Author: Paul Tomblin

Keystone Cougar 22MLS Great Lakes Regional Rally (Part 1?)

This past few days was the (see title for the whole name) KC2GLRR at Top O’ The Caves campground in Hocking Hills Ohio. We left home on Tuesday, but did it in two stages so Tuesday night we stopped in a Harvest Host for the first night. Now the thing about Harvest Hosts is that they ostensibly free, but you’re supposed to buy something they’re selling to repay them. This night we stopped at Debonné Vineyards, and we’d hoped to discharge our obligation by buying dinner there, but we got there at 5:30 and their kitchen closed at 5. So Vicki bought 3 bottles of some wine that she didn’t even like that much.

Since we couldn’t eat there, we had to head into town for dinner. The person at the front desk had given Vicki directions to the nearby small town with three restaurants they recommended. Unfortunately because they were drawing the directions upside down so that Vicki could follow along, they got one of the first turns backwards and everything else wasn’t working. Fortunately Apple Maps got us going the right direction. When we got to the restaurant, we saw the person who had given Vicki the directions, as well as a couple of other people from Debonné, and some people we’d seen in the Vineyard’s parking spot who were traveling by car even though they were fellow RVers. Also fellow fans of the YouTube channel Happily Ever Hanks.

Taking the much faster route back to our camper, we figured out where we’d turned wrong and turned our 4 mile trip to the restaurant into a 12 mile one.

So after a night of boondocking, we had an uneventful second leg (meaning I don’t remember any details). Vicki drove more than half, but I wanted to take over before we got into the difficult roads in the hills. Although we’re theoretically under-trucked for the weight of our trailer, Lopez (that’s our truck’s name because his license number starts with “LPZ”) handled it like a champ. No problems with any of the steep hills up or down, and around sharp turns and the like. I never had any reason to wish for a more powerful truck.

We pulled into our camp spot and it was just wall to wall Cougars. No, not the female kind (although there were a few of those), the particular make and model of our trailer. Like car models of my youth, they all had slight cosmetic differences because Keystone likes to mix things up, but also there was a great variety of custom mods and enhancements people have made.

Many of the people we’d met in the spring at the mini-meetup in Van Buren were there, as were some people we didn’t know yet. Unfortunately I have a terrible memory for names, and so I’m probably going to get some names wrong if I try to go into details, so I’ll be vague.

There were going to be more people from the group arriving in the next few days, but already we had almost this entire loop of the campsite for the members of the group. There were a maximum of two non-Cougar trailers in this loop, and one of those was a “camp host in training”.

The sites on this loop were not particularly well leveled. It took us a bit of maneuvering around to find a way to park the trailer that it was level-able. We had water and electricity hookups, but no sewer. Because we were planning to stay for a week here, I’d brought a brand new sewer tote, or pooper scooter, or whatever you call it. It’s a 36 gallon tank with wheels and fill and emptying ports that you can use for emptying your own grey and black water tanks. We’ve found that with a normal amount of usage – showers and dish washing and the like – we fill our 30 gallon grey tank in about 3 days. We didn’t really know how long it takes to fill the black tank, because in the past when we filled the grey tank we’d had to hitch back up, disconnect all the services, stow everything movable, and haul the trailer to the dump station, then come back to the campsite and unhitch and get settled again. And if you’re going to do all that, you’re obviously going to empty all your tanks. But with the new tote, I can empty the tanks one at a time as needed.

As a bit of an aside, it’s pretty much standard to hang the tote on the ladder on the back of the trailer. I tried that when I first got it, and realized I needed to put it up as high as possible so it didn’t block the turn signals and brake lights. Remember what I said about the site being not very level? Well it turns out it’s a lot easier to put the tote up very high on the ladder when you’re on a nice flat driveway, and considerably harder to get it off when you’re on a slope where you’re standing 3 feet lower than the ground level of the trailer. Fortunately Vicki was able to rustle up some other guys to help me. I’ve decided from now one to keep the tote in the pickup bed when it’s not in use.

