a client regarding my Windows computer, which crapped out on me last weekend. They asked that I mail it back ASAP so that they can reinstall Windows and do other maintenance on it. Because of their holiday schedule and the fact that I will have a lot less flexibility in my own schedule due to new work commitments starting next week, we determined that I needed to get to the post office today. So I quickly packed my post office kit that has a marker, scissors, and packing tape, as well as the computer and power supply and headed back to town!

The gals at the post office were helpful and found me a box and free packing material! I packed the computer and sent it off (you do not want to know what it costs to send a well-insured and packaged laptop across Canada). I had missed the truck to Regina, so it actually won’t head out until Monday night. Bummer.

Today was our first really hot day in ages and I was burning up by the time I came out of the post office. I decided on just one last treat for the day and went to the Village Food Store to see if they had ice cream. Yes! I got a ‘small’ cone for $2.10, a fair price. That’s it for treats for me for the next little bit!

Off to do some plumbing. I found another leak under the sink. 🙁

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Permanent Bypass Repair

I somehow managed to find the time today to effect the permanent repair of my water heater bypass valve repair. Since I determined that I didn’t need it, I decided to just glue PVC caps to the ends of the pipes I cut and call it a day.

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But it wasn’t quite that simple. I didn’t have enough PVC pipe on the right hand side to effect a bond between the pipe and the cap.

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Thankfully, I was able to cut through the elbow to get to the next longish bit of PVC pipe. I painstakingly sawed through enough of it to bend back the section and then snipped what was left with a sharp pair of pliers!

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This is a permanent repair that I won’t have to worry about. Now, let’s hope the rest of this system, including the other valve, doesn’t give me any trouble!

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Running the Dishwasher Off the RV Holding Tank and Pump

I did another load with the dishwasher today, running it off the holding tank, and WOW. The added pressure made all the difference! Everything came out sparkly clean!

I will not hesitate to do this again. The pump only ran at most 10 minutes of the whole cycle and I used less than a quarter of my fresh water tank.

Another thing that surprised me is how little power this unit uses, a mere 8A per 1.5 hour cycle. I could run this machine off grid no problem as long as I had a water source!

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Another Dishwasher

My countertop dishwasher died in 2012 and I really missed it. Since then, I’ve been dreaming of replacing it with an 18″ portable model, but they are rare and the few times I’ve seen a used one at a reasonable price, I didn’t have the money for it. I decided that I was getting a dishwasher again this summer even if I had to pay full price.

It surprises me the number of people who say to me, “Dishwasher?! You’re one person! Stop being so lazy!” I don’t get this attitude. No one said that when I bought a washing machine and stopped washing my clothes by hand! The people who say this tend to fit into two categories that sometimes overlap: people who don’t do much cooking and people who have never been single and responsible for the entirety of running a household.

Yes, it takes about 20 minutes to do the dishes each day. That’s over two hours a week. I have to make a meal plan, drive to the store, buy the food, and prepare the food. I have to do the laundry. I have to clean the house. I have to mow the grass. I have to do all the repairs on my home. Oh, and I also run a business, so I not only work, but I also have to do all the admin stuff related to running a business. My life is very full. Don’t tell me I don’t need a machine that can save me more than two hours a week of a chore I despise. That’s 20 minutes I can go walk around the neighbourhood, watch an episode of a sitcom, or read a chapter of a book.

Every time I get a dishwasher, it’s a keystone moment. My kitchen stays neater and then the rest of the housekeeping seems more manageable. My budget also improves because I no longer find myself avoiding cooking marathons because I don’t feel like dealing with the cleanup. I need a dishwasher a lot more than I need a washing machine since, for some unfathomable reason, I actually enjoy doing laundry by hand!

So with that out of the way, I found the dishwasher I wanted on Kijiji for $450. Two hiccups, I couldn’t afford $450 and it was in Swift Current, six hours away round trip. I decided to keep an eye on the ad since I could afford $450 later this summer. A new one would be about $650, so $450 would be a really good deal and so I expected the dishwasher to go fast. It didn’t and I saw the price drop to $350 and then $250 in a couple of weeks!

I could do $250 by borrowing from July’s budget, so I emailed the person and said that I’d be willing to pay $200 since I’d have to use up so much gas to get it. I said that I understood if she wanted to wait for a better offer and to keep my contact information. She emailed back to say that she was happy to get an offer and her dad could meet me much closer than Swift Current (Lafleche) so that she could get the full $250. Perfect!

She had bought the dishwasher for an apartment and then had a chance to get into a house, so it is barely used! It’s a GE model, which is better quality than the Danby I was eying.

