Month: December 2015

Cards have been sent (and some received), a few presents wrapped, tree has been decorated, and we are off for a few days of vacation. I know, I know, it has been a bit since I last posted; here is a review of activities since then.

First of all, we wish everyone a very Merry Christmas and may the New Year be a good one for you. (I’ll have a recap of our 2015 in my New Years post coming up in a couple weeks.) Please click on the link below to view our 2015 Christmas E-card! (Some of you have viewed it already separately).

Christmas Visitors

We decorated our small tree, which is in the bedroom to keep it safe from the cats and dogs, and finished other house decorations. Pam will be baking cookies later today (oatmeal raisin, one of the healthier cookies for folks watching sugar intake) and altogether it will be a quiet holiday for us here at home. Just as well; the weather is supposed to get nasty later today, followed by an even nastier cold spell.

Christmas Tree 2015

On the agenda – house search: We did get out to view a couple of houses yesterday, one of which is an “earth-berm” design where the back of the house is built into a hillside. This should make the house more energy efficient, but we were not impressed with the general design of the house. Located at the top of a ridge, this property enjoyed excellent mountain views, but required repairs and renovations both interior and exterior.

Front of earth-berm house

Jerry examines attached garage

Pam walks the dogs around the back side of earth-berm house

The second place we looked at, near Ouray, was more cabin-like (our usual style) with a large wrap-around porch — but– with lots of steps both outside and inside.

Jerry on Chipmunk Place cabin’s steps

Lots of steps on Chipmunk Place cabin

So, the retirement house search continues for “the one.” It is fun looking at the variety of homes in our price range, we learn something about the different areas each time we actually go out “into the field” and look at properties (as opposed to just looking at photos online).

Back home again, Pam took this picture of me with London (the white cat,) Jo the dog, and Sunny (the tabby on the floor) as I tried to relax on our glider. It seems anytime I sit down I accumulate a couple of pets!

Jerry with a few of our pets

I’ve been working on a few projects around the place to keep busy during my vacation time. One project included putting chains on the John Deere lawn tractor; we are expecting 3 – 6 inches in the next 48 hours and I use the JD to clean off our drive and sidewalks (gave it a trial run after a 2 inch snowfall this past Monday).

Another project was to add a reel-to-reel deck to my garage stereo system. I had purchased the deck at a yard sale some time ago and stored it in the garage attic. After getting a few tapes from eBay and finding a spare set of hook-up cables I finally put the deck in service.

Reel-to-reel deck now in service in my garage stereo system

You can hear the deck in operation by viewing this 1:37 movie clip:

[cincopa AAOAqLtH7OCl]

Other projects included putting rear brake pads in the Toyota RAV4; a check-up done by our favorite repair shop gave the “new” ride a clean bill of health but noted the rear pads were pretty thin and recommended replacement. So far the RAV4 is working out pretty well for us, but there are still a few service items to tackle such as changing the cabin and air filters, oil and filter, and installing the spare tire cover when it arrives. Nothing major and all routine stuff that I can do on a weekend.  We loaded the dogs into the back of the RAV4 for the property trip yesterday, still a few space allocation bugs to work out there too.

That’s it for now. Thanks for looking in!

Pam’s Two Cents Worth:

Spent an ideal Christmas Eve morning – in my pj’s until noon, drinking hot chocolate, listening to Christmas music.  I have two books to pick up and read later today (“Lights Out” by Ted Koppel and “Goddesses Never Age” by Christiane Northrup).  Great way to ease into the day.

I’ll be working on my 2016 New Year’s resolutions for the next post.  (I think you can guess finding “the” retirement house will be high on that list.) I did great on my resolutions for this year – learn to play simple chords on the guitar, read more books, drink more wine.

Happy Trails and Happy Holidays.

Its been a while since I featured any of our cats but lately there have been a few photogenic moments involving a couple of them. Here they are:

Velvet playing under the sofa

Sunny showing off his ruff

And finally, our newest indoor-outdoor house cat, KitKat:

KitKat at rest

KitKat was supposed to be an outdoor cat, and was for several months, until she decided to come back into the house. Still quite anti-social, she will allow herself to be petted on rare occasions but plays with the inside cats (particularly Sunny) and seems to enjoy herself. She goes outside often and is comfortable around the dogs. We hope she ‘mellows’ a bit and becomes more social when inside the house. She is, apparently, a very strong-willed feline.

In my last post I said I would have photos of our ‘new’ used car, a 2004 Toyota RAV4. This particular car is the base level trim but has some options such as all-wheel drive, luggage rack, and alloy wheels. Color is a light tan with silver bumper covers and accents.

2004 RAV4 – front

Driver’s side

Passenger side

Rear

We have a slip-on cover coming for the spare tire and a center cap for the passenger front wheel. Otherwise the car seems to be in good shape.

