Category: Rant

First RV trip of the season Part 1

Last year, after putting our trailer away for the winter, we sat down and decided that it would be safe to de-winterize it and head out in late April, and just to be really safe, we’d head 5 hours south so we wouldn’t have to worry about sub-freezing temps while we were out.

And that was a really good plan, until Vicki and I both got really interested in the Facebook group for people who owned our brand of trailer (Keystone Cougar Half-Ton 22MLS). And it turns out that some of the members of that group had decided they were going to meet up at a campground in Ohio called Mary Jane Thurston State Park. That’s nearly a 6 hour drive away, especially if you consider how slow you drive when you’re towing a travel trailer. But Vicki got really enthusiastic about the idea of going there. And so did I after a while.

So on the last weekend of March, we went to the RV storage lot and brought our baby home. And with the help of a bunch of sort-of consistent sets of instructions, we de-winterized her. Drained the water tank and all the water lines of anti-freeze, flushed the lines with fresh water, filled the fresh tank about half way up with a cup of bleach, and let it sit overnight. The next day, drained the fresh tank and filled it with fresh water and ran all the taps until the water stopped smelling of chlorine. Afterwards, Vicki complained that she didn’t like the taste, but to me it tasted exactly like the water tasted when I lived in an apartment building in North York Ontario. But I took the point, and next time I disinfect the tank like that, I’ll flush it twice.

While we were getting ready to leave, we got a phone call from Mary Jane Thurston State Park. They said they had some flooding, so they were moving our entire group to Van Buren State Park, which isn’t too much further way. When they said “some flooding”, I envisioned wet fields and maybe puddles, but later one of the 22MLS group went over to look, and the water was up to the seats of the picnic tables and there were geese paddling around. The new park was very nice, nice flat newly paved trailer pads and full electric and water hookups (and a sewer dump at the entrance). Actually, the campsite info we found before we went said they didn’t have water hookups at each site, so on the way we were filling up the fresh tank when the camp host came over and said “we have water at each site”, which my travel addled brain initially interpreted as “the ground is wet”, but I soon realized really meant there is a spigot at every site.

I have to commend the staff at Mary Jane Thurston for being proactive about this and making sure we didn’t end up scattered and disorganized when we arrived and found the campground closed.

Because of the length of the trip, we decided to stop along the way at a Harvest Host. A Harvest Host is a business (often a winery or farm (which is where the name comes from) but now includes brew pubs, distilleries and other businesses) that allows you to park overnight. There is an annual membership fee, but the overnight stays are free, but you’re generally expected (strongly expected) to buy about $30 or so of whatever their product is.

The host we stayed at was a distillery. They had a restaurant, except the company that was staffing his kitchen left last week, so we ordered from another restaurant down the road. This was actually our first “boondocking” experience. “Boondocking” means staying without water, electric and sewer connections. I’m pleased to say our batteries lasted fine, with only a small amount of conserving. Vicki bought some nice distilled spirits to meet our expected buy.

Both days of travel were pretty fraught, with strong gusty winds and driving rain. I was pretty fried at the end of each day’s driving.

There is an app called RVLife Trip Wizard, which is a highly rated trip planner and navigator which takes your rig width and height into account when navigating so you avoid low bridges and narrow streets. It kind of didn’t work for us. Here is part of the route it sent us on:

RVLife’s route

And here is Google, showing how that “road” turned into a tractor track halfway through:

Fortunately the driveway for the barn on the left is big enough to do a K turn in. I think the driver of the school bus I followed up the road was amused.

Thanks, American Imperialism

I’ve got some old code that I almost never edit, because it’s actually been working fine since… I think 2007 or so? I use it every 28 days to load data from the FAA into my database for navaid.com.

This month’s load failed because of an unknown waypoint type “IFR GOA VERTICAL FLT“. I looked in the code, and I did have a known waypoint type “IFR GOM VERTICAL FLT“. Can you guess what happened?

GOM stands for Gulf of Mexico. GOA stands for Gulf of America. They’re waypoints used for position reports for helicopters operating off of drilling rigs in the Gulf of Mexico.

The vanishing ski wax pack

A tiny bit under 4 years ago I restarted cross country skiing after a very long absence. I wanted to be cautious, so I started going to Cummings Nature Center that was one of the few places around that rented skis to make sure my knees were ok with this new idea. I vowed to stick to classic stride, and also not to worry about being fast. And it seemed to work out, so after a few weeks I bought some (used) skis and (new) boots.

