A Wrap on My Week....

I spent part of Labor Day working with Bree, feeding the caring for the alpacas. They get feed, hay and fresh water each day. Alpacas create  just a couple of spots in their pasture area where they poop so it's easy to clean up after them (they poop out little pellets). It's important to clean it up so that they don't pick up diseases. Erma Bombeck always said that the grass is always greener over the septic tank...well that's sort of close. Here it's ...The Grass is Always Greener Under the Alpaca Poop". When you have a big pasture, as some of ours our, you look for the tallest grass to find their bathroom spots. It was fun working with them...they are quite the curious creatures and they sure love the feed that they get. One came into the shed, when he heard me scooping it up, and wanted to stick his head right in the can to get some. I had to shoo him out so I could finish getting it ready for them.
With the long weekend the tomatoes were sure ripe and ready to be picked on Tuesday. We picked almost 400 pounds ! We pick into red totes and once the product is washed or prepared for CSA or market, they go into blue totes. They are washed with straight vinegar each time they are used to kill any diseases or fungus that has come in from the field. Wednesday was CSA day and I took the orders to our "South" location and handed them out to the members as they came in. When we set up the room to pack bags, here is the set up.

Ann looks at the list of CSA members , hands us a member's bag and tells us what extra items someone might get.

Starting with the heaviest items, we start filling the cloth bags. This week, these totes had onions and apples. Notice that some things are in red totes when they should be in blue. We had so many tomatoes in blue ones that we ran out of them so had to use red ones.

We work our way around the room, and the lightest items are at the end. We also put the items that not everyone is going to get, which this week was ground cherries, eggplant, swiss chard and peppers.

That's the process ! We have 62 CSA members. Some are 1/2 shares so they don't get all of the items. We usually have about 10-12 dozen eggs each week so those get distributed in some manner too. Sometimes I don't know how Ann keeps track of everything. It gets really confusing sometimes to figure out who gets what. So back to my story about being at our South pick-up: I got to talking to one of our CSA members, told him I'm a fulltime RVer and turns out he is shopping for an RV. He would like to go full-time but can't right now. He and his wife do shows (they are artists) and they bought a Smart Car so they can tow it when they buy their motorhome. They want something about 25' in length so we talked a while about that. Then somehow we got to talking about Ithaca, NY. I told him I lived there for a bit and that my son was born there. Turns out he was just there four days ago....went to the bird sanctuary on Sapsucker Woods Rd which is where I used to live. Wow, small, small world. It was fun talking to him...he found an object laying in the parking lot that he wants to incorporate into a piece called "The River" that he's working on. He uses items he has found on the river while boating or kayaking. Love these chance encounters to chat with people !

Oh, here's another neat thing that happened just yesterday. A guy named Norbert came by with this trailer to show us. It was a race car trailer and it has two entrances into it, in addition to the ramp door in the back. The side flaps go up so apparently someone used it as a concession sales trailer. It's going to be used as a mobile market for fresh produce. It will go into neighborhoods in Terra Haute, where low income folks or retirees live who may not have a car to get to the market and sell fresh produce to them. Our interns (me included) will take turns working with Norbert in nearby areas. Sorry I don't have a picture of the inside of the trailer. I was in awe of the whole thing that I forgot I had my phone with me till after he had closed it up. The outer walls of the trailer are lined with commercial storage racks, held in place by tie down straps hooked to the walls. You can see the AC unit on the roof so it can be kept cool

LiveJournal Tags: White Violet Center for Eco Justice,Terra Haute Farmer's Market,Wabash Valley Mobile Market

. There are two different refrigerated cases in the front, left corner so things like fresh cheese or whatever could be displayed there. In talking to Robyn, at White Violet Center, there is something being created called The Hub that will be a central place where farmers can bring and sell their produce so they don't have to try and find an outlet for it. This unit will hit the streets next month, I believe, to get the word out. Offerings will be light this year but once farmers hear about it, they can increase the amount of crops they grow for next year. The woman in the picture is Tracy, our alpaca manager.

