Wednesday, Oct. 9, 2019 – Travel Day to Taylorsville State Park in Kentucky

Set the alarm for bright and early (though it was still dark outside!), thought we'd be able to get out earlier than usual since I did so much packing yesterday and there wasn't too much to do, but of course, that was too much to hope for. For some reason, our batteries suddenly behaved as if they weren't connected, and we had no power to the jacks on the trailer, so we couldn't raise it to hook it up to the truck. It took some time, but we finally resolved the issue, there's some sort of individual circuit breaker in the battery compartment, and once I switched that off and on, it worked. No idea why or how or when that happened, everything was working fine last night. So much for getting out early! By the time we got finished at the dump, it was just after 10:00, which was my drop-dead time for getting out, so we just barely made it, but later than I had hoped when I got up this morning! It was an uneventful trip, thank goodness, and we found the perfect fuel stop in northern Kentucky, a Pilot on the east side (the one on the west side had NO room for us!) where we had room to pull in the car pumps, plus they had a Subway so Hubby managed to get us a sandwich while I fueled up the truck. From there it was a quick trip to Taylorsville State Park, a lot of back roads but nothing we couldn't handle, arriving just after 4:00, right on schedule. We checked in with no problem and went out to the horse camp, and found a fairly mundane campsite, at least compared to the fabulous site we had at Pleasant Hill, where we definitely got spoiled! Here all the sites are side by side, and they had hitching rails rather than highlines, which frankly, I hate, so I had to reconnoiter a bit to find a place where I could put up my highline around the edge of the trees in front of the one of the hitching posts, but managed to find one. It's a bit of a walk, but not much further than at Pleasant Hill. One advantage here, of course, we have electric and water right on the site, though getting water out to the horses will take some doing. I hope I have enough hose to reach them! I just hope the trails will be good here, because there's nothing really special about the camp. Lots of kids here, seems like a real family place, and there are quite a few non-horse people here, not sure what that's about. Anyway, very tired after our long drive, didn't even bother to unhook the truck or put the screen room up, just did the basics before getting the horses settled, and us as well!

Tuesday, Oct. 8, 2019 – Prep Day

Had a very busy and tiring day packing up and putting away everything that we had used during this last fabulous month at Pleasant Hill Lake. The most challenging was getting enough air out of my kayak to fit it back into the bag, but we managed it! Hubby helped me put some stuff up top in the attic, and I managed to get just about everything away, including closing up the awning so I had nothing except horse stuff to do in the morning. Unfortunately we couldn't hook up to the truck since the site isn't level enough, but that shouldn't take too long. It's a long drive to our next camp, so I'm hoping to get out of here asap in the morning!

Monday, Oct. 7, 2019 – Hay Pickup, Trailer Return and Shopping

First job on the agenda today was pickup some hay. Thanks to Facebook market place, I found some good second cutting right in Perrysville, on the way to Mike's place to return his trailer. A nice big farm with a lot of stuff going on, sold me enough to get me through next week, when I'll have to find some in Kentucky. Found Mike's place with not problem and off-loaded his trailer, then he offered to show us a good breakfast spot, and we left following him to an place called the Old Mill, in Ashland, right inside a big grocery store, which was great as I needed some produce and some nectar, both of which are better from a grocery store than at Walmart. We had a nice meal, then headed out to do the rest of our shopping before heading back to camp, where I spent a little time doing some preliminary packing for our departure on Wednesday, and watching a beautiful sunset!

Sunday, Oct. 6, 2019 – Repair and Visit Day

Slept late after going to be so late last night, but when I got up I decided to do a quick repair on the toilet. I had repaired the bottom seal a while back, but had developed a little leak because I didn’t put in any teflon tape, so I decided to go ahead and do that two minute job this morning. That went fine, but at one point I needed to move the bathroom sliding door, and unfortunately, when I did that from the bottom, I accidentally knocked it off it’s tracks. Of course, it’s not a simple track type like in a house, where you can just slip it back on the track, oh no, this has to be a very difficult to align top track, where a slide on the top of the door has to be pushed into a hanging nut on a bolt, then a plastic lock has to be turned 180 degrees to lock it in (though I suspect the reason it came off so easily was because the lock was never properly engaged.) I tried to work on it for a bit, but had no luck at all, as it’s one of those 2 or 3-person jobs. As it turned out, some nice neighbors, Erin and Steve came over to visit for a while, and when they learned of my problem they generously offered to help. Thank goodness I accepted! I’m not good at asking for help, but frankly, I would never have been able to do that job on my own, and we’d have been left with a permanently open bathroom door, NO THANK YOU!! Anyway, the three of us fussed with it for over an hour, but we finally managed to get it fixed and LOCKED! End of problem! Thanks so much, guys!! I had hoped to get a quick ride in today, but with all the time spent on that job, it got too late to go. Eventually the campground emptied out except for two sets of folks who are staying an extra night. Unfortunately, the one nearest to us runs their generator all night, so it’s going to be another earplug night!

Saturday, Oct. 5, 2019 – Hubby Entertains The Crowd

Worn out from yesterday’s dialysis, Hubby spent the day in the screen room reading and chatting with many of the neighbors who stopped by. One thing about this place, it’s definitely a community, and they were generous enough to make us a part of it! As a sort of thank you, Hubby agreed to provide some entertainment around the campfire this evening, performing the poem “The Man from Snowy River” as well as a few Shakespeare monologues, which were appreciated by all but a few diehard Ohio State fans that wanted to listen to the game on the radio instead (even though it was a rout!) We were joined by quite a few of the neighbors, and they all seemed to appreciate his skill. Again, it was nice to seem him interact with people, everybody loves Hubby! Stayed up later than usual, but did manage to spend a few quiet moments together before going to bed.

