Cruising through January

Consuelo's Gourd Project

January has been a busy month for us in Yuma. Our friends from Pincher Creek Canada arrived, and that alone added to our calendar, including occasional bike rides, some golf, dinners out with a movie (It's Complicated), happy hours, progressive dinners, Mary's good cookin', and various projects.

The friends are Ken and Mary Clinton and Art and Sharon Bonertz. Sharon and Mary are sisters. We've also gotten to know some other Pincher Cretians who are staying here, Leslie and Gerry Musa, and met folks from all over.

Consuelo, Sharon and Mary participated in a gourd decorating project. Consuelo's is shown above. It came out pretty nice, I think.

The bicycle rack that Art built in Canada for Consuelo's bike developed a list, and Art wanted to correct it. We pulled the trailer hitch off the motorhome, got some heavier bolts and reattached it. It's now straight. That took most of a day.

Art Bonertz strumming

Music has been touched as a topic. Art Bonertz brought his guitar along, and Ken Clinton is practicing steadily on his new electric guitar. I got my old buzzing ukulele out and rediscovered a few standard chords, but my memory is a sieve with regard to song lyrics. None of us has felt comfortable enough to get together and play at the same time, so maybe we'll skate by some bad music. Consuelo was encourage to enter the Karaoke Contest (with a $1000 prize to the winner) but the contest ends long after we depart Yuma, so that was sufficient for her to say no.

Classy slippers

Besides, Consuelo has been busy enough with other projects. She generated a slipper knitting class with 9 students, and they all made their way through to the felting process. Some students only managed to get one slipper made, and they are now out searching for Cinderella, or hopping around on cold mornings.

Speaking of cold mornings, the weather has been pretty good here. We did have a couple days of rain and hefty winds, highly unusual for this area. Record rainfalls were recorded, close to 2 inches on one day, which is 1/2 of Yuma's average annual amount. Many folks reported minor leaks, including us, and a slide awning or two was damaged, and some lighter than air plastic lawn chairs departed for places unknown. We're now waiting to see if the desert blossoms, as often occurs after a rain.

Tissues and Bananas Still Life

Meanwhile, I've been pursuing my photographic hobby. I acquired a new strobe flash for my camera, and have been experimenting (or, studying) its use and operation. Various objects have found themselves exposed on our tabletop, then subjected to bright lights. Some of the pictures, like the red gourd, look pretty nice. Bananas and a tissue box weren't so pleasing, but they were well lit. I'll be moving into portrait work next.

Flashy golf tees

I've also been leading two meetings a week for other campers in the park. One is a computer group, where we mostly help newbies learn how to use email and web browsers. The second is a photo discussion group, which led to a request for a presentation from a neighboring RV park. I expect this can develop into a photo seminar for amateurs in the future.

Does a Ford moo?

Ken Clinton's truck got horny one morning, as Art decorated his hood with some real Texas flair. Ken declined to take up the spurs, though, and de-horned the big hauler.

On to February!

We're Not in Kansas, eh?

Visiting Art & Sharon

When I've vacationed in other countries such as Sweden, Cuba or Spain, I've had an expectation that things will be different. Immersion is impossible for me in those countries since I do not speak those languages, and as a consequence I am not aware of local issues and problems that form the foundation of what is important to the the people there. For example, I tried but unsuccessfully to get an English newspaper in Cuba. Perhaps this fact, more than any other, is what gives Americans such a bad reputation when traveling outside our own country.

In Canada, I do speak the language (at least in Alberta) so I am up on the news. We watch local TV stations, read the local newspaper. In addition, conversations with our friends and their interactions with their friends and families gives us an intimate sense of what's going on here and what's important to them.

We've had enough conversations with our Canadian friends during winters in the US to get a sense of their view of the world. Even so, living in their neighborhood, watching them demonstrate their commitment to their town, province, and country presents a fuller spectrum of Canada and its people when compared to our life in the US.

For example, the folks we've met here are impacted by the recession much as we are. Their retirement funds have been reduced by the stock market decline. Canada has many of the same industries as the US, though often with different names. Shopping centers look very similar, and the inside of a Walmart is just like in the US. But other different stores compete with Walmart, places like Canadian Tire. Learning the names of common Canadian stores helps us know where to find things, and having done that, we think we can fit right in.

But we often bump into the differences and realize that we're still foreigners, no more adept at being part of the culture here than a 4 year old would be, still learning the customs and practices.

Canadian coins

Some of that comes in little language differences. For example, they don't write checks, they write checques. They don't go to college, they go to university. Not to "the" university, just "to university". And they go out and aboot, not out and about. They have a labour party, and red, green and blue are colours. Subtle, perhaps, but distinctive, eh?

