New Adventure

(NOTE: View a larger picture by clicking on the photo(s) above.)

How about another riddle this month. “I’m weightless, but you can see me. Put me in a bucket and I’ll make it lighter. What am I?” No cheating now. Running to the end to see the answer would be cheating. Think first! I’m sure you can get it.

December 1st & 2nd, Fort Yargo Park was closed to visitors. The reason for this was a deer hunt on the 1800 acres. Well, not actually all the acres. There were three hunting zones set up with a maximum of 15 hunters per zone. Only the 45 who had previously signed up for the hunt were eligible. As I understand it, 13 deer were bagged, 8 bucks and 5 doe. There probably would have been more killed if it had not been for the all day rain on the second day. Only one hunter stuck it out through the rain. I did see two deer scampering across the road in front of my truck. During all the time we have spent at this park, it is the first time I have seen deer here. Either I am always in the wrong place to see deer, or they are avoiding me just for fun.

The first week in December was another “Parsons luck” event. You remember Murphy’s Law, Parsons’ Law, same thing. Carolyn was fixing a meal in the trailer (lunch or dinner, depending on your regional preference) when she opened the refrigerator to retrieve some item. The door fell completely off the refrigerator into the floor. Surprise, surprise!

I was there to investigate the matter and see what broke. What broke was a little plastic sleeve on the bottom of the door that fit over a metal pin attached to the frame. OK! Now what? The first order of business is to get the door shut again to prevent the frig from getting hot. There is a similar sleeve on the upper door frame that slips upward onto another metal pin, but with the bottom sleeve broken there was nothing to hold the door far enough upward to fit over the upper pin.

I rummaged in my tool area and found a five-gallon, wooden paint stir. These stirs are about ¼ inch thick. I lifted the door over the upper pin and placed the paint stir under the door, between it and the frame. That was sufficient to catch the pin just enough to close the door. So far so good. But if we open the door like this, it will again fall on the floor. We needed a prop.

I looked in the gator (that strange green thing we ride around here) and found a piece of 4 by 4 about eight inches long. It looked about the right height. I took it in and placed it on the floor near the middle of the door. If we gently opened the door, holding it with upward pressure, we could gingerly open the door and prop it on the 4 x 4 to hold it open. To close the door, we reversed the process making sure that the paint stir slipped back under the door to hold it in place.

It seems like a simple fix. Get a new sleeve part and replace the broken one. I looked on the refrigerator maker’s website (Norcold) and searched for a part. I could find no such part. I then call Norcold. There is no part I am told. The hinge is built into the door. The door will have to be replaced. “And how much is a door,” I asked.

“About two hundred dollars,” I am told.

“ And how do I get hold of a new door.”

“You will have to find a dealer in your area,” he says.

I find a dealer that is some 35 miles away from us. I call and find that they have no doors in stock. It will have to be ordered. It will take a few days. The parts person on the other end asked if the refrigerator was still under warranty. I had no idea. She said that she could check for me. I said that would be great. She did, and it was. Several days later we drove to the dealer and picked up our free door.

The new door looked nothing like our old door. It still needed work. Our refrigerator door has wooden panels to match the cabinets. The panels had to be removed from the existing door and installed on the new one. No instructions. I had no idea how the panels came out or how they needed to be replaced. Through trial and error and a little effort, we accomplished the task and have a new refrigerator door. Don’t you just love it when a plan comes together?

The refrigerator is a key element in an RV. It is different from the refrigerator in your home. Besides being generally smaller they also are operationally or technically different, the refrigeration principle is the same, how it works is very different. The RV-refrigerator is an absorption refrigerator and unlike the unit at home with a compressor this type has no moving parts so it’s virtually silent.

Instead of applying cold directly the heat is drawn out, or absorbed. The theory is, when there is an absence of heat there is cold. Basically the RV refrigerator uses heat, either from an electric heating element or LP gas flame. The heat starts a chemical reaction and then through evaporation and condensation causes it to cool. It also works off of gravity, freezing the freezer compartment first and then dropping down to the refrigerator compartment. What else is different is many can be operated on propane gas, DC electrical and AC 110 volt electrical, as can ours. If our electricity goes out, the gas automatically takes over to keep it cold.

Have you ever seen a motor home, in a campground? Effortlessly, the driver backs into the campsite and shuts the unit down. Before the entry door is even opened you see four strange looking legs of steel being thrust ground-ward like some type of morphing kid's toy. With a slight, subtle shudder, the coach settled into a perfectly level position. Yep, automatic levelers, electric or hydraulic are a luxury to be admired. But what about the rest of us? Do we worry about level? You bet!

