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By Andy, on September 1st, 2010
Fate, Destiny, Karma. Call it what you will but it is a quirky deal. Things happen for a reason you know. When I bought the Old Girl back in November of 2005, I had never been inside an RV– much less a Class A diesel pusher. So I bought the Fish Bus with the idea of taking some road trips and pulling the race car trailer back and forth. Those were back in the days when I had more jingle in my pockets, that’s for sure. Well directly, my fortunes reversed and I found myself living in the Old Girl full time.
And it was fortunate in many ways that I had stumbled on an older RV that was quality built back in the day – I just didn’t know it at the time. I know God doesn’t suffer fools; I sure got a kitchen pass on this one. Since then me and the Old Girl have seen some tough places and harsh environs. As it stands right now, she is streaked and grimy. I have not had onsite water for 20 months straight and water is just too precious to waste it on an RV bath. No water also means I have not rinsed my black tank in as many months as well. At about this minute, I can see some of you uber-anal RV types writhing in disgust. All I can say is you gotta do what you gotta do. Hell, my chrome rims are dirty and nasty too!
Anyway, I am parked west to east here and the Old
 Delamination on the Old Girl Girl has has had her driver’s side exposed to those merciless UV rays of an extra hot Central Texas summer for months. I am figuring out just how damaging UV radiation can be. It turns plastic and rubber to dust, it bleaches the color out fabric and paint worse than a bottle blond doing her roots. In my experience, RV owners should worry about sun exposure more than just about anything else.
About a month ago, I noticed something odd about the sun side of the Old Girl. She has what I call the “chair rail” down the side, I don’t know what the proper RV term would be. It is the rail at floor level that is attached to the skin that covers the sides of your RV. In turn, the ‘chair rail’ is somehow attached to the plywood walls and plywood floor. I would guess it was glued on somehow. The rail had started to buckle and pull away from the wall. It was delamination but not delamination from a water leak. I am convinced the buckling was due to the UV rays. The other side of the Old Girl showed no ill effects; it is in the shade. The Old Girl is seventeen years old which is like 115 in dog years old. I guess some buckling and sagging is to be expected.
Of course, my main problem was to figure out how to fix it to prevent further delamination. The quick fix would have been to run some galvanized screws in there and say ‘good enough’ but it would have looked like ass. I had to figure out how to glue it back .
 Liquid Nails - Heavy Duty no less The problem was glue always works best if you can clamp the two pieces together. There was no way to do that. I even took the cargo door off trying my best to figure it out. So if I can’t clamp it, maybe I can super glue it. Hell, that stuff bonds immediately, I have glued my fingers together because it is so danged fast! Well, the first attempt was a failure, super glue is runny and I was gluing that rail from the bottom. Gravity took hold and the glue just ran out. I did manage to glue a finger to the side of the Old Girl so I knew I had a good batch of glue. Runny super glue was out. How about super glue gel? That would have probably worked if I could have gotten a tube as big as a tube of toothpaste. Those itty bitty tubes that hold about a spit’s worth of glue didn’t get it. I did manage to glue the back of my thumb to the satellite dish next to the work area — don’t even ask how that happened.
Scratchin’ my head, I knew there had to be some way to do this. After all it was not rocket science. The key was clamping the two pieces together and Liquid Nails was the
 Not Rocket Science adhesive of choice. “A manly man’s glue, not that housewifey super glue BS. ” he said, glancing down and noticing the hide gone from a knuckle and a finger pad. I took a landscape timber and leaned it up against the rail. Where the butt end touched the ground, I dug out a shallow hole with my sharpshooter and put the butt end in there. Then I got a 2X4 and put it between the timber and the Old Girl. It was riding high but I figured it would be just about right with some persuasion. I took that Liquid Nails and liberally shot it up from the bottom into the gaping crack of delamination. No finger skin was lost in the process. My 2lb hammer proved to be enough persuasion as I used it to drive that 2×4 and timber down the side of the Old Girl. It was tight as a bull’s ass when I got done. I wouldn’t recommend this solution on a shiny, fancy gel coat finish but the Old Girl just shrugged it off. She is tough that way.
End Note: Fate’s Right Hand by Rodney Crowell from the Tracks CD. Crowell is one of the few Texas boys that has survived Nashville unscathed. He writes smart and plays it tight.
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By Andy, on August 31st, 2010
I read a variety of blogs and forums each day; I call it Running the Traps.
 The Old Girl on a hot August day Back in the day, I read a real newspaper every day. I haven’t read a newspaper in years. The blogs and forums mirror my interest. RV stuff, firearms related things, Texas lifestyle essays; that kinda stuff.
