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!

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!

Up at dawn

It's been a while since I posted here. Consuelo and I have been very busy over the past few weeks, knitting and working on the campground wifi respectively.

Mahlon's Photography. I'm moving more towards creating a way to sell some of my photographs. The one at the top is a sample of what's going on over at Photoshelter, where I'm setting up my outlet. I haven't done much to drive traffic towards that site yet, so I haven't sold anything there. If you have a minute, stop over there and offer me a comment on a photo or two.

I did have a few prints for sale at the campground craft fair, and sold about 1/2 of them. Not enough to buy a new lens, never mind a camera, but it was a rewarding experience. I got a lot of nice comments on my work.

Next up is a juried show at the Art Center here on Jekyll Island. If I can get my act together to get the prints and get them mounted, I'll put in a few entries.

Consuelo's Slippers. Consuelo has been knitting and felting slippers at a breakneck pace. She had about a dozen made up for the craft fair, and sold a dozen there, but half of those need to be knitted yet as she didn't have all the right sizes and colors. So, she just keeps knitting away, even while she's traveling to Naples this weekend.

She is also going to enter slippers in the craft show at the Art Center, which means even more pairs to make and have inventory on hand. Busy, busy, busy.

Campground wifi. I started pressing the campground to get their wifi working back in December when we first arrived here. It was the main complaint from the campers, since many of us have come to depend on the internet for banking and other important things. I suspected that reconfiguring the settings would be a cure for most of the problems. Turns out I was right.

Once I got the powers to be to understand that I might be able to help, I rewrote the configuration file for the Ciscco router which connects to the internet. That improved throughput considerably for the users who worked in the community room. Then I went to work on the access points throughout the campground, and have reconfigured all of them, as well. It is by no means perfect, but it's a whole world better than what was there to begin with. Next they will be raising the antennas for better line of sight, and I expect a bit more reconfiguration. But the campground manager is pleased, and we have a lot more happy campers.