Let's understand why the rig needs to be leveled in the first place. Certainly our camping comfort is at issue. It would not be appealing to sleep with our heads lower than our feet or to be constantly struggling to keep from rolling into the wall or worse yet, the spouse. And consider the inconvenience of having the eggs roll off the galley countertop every morning.

The primary reason for leveling any modern RV is to enable the absorption refrigerator, specifically the low-temperature evaporator coils in the refrigerator, to function properly. Due to the dynamics of the RV absorption refrigerator, the evaporator coils inside the cooling unit must permit the gravity flow of liquid ammonia through a portion of the system. And as any RVer who can spell "RV" will know, liquids simply won't flow uphill.

So now you know. Enough about refrigerators.

We hope that everyone had a Merry Christmas. I know that times are difficult for many people. Even Santa has his problems. Dasher and Prancer were laid off, and Donner and Blitzen had to take an unpaid furlough. So actually it was only four tiny reindeer this year.

The Park tries to get into the spirit of the Season. The first picture shows the modest light decorations on the Visitor’s Center. We had a party for the Park personnel, hosts, et all. It was held in the Will-a-Way section of the Park. This is an area designed for special groups such as handicapped and troubled youth. The second picture shows a table full of food for the occasion. You see the area where we ate in the background. A good time was had by all, and the table looked nothing like that at the end.

The Park had special activities at the Old Fort on the week-end of the 12th. There are a number of reenactors, in period costumes, creating items of the past, crafting, throwing axes and cooking period fare. The third picture is of the out-door kitchen behind the fort. You can also see targets in the field behind the kitchen where the axes are thrown.

Since we left here last August, the new area of Yurts has been completed. What is a Yurt? The last two pictures show the outside and inside view. Basically, a Yurt is a round tent, with inside wooden lattice structure covered with canvas with a fiber-glass dome and a classy wooden floor. As you see here, there is a deck on the backside, a picnic bench, a fire pit and grill in the front. The size is about 20 feet in diameter and sleeps eight in bunk beds and converted couch. It contains a ceiling fan and a heater for comfort. One can fish directly from the deck.

The original yurt is a portable, felt-covered, wood lattice-framed dwelling structure traditionally used by nomads in the steppes of Central Asia. The structure is kept under compression by the weight of the covers, sometimes supplemented by a heavy weight hung from the center of the roof. They vary regionally, with straight or bent roof-poles, different sizes, and relative weight. A yurt is designed to be dismantled and the parts carried on camels or yaks to be rebuilt on another site. The Kazakh (a nomadic group in the region) word used for yurt means "felt house".

During the course of this blog, I have used a familiar symbol and word, “&” and “et.” It has an interesting history. The symbol is called an ampersand. The name "ampersand" certainly sounds as if it should mean something terribly exotic, coined in the misty yesteryear of typography, but its roots are actually quite humble, and we have the long-suffering schoolchild to thank for the word.  It comes from the practice once common in schools of reciting all 26 letters of the alphabet plus the "&" sign, pronounced "and," which was considered part of the alphabet, at least for learning purposes.

Any letter that could also be used as a word in itself ("A," "I," "&" and, at one point, "O") was preceded in the recitation by the Latin phrase "per se" ("by itself") to draw the students' attention to that fact.  They would say, “A per se A”; “I per se I.” Thus the end of this daily ritual would go: "X, Y, Z and per se and."  This last phrase was routinely slurred to "ampersand" by children rightly bored to tears, and the term crept into common English usage by around 1837.

The ampersand symbol itself, the "&," while devilishly hard to draw by hand, becomes much less mysterious when revealed as a stylized rendition of the Latin word "et," meaning, of course, "and."   Finally, it's interesting to note that proofreaders reading copy aloud to one another pronounce the ampersand symbol "et" to distinguish it from the actual word "and."   

And so, we come to the end of another blog. When next we meet we will be in a new Park where we have not been before, High Falls State Park in Jackson, GA. That will be our next New Adventure.

Oh, yes. You are looking for the answer to the riddle. Huh? Ok, here it is………..a hole.

As and “aside” to end the year, here are the statistics from my Word Count of what I have written thus far in the blog:

Pages 125
Words 83,959
Characters (no spaces) 367,460
Characters (with spaces) 451,593
Paragraphs 1,148
Lines 6,038

HAPPY NEW YEAR TO ALL!

Heritage makes the person; Attitude makes the life.