Kevin Standlee: Fandom Is My Way of Life

Fernley being literally in a desert, fog is not something we get all that often; however, it can happen, and this morning was one of those days.

( Good Morning Not to be Driving )

I am once again happy that my daily commute is a few meters from the bedroom to the living room. I did go out for some errands a little later in the day, but I waited until the fog burned off.

Several days ago, Lisa pulled the dead auxiliary battery out of the Big Orange Van and we went over to the local NAPA Auto Parts and traded it in on a new deep-cycle RV battery. Lisa then put it on the battery charger for a couple of days, and on Sunday she swapped it for the "coach" battery in the Rolling Stone. The coach battery is two years old and still holds a charge, just not as well as it did originally. She put it into the Big Orange Van, which doesn't need quite as robust a battery as I do in the RV. I'm now less likely to wake up gasping overnight with a CPAP machine sounding a low-power alarm. Just to be sure all is well, we'll plug the Stone into ground power the day before I next leave. That, along with driving 300 miles to the Bay Area, should assure that everything is topped up.

It has been an excessively interesting day, but if I'm going to get any sleep tonight, I won't be able to write about it in the detail it deserves.

Lisa spent more than six hours working on the Big Orange Van, replacing a kinked fuel tank vent hose and a split fuel line, and at one point briefly set the van's engine on fire. (Fortunately, she has a small halon-type extinguisher and no harm was done.) While the vehicle still needs lots of work, at least it's moving again. Because of how badly beat-up her hands got after that, she's postponed work on the small pickup for a few days.

We took the rental van into Reno and closed out the Moana Lane storage locker. Turns out they refund the unused rental days, so I'm only actually out a few extra days' rent and the $10 key deposit for having lost the original key. We pulled everything out and hauled it to Fernley. The garage/workshop is now looking very full of boxes. I'm glad we had the rental truck for this because I don't think we could have fit the locker's entire contents into my van, even with all the seats but the two forward ones removed.

Finally getting back to the trailer in Fernley, I checked the train status, and as of late Tuesday night, it was still looking like my 8:36 AM train out of Reno would be here about that time. Seeing me fret over schedules, Lisa suggested that we go into Reno, drop off the rental truck at the Budget night drop, and spend the night at Circus Circus, which is walking distance from the Amtrak station. This option looked even better after I called CC Reno and found they were offering $32 rates. We packed up again and Lisa and I convoyed into Reno. I got the rental truck dropped in the last available night space, we went to CC Reno, had a very annoying experience getting Security to let the Big Orange Van into the over-height vehicle lot, and after checking in to the room went for a late dinner at the Eldorado.

And believe it or not, the above really is the digest version. Good night!