Many years ago, I “loaned” my old waxing stuff to my friend Dan to assist his son Tom. I put “loaned” in quotes, because I thought I was loaning it, and he thought I was gifting it, and being that I’m non-confrontational, I never asked for it back. It was a very complete set of the waxes and other stuff (iron, corks, scrapers, etc) that any classic ski racer would need.

But when Dan sold me the skis 3.5 years ago, he also put me onto this stuff called “Start Tape”, which is a tape you apply to the kick zone of your ski and it acts like a universal wax system. It actually works pretty well – not great if there is soft fresh snow, but good enough on groomed trails. After all, I’m not trying to be particularly fast. And so far, each application has lasted most of the season.

That year I was still kayak racing so I soon found myself making what I would consider a decent distance – up to 10-11 kilometers. Ok, that would have been a warm up when I was racing, but it’s good enough now. In subsequent years, I haven’t been maintaining my fitness in the summer because my high hamstring tendonopathy/ischial bursitis/undiagnosable sit bone pain, and also the only place to ski is Bristol Mountain, because they make snow. And consequently, my longest skis are barely 5 kilometers long.

Last year I decided I needed to take control over preparing the glide section of my skis and also experiment with possibly getting more complicated with the waxing options, so I bought a small selection of waxes, corks and other stuff in a nice little bag. Except after cleaning off the old wax on my skis yesterday, I went looking for it, and couldn’t find it. I think I’ve looked everywhere it could have been, and a few it couldn’t. So now I’m thinking the only option open to me is to buy another one, which will guarantee that the first one will show up.

PRP

Today was one of a long excruciating series of attempts to find some relief for my “butt pain”. I’ve had diagnoses like sciatic nerve demylenization, high hamstring tendenosis, ischial bursitis, performis syndrome and probably some other things I’m forgetting. I’ve had cortisone injected in my spine (where the sciatic nerve comes out), in my ischial bursa and in my hamstring, I’ve had physical therapy for all those diagnoses, and I’ve even had a electrodes implanted in my spine for a pain stimulator. So far nothing has worked.

The last doctor who worked on me suggested I look into getting an ischial bursectomy, but after calling 7 or 8 doctors in places like Texas, Kansas and New York City, all of whom whose websites said they do it, I got told over and over again that they don’t actually do it. I actually found one who said they do it and they booked me in for an appointment. And yeah, the front office person who booked me in had actually checked with another staff member to make sure they do it. This was in a fancy clinic in New York City just a block from Central Park. We had to fly down there and back. And when we finally saw the doctor, he said he doesn’t actually do that procedure, but he said he was going to suggest something less drastic. I think I surprised him when I asked him if he meant PRP (Platelet Rich Plasma?) or Prolotherapy. He was going to recommend PRP, and he confirmed the feeling I’d gotten from my research that while both are not FDA approved, many people find PRP helpful, whereas prolotherapy is pretty dubious.

The best thing about PRP is that I could have it done here in Rochester, and didn’t have to fly somewhere. Also, while it took a few weeks to get in to see the doctor who could do it (who was also the guy who’d shot cortisone in my hamstring), I got the appointment to have the procedure a week later (ie today).

So I had it today. First they took a bunch of blood – they tried to take 90ml but my blood kept coagulating so they had to stop at 78ml, after jabbing those giant 17G needles in me 3 times. They centrifuge it, and the centrifuge spits out a bag with plasma and platelets,and another bag of red blood cells. Sadly, they throw out the red blood cells, so there goes some more of my left over aerobic fitness.

Then it’s into the OR where they put you face down on a table and inject some lidocaine and then the platelets right into the hamstring. The lidocaine hurts like hell getting the needle in, then it feels just semi unpleasant as they inject it, and then it feels a different type of unpleasant when they inject the plasma.

Then it’s all over, until a few hours later when the lidocaine wears off and you realize your entire leg hurts like hell all along the hamstring, and you can’t take anything except Tylenol because the whole point of the procedure is to cause inflammation to start the healing process, so you can’t take any anti-inflammatory.

I’m really banking on this working, because my only remaining option that I know of after this is to keep searching for a doctor to do an ischial bursectomy. I found a video on YouTube that showed a doctor actually performing one of those, so maybe I’ll try to track that doctor down.

Pain sucks, fighting for treatment sucks harder, and the mental toll of this whole drawn out process is enormous. It’s only taking a pretty heavy dose of an anti-depressant and the love of family that gets me through the day and keeps me from giving up.