Friday, Oct. 4, 2019 – Computer Finally Finishes!

After morning chores I rand down to the office to check on my computer, and it wasn’t quite finished, but it was up to 92%, so it should be done by later in the day, yay!! I spent some time in the morning cleaning out Mike’s trailer and meanwhile, lots of people came into camp for the weekend, not surprisingly, and we had company come by quite a bit of the day. Eventually we started dialysis, but today we had a lot of problems. I don’t know if it way a poor cannulation or if there was something wrong with the cartridge (we had one box that was pretty crushed when it was delivered, and it was from that box), but his arterial numbers were just so high I had to lower his blood flow rate so slow that it took nearly 4 ½ hours to dialyze him. It was dark by the time we finished, and it was too late for me to reclaim my computer, but I’m sure it will be done by tomorrow. Then all I have to do is play catch-up with all the files since July 7!! What fun!! Grrrr!

Wednesday, Oct. 2, 2019 – Recovery Day

After a long and tiring day yesterday, we had only enough energy to cope with Hubby’s dialysis today. Because of all the bruising from yesterdays surgery, he was quite tender, so it took an extra delicate hand to not cause him any further pain. I was worried that with all the messing around with it yesterday that I would have trouble getting him hooked up, but in the end, I managed to get a good flash and it was a good session. Thank goodness, because I felt so tired I wasn’t sure how well I’d be able to handle it if we had a lot of problems. Spent a good portion of the day trying to download my files on Carbonite, but with only my Verizon hotspot as my Internet connection, that was a LONG slog. I only got about 5% down, so at this rate, it will be weeks! There’s got to be a better way!

Tuesday, Oct. 1, 2019 – Hospital Day

Up bright and early as we had an hour’s drive to the hospital in Canton for Hubby’s fistula clear-out. Even though we just had this done on July 3, it seems the veins have narrowed enough to make it nearly impossible to do a good dialysis, so off we went to another hospital, this time Aultman in Canton. Arrived before our 9:00 a.m appointment time, and they were pretty quick at getting us in. I managed to log onto their wifi, but it was pretty slow, so I didn’t get very far downloading my files off Carbonite during the course of the day. They had quite a bit of trouble getting his fistula opened up, had to do some tricky procedures that took an extra hour. Worse, they felt his blood pressure was too low to give him a general anesthetic, which usually lets him sleep during the whole thing, but instead gave him locals, which kept him awake and aware the entire time, which meant he was very tired by the time they got done. It was after 4:00 by the time they finished, and we still had a couple of stops to make before getting back to camp around 7:00. Just in time to feed the horses and crash for the night!

Monday, Sept. 30, 2019 – Computer Day

Over the weekend, I accidentally dropped my computer and it hit the ground hard, so it wasn’t surprising when it wouldn’t boot up again. I tried to reseat the hard drive, but it was dead, so I took it to a local computer repair store in Ashland, and they fixed me up with a new solid state 1 terrabyte hard drive. Probably overkill, but last time I lost a hard drive, I had no idea how much data I actually needed (I have millions of old files I keep passing down, I really need to do some housekeeping on it, but just can’t seem to find the time!). Anyway, that took the bulk of the day, then when I finally got everything up and running and started to download my backup from Carbonite, I discovered that for some unknown, mysterious reason, they had stopped backing me up on July 7! Not a single file, photo or document saved since July 7! What the hell?? I had a long chat with them about it, and they still weren’t able to explain what happened. I understand that they might have had some problems when we were in a bad cell phone area, but I’ve been in a good 4G area for weeks now, and evidently, it never resumed! GRRRRRRR! A whole summers worth of work lost! Well, at least most of it has been put up online so I should be able to retrieve it, but that, of course, will take days if not weeks to recover. Not a happy camper at the moment! I started downloading using my hotspot, but that is going to take WAY to much time, but since tomorrow Hubby will be in the hospital all day getting his fistula cleared out (it’s been slowly getting more and more difficult to use his access for dialysis), I figure I can use the hospital’s wifi so get some of it done. That will give me something to do while I wait, I supposed. Oh, well, such is life!

Sunday, Sept. 29, 2019 – Heritage Days at Malabar Farm

Though it's a dialysis day today, I wanted to visit the Farm during the Heritage Days, so Hubby and I got over here shortly after they opened at 10:00 and was able to wrest rides to get us to the various parts of the event. We sat along the rocks above the cannon display, and watched while they set of Civil War cannons just below us. We took a tour of the Big House, as they call it, and learned all about how Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall were married here, and how James Cagney was put in charge of the vegetable stand during his stays there. We climbed onto a horse-driven wagon (with help from my dance partner from last night!), and journeyed over to the other side of the farm. I walked a bit while Hubby sat on a bench, though he was chatting up the ladies all the time he was there, as usual! We took another wagon ride back to the barn, did a bit more walking, shared a root beer float (great breakfast!) then decided it was time to head back to camp. We spent about two hours there, and as we left, we saw dozens of people lining up for wagon rides, and a long line of cars making their way into the Farm, so I suspect we left at just the right moment! Had a proper lunch when we got back, then got Hubby hooked up to his dialysis machine. It's been getting harder to get a good connection, so we've been scheduled for yet another vein clearing on Tuesday, grrrr! A good day, though, Hubby was as glad as I was to get out of camp for a while and do something a little different. He even commented that we should look for more things like this to go to, to which I heartily agreed! Spent quite a bit of time chatting with some neighbors in the afternoon while Hubby was dialyzing, then settled down for a quiet evening, as it's been a couple of busy days!