He's back!

Yep! I'm still alive!

   I'm pretty sure the department of veterans affairs will be really pissed to know that too. I believe their agenda is secretly to hope that all us vets die off so they can all get a huge pay increase by redistributing what we've earned the hard way. 

   SO! What's been going on up in the wild and woolly far north of the great state of Texas? Obviously not a whole hell of a lot if I haven't posted in well over a year now. One really wonderful and long-awaited event did happen almost a year ago though. Due to a variety of circumstances, the lady I fell in love with at first sight over 40 years ago and I were finally able to get married. 

   She had a dream of getting married in Las-Vegas so we mapped out a vacation road trip and headed west. Visited Monument Valley, Canyon De Chelly, Painted Desert, petrified forest, the Grand Canyon, Lake Mead, the Hoover Dam and, of course, Las-Vegas itself. 

   We actually stayed down in Laughlin which is still a LOT of fun but not nearly the mass of crazy people. You feel perfectly comfortable walking from casino to casino any time of night. Vegas is just entirely too freaking insane for me. We made two trips into the madness though. One was to just see the strip and the other trip was to get married. 

   Officially hitch now we blasted back through the desert to Laughlin again. No one on the highway at close to midnight so I let the Genesis off the chain for a bit. Speedometer passed 100 like it wasn't even a strain and kept accelerating as if it were child's play. The car stayed quiet enough for normal conversation and absolutely rock steady. I took my foot off the gas well before we were anywhere close to top speed.  Not sure what that number is but I have no doubt the car would have no trouble reaching it since I still had about 2500 RPM before hitting redline. 

   Back in Laughlin (somewhat ahead of schedule), we celebrated with a steak dinner before playing some one-armed bandits and heading to our room to sleep because the trip back to Texas started early the next morning.  While it was a nice trip the best part was the bit without any schedule. I much prefer fairly unstructured vacations where there might be one ultimate destination in mind but otherwise, it's just open for any spur of the moment destination choices that might present themselves. 

   With the "stop living in sin" box not checked off honey and I began the process of getting all that married people stuff figured out. nearly a year later we're still working on legal stuff and other details. Everything will fall into place eventually. :-)

   Around the house, I had royal fits with my Troy Bilt self-propelled mower. Darn thing just refused to freaking run for more than a couple seconds. Parked it forever and bought a little cheap Murray from Wally World. That worked okay until I started having chest pains while mowing....... or anything else that required much effort. Found out that blood flow to my heart muscle was restricted by some blockages. Got some Nitro for that and it helped. 

   Problems with gas-powered lawn equipment persisted. Weedeater refused to run.... as did the blower. Decided that I had had quite enough frustration with stuff not wanting to work when I need it to so I retired all the gas stuff and bought all EGO battery powered stuff. 

21"self-propelled electric mower, weed eater, and blower so far. Love the stuff!! I put the mower through a torture test and mowed 1/4 acre of 6" tall grass with it before the 7.5 amp hour battery gave out. Might have cut more but I was using the self-propelled feature as well as mowing. Needless to say, it has no problem at all with the little bit of front yard we have. Weedeater? Same thing.... I weed whack over 1000 feet of fence plus cleaning the corners and getting around the perimeter of the house and around trees. The battery (a smaller 2.5 amp hour unit) goes strong the whole time. Never going back to gas lawn equipment. 

Oh.... the mower even has LED headlights that are really bright..... so for grins, I mowed the front yard one night starting at about 9:45. Had no problem seeing where I had been or where I was going and no one even knew I had mowed...... it's quieter than the string trimmer!!! 

   Had the water pump on the big Excursion finally get to the point where it had to be replaced. It lasted for over 14 years so I really couldn't complain. Even with getting new upper and lower hoses installed plus a new serpentine belt and thermostat it was under $500 and ready in half a day. This shop gets all my business so, because I was between my military retirement check and social security,  he said "Just stop in and pay me when you get your check." Handshake and it's a done deal. I like doing business like that. 

   Well..... even though this is the first post in over a year we're already all caught up on stuff. I guess it's a good thing that very little is going on at this point in my life..... makes getting by day to day all that much easier.  I still spend a few hours a week investigating retirement south of the border. Panama is still at the top of my list but I still haven't totally ruled out Belize and Mexico. Caribbean storms are the biggest issue with those last two and I'm not all that sold on the western coast of Mexico yet. Costa Rica is on the list as well but I'm looking for higher elevations and more spring-like low humidity climate year round and not sure Costa Rica will work for that. Sweetie and I don't want to just sit here in Texas and scrape by when she retires when we could move south and genuinely enjoy retirement. 

Gotta scoot! As always..... Y'all be good and take care of each other!