Kat’s TravelBlog

Happy summertime, everyone. We’re still alive, if a bit wilted from all the heat. The temperatures and humidity have been fierce here for the past week or two, with heat indices over 100°F. Thank goodness for air conditioning, but I shudder to think what our electric bill will be this month.

School is going reasonably well, although I felt compelled to drop one of the two courses I was taking because with everything else that’s happening I couldn’t keep up with it. The one I’m still in is going quite smoothly, though. I have an A in there so far, and it is very enjoyable. There is a lot of back and forth on the class bulletin board, which makes it interesting, and since the topic is online journalism, we’re all supposed to blog and tweet, which is fun.

If you read my other blog, you know we got new iPhones, which is also skads of fun. Phyllis should be here this weekend, and we plan to go down to Kansas City for a family get-together on the 4th of July. So we’re having a good summer. I hope you all are, too!

We have survived the week, and that’s grounds for celebration. I wasn’t sure we would get this far without some kind of major breakdown. However, our first week of physical therapy was not as stressful as feared, and the first week of grad school also went better than expected.

That’s not to say there were no downers. Tuesday aquatic therapy was called off because of thunderstorms in the area, and by Thursday’s session Phil’s foot was hurting so badly that he made a quick visit to his podiatrist to see what was wrong. He thought perhaps it was a spider bite or something like that. Nope, it’s gout. He’s feeling better now (with the help of painkillers), but this will likely require yet another change in diet, in addition to the adjustments he’s had to make over the years for his diabetes. The good news is that the latter condition seems to be under control once more, and his blood sugar levels are the best they’ve been in years. But the doctor told him not to go to aquatic therapy until he can see him again, next Thursday. So, I’ll be going alone. I did that this Thursday, and combined with the “dry” P.T. at the hospital, it made me feel better. When the weather and Phil’s foot don’t prevent it, we will be doing therapy three days a week, two in the water and one in the gym.

I was just as glad to miss aquatic therapy Tuesday, though, since that’s the day my new computer arrived, and I didn’t want to miss FedEx. We had debated whether to get another laptop, or a new iMac, but finally decided on the desktop version, with a 24″ screen and 3.06MHz Core 2 Duo processors. I did not use the Apple student discount, however, since I found what I wanted in their factory refurbished page for less than the discounted new machine with the same specs. I trust Apple’s refurbished program since I’d bought one before and had no problems with it. Besides, it comes with the same warranty as a totally new computer. So, this is my new classroom:

Backtracking a little to Monday, you may be aware that the new iPhone 3G S was announced that day. While I didn’t order one on the first day, after talking it over with Phil we decided to go ahead and get one for me this month since the screen on my old one cracked when I dropped it on the ceramic kitchen floor last week, and one for him next month. Since we bought our existing iPhones two years ago, they are eligible for upgrading without any penalty now, so we think we made the right decision last year when we passed up the opportunity to upgrade to the 3G model early. People who did, or who bought new ones then, have been unhappy about having to pay full (unsubsidized) price for the latest and greatest, but that’s a bit unrealistic. It’s amazing Apple and AT&T let them upgrade early for a low price last year. So I won’t be adding my voice to their howls of outrage. The new phone should arrive next Friday. Since it has a video camera and uploads directly to YouTube, maybe I’ll even turn this page into a video blog, who knows? (But don’t hold your breath.) I will be writing more about the gadgets in my techie blog, of course. Phil is probably more enthused about the video camera than I am. He has been very happy with the quality of pictures he could take with his original iPhone’s 2 megapixel camera, so the prospect of the new one with 3 megapixels, auto-focusing and video to boot have him postively estatic.

In the meantime, online classes commenced Monday, although I’d already started some of the readings for one of my classes thanks to the instructor publishing the syllabus early. Those have been going quite well so far. The other students are an interesting group, and the subject matter is very stimulating. In the Online Journalism class in particular, the “discussion board” has been quite lively. My other class, Media Ethics, is starting off a bit slow but the movies we were assigned to watch have sparked some stimulating conversations here at home already. As you may know, Phil was a Journalism major as an undergrad, so he has strong opinions about the field as well as a lot more insight into it than I do, since I’m new at this. One of the movies in particular, Broadcast News, generated quite a debate over whether television news anchors are really as responsible as, say, investigative reporters, in terms of upholding journalistic ethics, or are they hired more to be performers than journalists. It will be interesting to see what the other students say about this next week when we are supposed to write about ethical dilemmas seen in these stories. Oh, and if you’re curious, the other movies suggested were The Insider, Absence of Malice, and State of Play. I watched Absence of Malice first, then Broadcast News, and I have The Insider on DVD to watch later today, but State of Play isn’t available in local theaters or at Netflix, so I’ll have to wait for that one. Hmmm, two of these star Russell Crowe — I like this professor’s taste!

