Category Archives: Days in My Life

I don’t just sit around and watch TV.

Jack the [Desert] Dog

Posted on by
Comment

Not exactly a “dog park” dog.

Wickenburg just put in a dog park. If you’re not familiar with the concept, it’s basically a fenced-in area where people can let their dogs run around. It’s especially nice for folks who live in apartments or trailers or don’t have fenced-in yards. Wickenburg’s dog park isn’t anything special — at least not yet. I hope they plant some trees and do some cross-fencing to spruce it up a bit. Right now, it’s just a big area adjacent to the airport that’s surrounded by chain link fence. There are two leaf-less trees, two cheap park benches, and a bunch of molded plastic patio chairs.

But it’s better than nothing and I’m glad whoever put it in did so.

Throughout the day, folks gather there with their dogs, letting them run around together. The dogs bark, the owners shout. The dogs play, the owners socialize. It’s a relatively pleasant scene. Since the dog park is right on the other side of the fence from my Wickenburg hangar, I see its dynamics each time I’m at the airport.

My dog, however, will never set foot inside the dog park. You see, Jack’s a desert dog. He — like my neighbors’ dogs — roams freely on our property on the outskirts of town. On a nice day, we open the back door and let him out. He chases rabbits and squirrels and, when it gets a bit warmer, lizards. We have 2-1/2 acres of property, but he occasionally wanders off to visit with my neighbors, too. Their dog comes to see us once in a while, so it all evens out.

Jack goes lots of places with us. When I head out to the airport or store in town, he rides in the back of my Jeep or pickup truck. He likes to bark when he’s in the back of the truck, as if to yell out “Look at me!” It’s actually pretty annoying and I have to break him of the habit again soon. (Stopping the truck suddenly and throwing a cup of water on him usually does the trick.) When he rides in the Jeep, he likes to sit in my seat while I’m in the store. I don’t have the back windows on the Jeep and he’s fallen out twice. Once was when I was parked at the supermarket. An announcement over the loud speaker said, “Will the owner of a black and white dog please come to the courtesy counter.” I went out to the parking lot to find him circling the Jeep excitedly. He was very glad to see me. A woman standing nearby said, “Is this your dog and Jeep? He’s been trying to get into it. I was going to let him in, but I wasn’t sure if it was his.” I opened the door and he jumped in. We all had a good laugh. He hasn’t fallen out since.

Jack the DogJack also goes hiking with us out in the desert. He’s well behaved on the trail and never bothers other hikers. He’s a bit of a nuisance when we go out to take photos, as we did the other day. He always seems to get into the shot. But now that he’s older — he turned nine this year — he’s starting to slow down and spends a lot more time just relaxing in the scant shade of a tree while we bend over wildflowers and lie prone to shoot up at cacti. It could also be his thick winter coat — which I’ll soon be vacuuming up off my floors and carpets — that keeps him too hot in the springtime to run around.

In answer to a commonly asked question, yes, Jack has flown in the helicopter. He’s been flying with me three times now. I think he considers the helicopter just another vehicle. The last time we flew together, he was very well behaved alone in the back seat.

Jack’s a good dog — the best I’ve had so far. Although he tends to get excited easily and seems to live to be petted, he’s smart and listens — unless, of course, he’s chasing a rabbit. We may spoil him by making him a part of our lives, but we don’t pamper him and don’t allow him to misbehave, especially when there are other people around. In other words, we don’t allow him to give people a reason to complain about him. If more people disciplined and trained their dogs properly, we wouldn’t need so many “No Dogs” signs and leash laws.

And we probably wouldn’t need dog parks, either.

Off-the-Grid Camping in the New RV

Posted on by
3

Working out the kinks.

One of the improvements I made on my old RV was to add a solar panel to the roof. It was connected to a battery charger which, in turn, was connected to the camper’s batteries. When the sun was out — which is during most daylight hours here in Arizona — the batteries were charged. This made the camper extremely useful for off-the-grid camping. My husband and I did a lot of that last year on our way back from Washington to Arizona. We never ran low on power, which was a good thing because we didn’t have a generator.

