Gosh we’ve been busy the last 2 weeks…seems like we’ve been on the go with one social thing or another just about every day and we’re smack dab in the middle of a 4 day stretch of having something at the Elks Lodge every night…chicken dinner, bingo, fun night, lodge meeting and initiation for our friend Jeff…it’s just one thing after another.

Nothing else much new since Sunday…it’s been downright hot…high 80s with 80% humidity. Neil went over and got new tires for our Mazda today and found out the rear brake pads are worn out so he’s got an appointment for Friday to get that taken care of. Afterwards he went on a bike ride…14.72 miles, 15.57 mph, 56:43 but that didn’t include the 15 minutes he got stuck at the railroad crossing…if he had been there 30 seconds sooner he would have gotten across but instead the train pulled across the road. It went almost all the way across…the last car in the train was 1 car length from entering the 4 lane divided road when it came to a stop. Decoupled just after the road and left 6 or 7 cars blocking the road while they pulled ahead 100 yards, moved the switch gear and backed into the local concrete/landscaping materials business to drop off a hopper car full of gravel. Once that was in place they unhitched the car, pulled again, moved the switchgear back to normal and reconnected to the road-blocking 6-7 cars and went on their way. In the evening we went and were the casher and 50/50 raffle host for Fun Night…sold some burgers and fries, made $107 for the lodge, and had dinner afterwards.

Thursday Connie had a district meeting for the Ladies up in Deep Creek about 25 miles north of here…Neil ran down and got groceries from Walmart before she left about 1000 and then went on a bike ride before it got too hot…it was not a cool day but definitely better than it was later in in the afternoon. 12.44 miles, 16.39 mph, 45:32…route was just around the Pritchett Loop as  he didn’t feel like going out on any main roads today. We had breakfast for dinner (hash with potatoes, onions, an Italian sausage and an Andouille sausage fried up nice and then topped with an egg. Then she’s off to bingo in the park and he’s off to the lodge for the bi-monthly meeting and initiation of new members including our friend Jeff.

Friday Connie worked and had her mammogram while Neil got the rear brake pads on our Mazda changed…they were worn out. We skipped the Elks fish dinner and had some sautéed Halibut with an oriental sauce along with a summer squash with pecans, butter and cinnamon…pretty good. By the late afternoon Connie was feeling bad…she musta caught some sort of flu bug because her head was draining, body aching, and stomach not happy either. She felt pretty bad all evening and into Saturday.

Saturday was another bike ride…scheduled thunderstorms in the afternoon so he went early…14.85 miles, 16,41 mph, 54:18 and I gotta tell ya there were a lot of idiots on the road…3 of them on the Pritchett Loop which is normally pretty scarce traffic wise flew by him with no moving over and blasting the horn…morons need to watch out for bikers. Connie was still feeling poorly so she skipped the quarter auction at the lodge and decided to only do 1 ofd the 2 masses she was supposed to do tomorrow…will skip the normal choir mass and we’ll go to the later one where she’s cantoring only.

We got an email from our mail service this week and are going to give their new service a try. What we’ve done for the past 4 years is get our mail sent to Fort Myers once a week while we are here but during travel seasons it goes to Bryan who scans it and puts it up on DropBox for us. America’s Mailbox has a new service where they scan the front of the envelopes and put the pictures up on the web…then you can select items to open/scan into a pdf file, trash, hold for shipment later, or ship now. Our preliminary indication is that it will end up being a little more expensive than what we’ve done to date…but will get Bryan out of the role of having to scan all our mail for us…with his job and baby Alex he and Jen are pretty busy so we’ll lighten the load on him a bit I think. Anyways…we’re going to try it out as it’s free for 2 months and see how we like it. We had also toyed with the idea of shifting our residency to Florida in the fall…since we would have had to go back to SD to renew our licenses next winter and a trip to SD in the winter didn’t sound like a great idea to us. SD has finally gotten their act together though…and we can now renew our licenses online so we decided to skip changing residency as the cost for FL is about the same as it is in SD overall and it’s a lot easier not to have to fix our address with banks, credit unions, and all that jazz.

Sunday Connie was still feeling a bit poorly…but struggled through cantoring at the 1100 Mass and then we came home. Neil grilled some chicken and we had bake taters to go along with it for dinner along with the rest of the bottle of Pinot Noir he opened  Saturday night. He did have a nice nice ride in the afternoon…18.41 miles, 15.94 mph, 1:09:19 and he headed east around the Eco loop area so that it was at least downwind the last few miles.

Connie continued to feel bad…doing lots of drugs and basically just laying around. She skipped the quarter auction at the lodge on Saturday, choir at Mass Sunday, and choir practice today. The good news is that she is improving today…she has a positive startup rate as we used to say in the submarine biz…so hopefully she’ll be well on the road to recovery by tomorrow. We found out there’s going to be a big announcement at Seminole Campground on Thursday…several rumors abound but it looks like  for winter after next they’re going to change back to regular/premium sites…that’s the way it was the first year we were here and I guess they’re going back to it, lets them charge more money I guess. Bryan the park manager told me the other day that they were going to start keeping a few sites open for daily/weekly/monthly stays even during the high season…all this winter he’s had people calling looking for a site for short term and keeping a site open will being in some serious extra money if it’s on a daily rate…he thought that he would have been able to fill a site 4-5 nights a week this winter if he had one open.

Anyway…that’s about it…guess I’ll go ahead and post this…here’s a couple funnies for ya’.

The most accurate pie chart evah.

OK…everybody stay back now.

Neil likes to ride…but I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t be bike riding here. We did walk along this area on the Cliffs of Moher during  our Ireland trip in 2014 although not at this exact spot.

Speaking of Ireland trip…the island in the last scene of the most recent Star Wars episode is Skellig Michael…about 10 miles off the southwest coast of Ireland. We visited the beehive huts up at the abandoned monastery there…and were standing in the same spot that Luke was standing in during his brief, non speaking role in the movie…for which I read he received $10 million. They shoulda hired Neil…he’s got a gray beard like that and he woulda done it for $1 million, $2 million tops.

And since we’re on the subject of Star Wars…I think this guy went to the wrong rebel re-enactment.

Cyas.