Oh, and of course the foregoing isn’t nearly enough to keep me occupied (not!), so I’ve also been working with my partners at alternaCrafts LLC, getting ready to open our blog to the whole world. We have already been “tweeting” to get started on establishing our brand and creating a community, which is going well. In just a week we have gathered 14 followers, and posted 13 updates to our Twitter stream, even before anyone knows what we’re about. With luck that will change next week.

Speaking of Twitter, you may have noticed the widget with my Twitter feed (in the right sidebar on this page) has changed appearance. I did have a nice, matching color scheme with a dark red gradient background, but managed to mess that up by not knowing what I was doing at WidgetBox. It still shows the tweets to better effect than the old widget I had, but I have to get rid of that grass! That’s what happens when I get in too big a hurry and try to take shortcuts. I just wanted to use the same underlying code for a widget to put in my Scrapplet page, but change the look to match that site, however, when I saved the new widget it overwrote the red one. So, I’ll have to go back and create a new one and try to get it to look the way I want it for this site. In my copious spare time.

Has it really been a month since I updated this blog? My apologies! It has been a busy time, but still…

So, what we’ve been doing, besides moving from the RV to the house, includes good things and not so good ones. On the good side, my application to start working on an online Masters degree in Journalism at University of Missouri’s J-School was accepted. Classes start Monday. I’ll be taking Online Journalism and Media Ethics this summer.

The not so good things are mostly about health issues. Both Phil and I have been having back problems, and this week we saw the neurologist. Not surprisingly, she said we both need to do more walking and swimming, and gave us prescriptions for physical therapy. In my case, she also prescribed epidurals and said I would need surgery to really address some fundamental problems. However, she said the surgery could wait till we go south this winter, since the clinics that do laser back surgery are in Florida and Arizona, two of our popular destinations. And at the moment both Phil and I are not in too much pain.

In the meantime, another distraction is that one of the electronic publishing ventures I’m engaged in is getting close to launching our website. While we have a domain name and have been working on the site, it’s not open yet so I won’t give the address until you can actually go there. It’s been rather fun working with a couple of really cool gals on this project. We finally created a company this week to manage all the business aspects of the venture, which you can follow on Twitter to see what we’re up to.

We’re expecting a visit soon from Phil’s daughter, Phyllis. She’s bringing some of her stuff here to store in our basement while she takes a teaching job in the MidEast for a couple of years. We’ll miss her while she’s there, of course, but maybe we will even be able to go there to visit sometime, and anyway we can stay connected online. Maybe I’ll get her into Second Life, or maybe I’ll finally get my own virtual world set up for more private visits, who knows? For more of that kind of geek talk, visit my techie blog.

So, life goes on. And as far as that goes, life is really pretty good. We’re enjoying the moderate weather here in St. Joe, and have been able to visit with friends and family as well as rediscovering what it’s like to have more than 300 square feet to live in. When we get in better shape physically it will be even more enjoyable, and we’re working on that.

We’re home!! Well, almost. In St. Joe anyway. We decided not to go up to Omaha this weekend after all, so we’re at the RV park in St. Joe and will be moving back into the house over the next week, and looking for a new RV storage place for the summer. Unfortunately, our house doesn’t have a place to park the rig, and after getting infestations of various types of critters from leaving it on Phil’s cousin’s farm the past 2 summers we thought we’d try something different this year. The farm is about 12 miles outside of town anyway, and it’s awkward to run back and forth hauling stuff. My car won’t carry much, so it takes multiple trips to unload all our clothes, food, etc. for the summer. Anyway, the house water won’t be turned on till Tuesday, so we’ll be in the RV at least till then. It’s handy having a decent RV park only a couple of miles from the house.

We probably will take the RV up to Council Bluffs for at least some of the repair/remodeling work, though. That’s where we bought the rig in the first place, and Leach Campers has a moderately good-sized service department, bigger than anyone here in St. Joe. Maybe we can get them to trade our sleeper sofa for the built-in desk/cabinets & Euro recliner we want, but at a minimum we’d like them to give us an estimate to do the body work and whatever minor stuff needs doing.

So, we have a weekend to rest up before the Big Move (although we’ll probably start hauling stuff to the house tomorrow). We’ll pick up the mail in the morning on the way over there, and see what needs to be done before we can take up residence again in a house that doesn’t move. At least the weather up in this part of the state is decent this weekend. It rained like crazy down in Nevada the past two nights, and we saw lots of minor rivers out of their banks on the way north. Springtime in the MidWest! Maybe we can get most stuff transferred from RV to house before it gets messy again. I hope so!