We removed the back seats to gain cargo area and have already used the space to haul the three dogs at once, brought home a Christmas tree, and took packages (and hand truck to move them) to The UPS Store. The space will be very useful to us.

Cargo space with seats removed

The cockpit area is smaller than the Honda but comfortable.

Cockpit area

The 5-speed manual transmission and 4-cylinder engine got us 26mpg on the first fill; we hope to get a few mpgs better in warm weather when we tend to take longer trips.

The car has an after-market JVC brand stereo system in it; I was planning to revert back to an original CD/radio deck when I downloaded a User’s manual and found the JVC will play music from a USB thumb drive. This eliminates the need to carry CDs in the car. I copied some of my music to a USB drive and tried out this feature and it seems to work very well.

JVC deck

Another feature of this deck, which I have not yet tried, is that it can “pair” with a smartphone to enable hand-free phone operation. (Well, 14 states have banned the use of hand-held phones when driving and 46 states have banned texting while driving.) The pairing is done via BlueTooth technology. There is a microphone installed, part of the deck, that should enable voice commands to work with my iPhone 6+. I doubt if I will use this much as radio and music are the most-used features we wanted, but I occasionally do get calls while driving to and from work and the hands-free features may come in handy for those calls. For the record, the deck is a JVC model KD-X310BT. Reviews show it to be a decent entry-to-mid level unit.

The past week was pretty quiet and the weather for the upcoming week shows snow probable on Monday followed by a cold spell with high temps below freezing for the rest of the week. Not much will get done in those conditions other than some filing of photos, updating a few web pages, working on Christmas cards, and other indoor projects.

That’s it for now. Thanks for looking in!

Pam’s Two Cents Worth:

Finally succumbed to the first head & chest cold of the season, it was a doozy.

A few words about the guitar playing, see-eester; I play in private to keep my fingers (and brain) limber, no public performances (not even for Fields).  Did you think we were having hootenannys around here or something? Lately, my fingers have been cracking with the dry weather and office work, so until they heal I won’t be plucking and strumming much in any case.

Happy Trails.

Thanksgiving has passed and the Christmas season has begun. Here are a few things we have been doing for the past week.

Thanks to all who responded to my Thanksgiving E-card entitled “Pies.” It seems much of the Thanksgiving meal centers around pies; we are no exception. Here is a photo of the pumpkin pie Pam baked for us:

Thanksgiving Pie

Normally Pam bakes a rhubarb pie as well but no rhubarb was to be found locally this year. Bummer.

During the weekend that followed we put up our outside decorations. We will never win a prize but it is nice to have some Christmas lights on when we get home after work. Pam puts up a large garland complete with bows and lights while I put lights up on the garage eve and front of the house.

Garland and bows

Front of house decorations

Inside decorations will be going up in the next few days. We are going to get a small tree and hope the cats (5 in house) and the 3 dogs won’t destroy it.

We found a ‘new’ used car; a 2004 Toyota RAV4. I had gone over to Grand Junction last Saturday and located 3 potential cars; this past Monday Pam went with me for test drives. We picked this particular vehicle even though it is a bit older than we had planned mostly on the basis of removable back seats and a fairly well-documented service history. The car was a local trade and not from an auction. We will be picking it up later today (Saturday) and I will take photos of it for the next post. The car needs some cosmetic work (front bumper cover and spare tire cover) and we will address these things as we move along.

I have mentioned, in past posts, that our local grocery store has a ‘fuel points’ reward program. Each purchase contributes to the fuel point total, earning a discount on gasoline purchases. Last month we hit 1000 points, $1.00 per gallon discount, and I redeemed those points yesterday. Gasoline cost 87 cents per gallon after the discount. Purchase is limited to 35 gallons; in addition to filling the car I took my gas cans along and got the limit.

$.87 per gallon with discount

It was kind of unreal to see the gallon figure higher than the dollar amount as I was pumping the fuel. Too bad this is not the case every time we need to fill up!

That’s it for now. Thanks for looking in!

Pam’s Two Cents Worth:

The weeks before Christmas are, I feel, a struggle between what has to be done (going to work) and what I would rather be doing (writing out Christmas cards, decorating the house and baking). Will that change after retirement? Hope so.

I have nothing good to say about “pre-owned vehicle” shopping.  Fields has scheduled an appointment in a few weeks for the RAV4 with our foreign car shop to (thoroughly) check out the “new” silver-colored ride. Hopefully, there will be no unpleasant surprises. We already know the front bumper needs to be replaced.  I’m lobbying for a repaint job for [new] front and [existing] back bumpers – plus side trim strips – in Hilltopper purple (one of my high school colors). It would be lovely to be able to visually locate our RAV4 in a parking lot of SUVs; even if I develop memory loss, I’ll always remember Hilltopper purple.

Happy Trails.