Phannie

Phannie
Photo taken near Monument Valley, Utah

Tuesday, June 24, 2014

A Month With the Kids and More Stuff for Phannie

At Rayford Crossing RV Resort, Spring, Texas (Houston)

We have the good fortune in retirement of being eagerly available to Mindy and her family when the need arises.  Her decision to return to nursing school here in The Woodlands offered the opportunity for Sandy and me to add a little support for what will be quite a challenge for her, now that she is a young mother of two.  Tyler is very devoted and supportive, too, but he works long hours and cannot always be available.  That's where we come in, and we've found there are few things as satisfying as being able to fulfill an occasional need for our loved ones.  Frankly, I can't think of anything that would be quite as sad as reaching a point where we feel unnecessary and unneeded by our family.  Filling in a few gaps is much more of a blessing to us than to them, although they would argue the opposite.

We also have the delight of watching our grandsons as they grow, changing so rapidly right before our eyes.  We were there on Mason's first day of school, and we were there to see Pryce first roll over and then sit up.  Wow!  Not every grandparent can say that!
Grandson Pryce sitting up!
Our time here is rapidly coming to a close for right now, as Tyler's sister, Holly, will be helping out for a while as we make plans for a summer trip to the mountains.  We are always looking for an excuse to leave Texas in the summertime, as my beloved state becomes largely uninhabitable during that time.  As it stands now, we will be caravanning to a campground near Dolores, Colorado around July 18, where we will spend a few days before exploring more of Colorado afterward.  

I have a few additional things to show you that we have bought for Phannie:

We had a pressing need for a sliding shelf under the kitchen sink.  In Tiffin coaches of this type, the lower cabinet is very deep, and we had all kinds of difficulty retrieving articles at the back of this cavity.  Solution?  Shelvesthatslide.com. We merely sent them the measurements, and we got back a well-constructed pullout shelf that I conned Tyler into installing.  We're very happy with the purchase, but a downside was the installation instructions, which we thought were rather poor.  Thankfully, Tyler and I together were able to figure it out without much help from the instructions.


Opening the box from Shelves That Slide
Tyler in installation mode (finally good for something)

Voila!  Nice job, Tyler!

Here's another must have:  The Oxygenics shower head.  Got this from Amazon for about fifty bucks.  Any RVer knows that water pressure is an issue in our rigs, so I got this to try to boost it a bit for taking showers.  I'm not sure how it works, but it does help.


Next is the Strongback folding chair. It's not exactly cheap at around $100, but I'm sure we would never be satisfied with anything else.  It's incredibly easy to fold and unfold, and the back support it gives makes it well worth the cost.  We definitely love this chair:



Well, there you have it for now.  I'm not doing a lot of posting lately, but that's because we're not traveling.  And this is a 'travel' blog, after all.