We left Albuquerque today, stopping for the night at the Flying J truckstop in Amarillo instead of an RV park. Not only is parking here free, but thanks to a card I got at The Rally last weekend, we can have a free breakfast in the morning, and what we paid for our supper tonight will count toward an increased discount on gasoline next month if we spend a minimum of $30 before then. That won’t help us a lot this trip, though, since we only have one day’s travel planned for May, from Omaha to St. Joe on the 3rd. But next time we travel we’ll take advantage of it, and even without the added bonus the card will give us a penny a gallon off our gas bill. Every little bit helps.

We enjoyed our two weeks in Albuquerque, at Isleta Lakes Resort. The campground, which is between the golf course and a couple of large fish ponds, is in a low spot not far from the Rio Grande. So even though it is less than a mile from the interstate highway, there is no highway noise because of low hills between the park and the road. There is a train track that goes along the edge of the park, but somehow trains don’t seem to bother either of us. I guess we grew up used to hearing them so it’s easy to sleep right through the passing of Amtrack or NM Rail Runner. We didn’t see any freight trains to speak of, just those passenger lines.

When we return to Albuquerque, which we plan to do, we will most likely stay at Isleta Lakes again. It is by far the nicest RV park we’ve seen in that area, and was quite competitively priced when staying for a week at a time, too.

Perhaps you are as tired as I am of hearing about the horrible economy, but even when times are good I’ve always enjoyed finding ways to save money without giving up much in the way of enjoying life. It’s like a game. It’s probably a good thing I enjoy this game if I’m going back to school, since that will likely require some belt-tightening along the way, but I’d do it even if it wasn’t a necessity. There’s no point in being wasteful, and finding ways to use resources efficiently is a challenge that can have some real rewards. An example is the way I plan to buy my next computer. The online Apple store has a nearly-hidden area with refurbished, nearly-new machines. I found an iMac there that has almost the same specs as the latest model, but for $500 less. It comes with the same warranty as a new machine, so there’s no real risk. I bought a refurbished Mac once before, back in the Power PC days, and was quite pleased with it, so I don’t have any qualms about doing it again. That’s the kind of bargain hunting I like. If I just wanted a cheap computer I could certainly get a Windows (or better yet, Linux) machine new for $500 less than the refurbished Mac, but it’s not just a matter of price. I insist on getting high value as well to count it as a “win” in my game. After all, what’s the point of saving money if you can’t get what you want for it?

What about you? Do you enjoy shopping as a sport? If so, what gives you the biggest thrill, finding something you’d been seeking for a long time, or finding something for a really good price, or discovering something you didn’t know you couldn’t live without until you saw it? Have you ever bartered for something? Is that more fun than just paying the list price? I think there must be something hardwired into humans to make us enjoy all these ways of practicing commerce, since it seems to be universal across cultures. Americans don’t get as much fun out of shopping in our mass-market, off-the-shelf buying as other people do, but it’s not completely impossible to find places and times to let out our inner horse-traders. Maybe if we used more folk-economics we would be less dependent on credit cards and rapacious big banks? That would be a good thing.

Today at The Rally we spent all our time looking at other RVs instead of visiting vendors booths. It’s fun to see what kinds of options all the manufacturers include. As well as making us appreciate what we’ve got (our Southwind is really a pretty nice coach), we got some more ideas for customizing our living space. Here’s an example:

This coach has a living room slideout a little shorter than ours, so it would be quite practical to replace our existing dinette (which I hate) and the useless sleeper sofa with a table and chairs, built-in cabinets, a small corner desk and a free-standing recliner and footstool. We could be more organized and neater, and have a bit more floorspace as well as improving the aesthetics. If we had the cabinets custom fitted, we could design them specifically for the kind of gear we use, too. For instance, the corner desk/cabinet in these pictures has deep drawers as well as a shallow triangular cabinet space. I’d make that mostly cabinet with room for a printer and uninterruptable power supply instead. Since we have a little more room than the coach pictured, the corner desk could be a few inches deeper, which would give me more than enough area for an iMac or Macbook and other stuff that usually fills up my chair-side tables. I really like the chairs they chose, though.

We will be going over to the Expo Center pretty soon to take in the final events of this year’s Rally here in Albuquerque. Phil wanted to come to this because he’d never been to a big RV rally before, but I doubt we’ll repeat the experience. Neither of us enjoys mob scenes, and the seminars offered are mostly either sales pitches or not very novel information for someone like Phil who has been RVing for decades. The exhibits are good, though, and I found several of them quite informative. I wrote about one in my tech blog, a new implementation of fuel cell technology applied to RV gear.

