Oh No, Not Again

Wesley Chapel, Florida (high 85, low 68)

The summer rainy season has started and we're getting our afternoon showers, which often bring strong storms with a lot of thunder and lightning.  We are very anxious to get back up to the mountains.  It's stifling hot and humid here.


When we go to the Keys, we have no mobile RV repair person that we know and trust, so we always try to do repair or replace anything we think may go wrong, before we go to the Keys.

If you remember from my previous blog posts, our preventative maintenance didn't work well this year, when our our almost new RV toilet broke while we were in the Keys.   Of course we didn't have spare parts (we do now) and had a bit of a dilemma trying to repair it ourselves.

Our Thetford Aria Classic toilet is porcelain including the bowl and the base, but unfortunately, the foot pedal mechanism is plastic and poorly designed.

Well, guess what?   Not two months after we repaired the toilet, the foot mechanism broke again!   Grrrrrrrr.  That toilet was only a year old when it first broke.

We called Tim Stratton our favorite local mobile Rv guy, has relocated to North Carolina, so now we have to find another repair guy.   Grrrrr

We found another local mobile guy and have an appointment for the repair.  He's a bit young, so I hope he has enough experience to be able to handle all the potential things that can go wrong in an RV.   The bolts on the closet flange on our RV are lined up at an angle. They don't move, because the closet flange is all one piece and all a part of the holding tank.  When we tried to install another toilet, the bolts didn't line up correctly and we were unable to install it.  Just as an FYI, apparently this is quite common and there is a part you can install to make it work.   We just found that out and I don't know what it's called.

We have to decide whether to replace or repair the toilet.  He said all Rv toilets are made pretty much the same way and they all use cheap plastic parts.   We think our Aria toilet wasn't put together properly from the factory and one part isn't centered like it should be.   We were afraid to take it all apart and try to center it correctly when we were in the Keys because if we messed up, we would have been without a toilet.   Maybe our new Rv guy can do something with it because we feel that is the cause of the foot pedal breaking.   We will have to see how it turns out.  Sorry for so much toilet info, but I like to document things because for sure we won't remember in a year or two.  :)



I went to the doctor earlier this week because I've felt some pressure (if that's the correct way to describe it)  in my chest.  It felt more like a lung issue than a heart issue and since I used to be a smoker (30+ years ago) and I did a few Google searches of my symptoms,  I felt it might be a good idea to get it checked out.  They did a breathing test which I passed with flying colors, an EKG, just as a precaution  and a chest x-ray and everything appeared fine.  I felt pretty good afterwards after passing those tests.  I decided to wait and see if I start to get better before I followed up with the doctor.  We both had a pretty good respiratory bug a few months ago, so maybe it's still there a little.  I wondered if I had pneumonia. I guess the tests ruled that out.

A few days later, we met a neighbor who just lost her husband a few weeks ago.  They had just sold their house in Tampa, and were planning on spending the summer in Maine.  He felt ill, and went to the doctor.  They did a chest x-ray among other things and said he was fine.  A few days later he ended up in the ER where they did an MRI and discovered he had lung cancer and his lungs were completely eaten up with cancer.  Eighteen days later he was dead.  That just goes to prove how short and unfair life can be.  I felt  so sorry for this poor woman and her husband.  

Of course, when she told me the x-ray of his chest didn't show his lung cancer, my good results from my medical tests don't make me feel as secure as they did before I heard about him.

The breathing issues I was having seem to be better, but if they don't clear up, I will go back to the doctor.  I'm just wondering if some of the respiratory bug I had had started to surface again. I've been taking my echinacea and will definitely keep an eye on things, and although I am not  big on seeing a doctor, I will follow up if I need to.


Al is getting his annual physical today.   He also had an appointment with the surgeon as a follow up on his rotator cuff surgery.  His surgeon is the doctor for the Tampa Bay Lightning (hockey team) and they will be playing in the Stanley Cup finals starting today. He got a call from the doctors office canceling his appointment and all others this week.  I guess the hockey team has a higher priority than Al.  :)



I heard that Live Writer has partially fixed their program but the pictures still won't load.  Since my last experience posting via Blogger worked out so well, I decided to try again.

I am posting some pictures from last summer in the mountains, just to test blogger again.

BTW, does anyone know where in Blogger can you tell how many words you are posting/writing?
The word count showed up in Live Writer, but I can't find it in Blogger.