Then there's the money. Canadians are less inclined to waste things as we are in the US. That shows up in the money in that they have 1 and 2 dollar coins, playfully called loonies and toonies, because they have loons on one side. No dollar bills. Every bill denomination is a different color, easy to tell apart. This all adds up to a more efficient method for handling money. Also, they have the picture of a living person on their money, not dead presidents.

Of course, y'all know that we have our own regional peculiarities in the US. Uffda! But the major regional difference in Canada is put forth in writing and made visible throughout the country, on road signs, on packages in the stores, and any official document. That's the French spoken by Quebecers, making Canada a bilingual country. This annoys some Canadians, since it's unlawful to post signs in English in Quebec itself. We see some bilingual things in the US, too, but its not enforced by law. It's more likely to be a marketing ploy to make the US more attractive to our visitors.

There's more international pictorial road signs here, too. That takes a little getting used to. A sign with a little picture of a road on the left and a picture of a truck on the right means "Trucks entering the highway from the right". Or a picture of a little person, with a big X under him, means "Pedestrian crossing". Easy when you learn it, bur it requires some learning.

So, I'm glad to be here to experience firsthand a life with similarities and differences, that works as well or maybe better than life in the United States. I'm glad to be doing it before my brain solidifies and rejects the differences as bad or wierd, as may happen when I get senile. I'm glad to have good friends in another country, that can share their lives and gently remind us that there are other ways to do things that make them just as happy. As Mark Twain said, "Travel is fatal to prejudice". And as Maya Angelou said, "Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends." We're getting there. In the case of Canada, we first had to recognize that it's not just like another state. We had to discard our inbred arrogance.

Busy, New and old Friends, Summer?

Turtle in the sun

The last month has been a busy one for both of us. Good busy, not bad busy. We've been happily doing things that we enjoy, finding friendship, and enjoying the turn toward warmth we've seen in the past few days.

We're still on Jekyll Island for another 2-1/2 weeks. This is the longest we've stayed in one place since we began our life on the road, not counting stays at our own property. It seems like we've only been here a week or two.

Allen Newland out of the sand

Consuelo is winding down her slipper knitting classes. I've lost track of how many students she's had, but I'm guessing a dozen or more. When she realized how long it typically took the average knitter to complete a pair of slippers (three weeks), she realized she would have to stop accepting students long before we leave here, in order to finish everything. Some were disappointed, but that just points to the continuing interest people in our community have in trying new things to satisfy their creative needs. A few knitters could not get through one pair. Others have ordered yarn for four or five pairs.

One of the Jekyll water towers

My project of fixing the wifi in the campground has been completely successful. Initially, I worked with the IT specialist on the island to load-balance the Cisco router. Once he gained confidence in my ability to troubleshoot and program the system, he turned it over to me to proceed. The main problem was not with the router, but rather with the configuration on the wifi access points. I've received many compliments for getting this running. The system is now up against the limited bandwidth of the DSL lines, instead of folks being unable to connect at all. Everybody gets a little bandwidth now, enough for email and limited web browsing. Typically 30-40 people are connected at any given time.

Consuelo and Mary Jo

The campground has turned from a retirement community to a family campground. The weather warmed into the 80s this week, just in time for school vacations, and all the little camp spaces that were empty all winter are now full of van campers, tents, and little RVs. The average age of a bike rider has dropped by 30 years.

I got to know one little boy who was camped behind our RV with his dad. Adam is 6, the precocious kind of kid who wants everything to be the biggest, fastest, smartest in his life. The three of us walked around the campground looking at the RVs, he showed me his Pokemon cards, and one day I came home and found his feet sticking out under our doorway. He had crawled under our motorhome to pet Thumper. When he came out, he looked like he had eaten a box of chocolate ice cream, with all the dirt on his face.

Ron Anderson ready to tee off

Consuelo and I both have entries in the Jekyll Island Arts Festival. She entered slippers in the fiber arts competition, and I entered 3 of my photos. She also knitted a dozen pairs of slippers to sell in the arts store associated with the festival.

I also produced a 5 minute DVD on Jekyll Island Winter, which a number of people have paid me for. I'm also working on 2010 Jekyll Calendars which have been requested by other campers.

As we wind things down, Consuelo is now sewing a dress for Amelia's birthday next week. I'm playing more golf.

All this activity has spawned a whole new collection of friends and acquaintances from all over the US and Canada. Some we'll probably track down in our travels. Others we'll look forward to seeing again back here on Jekyll in a couple years.

Art and Sharon Bonertz

A plus for us, we've had some old friends here in the park with us for a month each. Wayne and Mary Jo Lohrmann were here in February, and Art and Sharon Bonertz from Alberta arrived March 1st. They make us laugh, a rare and welcome commodity in the current state of financial affairs. In fact, we nearly got thrown out of the campground for laughing a few years ago. We're not quite so silly this time, but then again, we're camped farther away from the campground host!