Well, that's about it. Tomorrow I need to water the chickens and collect the eggs. We have basil in the food dehydrator and the trays will need flipped in the morning. I'm going to start working on my project, which involved crunching some numbers and doing some research. Hope everyone has a great weekend !

Big Changes Ahead....

Today we gave our two week notice to our current employer. We've gotten a new job, as co-managers of a retirement community, and our training will start on May 2nd. This decision took much deliberation on our part because it means we will come off the road and will no longer be full-time RV'ers. We have worked for our current employer since last July and have never made it out of New Jersey, although the company owns facilities in nine other states. I know that there are many definitions of what it means to be a FT RV'er but I'm not sure going from one Mini U parking lot to another meets any of those definitions. Linda and I commented to each other this morning that it's funny how nine months in New Jersey has changed us. A new, positive change is just what we need !

Our new company is Holiday Retirement . This company is the largest provider of independent living and has facilities throughout the US and Canada. The company was started by William E Colson in 1971. When Mr. Colson became ill with cancer he sold the company to Fortress Investment Group, with the understanding that the "Holiday Touch" had to be maintained as an essential part of the company's philosophy.

We will train in Virginia Beach for two weeks and then we go to Charlotte, NC for two more weeks of training. Once we finish training, our property will be in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. This is a picture of our property. We will work with the property managers at this location...we will be co-managers. We will have our own apartment, complete with full kitchen and washer/dryer. Each facility has an executive chef who cooks everything from scratch and provides three meals a day to the residents and it's also one of our perks. We'll have full benefits...Blue Cross/Blue Shield, dental, vision and can participate in their 401K plan. Lots of bonus potential, which combined with all the other perks, sold us on accepting this new job.

It will be great to work once again in a place where we'll feel that we are making a difference. It's only when Linda and I feel that we are "making a difference" and not merely "making a living" that it means the most to us. There is way too much negativity, lying and deception, and downright rude people that we encounter in this business (I can't tell you how many times today Linda got hung up on)that it will be wonderful to talk and interact with mature adults and help them in their day-to-day lives. Will we encounter some grumpy ones from time to time ? Sure....but overall we'll be helping people to live better, more enjoyable lives. We can't wait to get started.

We're not getting rid of our RV. Taking this job will help us recover the money we lost when the market tanked in 2007...just as we went on the road. We want to get some money set aside so when we truly retire, we'll be in good financial shape. It breaks our hearts to come off the road but we've always been survivors and we do what we got to do to accomplish our goals. Our rig will be with us on-site so we can keep an eye on it and get out camping on our days off. Who knows...this new job might afford us more time to get out and camp than we've done boondockin' on blacktop for the last ten months. Anything's possible !!

In Ahead of The Storm

Wednesday morning we started discussing the news that the Northeast had a storm coming in at the end of the week and decided to pack up and head for New Jersey. Our site was a giant mud hole (worse than it was when we got there). Backing out was the easiest way to get off the site since there was very little space at the end of the site to make a turn (I think the guy with the van next door would have noticed if the rear half of his van was missing).