I am posting these in the large size.  I usually use medium because if I remembered right, the large were too large for my blog pages.  It looks okay, we'll see, I guess.

I think I just may stick with doing my blog posts in Blogger.

Pondering Blogging Without Live Writer, and Wildlife Pics

Wesley Chapel, Florida (high 90, low 70)


We’ve been taking care of business since we got back from the Keys.  We miss the Keys, but right now we’re dreaming of the north Georgia mountains.  They have been having wonderfully cool weather, compared to the 90’s and stifling humidity that we’re dealing with here in the Tampa area.

We haven't done anything fun or blog worthy since we got back, but we have had some nice visitors in our back yard.


Al found this little gopher tortoise walking down the street in the campground on the hot asphalt. Gopher tortoises dig holes in the sand/dirt and make their homes there.  They do not live in the water and they don't live in parking lots.

We worried about him walking on the hot pavement.   That is not the usual tortoise habitat and since they are cold blooded, we worried that he could get overheated, not to mention get run over.

We debated where to put him because they usually are heading somewhere and we didn't want to disrupt his pattern.  We put him down in our friends site and he headed right over to some plants and crawled under them.  We think he was happy to be out of the baking sun.

He spent the night in the same place, and our friend saw him early the next morning walking back down the street.   I had considered taking him to the State Park or possibly calling a wildlife sanctuary to see what they thought.  They are a protected species, so we would have had to make sure we didn't break any laws.  I just didn't think a busy campground  was a good place for him.

A campground with paved roads is not exactly tortoise habitat.  It may have been at one time, but now it's people habitat and there are huge zero turn mowers running around all the time, as well as cars and rv's.  

Be safe little tortoise.  I hope you found a better place to live.   Notice the front feet?  You can see how adapted he is for digging burrows.

We've never seen one quite this small.

We have been seeing the otters again.  Last year there were four of them, and we think two were offspring.

This year, we only see two, so maybe some babies will be coming.

They were very cooperative and posed nicely for me.

They sure kept their eyes on me.

There has been a lot of talk in Blog land since the changes with Blogger have caused us to not be able to use Live Writer to write and post our blogs.  Sure, you can post directly from Blogger and it's do-able, but pictures take too long to load, and it's not anywhere as nice a program as Live Writer.

But since the Google gods are going to do what they want to do and since we may or may not be able to use Live Writer, I guess I will have to deal with posting blogs via Blogger.  This will be my first one in years, so I guess we'll see how it turns out.

It's been said that blogging is no longer in fashion and many people have migrated over to other social media options like Twitter, Facebook, and Google +.   I guess Google is encouraging us to quit blogging and use Google +.

I have explored Google + some but I don't find it suits my needs as well as blogging.  I started blogging to keep a picture diary of our RVing life and the places we go and the things we've done.

Before blogger, I actually typed journals on my computer and inserted pictures into those journals.  It worked just fine until I discovered Blogger and a better way to do the same thing.  Once I started blogging, it wasn't long before I got my first follower.  I found other bloggers via blogging and have made many new blogging friends.  I've learned a lot from other Bloggers and I for one will miss it if it goes away.

After thinking about what Rick said about Blogger's "time to shine is over",  I considered other options because I do see some value in Facebook and maybe if I explored Google + a little more, I could make it work for me.  I quickly realized that there are no other options, at least that I know of right now, that will give me the things that Blogger does.

I use Blogger to document our life.  I like the fact that others read my blog and comment.  I like the fact that I have other blogger friends, but even if no one reads my blog, I will continue to post it for our own use.   I like the fact that I can go back to previous times.  I like looking at my pictures and remembering fun times.  I like being able to refer back to things if I can't remember something.  I like going back and seeing what the weather was like at a certain time of year.  I like being able to refer back to when we did a repair and who we used.  I have a separate blog for our RV lots in Georgia and the Keys.  I use it to help me rent them out.  Facebook steers people there and Blogger gives them more information and pictures.

So Google, you can do whatever you wish with Blogger, but I'm going to continue to journal our life, with or without you.   Maybe I need to back-up my blog though.   :)


I just saved and did a preview of this blog post.  It seems to have turned out just fine, so other than it taking much too long to post pictures, maybe it won't be so bad.  They have made some progress because it's easier to resize pictures now and you don't have re-size each photo.   The paragraphs are staying separated when before they all seemed to run together.   Maybe it won't be so bad after all.