Update: Mom, Hummingbird and Travels

Lots of response to my Facebook posting last Sunday about mom being in the hospital.  Family and friends from all over gave “likes” and made “comments” about mom.  I am sure the “likes” were that they ‘liked the fact she was ok’, and not that they ‘liked the idea of her going to the hospital’.  It’s that “facebook” thing you know….  However, one set of comments seemed to be a bit amusing, and I will share that with you in a bit.

But just so everyone could see mom in her normal condition, the two pictures above were snapped this afternoon when mom came over to read to Euleda, who is Arny’s mom. 

My brother Bob has two children, Jennifer and Jared.  I have talked about the story when I took both of them, along with my oldest brother Jim’s daughter to the park here in Sacramento around 1978 and Jennifer pushed Jared into a duck pond….anyway, I did not realize that the effects of not being able to breath air for those few seconds would have such a devastating effect on little Jared who made this comment in Facebook about his grandmother who was taken to the hospital with chest pains, just to find out it was Gastritis.

Don’t know what got into his head thinking that someone died, let alone his Gma, but his response to my response is just darn funny!

    

The resident Hummingbird, the one which rules the feeder, likes to perch himself up on a twig where he can watch for intruders.  A couple of days ago I saw him up there grooming himself, and got these shots…the last of which included a rare picture of his tongue. 

A couple of weeks ago while in Oregon we realized we were not charging the house batteries (the ones that all the 12v lights and other electrical items run off of in the motorhome).  Took it to a shop and we could not figure out where the battery isolator was located.  Well, there it is, right there in the main cargo bin by the front door.

A bit easier to see now that I removed a few things.

When I removed the door guess what I found?   It was the biggest RATS NEST that I had ever seen.  That entire compartment behind that pull-off door was full of leaves, tissue paper, droppings, AND, the most important thing, NOT ONE CHEWED UP WIRE!!!!

But this one red wire, the one with the white arrow pointing to it above, was very loose.  The rat was long gone, the nest is long gone and I filled the hole where he easily got in from the frame at the top, marked by a blue arrow.  Now this was definitely a Florida mouse because all the leafs were Florida trees and not California trees…and they were very, very dry and thank goodness there had not been a spark in there!

As I said before, we have only had the motorhome for under a year, just at a year now…and we are still learning about all the little hiding places.  YES, I had looked behind that door once last year, made a mental note about which quickly got lost in the quicksand of my mind  (Jared is thinking that my brain didn’t get oxygen when I jumped in to save him, but it only came up to my knees, so I can’t use that excuse).  Never gave it a thought when we had it in the shop up in Oregon even though I kept running through my brain all the places I had seen “large wires” at during the previous year.

So after Father’s Day, we are going to do our first minor trip up to the Sierras, to get out of the heat down here in the valley.  I have a few National Forest Campgrounds and a few Full-hookup Campgrounds which I want to visit over a ten day period.  Overall it is a little over 300 miles, but at any given time we will be no more than 100 miles away, and it will give us some non-hookup time to try out the solar panel and the generator, and some full-hookup time too. If all goes well, than after the 4th of July we will expand a larger loop further north.