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It just fits in the lounge between the loft ladder and the counter and gives me the extra bit of counterspace I wanted for my tortilla press and food processor. I have just enough floor space to easily roll it to the sink. I had originally planned to try to run it off the garden hose so I wouldn’t have to move it, but the manual says that it really does need hot water to run properly, so I’m going to run it off the sink after all. The seller thought to include the adapter I need to hook up the hose to the sink.

I ran a test load and was quite pleased. The dishes, pots, and cutlery came out clean, but everything that had sticky residue on it (ie. peanut buttery food processor parts) didn’t get cleaned at all. I know this is likely a water pressure issue in that I have none when hooked up to city water, as I was for the test.

I am going to do another test off the holding tank, just to see if that improves things. I don’t want to make a habit of it because I doubt it’s good for my water pump to run that long. This could end up being good motivation to MacGyver myself a Mexican-style tinaco system to accumulate water and then gravity feed it into the RV! I just can’t imagine where I could install such a tank since I wouldn’t want that weight on my RV roof! So in the meantime, I’ll make sure to give the peanut buttery stuff an extra rinse. 🙂

I’m so happy with my new purchase! It really feels like it was meant to be… and I will miss it this winter in Mexico. One more reason why I’ll be happy to get home in the spring. 😀

Oh, and it’s HEAVY. There is literally a huge cement slab installed into the bottom of it! Huh?! It’s impossible for two people to get something like this into the RV, so I used my brain and MacGyvered myself a series of ramps to get it out of the truck and into the house!

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Today Was… Frustrating

I had big plans for a fun day today. I woke up at 5:00 raring to go even though I’d only had six hours of sleep and I forced myself to get another hour before getting up.

Some unexpected work came in a couple of days ago, so I needed to put in a few hours of work before leaving. That failed spectacularly because my Windows computer crapped out on me (something that would be user diagnosticable and fixable on a Mac, but needs professional help on a Windows machine) and then the stupid software I use for transcription because there are no other options also refused to work.

I ended up wasting the entire morning troubleshooting things that were working fine yesterday and finally had to leave because I had an appointment to pick up something I was buying off Kijiji.

First stop was the bank where the ATM started to spit out my money and then broke down. Seriously. Am I cursed or something???!!! Thankfully, the machine gave me back my card and a receipt saying that nothing was deducted from my account. I went across the street to the TD and paid almost $10 in fees to withdraw from them. I’m sure CIBC will reimburse me though; I’ll call the Assiniboia branch Monday morning.

I then headed west out of town to meet up with the Kijiji seller. She had originally asked me to meet her at a grocery store in Lafleche (The Arrow), a town about 45KM west of Assiniboia but had emailed me in the morning asking to meet her at the entrance to Thomson Lake Regional Park, near Lafleche. I sent her a Google link to make sure I had the right place and she said that was it, so off I went there since it really wasn’t a detour. Except that Google was wrong and SK apparently doesn’t believe in signage. There was NOTHING in the area indicating that Thomson Lake Regional Park even exists. Google and Apple maps were both sending me to the wrong place.

I drove a ways past Lafleche and then went back, doing in total almost an extra 40KM, which was way more gas than I could afford to burn. So I knew I had to cancel the touristy part of my day. 🙁

There was a trucker fueling up just outside Lafleche and I asked him if he knew where the park was. Yes, and he gave me excellent directions. There is ZERO signage all the way to the turnoff for the park and even then, it’s just a little brown sign with absolutely nothing written on it. What a well kept secret! I am going to research it more and see if it’s a place where I could go kayaking since it’s really not that far when you know where it is!

Thankfully, I had left early and was only a few minutes late. I ended up meeting the seller’s father. She lives in Swift Current, which is six hours away round trip for me, but he was spending the weekend at Thomson Lake, just two hours away round trip for me, and offered to bring the item. So I know I got off lucky in terms of extra driving today!

By this point, I had a bad headache and was no longer in the mood for adventure so I didn’t even care that the rest of my day was spoiled. I headed back to Assiniboia where something finally went right with my day (well, besides the exchange actually taking place!). The home store had what I needed to effect a permanent repair on my bypass and the grocery store lost leave of its senses and was selling absolutely gorgeous bananas for just 69 cents a pound rather than the usual 99 cents. The 69 cent bananas tend to be so ripe and disgusting I wouldn’t even want them in a banana bread, much less a smoothie. These were still good enough to eat as is!

I got home and somehow managed to wrestled my unwieldy purchase into the rig. I haven’t decided yet if I’m going to tell y’all what it is. 😀