We hit a little rain but had an
uneventful trip north, which is a wonderful thing. We stopped at Linda's brother's house to pick up our car. They were kind enough to watch it for us while we were down south. Kathie had a wonderful dinner waiting for us when we arrived. After eating, I headed out for our work site to check things out...making sure we could get in and get our rig in where it needed to go. Some of the Mini U sites are very tight and impossible to navigate with our rig.. This one had ample room to make it around the end of the buildings but the space where we needed to park was really tight to get in to. Linda and the current manager tried their best to get it in as tight to the building as they could but being pinned in between buildings on three sides made it impossible to get as close as they wanted. It will work for the time we are here but when we went to hook up to the power, found that even with 60' of cord, we didn't reach. Ughhhhh!!!!! No way to get closer either. Problem is that the usual RV parking spot is where the snowplow has to push the snow off the site. Dang snow and winter anyway. Soooo....we plugged a 110 v. cord into a nearby receptacle and fed the end into our bedroom window so we could plug the heated mattress pad in on our bed and stay warm. With the severe cold and winds, there is no way the batteries would have held with the on/off of the furnace all night. We ran the furnace till the inside temp was 70, then shut the furnace off till morning and climbed into our toasty bed. When we got up at 7:00 it was 49 in the rig..Brrrrrr.... Grabbed the computer...located the closest Camping World and off we went to get another 50 amp extension cord. The roads were slippery....snowy slush on them. Took us 1.5 hours to get there (usually a 57 min trip according to GPS). Got back and plugged in....Ahhhhh....heat, lights, all the comforts of home. Just in time for the huge storm coming our way. Possibly 14" of snow and 20-40 m.p.h. winds. Yuck !! Apparently my order for springtime temps and no snow fell on deaf ears with the goddess upstairs.....

We went into work and worked a few hours today. First official day is Saturday.

Words To Live By....

Each time we hit the road we usually gather up some of our little stuff, around the rig, and put it away so it doesn't fall or break. Something I came across this last time, that we had stored for that very reason, was a little plaque that is very special to Linda and I. It now holds a prominent place on the ledge over my chair. It reads...

Every Day Brings....

more books to read,
more songs to sing,
more friends to hug,
more trips to plan,
more faces to kiss,
more reason to trust,
more people to love,
more life to discover.

This was a going away gift to us from our friend Karen, who we met in Baltimore. We don't get to see Karen much but this gift expresses to us our feelings about our new life on the road and the bounties of this life....more of everything ! We find that the longer we sit somewhere, the more our thoughts wonder to getting back on the road in search of our next adventure. Woven in their somewhere is also the thought of...how can we intersect with our friends to see them for a bit (that's the "more friends to hug" part of the poem or perhaps the "more faces to kiss" part depending on how good a friend they are)...LOL
This is one of those times. We had some interviews today and another one tomorrow. We hope that very soon the "more trips to plan" part of this poem will be necessary and we'll be back on the road again..with "more life to discover".
It sounds like an Rv'ers credo and words that everyone might want to live by....Here's hoping that each of you have all the bounties that this poem speaks of, in your own life.

Shrimp

Today it was 83 degrees and quite humid....the first day where we ran the air conditioning pretty much all day. It's only now, at 8:30 p.m., that we could open the windows and it's cool enough to let the night air in.

For supper we defrosted some of the gulf coast shrimp that we had purchased with our friends, down in Bon Secor, Alabama at Billy's Seafood and cooked it for supper. We had some chipotle shrimp in the freezer so we combined the two and put it over some noodles. It was yumlicious !!

Went back to the ball field today and let the boys run. They weren't quite as anxious to run as long since it was so warm outside. Yesterday when we got to the intersection, right near the ball field, Linda thought there was an unusual amount of smoke coming from the exhaust of the TigerBait Grille (a restaurant right there on the corner). We proceeded to the ballpark and it was only a few minutes later that we heard the sirens and realized that the restaurant had been on fire and the fire companies were responding to it. When we came back by there, after leaving the park, there were a lot of fire trucks all over the place but the building seemed to be intact. Today it looked like business as usual as there were cars parked outside and they appeared to be open for business. It's good that it wasn't as bad as it appeared yesterday.

We are so happy for friends of ours who hope to RV full-time as soon as both have retired. They put their house on the market and in one day had gotten an acceptable offer on it. They have been working, step by step, on getting to the point where they could retire, sell the house and get their RV. Step by step they are making their dreams come true. We met these gals while at the Life on Wheels workshop, in Allentown some years ago and have been good friends ever since. We make our paths cross as we travel throughout the country. We wish them as much success finding their perfect RV as they've had so far with every other phase of the process.