One blog I read is by a young guy who lives down on the Redneck Riviera around Corpus. He has little personal info on his blog but by reading him now for sometime, I get the feeling he is a single guy and maybe mid 30’s at most. And he is plenty pissed off. Seems he is mad at just about everything and here lately, his content has become so poisoned, I wonder why I even bother any more. He writes about his “drywalled suburban prison”, he rails against “The Man” and paying taxes and Corporate Greed. One recent post finally got the best of me and prompted me to editorialize on the selfishness and immaturity he shows. To paraphrase, he commented that our freedom to travel is restricted by the landed gentry -the Forces of Nice as he put it. We couldn’t be gypsies or vagabonds anymore because these influential few were too protective of their little kingdoms. They shunned the travelers because we devalued their ” over-inflated property values”.
Well, that got my goat. The last time I checked, the majority of Americans are permitted to go about their daily lives pretty unfettered. Especially those of us who spend the majority of our year living in a recreational vehicle. But this angry young man still interests me – simply because his idea of what America owes him seriously clashes with my idea of what America offers me.
None of us have to live in a particular city or neighborhood or house/apartment.. we choose to live there.
None of us has to work at a particular job. With the exception of our kids in military service, I reckon each of us could turn in our notice tomorrow and go work somewhere else.
Seems like alot of the younger generation is carrying a heavy debt load — as is this young man. It was the nature of the beast I guess back in the high flying 90’s and the first part of this century. Easy credit and spend like there is no tomorrow. Me? I have been well off and I have been hardscrabble poor. I sorta like poor better. It takes too much energy to spend all that money and live that lifestyle. Fact of the matter is, the debt this kid is carrying is 100% on his shoulders. Nobody made him spend himself to the point of no return.
So I am reading his poison and feeling the heat of his anger and tasting the bile of his hatred and it scares me just a tiny bit. His solution to every problem is to solve it by force and he is so very positive he is on to something that will save the Republic.
As regular readers know, I am no fan of Big Government and I am not all that thrilled with the current state of affairs in the good ole USA. This kid’s vision of America is definitely a place I would not want to live. The strong would oppress the weak, equality would be measured in guns and ammo and any semblance of Rule of Law would evaporate. Think Mad Max or the Mongol Hordes or Feudal Lords. Instead of championing individual liberties as he espouses, the actuality of his world would fling us back to a time before the Magna Carta.
Well, there is always a good and a bad. The bad would be if his ideas of changing The World as We Know It gained traction. I know there are thousands more just like him. The good is that I am pretty sure I know his kind. He is the kid that got picked last in basketball, he is the kid that immersed himself in fantasy role playing games. He is the kid that did not have a strong male role model growing up. Anonymous blogging lets him be the macho, muy importante hombre he can only dream about being.
Oh well! I am just going to go back and try to enjoy my little corner of the world.
End Note: After getting all worked about the Angry Young Man, I needed some attitude adjustment. I plugged the earphones into the Zune and grabbed a beer. Keep On Keepin’ On by Jack Ingram from the Live at Billy Bob’s CD came up. Things happen for a reason you know! Any way, back in the day, Jack Ingram and the Beat Up Ford band were pretty much as good as it got here in Texas. Then it happened. Some alien hillbillies from Nashville kidnapped Jack and sent the Beat Up Ford band packin’. They sucked his brains out through his ears and replaced it with some oatmeal/pablum/ cream o’ wheat mess. Now he is just another Trashville pretty boy with hair that embarrasses his mama and he sounds just like all the other Trashville pretty boys. Oh well, that is what they make digital music for – I can savor Jack at his best – forever. It never gets old.
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By Andy, on August 26th, 2010
Why is it when you have time to get out and bum around you don’t have the extra funds? I guess I need to work more, huh? Then I don’t have the spare time to bum around. What a vicious circle! So this entry is just a disjointed series of miscellaneous thoughts and random events — none of which alone would meet my minimum word requirements for a stand alone blog post.
That damned LaCie drive…. I have been using this slack time trying to get the Zune player back up to date since all my music went to hardrive hell when the first LaCie failed. I plugged the new LaCie in when it came back and let it grind away for several days before I decided to put music on it. Worked like a champ — now the worthless Made in Mexico POS is doing the same thing as the old one…. after I spent countless hours downloading replacement Zune content. Right now I have just about had it. I am transferring the LaCie content to an old Maxtor external drive that is 5 years old. It is a antique 250 gig behemoth but it works! A call to LaCie is on the list of tomorrow’s business. I would still heartily recommend the Zune – I have the 120 gig model. It failed after it lived in my front shirt pocket for several days of shirt drenching sweat. On the day it died, water was running out of its’ innards. Muddy water at that.