Another exhibit showed something we may invest in before our next big trip, a custom RV desk to replace the yucky dinette set pre-installed in our RV. Another booth had information about setting up an LLC in Montana to use for registrering an RV to save property taxes. We had discussed doing this before we bought our present RV, but didn’t get the information in time, which cost us a bundle in sales tax and property taxes. While we don’t have plans to buy another RV, we’re paying several thousand per year in tax on it to the state of Missouri, where the RV is parked just two or three months per year. That seems pretty unfair, so we may just look into the concept more seriously.

Another useful booth was one run by the guys from the 3G Store, where we bought our mobile WiFi modem, router and antenna. The sales/tech rep I’d dealt with was there, and he recognized our name! He even remembered that we’d been referred to their shop by an article in Tony Cornett’s blog. He also answered my question about using a cellphone amplifier. Our friend Mark had told us we needed one of those to really pull in the signals in fringe areas, and if we had the right gear it would work with our handhelds as well as the modem. They confirmed this, and showed us the right equipment to get (amp and rebroadcaster), and where to install it in our RV for optimal performance. That’s another item to put on our wishlist for improvements to make before our next trip.

Now it’s time to go over to the expo, so I’ll wrap this up. Hopefully I’ll have more positive things to say about The Rally after today’s visit, too.

Here in Albuquerque, where we will stay until at least April 24th, we’ve been enjoying a relaxing week at Isleta Lakes resort on the Isleta Pueblo reservation. One of the nifty features of this RV park is the train track that runs past it, and the local passenger train station right outside the gate. We are talking about taking the train into town tomorrow, and may decide to ride it all the way to Santa Fe. Next week we definitely plan to take it up to Santa Fe and transfer to the Santa Fe Southern excursion train to Lamy, NM.

In the meantime, I’ve finally submitted my grad school application to the University of Missouri Journalism School, for an MA in Journalism. It took nearly a month to get all the paperwork together, including three essays, an updated résumé and three letters of recommendation as well as several inevitable forms, but it’s all done now. Applying online is definitely the way to go. I went ahead and enrolled in one online class for the summer term, “Online Journalism” and as soon as it’s available, will sign up for a one-hour seminar as well, so I’ll qualify as a fulltime student (required for financial aid).

We arrived last night at the Isleta Lakes Resort, on the Isleta Pueblo reservation. This is a very elegant place! Thanks to all the gamblers at the casino for subsidizing the rest of the attractions The RV park has a couple of small lakes, next to the Rio Grande river about 10 miles south of Albuquerque. We haven’t been out exploring yet because this is one of the five days a year when they get rain, but what we can see out our windows is quite attractive. This evening we plan to take their complimentary shuttle up to the casino and have dinner in one of the five restaurants there.

Of course, the real reason we came back here was to attend The Rally, a big gathering of RVers and vendors sponsored by Good Sam’s Club. We’ve never been to one of these before, so since we were in the right part of the country this time, it seems like the thing to do. If we enjoy it, maybe we’ll go to another one sometime. If not, … well, I think we’ll enjoy it.

Meanwhile, in my other life, there’s some new developments concerning the International Spaceflight Museum. First, we have a new promotional video on YouTube:

Next, in light of my upcoming enrollment (assuming my application is accepted) in University of Missour’s J-School, I’ve resigned as president & CEO of the ISM Corporation, nonprofit parent company of the ISM. We’ll be holding elections of new board members and officers soon, and of course I won’t be completely quitting the museum, just unshouldering the executive responsibilities. The grad school application is almost completed. All that’s lacking now is my updated résumé and clicking the button to submit it.

So, after the RV Rally, we’ll be heading back to Missouri to arrive in time for the Severance Alumni Banquet. Phil’s brothers have said they’ll be there for that, too, so it should be lots of fun.

It’s over. I took the GRE and was pleasantly surprised that at the end of the process my scores were shown for the verbal and quantitative sections. I did alright! In fact, my scores were almost identical to those I received first time around, in the late 1980s. So much for worries about becoming senile. Or maybe that was already well underway by that time… Still, I’m happy, and I’ll be able to complete my application for admission as soon as I get transcripts from all the colleges and universities I’ve attended. Unfortunately, that’s a pretty significant number, so it may take awhile to get them all in order. I also need to write a couple of essays explaining why I want to go to all this trouble anyway, which really could be the biggest challenge of the whole mess. But I’ll manage.

Excelsior!