After we got the trailer squared away and went around introducing or re-introducing ourselves to people, I flew my drone around the campsite to try to capture how many people are here. Unfortunately my upload bandwidth sucks, so I wasn’t able to put it on YouTube. I generated a very low-res version and put it on Facebook, but it was in a comment so I don’t think very many people saw it.

Update – new campground has wifi, so here it is in full 4K glory on YouTube:

*End Part 1*

Garage Cleaning

We’ve lived in this house for 20 years, and it’s probably been 15 since the last time I gave the garage a good cleaning. So today I finally steeled myself to do it. It wasn’t easy, because I’m a master of finding better things to do – it’s been a week or so since the last time i paddled, and I’ve been casting longing looks at my V8 Pro all this time. But after literally years of false starts, I decided today I was going to do one side of the garage. Today is garbage day, so I decided I’d start on the easier side and just go until I tired out or the garbage tote was full, which ever came first. I got one bay almost completely done. I found a lot to throw away, as well as a few things related to my old Thunderbolt kayak that I’d like to find somebody to give to.

It was a lot of effort, especially in regard to my chronic pains and the heat and humidity. But I made the effort and I’m happy with what I accomplished. Two more days like this and it should be done. I’m not sure if I should wait until the next garbage day so I can throw stuff away immediately, or if I should just build a garbage pile and get it done while I’m still happy about what I’ve done so far.

My sweat soaked shirt

RV Upgrades, Bathroom Fan

So the bathroom fan in the trailer has been a bit of a pain point for two reasons:

  • First, and foremost, Vicki has trouble reaching the knob that opens the cover, and the switch that turns on the fan.
  • And as a secondary consideration, the fan is tiny and doesn’t move a lot of air. Also only vents outward at one speed.

So I bought a fan that actually fills the whole housing, has a speed and direction control, and which has a remote control. Then I waited for several weeks to install it because I was looking for a weather forecast that showed two days of no rain and non-scorching temperatures. It seemed like every day was either raining or temps above 90F. So we got the weather window on Monday and Tuesday. Sure, the temps were still in the high 80s, but that’s better than 90, anyway.

I’d been told by people who’d done it that it should only take one day, but I know my limitations, and I also know how many times I’ve found in the middle of a project that I had to run out for more tools or supplies. Turns out that planning for two days was a smart decision.

I’ve watched a number of YouTube videos on how to do this, and they all said that you basically just need to “roll up the rim” (sorry, non-Canadians, you won’t understand) or peel off the existing sealant after you take the old fan out. Well, I was unable to do that – it was stuck too hard. Instead I used a sharp scraper and just sliced off the layers of sealant as best as I can. I did end up gouging into the trailer roof skin a few times, but I made sure to put extra sealant on those areas.

Cutting off as much of the sealant as I could took all of the first day. At the end of it, I was dehydrated and extremely sunburned. No idea why I forgot to put on sunscreen. It’s not like I’ve been getting regular sunburns since I was a baby.

This is not its final form. I cut a lot more sealant and butyl tape off.

As you can maybe see in the photo above, the wires come out from under the folded over roof skin. I cut those off, and I went to Home Depot and bought some WAGO connectors to wire the new fan in. Now it had power, I tested the fan with the remote and with the switches on the inside. Worked great.

I drilled new holes where the holes were in the new fan housing, because they weren’t all in exactly the same place as the old one. I put down strips of butyl tape over both the old holes and the new holes. The fan fit into the existing hole just fine, except I was disappointed to find I needed to take out the existing interior shroud and use the one that came with the new fan. I was hoping to avoid it, because I wasn’t 100% confident in how I was going to trim the new one to the contour of the roof. Turned out it was super easy, barely an inconvenience.

After I screwed the fan down onto the butyl tape strips, I put sealant all over the flange, and the edges of the flange. I used one tube of the stuff. I’ve heard other people talk about using 3 tubes of it, but I can’t see why – it seems like I used twice as much as you’d think, and it was piled up pretty high.