Well, that was a waste of time and money

So our house network looks kind of like

-fiber-[Fiber Modem]-[Router/WAP]-[switch]-[security camera]
                                          -[living room drop]
                                          -[dining room drop]
                                          -\
       -upstairs-[switch]-[linux]
                         -[iMac]
                         -[Mac Studio]

The cables represented by dashes (except the fiber one) are supposed to be Cat5e, but they might only be Cat5. The switches are 10/100/1000 Mbps and all three of the wired computers are running 1000 Mbps. The new one, the Mac Studio, had to be coerced in that speed, because it didn’t seem to be capable of negotiating correctly. I wrote that off to the fact that the switch is several years old and came out before 2.5G/5G/10G Ethernet was a thing. The WiFi is 802.11ac (I think) although I never really saw even close to the theoretical speed out of it. I think most of the time Speedtest.net would show the computers on the wired connections getting somewhere between 600-800 Mbps and the wifi only getting maybe 40 Mbps on a good day. But that was perfectly adequate for most uses – I want the faster speed on my wired computers because I’m uploading big video files and running various servers.

A few months ago, Greenlight told me that they were updating my fiber to 2Gbps. At the time, because my whole network is 1 Gbps, I didn’t think much of it. But recently Vicki’s been complaining about the WiFi being too slow and dropping out whenever the microwave is on. Fair enough, my experience is that home routers is that they need to be replaced every 5 or 10 years, and this one was in that age range (I think.)

I’ve been looking for routers that can do at least 2 Gbps on the fiber “modem” side, and also on the uplink to the switch. I did some investigation, and couldn’t find one at a decent price point. But then a couple of days ago I found a review of “best routers” that seemed to be saying that one of the routers could do the trick. It also had WiFi 6 which should speed up some of the WiFi’d devices. I also found some switches that said that they could do 2.5 Gbps on all the ports.

I spent a very frustrating time yesterday trying to get it all set up. My first problem was I forgot that because I’ve got a static IP, I had to manually enter the WAN IP address and other stuff. I got it all set up, the switches were showing 2.5 Gbps from each other, from the new router, and from the Studio. Speedtest was showing the wired computers were making 900+ Mbps up and down, and WiFi on my iPad was just about as 2/3rds as fast.

One weird thing I noticed is that the link between the router and the fiber “modem” was still showing at 1 Gbps. I didn’t realize it at the time, but the review I read mislead me. The router is capable of 2.5 Gbps WAN, but only using something called “Dual WAN”, which I think means using the both the port labeled WAN and the first port labeled LAN to connect to the fiber modem. But since only that LAN port is 2.5 Gig, I’d be able to get data to the router faster, but it couldn’t go out faster to the upstairs wired computers. I suppose that might make the WiFi a bit faster? Also the fiber modem only has one port, so I’m not sure how to make use of the “Dual WAN”.

I tested port forwarding and all that stuff and it all seemed to be working just fine, when I decided to see if copying files between the 3 wired connections were any faster. (In retrospect, they probably wouldn’t be since 2 of the three computers are only capable of 1 Gbps.) Soon after I started the copy, the Linux computer completely stopped talking to any network. I rebooted and it still wasn’t talking. I fiddled with a bunch of configuration, but the only thing that got it working again was putting back the original 10/100/1000 Mbps switch upstairs. Not sure why that happened, or why switching the switch could fix things.

At that point, I was having trouble with my Mac Studio. The Ethernet kept dropping and coming back up. I looked in the hardware settings for the Ethernet port and it was set to Automatic instead of Manual like it was supposed to be. And every time I switched it to Manual and reconfigured everything, after I clicked “Ok” and then clicked “Show Details” again it was back to Automatic. I eventually gave up on that and just used my old Thunderbolt to Ethernet dongle I used to use with my work laptop when I had one. Actually after I woke up this morning I had an idea and deleted the Ethernet configuration and made a new one, and it worked fine.

Meanwhile I reconnected most of the other devices to WiFi, including the Roku, and right now with Vicki watching videos on one of her devices and me watching videos on the Roku, Speedtest is showing the WiFi speed down to 30-40 Mbps again. Sigh.

So honestly I think I’ve spent a lot of time and money, and given myself a terrible day of screwing around with things that used to work and then didn’t work, and now work again, and all for nothing really. And I still have to manually re-attach some of the Wyze cameras to the WiFi, which in one case will involve going up on a step ladder to push a reset button and show it a QR code.