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!

It's Raining... what a surprise!

We've been parked in Hoquiem, WA for 3 nights. It's on the southwest corner of the Olympic Peninsula. I surmise that wood products and/or paper are the major industries here. Hoquiem and her larger sister Aberdeen sit at the inland end of Gray's Harbor, one of the few bumps in the Pacific coastline providing safe shelter for boats. So there's a fishing fleet here, too.

We've been parked in Hoquiem RV Park, a nice campground with good amenities and friendly staff. They have a very good wifi, as campground wifi's go, and I've downloaded some Windows upgrades and checked out some video tutorials on the Adobe site.

Ocean City Beach

It's been raining since before we arrived. Such is the reputation of the Northwest Coast in the US. Right now, the weather forecast has no sun in it for the foreseeable future. The sun came out for a few minutes Wednesday night, so I took off to Ocean City beach, about 20 miles NW of where we're parked. By the time I arrived, the overcast had arrived again. I walked out onto the beach, which I shared with one lonely seagull. IF it had been summer, and IF the sun had been out and IF I got there at noon then it would have been a really great day at a beautiful beach. Only IF.

Consuelo has been busy knitting slippers, preparing to sell a few pair at a flea market in Yuma when we get there. She's had a little trouble with yarn deliveries, as we've been on the move since we left Chimacum. It turned out that the last box she expected arrived the day we left Chimacum, and was returned to the vendor.

I've been busy working on 2010 photo calendars, also to sell in Yuma and online. I've started a web site here for them. I expect to add 3 or 4 more before I finish. I've ordered a new printer from Office Depot to print them, but Office Depot has thoroughly screwed up my order, and may cause me delays before I can deliver. We'll see. I've asked them to refund my money, but I expect a gnat has a better chance of devouring an elephant.

I've also been working on my commercial photo website. Photoshelter offered up a 30 day trial of their custom websites, which I've had up for a couple weeks now. It's a lot nicer than the regular site, but until I sell some photos, I can't really justify the extra cost for style points.

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.

Little Dream, Big Reward

El Centro, CA, In The Rearview Mirror (by Consuelo)

A month, three days, twenty hours and twelve minutes… Rio Bend RV Resort, a nice stay by the golf course, surrounded by old and new friends.

Slippers drying for the craft fair

Early in our stay I checked out the planned activities looking for something crafty to do. I’ll take the watercolor class, I thought, so off I went the first Monday of our stay. $7 for all the mess I could make, what a deal. I brought to the class one of my now-famous knitted and felted slippers to ask the activities director how I should price them for the up coming craft fair. I’ve made over 30 pair but all have been gifts so far.

So, I whipped the slippers out before the class started and I was accosted by two enthusiastic Canadian women. They giggled as they tried them on and were curious how they were made. Felted? They had no clue what that meant but in the spirit of “we’ll try anything once”, they asked if I would teach them how to make them. They were sure there were a couple more women at their campground across the road that would be interested in learning as well. We made a date to meet at their place the following day.

Instructing the Canadians

At the meeting, four others joined our developing plan for a class. They, too, tried on the slipper I had brought and giggled with interest and curiosity. We chose a day, 10 days hence, to give time for large orders of yarn to be placed and delivered. I busied myself ordering yarn from a manufacturer I love and recommend for this project, we bought seconds which are low cost and flawed in small ways not impacting a felting project. Everyone was excited.

The class day came and we gathered at the home of one of the students… I made a feeble attempt to teach. These were all lively, fast thinking, smart women and I could barely get a word in edgewise!! Silly me, I had made IBM-ish charts to explain this and that to them but, no luck, they just wanted to get on with it and KNIT! And knit we did. There were “challenges” to techniques, some thinking they knew a better way… all that knitting had to be ripped and the teacher’s instructions were then, finally, heeded. Lots of laughs and a few struggles.

The class, pre-felting

When finished, these slippers are humongous. At least fifty percent bigger than the final product so… there were doubters that these large sloppy looking things would ever fit. A week later, having given everyone enough time to finish the pair, we gathered at the campground’s laundromat to felt them. Several hot washes did the trick and there were oos and aaahs of delight as the projects got smaller and smaller and finally measure the intended size. They were all going to show them off at the campfire that night. There were hugs and thank-yous and wishes for future projects. I was happy.

Finished products

Here is the part of the story I didn’t tell most of them: feeling qualified after thirty-plus pairs, I had been thinking of teaching this project. Had not yet figured out where and how, it was just an idea rattling in my head and then our paths crossed at the watercolor class and it all became clear. The moral of the story is a well-known one: dream your dreams and a way to attain them will show itself at the right time and place. In my fortunate case, it was also the right, fun, interesting people that just appeared out of nowhere to bring this little bit of fullfillment into my life. Now I think I’ll offer to teach at campground as we travel the counry and, come summer, maybe even in Maine.

PS I sold seven pair at $30 each at the carft fair. What a hoot.