Working like a dog
Here’s Loyal Pet Number One being lazy. I can’t blame her.
Short weekend. We didn’t do too much. Loyal Reader Number Four and I went to the temple on Saturday morning and out to dinner with three other couples on Saturday night. We went to an all-you-can-stand-to-eat Chinese restaurant. I suppose it might have been worth the price, but there was a lot of inedible stuff there. I’m not a fan of all-you-can-stand-to-eat restaurants.
I finally got the old Coleman lantern working on Sunday afternoon! Huzzah! I’m not really sure what was wrong with it. The pump was working fine, so I didn’t have to install the leather seal I had bought. The generator appeared to be brand new. The mantles were brand new. The fuel seemed to be fine. It just wouldn’t light. I ended up replacing the generator anyway (don’t know whether it really helped or not) and went through a lot of matches with no luck. I finally got out one of those long-necked lighters and got it going after pumping it way up. Lots of spluttering and flashing and – finally – light. Once it was lit, it ran just fine. Hopefully, it will be easier to light the next time. It’s a really cool old lantern (it’s a 220F, built sometime between 1964 and 1973). Now I have to decide whether to put it in the trailer with the camping gear or keep it here for emergencies. Decisions.
Took the back roads (link warning: annoying Nissan-sponsored blurb) home this evening and enjoyed the trip. It had been a very slow ride this morning, so I stayed about an hour late tonight. The freeway through Livermore and Tracy has been more crowded than usual lately, so the back roads have been more attractive. The mountain switchbacks are fun in the Miata and it’s nice to have pretty much zero traffic for a very large portion of it. I need to figure out how to drive it in the opposite direction some morning. Maybe tomorrow if it’s not raining.
Let’s see, did I cover all the high points of last week’s Utah weekend trip? Drive: check. Salt Flats: check. Dreary Nevada wasteland: check. Fun dramatic performance: check. Visiting with family: probably not. We visited with family and it was nice to see them again after too much time had gone by.
The visit with my father last week was also fine. I hope he’s having a nice time with his brother. Don’t know when that visit is over and he goes home – maybe that time has already come and gone by now.
My father brought a bunch of pictures of his hometown in Colorado that were very interesting. We had been there a few years ago and had found it interesting, but the father’s comments and perspective were especially interesting. Example: he went to the old school and found pictures of all the graduating classes from Way Back When. He remembered a lot of them and told us interesting things about them. The same with the old pictures of the coal miners from the historical display in the middle of town. Just fascinating. The town itself is a wreck, of course.
Okay, it’s time to be done tonight. See you on Tuesday.