There are a few things that won’t work in an RV without a connection to A/C power:

  • A/C power outlets. This means you can’t plug in and use any device with a standard plug.
  • Certain light fixtures. Some lights are A/C while some are D/C. A/C fixtures won’t work without an A/C connection.
  • Microwave. Even if it’s standard equipment on an RV, it’s plugged into an A/C outlet.
  • Air Conditioning. It’s A/C and it sucks a ton of power when it is plugged in and running. That means that even if you have a generator, you need a pretty powerful one to run the A/C when you’re not hooked up to campground or city power.

There are a few things that will run on propane or battery (D/C) power if you’re camping off-the-grid:

  • Refrigerator. Setting the refrigerator on “Auto” tells it to look for A/C power first; if that’s not available, it uses propane from the onboard tanks (assuming the valves have been opened).
  • Stove/Oven. Obviously, they’re propane. It would be dumb to put an electric stove in an RV.
  • Water pump. If you’re not connected to a pressurized water line, a D/C pump activates when you run the water to pump the water from the onboard fresh water tanks.
  • D/C devices. Some RVs include D/C outlets — think of power ports or cigarette lighters on a car. My old RV had one and I added a second; my new RV had three and I added a fourth. These are handy for charging cell phones or plugging in low wattage inverters to plug in low wattage A/C devices like laptops.

Other appliances use D/C power all the time, but if you’re plugged in, your battery is being charged all the time, so it’s no big deal. The heater, stereo, and certain light fixtures are good examples.

As you can see, RVs are pretty much designed to be self-sufficient when you’re off-the-grid. There’s a limit, of course, to how long you can live in an RV without a hookup, though. The solar power (or a generator) helps take care of electrical needs. Eventually, however, you’ll run out of water or fill up your black water sewer tank. There are ways to get around these issues — for example, minimize toilet use by using public toilets whenever possible, carry extra water in external tanks, etc. — so two people can easily live in a well-equipped RV off-the-grid for several weeks if they need to.

Oddly, however, most RV owners do not live in the RV off-the-grid. Instead, many of them tend to pull their RVs from one parking lot-like RV park to the next, cram them into narrow spaces between other RVs, hook up power, water, and sewer lines, and retreat inside their luxury boxes to watch television.

I’m not like most RV owners.

Before trading in the old camper, I pulled the 135-watt solar panel off the roof. This past week, I had it installed, with a new battery charger and controller, on the roof of my new RV.

This weekend, my husband and I are out in the desert about 25 miles west of our Wickenburg home, testing the trailer’s off-the-grid setup. I’m out in Aguila, at a private “resort” where my clients are testing some wireless networking equipment. The test requires me to fly their equipment around in the helicopter to see how well it works with ground-based mobile and stationary equipment. There’s more to it than that, but for the sake of my client’s privacy, that’s really all I’m willing to say.

At Robson'sThe job has a lot of down time — time when I’m just waiting around for them to be ready to fly. It made sense to bring the RV out here for the weekend. It gives Mike and I a chance to get away and relax away from home and we can bring along Jack the Dog and Alex the Bird. And, of course, we can test the off-the-grid setup of the RV close enough to home so that if there’s a serious problem, we’re not suffering. So the RV is currently parked about 100 yards from the helicopter’s landing zone out in the desert.

We’ve discovered a few things:

  • When the refrigerator works off propane, it makes a noise that sounds like a fan running inside it. We’re not sure if it should be doing that. It seems to work fine and the fan noise does stop when the refrigerator reaches the correct temperature. But my last two RVs had silent refrigerators, so we’re a bit concerned.
  • The fresh water in the tanks smells like shit. I do mean that literally. We’re not drinking it, but we are washing with it. It’s making the RV stink a bit on the inside, so we have a lot of windows open to keep the air cleared out. This is our fault. We should have flushed out the system before using it. We’ll do that after this trip and likely run at least one tankful of clean water through it, too.
  • The new solar setup works great. It had the batteries fully charged before 10 AM. While it was doing that, we were using the lights, stereo, cell phone chargers (all D/C) and a 300-watt A/C inverter to charge my MacBook Pro and some aviation radios.
  • The 2000-watt Honda generator I bought so I could run A/C devices if I wanted to works great. It’s easy to start and can be very quiet. We gave it a good test on Saturday night when we ran it to see if we could watch a DVD (Up) on the 32-inch (or thereabouts) flat screen TV the RV came with. It ran hard when we first started it — likely to recharge the batteries we’d run down a bit after sunset while giving us A/C power — then settled down to a lower, quieter power setting. I don’t think I’d run it in the future just to watch TV, though.

