Two Weeks Off....Really?

That's me kicking a $2100 tranny that cost a total of nearly $3K to have replaced. That is the old one.
Jim balancing a grill on fire on the last day in Madera.

Some peppers a friend of Midori's in Chico sent down to us.
And other stuff too.
A whole bunch of stuff....we discovered our grape vines had a bumper year too and the girls had fun picking those. We freeze them and enjoy frozen grapes all year long.

Well, after the Madera Fair we found ourselves with a two week vacation. We will take off for Texas, NM, and Southern Cal near the end of this month coming home finally around November 1.

Our home coming was truly an interesting affair. I took the Ford (which I reported earlier had transmission noises and silver filings in the pan down to be fixed.....$2920 later she is running like a top. When we got bak and my mechanic checked it he found more filings, even though it had been services and cleaned out in Madera, which meant something in there was coming apart. Shortly my money and I parted as well.

We also discovered on homecoming that somehow the plug for our deep freezer in the garage had been pulled out so it had become a lab for mold growing. Several of the buttons on the dishwasher don't work either. The door latch on the front door had loosened (it does that once a year) so i had to take that apart and fix it. Since I was in fix-it mode I took my office window (i broke the inner pane last year) down to be repaired (another $85.) Oh, and the swamp cooler pump shorted and had to be replaced. OK, so there are no profits left from the summer tour and I still have to analyze and figure out why the RV's ABS and Break light keep coming on.

I hope I am not depressing any of you. I am actually finding this all rather hilarious. How can you not? I mean we started the season off with a promoter not paying us for 10 days of work and have every natural disaster under the sun follow in our wake (tornadoes in OK-two days after leaving Canton, OK then just one hour after leaving OK City, major thunderstorms everywhere, Missouri River Floods in Plymouth, IA, Earth Quake in Virginia one week after leaving there, Hurricane Irene floods Walton, NY one week after we leave. Oh, and not to forget about the big power outage in Ohio while we were there. One Facebook friend wrote, "...and destruction follows them..." It has been weird.

If this all seems disjointed I must apologize. So much has happened that the flood of thoughts are overwhelming and I have a scatter brain anyways.

Upon returning I called one good friend and he goes into atrial fibrillation while I am on the phone. Thankfully he is fine and we will meet for lunch next week. Then I get off the phone to find out that Buttercup the snake had escaped from his cage (he is harmless as everyone knows) but for his own health and well being (we don't want to find a dead snake 2 months from now somewhere in the house. So we tore the house apart. Jim's new girlfriend was over and threw in a hand. By here scream we knew he had been found, nearly two hours after we noticed him gone and 10 or 12 hours after he escaped. The house was now in shambles. UGH!

So what is next to come??? What an adventure!

Tomorrow the kids head to Trapeze Arts for practice and tips down in the bay Area.