Went to the new jobsite in North Dallas on Tuesday. Gonna be different for sure. Only 16 acres and the eastern property boundary is the back yards of 10 substantial brick homes. It felt odd. The RV parking logistics are a challenge. The septic system is located at an old home site that was bulldozed away. Power is 100 yards away in one direction, water is 150 yards the other way. As with all of out jobs, the client is super nice. I gave him a half dozen options and he said he was on it. We will see what the changes are when the Old Girl heads north in a couple of weeks. I lived close to there for 10 years and I had forgotten how the wind does blow. The Stetson had to stay in the truck during the visit — I felt nekkid.
Been studying up some on West Texas.
 Joaquin Jackson The lure of the area is strong. A strong sense of individuality permeates the region. Suits me fine. Land is cheap because a goat would starve on 20 acres. A hard life in a harsh setting. But maybe I need that after years of fat and happy and a disconnect from true reality. Specifically I am looking at the Big Bend Area — Alpine, Marathon, Presidio area. Down on the Border….
 Terlingua,TX cemetery A couple of interesting observations gleaned from blogs and forums and newspaper articles. Brewster County, Texas is the biggest county in Texas. The size of Delaware X2. 8600 residents on the 2005 census. From one of the forums, ” We don’t have any of that white trash cooking meth down here. We just didn’t put up with it when they tried us.”
It is the land of Texas Ranger Joaquin Jackson.
I figure I could fall off down toward that Big Bend this Winter in the Old Girl during our work break and boondock while I checked out Terlingua and Stillwell Ranch and Adobe Walls. The Northern edge of the Chihauhaun Desert, peaks over 7800 ft, ocotillo and juniper and prickly pear.
Well. I guess any post with the title ‘Incoherent Ramblings’ has to have a little bit of Soapbox content as well. The reason for me looking to West Texas is because I feel uneasy. My bro and I talked at the end of last year and both agreed that even though our elected officials were saying we were at the bottom of the worst that could happen, we had not seen the worst. I feel that is true as I write this; we are heading toward a new low that will surpass the abyss of the last quarter of 2009. After voting a straight Republican ticket my entire adult life, this past 18 months has left my with a steadfast distrust of anything a career politician utters. They are elected by lies and grovel at the feet of big business and the lobbyists. We are truly in deep shit… and I cannot for the life of me see a solution that even remotely resembles the world as we know it now.
I am not one of those Preppers or Anarchists but I do believe we are in for radical changes and I will see it in my lifetime. I am figuring the Federal government is going to collapse to a certain extent – an implosion due to sheer weight and disenfranchisement of the rank and file American. If you live anywhere in the Northeast corridor or a major Metro area, the tentacles of the Feds will probably still encircle you. For the rest of us in rural America, I think we will be left to our own devices like an unwanted stepchild. The Feds would not have the resources or the inclination to expend energy to coerce us any longer. Regional governments would rule the day; much as it was before the Great Depression. What better place to be than Texas – specifically West Texas if that day comes?
End Note: Every one in awhile I get ahold of some music that rolls up on the Zune and I think I am going to have to pull the Suburban over to deal with that WTF??? moment. I download music on my Zunepass for free. $14 and change and I get to siphon as much music off their servers as I want. Honestly, some of it I never listen to . But some of it just makes that big ass Suburban hit the shoulder. Isn’t that the nature of good music? It is supposed to move you and make the hairs stand up on the back of your neck.
So the album I am talking about is Southern Horror by Javi Garcia from Weslaco, TX. Steve Earle and Ryan Bingham before they sold it to the Man. Rod Stewart when it was still Faces with Rod Stewart. Chris Knight if Chris Knight wasn’t from poor ass Appalachia. Worth a listen and then some. How often have I End Note-ed an entire album?
“Cheap or high dollar, A whore is a whore.”
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By Andy, on August 23rd, 2010
Still takin’ it easy here in Calvert waiting on this job to wrap up and the next one to start in North Dallas. I think I will head up to North Dallas Tuesday to see what the RV facilities look like. I think the owner is going to have to make some power mods to accommodate us. I would rather him do it now instead of after I arrive. It is
Continue reading Piddlin’ and Sweatin’
By Kathy, on August 21st, 2010
Note: This is a first. No one has ever guest authored on MyOldRV but I guess there is a first time for everything. I can only guess y’all are getting tired of my anarchistic, NO-RV content ramblings. The ladies ( and you know who you are!) should appreciate this one… Andy
Small RV Kitchen
How to cook a gourmet Asian meal when your kitchen is smaller than an egg roll:
Organization is key;
Continue reading My Kitchen is Smaller than an Eggroll
By Andy, on August 20th, 2010
18 days straight of temps over 100 degrees and it finally broke a little bit today — the official temp was 97 degrees.
Texas Heat Wave
Not a record by any means but by God, it has been plenty hot for me. Luckily, I sorta got ahead of the curve at the first of the Summer and installed an everyday window air conditioning unit in the Old Girl to augment the cooling capacity.
You see,
Continue reading Air Conditioners Running Hard….
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