Everything else works exactly as expected.

At this point, I consider this second test a success. It proves to me that the new RV can be at least as comfortable — more so, of course — than the old one when camping off-the-grid. Even though I didn’t get the solar power system I wanted, I think my less expensive solution — one solar panel to charge the batteries and a portable generator for more power when needed — will work fine.

One thing’s for sure: having a portable house along on these weekend long gigs is very nice indeed — even if I’m not plugged in.

Glass Replacement FAIL in Wickenburg

Posted on by
Comment

How does anyone get anything done in this town?

The old guy Mike called to give us an estimate for replacing two windows refused to take driving directions to our house. Instead, I had to drop everything and go out to meet him.

He wasn’t at the corner where he was supposed to be. Instead, he’d driven his unmarked truck past me and was waiting two blocks from our home. He used his cell phone to call me. I tracked him down and he followed me to my house.

Upstairs Windows

The window on the right is the one that needs replacing.

The windows are upstairs. He followed me up the stairs. I pointed out the 4 foot by 8 foot double-pane glass panel that needed replacement. The seal between the two panes had failed and moisture had slipped in. Each day, the window would fog up in a way that couldn’t be wiped clean. Since the window is one of two that offer the best view in the house, we wanted it fixed quickly.

He walked up to the window and looked at the garage roof outside. “How do I get out there?” he asked.

“On a ladder,” I replied.

“We can’t do that. The glass is big and heavy.”

“You did it twelve years ago when we first bought the house,” I told him. I pointed at the identical panel of glass beside it. “You replaced that one right after we moved in.”

“How did we get up there?” he asked.

“On a ladder.”

Bathroom Window

The bathroom window is broken.

I took him into the upstairs bathroom to see the other window that needed replacing. This was a small two-part window of white-smoked glass. One panel slid back and forth to open or close the window. The other panel remained stationery. The stationery panel had always had a bad seal that let moisture in, but we never bothered to replace it since you couldn’t see through it anyway. But during a recent storm, that panel’s outside pane had broken. We wanted it replaced.

He pulled off the panel that slid back and forth and set it down beside the toilet. He reached around, pushing the screen out a bit and mumbling about how he hoped nothing fell.

“How do you get up to this window?” he asked.

“On a ladder,” I replied yet again.

“What size ladder?”

“My husband uses an extension ladder. We have one you can use.”

He put the other panel back in place. “I don’t know why anyone would build a house like this,” he muttered as he led the way out of the bathroom.

My patience was stretching thin. “People don’t usually design houses just to make it convenient to replace windows,” I told him.

He went downstairs, outside, and around the side of the house. I followed. He looked up at the bathroom window, which had to be at least 20 feet off the ground. Then he looked at the comparatively short climb to the garage roof.

“Once you get up there,” I told him, you can walk on the garage roof pretty easily.

He looked at the situation for another moment, then suddenly said, “I can’t help you, lady.”

I don’t know if he was expecting me to argue or beg with him, but if he was, he was disappointed.

“Okay, thanks for your time,” I said quickly. “You can find your way out? Be careful backing up.”

And then I went into the house, leaving him find his way back to wherever it is he’d come from.

Of course, since the old guy is the only glass replacement option in Wickenburg — or at least the only one my husband could find — we’ll have to get someone up from Phoenix to do the job. But that’s typical here. No matter how much you try to spend money locally, you just can’t get what you need.

This is the Kind of Stuff I Get in E-Mail

Posted on by
Comment

Come on folks! Get a clue!

I found this message in my spam folder this afternoon:

I have xp, I have been using microsft exscel 2007 with no problems until today
the spread sheet prints with wavy lines
cells are wavy, it is not the printer because when I go back and print old spread sheets it is fine
thank you for your help

I have not edited this other than to remove the sender’s name. I had never before been in contact with the sender.

Yes, I know I’ve written books about Excel, including Excel 2007. But does that make me the go-to person for all Excel questions? Like I have nothing better to do than sit at my desk and wait for Excel user questions to come in so I can answer them?