After that, I tidied up the roof, and went inside and marked and trimmed and installed the interior shroud. Tested the fan again, and it worked great. Then I had to put on gloves and fish out the bits of sealant that fell in the toilet when I was scraping.

Afterwards, Vicki gave it the full test. She pronounced it satisfactory. I’m very proud.

Linux Upgrades

Both my home server, and my VPS (Virtual Private Server) need updates. My home server uses Kubuntu 22.04 LTS, and the current version is 25.04 (or 24.04 if I want to stick to LTS, which I probably should). My VPS is on Debian 10.13 (buster), and the current stable version is 12 (bookworm). Both are nagging me that the version they’re running is no longer supported and I should upgrade ASAP.

Ok, for the Kubuntu machine, there’s an update program. But when I run it

sudo do-release-upgrade

I get a message that says

The package 'postgresql-14-postgis-3' is marked for removal but it is in the removal denial list.

I think that means I need to remove PostGIS and try again, and then hopefully reinstall PostGIS after the update. But I’m reluctant to do so, in case it breaks something. I guess I need to bite the bullet and do it.

My VPS was originally Debian 5, and over the years I’ve upgraded it many times just by editing the /etc/apt/sources.list to the new release name, and running

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade

But when I contacted Linode technical support about something else, they were horrified that I appeared to them to be using Debian 5. When I told them what I’d done, they were even more horrified. Evidently the proper way update is to spin up a new VPS instance with their Debian 12 image, and then migrate applications and files over. I’d worry about missing something. On the other hand, it might be a chance to leave behind the cruft of things I no longer need.

I guess I’ll start with the local server by removing PostGIS and proceeding from there. For the VPS, I might try just cloning the VPS and doing the old fashioned way.

Well, that’s different

I haven’t written about my pain stuff in a while. I think last time was just after my first shot at PRP. At the time, I didn’t know it wasn’t going to work. Neither did the second PRP shot. At that time, I latched onto what was possibly my last shot – the guy who’d done several corticosteroid shots in me (none of which helped) in my sciatic nerve (both down in the hip, and then again where it exits the spine), and in my ischial bursa, and also implanted pain stimulator electrodes in my spine had told me that I needed my ischial bursa removed. The only problem was that nobody does it – I talked to doctors all over the place, including New York City and Kansas City.

By luck, somebody in r/ChronicPain in reddit responded to an old post of mine to tell me that this doctor in Houston did an ischial bursectomy on him, and it had helped him immensely. This set off a long process of trying to get that doctor’s opinion on whether I need an ischial bursectomy and whether he’d do one on me without multiple trips to Houston. The doctor’s office sent me a very detailed protocol for the MRI that they wanted. My primary care doctor didn’t want to order it, because she didn’t really know how to get the local MRI centers to follow the protocol. However, my pain doctor talked to a couple of doctors of radiology and got a way to get my protocol done.

When I got to the MRI appointment, I didn’t get to see a doctor, but the radiology technician was really into this challenge. She’d even read the journal article that the protocol refers to. The MRI process was a bit longer than usual. The amusing thing was that the next day they called me and the radiology doctor wanted me to come back the next day so they could do their usual protocol and compare it to the Houston doctor’s protocol at no charge to me (or my insurance). I had nothing better to do, and I’m interested in more data.

I don’t have the tools to look at the actual MRI scans, but the second MRI got the usual radiologists summary. And for somebody hoping for a possible path to a cure, it was mostly terrible news. They said there was no evidence of ischial bursitis, and only mild hamstring tendonopathy. However, there was a bunch of stuff going on in the hip joint itself, most of which was highly technical and hard to interpret.

I had to jump through some hoops to get imagery to the Houston doctor, and I waited for their response. And their response was a complete surprise. They think I need a hip replacement! They said I have too much arthritis to be a candidate for arthroscopic surgery.

Well, the good news is that there isn’t a shortage of doctors here in Rochester who can do a hip replacement. Funny, all this time I’ve ignored the pain in my hips, because it seemed less important than the pain in my sit bone area. The pain in my hips didn’t stop me from paddling or walking, it was just a constant thing like my knee pain.