It is apparently "Pit Bull Awareness Day" today...

so let me say this:  I am a nearly middle aged housewife.  I mostly work in RV parks. I am a full-time RVer who travels the country in my Airstream.

and i own a pit bull.

She was used by a local animal shelter in a fundraiser once ($1 per kiss), she has been mentioned and/or pictured in the newspaper four times, she has worked as a therapy dog in a nursing home, and she has been our faithful companion for the past 7 years.

Thank you Luna for being the wonderful dog you are, and for teaching me, and many many others, that "Pit Bulls" aren't what the media and the hype makes them out to be... they are just dogs. wonderful wonderful dogs.

you see interesting things when you drive near nashville...

like Loretta Lynn's dusty pink tour bus with her name across the side.

or this slightly more understated one:

by the Belamy Brothers

drove past the Grand Ol Opry, too. was cool! squeeeeee! :D

hehehehe

What could cause electric trailer brakes to drag slightly at random intervals? It's driving us nuts and screwing our MPG.

Holy crap this dog is awesome. and in other news....

stumbled across this vid tonight, and it is awesome. best dancing dog i have ever seen. had to share

and in other news... we returned to Rodanthe early early this morning. very minimal damage to the park, altho the ground was wet and squishy, and the road still had some water and sand on it in places. Earl was a big threat, and a big nothing. o well, better safe, and out, than sorry and stuck there. back to work as usual

Earl's comin' to visit...

so i'm getting the heck outta dodge. leaving tomorrow and heading a couple hours inland. hopefully the bridge stays up so we can get back.

i'll take pictures of whatever happens wherever i end up, but i won't be on the OBX, thas fer sure :D

WARNING. pissed off rant ahead...

I like my job in NC. it's very busy here, busiest KOA i've worked at yet, and the first corporate location i've worked. there's a new manager here this year, which brings me to my complaint.

i am getting sick and friggn tired of hearing how great the last manager was. how everything was spotless and beautiful and perfect and how things have gone "so far downhill" this year. normally i would just blow this off, yeah, things tend to take a dip the first year a new manager takes over... its the learning curve. so WHY does this bother me so much this time, you ask? because in this case, the last manger let the whole park fall apart... he didn't repair ANYTHING. he would just slap a fresh coat of paint on the wall that was rotten inside and falling down, and hang a flower basket in front of it, so it LOOKED pretty... and he let the park fall to ruin like that for FIVE YEARS. now a new manager comes waltzing in, and the whole place collapses around his ears, and he's doing all he can just to keep his head above water, and every day i just hear about how great the last guy was.

ARGHHH!!!!

yeah, the grass gets a bit tall on occasion, we're severely short-staffed. we have maybe 1/4 to 1/3 the staff we SHOULD have for a park this size. we get on it as fast as we can. yeah, the bathrooms get a little dirty-looking sometimes. hello, we're at a beach, people track sand in constantly. every dall, all day... and with the aforementioned short-staff situation, we can't mop as often as we should, but it does get done! there's a nail sticking out of the deck? someone's there with a hammer. toilet clogs? someone's there with a plunger. we're doing our darndest, but there's only so many of us, and so many places we can be at one time.

and to that guy who pissed and moaned about the dump station, and then wrote a paragraphs-long nasty review about how pissed you were and you were never coming back and we're an ecological disaster...shut up. we don't want or need you back if you gonna act like that. the whole park is on a septic. not sewer. no city pipes hauling your crap away, no siree. there's a big ol crap tank down there, and they DO give out after a while... especially when handing the needs of a 300 space park. you just happened to be the lucky guy that the thing blew up on. if you'd come in the office and expressed your displeasure in a reasonable manner, we woulda probably given you some money back, maybe a free night at some later date when things were fixed up right. they're nice, reasonable people here... but no, you came storming in acting like a d-bag and threatening to call the EPA on us. well guess what. that dump station has a BRAND NEW tank now. there is no 'ecological disaster'. the thing works like a charm now. and it isn't because you pissed and moaned and had a temper tantrum in our office. it's because it broke, and our new manager actually FIXES things that break. imagine that!

we've been here for a month and a half, and we've gotten a brand new septic tank, new bikes on order (because the old ones are hideously old and rusted and falling apart, like everything else), and a new bouncy pillow. the pillow is important because the old one broke. people LOVED the pillow. corporate said they wouldn't pay for a new one. it was too expensive. the manager somehow managed to GET ONE ANYWAY.

so yeah, we don't have flowerpots hanging out front and fresh paint on everything this year. sorry. we're actually spending the corporate budget on FIXING things that are broke this year. i guess NEXT year we'll focus on pretty.

signed, that smiling face at the front desk.

BRING ON THE PAIN~!~!~!

sheesh. this is turning into a man v food blog with all the crazy stuff hubby keeps eating everywhere we go....

this time it's Texas Pete hot fries at Lisa's Pizzeria in Rodanthe, NC. the SMELL alone had me cringing, i wasn't brave enough to try them. lol

He's doing it again. This time it's a two pound burger called the Cylone at a little place called Top Dog Cafe in Rodanthe NC. Photos are here!
now that's a big burger!

A bittersweet move

I enjoyed Amarillo. really i did. it was pretty there, there was much fun stuff to do and look at in the area. i loved the atmosphere. even the hot weather didn't bother me that much. I didn't like the treatment... long story very short, the management style of our bosses in Amarillo really didn't agree with us. We started workamping to have fun and see the USA, not be berated and maltreated. if we wanted to take that kind of abuse, we never would have left our good-paying-but-stressful jobs in New Jersey.

we left

my skill with computers and hubby's skill with everything else got us snapped up from the job market very quickly and after the past 3 1/2 days on the road and 1700 miles we are in the Outer Banks of North Carolina. it's beautiful here. i look forward to my first day tomorrow.

the aftermath...part deux

man that poor skylight is beat up!