My Contact page clearly indicates that I do not answer questions about my books via e-mail. But this isn’t even a question about my books. This is a technical support question about a printing problem. How am I supposed to know what this person — who is borderline illiterate — did in Excel to get wavy cell lines?

This message is good for one thing, however: it gave me fodder for a rant about the kind of crap I find in my e-mail in box.

Sheesh.

Solar Power Woes

Posted on by
3

Why I won’t be buying a solar energy setup for my new RV.

My old RV — which we drove away from this afternoon without a backward glance — had a solar panel on the roof. The panel charged the RVs two batteries, which, in turn could power the lights, stereo, and any devices we had plugged in to the unit’s two DC power ports. This was handy when we camped off-the-grid, as we did numerous times on our way from Washington state to Arizona last summer.

The system didn’t have an inverter, though. That meant that it could not power the AC power outlets or anything plugged into them, including handy devices like the microwave. We learned to do without.

Our New RigMy new RV is quite a step up from the old one. It actually has rooms. And a desk I can sit and work at. And lots of space.

Of course, I wanted it to have a solar setup, too. But a full-blown setup that would include an inverter and be able to power any of the outlets and devices on board. Okay, well maybe not the air conditioning, but everything else.

My husband, Mike, is a solar guy. He knows how to design solar power systems. He designed the one on our old RV and designed and built the significantly more complex one on our off-the-grid vacation “cabin.” So he sat down with a pen and paper and, using the Internet, researched a solution. I’d use the panel off my old RV, match it with a second panel, add two batteries, an inverter, and a bunch of other stuff, and have a 2KW solar setup. The cost: roughly $3K.

Now $3,000 is a lot of money, especially after pouring a bunch of money into a new RV. But I like the idea of renewable energy. And I love the idea of silent energy. So I was willing to spend another $3K. I saw it as an investment in the future.

We were in Quartzsite, AZ when I picked up the RV. There are lots of RV service centers there, including two that specialize in solar power systems. So we drove over to one to get a quote.

And that’s when things started getting funky.

One guy priced up a system for us what was just a bit over Mike’s estimate. That didn’t include installation labor, though. (I insisted on a professional installation.) He quoted us labor at $55/hour for maybe four hours. I took a deep breath and nodded. So the sales guy handed us off to the order writer. She priced everything out. But suddenly labor was $85/hour and we were looking at 10 hours or more. She refused to be pinned down, but I was seeing a minimum of $4400. My “ripoff radar” — developed after years living in the New York area — perked up and started sending me signals. I told the woman I’d sleep on it and we left.

We went to the other solar outfitter. We’d bought all our solar panels for the vacation cabin and some other equipment from them in the past. They priced out our system and came up with a solid number: $4168. Ouch.

Mike and I talked about it at some length. He’d already suggested a much cheaper alternative for the times we were off the grid: a 2000-watt Honda generator that could be used parallel with an identical model to give a total of 4000 watts. If you needed a little power, you’d fire up one. If you needed more, you’d connect the second one and fire it up, too. With 4000 watts, we could power everything in the camper, including the air conditioning.

At first, I’d resisted the suggestion. I wanted quiet power. The Honda generators were known for their quietness, but nothing would be as quiet as solar.

But the kicker: I could get the Hondas for less than $1,000 each. Just one would provide as much power as the solar setup we’d envisioned. No need for an inverter or charge controller or holes drilled in the RV roof.

Yamaha EF2000iS GeneratorLater that day, we walked around the RV show in Quartzsite, where vendors were selling all kinds of things for RVers. One of them had Yamaha generators. The Yamaha EF2000iS did the same thing the Honda I was considering did, but it was 2 decibels quieter and 2 pounds lighter. And a tiny bit cheaper to buy, too.

It was even cheaper on Amazon.com.

So I didn’t go with the solar setup. I just can’t justify the added expense — after all, to get 2,000 watts with solar power, we’d be spending four times as much as the generator would cost us.

And I’m sure I’m not the only person who feels this way.

It’s unfortunate. There are many people out there who want to do the “right thing” and use renewable energy. But it’s difficult to justify the added expense. When a friend pointed out that I’d have to buy fuel for the generator, I replied that $3000 worth of fuel could go a long way at 5 hours per gallon. The solar setup would never pay for itself.

I’m hoping that changes sometime soon.