ALMOST ANOTHER GREAT WEEK Monday was a great day, beginning with a “Tourist Council” meeting which I managed to miss (too much like work), followed by the Spring Choral practice. We attended an RV.net gathering for winter Texans; RV.net is a web forum for RVers, and the gathering was an opportunity to put faces with names and “handles”. We departed early to pick up a new CPAP machine in McAllen, followed by an early dinner at Red Lobster; we don’t get to eat at Red Lobster often, so this was a treat for us. Tuesday was a great day, and we got in our 2-hour dance lesson. With highs in the mid-80s, it was also great pool weather. We had a patio party at Larry and Vickie Wortham’s Tuesday evening featuring smoked pork shoulder, cooked by Larry. It was great, and the other folks who attended brought wonderful side dishes. (We’ll come back to Tuesday in the paragraph below). Wednesday was a quiet day, our church choir practiced on Thursday afternoon, and I lost really bad in a shuffleboard match Friday morning. Now, returning to Tuesday evening.

BAD NEW FROM HOME Tuesday was a wonderful RGV day. However, we got bad news from home Tuesday evening—an ice storm centered over Baxter County, Arkansas, Monday evening and Tuesday, dropping as much as 3 inches of ice. We lost power at our house on Tuesday evening at 5:30 PM, but our wonderful neighbor and friend, Wayne Bodenhamer, moved one of his generators to our house and kept the 2 refrigerator/freezers and chest freezer “charged”, saving us lots of money and time. Additionally, he was taking care of 3 other neighbors. What an unsung hero! Also, Barry Block from our quartet came down from Mountain Home despite bad road conditions, and checked on our place. Typically, our neighborhood maintains power in disasters, and we had plenty of them last year, with only a brief loss of power. However, each day we talked to Wayne, things continued to worsen. Finally, we could no longer allow him to carry our burden while we were having fun and left for home on Friday afternoon, leaving DunnGone in the RGV, driving 16 hours straight through, stopping only for gasoline and some emergency supplies at Marshall, TX. We were able to purchase a small generator there as well as propane cylinders and Coleman fuel. We arrived home at 6 AM, and immediately crawled into a cold bed. After three hours of sleep, we awoke Saturday morning, drove into Mountain Home, and purchased gasoline to run the generators. Since that time, we’ve been maintaining generators; Kay consolidated food into one refrigerator/freezer and chest freezer, and trying to heat the house for more expected cold weather this coming week. We did manage to attend dinner with some friends, hosted by Ray Minardi, and celebrated Carolyn Todd’s 70th birthday; way to go, girl! We were both able to shower today (Sunday), thanks to a solar shower we use for wilderness camping. We plan to depart again for the RGV as soon as the power comes back up. Kay has done yeoman’s work in getting us ready to depart the RGV and taking care of household chores at home. We have great internet service, relying on an air card and a wireless router hooked up to the generator. We have to be careful, though to maintain battery power in our computers since charging them is more of a chore than one would guess. Anyway, that’s how our week went. How about yours?