April 5, 2012 -- Why did we come back to Livingston?

We woke to the sound of thunder and raindrops on the roof Monday morning in Columbus. Darn, I had hoped the weather man was wrong in his prediction of rain in Houston for Monday. At least this time he was right!

Luckily it only sprinkled as we drove through the Houston morning traffic. The brand new Katy freeway is already bogged down in the morning—could it be the three lanes the DOT reserved for toll lanes and a two-person carpool lane? As they were mostly empty and our four lanes were crawling along at 20 mph, I would guess so! We would have paid the toll—but no trailers allowed in either lanes. At least unlike in San Antonio, we moved. Three hours later, we were at the house:

And then the work started. The house was in fine shape, but the camper and car weren’t! There was several tons of stuff needing to move from the camper and car into the clean house. And of course, within minutes, it started raining—again. Everything was wet from a severe morning storm.

Tuesday night was the BIG storm! What a wild welcome home. We knew it was coming our way. It hit Dallas area in the afternoon, but we were under a severe thunderstorm watch all afternoon and most of the night. Our weather radio alarm was going off all night. Luckily, we didn’t have any tornadoes, just heavy rain and some hail during the night. The sound and feel of Texas thunder is something that can’t really be described—more like the sound and concussion of bombs being dropped all around you. It is awesome. Our hearts go out to everyone up in the Dallas/Ft. Worth area. I know their storm was terrifying. I was ready to head out west again.

However, we are here to get some work done. The first thing we had to do was replace the set of batteries in the other (gray) truck. Last summer was expensive. Apparently the summer heat killed the two batteries in the camper-truck and the two in the camper. We thought the gray truck was fine as it was working when Larry disconnected the truck batteries in November. His trick didn’t work! Yesterday, with Lee Dudley’s help (just like with the white truck last summer), we replaced the two batteries in the gray truck.

One of the chores is to get an air conditioner installed in the garage to combat the increased summer heat. I will call Charlie today.

Another wrinkle in my plans was discovering the 25 lb. box I mailed from Bethel Island—came in weighting 9 pounds—Nine pounds of someone else’s stuff! When the mail room handed me a BIG box, I said, “No, that isn’t my box. I had a much smaller white box.”

“Had” was the word. The post office tapped our box top to the top of a bigger brown box filled with some junk.

And instead of a LOT of good stuff I mailed, it had:

See the size of box??? See the weird stuff? That is more packing paper under the stuff too. No new Reebok tennis shoes nor new bottles of toilet chemical and sewer valve lubricant?? No DVDs, books and magazines. For my good stuff---they gave me four pieces of kids clothing, some cherished (well-used) toys.

Luckily I insured my box for the amount of stuff I was shipping. My sister replaced two items for me yesterday. And I will be replacing most of it once I get my nice check from the post office. Of all the boxes I shipped back, this one had the least valuable items, so I feel lucky. Lucky! It could have been so much worse!

P.S. Note: Three of my magazines from the box found their back to us via US mail yesterday. I wish they had been the Cook’s Country magazines I sent, darn, but the address of those was on a front flap I had removed. Oh well, just another challenge of living life on the road.