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April 28, 2010, a Wednesday
Parker (K), Colorado, USA
— Back to our normal life
I awoke early and got out of bed while J was still sleeping. I worked up a blog entry, then had breakfast after J started stirring. The RV felt crowded after having the nice suite at the B&B in Pennsylvania. J went for a walk and I put away the rest of my things from the trip. J returned as I was processing images for a stock submission from our visit to Mt. Evans in June 2008. Mt. Evans is one of the best locations to photograph Mountain Goats (below left), and when we were there we also photographed some cooperative Bighorn Sheep (below right).


We prepped the RV to move and left in the RV around 11:15.

We went to King Soopers to grocery shop and have lunch. I went into King Soopers and bought enough for my lunch while J went to Wendy's for some takeaway. I returned to the RV and had my normal lunch. I processed more image for a stock submission while J went into King Soopers for a major shopping haul. We left around 1:20.

We went to SJ&DilK's (J's Son J and Daughter-in-law K's) and started to do some laundry. Then we hung out with GS (granddaughter S, age 3), first in the house then in the RV. After a while, GS discovered the small dash duster by our dash, and she proceeded to dust everything in sight. :) GA (grandson A, age 8.5) came into the RV after he finished school. DilK gave me a ride to Extreme Auto after GJ's (grandson J, age 4.5) Taekwondo session.

We got to Extreme Auto around 5:25, just in time for me to pick up the Jeep before they closed for the day.

On the drive back to SJ&DilK's, the Jeep made an occasional low-pitched whining sound that it hadn't made before. :(

By the time I returned to SJ&DilK's, DilK had just finished ordering pizza for dinner, so I didn't dump like I had planned to do. I had waited to dump until after the three loads of laundry had gone through the washer because we have to remove the drain hose for the washer from the drain in the wall before we dump using the macerator. From a project management point of view, dumping while the last load was in the dryer made the most sense because everything would finish up around the same time. However, I didn't take into account the fact that dumping is a hands-on activity while letting laundry dry in the dryer is not. So, it would have made more sense to have dumped first because we could have eaten dinner while the last load of laundry was in the dryer. I didn't think it would take so long to do the three loads of laundry.

We had dinner of the pizza from Papa John's (one pepperoni and one half cheese and half pineapple) with a cranberry/walnut salad from Sprouts Farmers Market.

After dinner, I went outside to dump using our Flojet Macerator Pump then filled up our fresh water tank. We left with me in the RV and J in the Jeep.

We returned "home" around 8:10. I set up one of my new iStarUSA v7AGE220-SAU external hard drive enclosures and installed new firmware to allow it to use 2TB hard drives. It worked just fine. :) For kicks, I installed the new firmware in my old, broken Sans Digital TowerStor TS2UT external hard drive enclosure, and it seemed to load OK. (You may read more about the TowerStor enclosure on my blog entry for April 17, 2010.) It even recognized a 2TB hard drive this time. I played with it some more and discovered that the top bay of the two-bay enclosure is bad. J&CB came by and visited for a while. They suggested that we could park the RV in the back of JB's mother's house practically across the street from where we were parked and that way we could put out our slide — cool. :) Plus, we wouldn't have as much street noise.