From Drop Box

the edges almost all the way around are broken off, and you can see the broken corner much more clearly. the backside had bad cracks all through it also.


we don't really have the $200 to spare that it would take to replace this with Airstream correct parts, so... husband creative fix-it powers - ACTIVATE! viola, a $9 roll of flashing fills the gap till we can fix it right.

From Drop Box

and the really awesome thing, we just finished about 15 minutes ago, and it just started to rain as i type this. it hadn't rained a drop since the skylight first broke 4 nights ago... and trust me, the weather has looked plenty threatening. it all bypassed. Thank you God.

picture

i ran outside in the wind and grabbed it... it flew several car-lengths before it landed. most of the edges, and one corner, were all broken off (you can see the broken corner in the pic), but it was intact enough to tie back in to place to provide at least *some* protection if it decided to rain.
well.. this means Eric will be on the roof next time we have the time. :-/

The wind ripped our skylight off tonight, about a half hour ago. I have a picture, but i can't post it right now because i have no internet. Hopefully pictures tomorrow (or later today, i guess) the wind is still whistling outside. I don't think i'll be sleeping well tonight. :-(

poor Eric

he had a tooth pulled today. so he's kinda miserable :( it had a HUGE hole in the side of it, hidden between the teeth! no more pain from that puppy at least!
yay?

WHOA

altho i have occasionally been posting minor updates, i have been woefully lax in providing photos to go with my posts. i am going to fix that.

FIRST... we were in Titusville FL because the state finally came thru after just over a year, and now Eric has a lovely set of brand new hearing aids that work GREAT. BUT, while we were there, we stayed for most of the time in a surprisingly cheap (for the location) hotel, right on the river, and they sent a shuttle up while we were there, so I got photos of that, too. sorry they mostly turned out blurry. most of those can be seen here.

home is home, no matter where you roam:

From Titusville, FL. 2010

when we hit Texas there's all kind of cool things to look at...
the Big Texan

From Amarillo, TX

Cadillac Ranch

From Amarillo, TX

the American Quarter Horse Association Museum and Hall of Fame

From Amarillo, TX

(which had some really beautiful saddles on display. check 'em out in the gallery.)

and the Panhandle Plains Historical Museum

From Amarillo, TX

and we havn't even been to the Palo Duro Canyon yet.
lots and lots more pictures here.

also, i changed the look and layout of my blog. like it?

Eric likes to hurt himself with food on our days off...

why is that?

we're off to the Coyote Bluff Cafe to have the "Burger From Hell". well, he's gonna have one. I'm gonna steal his cheese fries. :D

The steak won. But only 7oz left it knew it was in a fight!

We at the big texan! Watch hubby stuff himself! www.bigtexan.com

The hearing aids are finally aquired and we're on our way back to texas, our trailer, and a sense of normalcy. Not to mention a job! Yay!!!

My life has become a comedy routine, because I am now, quite literally, "livin' in a van...DOWN BY THE RIVER!!!!!"
lol

Well, after about four years and many games it was barely able to handle, my laptop has decided to give up it's hold on life. In the middle of a game my screen froze, then converted to a very low resolution along with a notice of a video error. When i clicked OK i got a BSOD. It will POST, but nothing else, and after a min it shuts itself off. Oh well.

Why is it so cold in florida? And why did i leave my jacket in the trailer...900 miles away :(

Well, after over a year waiting, we finally got the news that the DVR of Florida was ready to help us. Cue a whirlwind day of packing and planning, and we have just now departed to get Eric some new hearing aids! I hope everything goes smoothly.

mobile post

well, i did it again.

my hair. 10 inches of it.
gonna send it off to Locks of Love within the next couple of days.

O.o

you see this?

its snow.

SNOW.

fortunately it was all gone the next day.

BUT STILL!!!!!

the aftermath...

well, after my last post, we were packed and on the road by that evening. we didn't make it too far the first night, but as everything in the trailer was frozen solid, and we hadn't had a good shower in a week and a half, our first night was spent in a cheap hotel. with heat. and hot running water. it felt like heaven.

two more days south and we stopped in a little town called Cedar Creek, TX. it took another 2 days for everything to completely thaw. that was when we were able to assess the damages:

one crapper hose - frozen solid and broke apart when trying to remove
the kitchen faucet - both the cartridge and the sprayer head cracked and leaked
the fresh water hose - was intact, but both ends expanded just enough to leak $2 fix at both ends
and the big nasty one... the water heater cracked.

we have not yet replaced it, all we did was bypass it and drain it. but we will have to fix it eventually. for now, no hot water and regular trips to the park's showers.

here's the new faucet tho

....

The crew at Amazon offered the workcampers the opportunity to stay and work through January, and we figured that since we didn't have to be anywhere until May, why not. Everyone we talked to, and every weather site i looked at, said the average temp was 30-40s. cold, yes, but tolerable. we agreed to stay

our water froze Christmas eve. and it got colder. and colder

we waited for the cold snap to end. they always do. we can tough it out. everyone told us this was exceptional, this never happens.

and it got colder.

and colder

and we waited.....


as i type this, it is 2 degrees outside. and this is what i woke up to find:

my dog's bowl. half frozen. it was INSIDE the trailer. we're packing to leave today