Great Birthday Celebration

Today marks one week since Harry started work at Home Depot. The first day was orientation, and the next days after that mainly entailed completing all of the computer training. So yesterday was his first actual day on the floor. It went well and he is enjoying the job so far. I told him it will only get more comfortable as he learns the department and doesn’t have to try and remember where everything is located.

Other than work, the main event this week was my birthday on Wednesday. I hadn’t asked for the day off, but just luckily I wasn’t scheduled. I had a really nice day. For the third year in a row, I started off the day by running my age – this year 5.2 miles to represent 52 years. Every year on this run, I reflect on how lucky and blessed I am to be healthy and in relatively good shape.

Later in the day, we took a ride over to Lakeland in our new ride. On a side note, I am so enjoying having a car again. And what a difference it’s already made in our fuel bill. We would be burning up quite a bit of our profits going back and forth to work in the truck for sure. For my birthday, I looked for a new restaurant to go try and I didn’t even have to look on google maps to see if we would be able to park the beast there. haha

We went to a restaurant called Harry’s that has a New Orleans theme. I forgot to take a picture of the outside, but I did get this one from our booth. It had a really cool atmosphere. We went for lunch around 2 in the afternoon so it wasn’t busy at the time.

 

Wow, the food was SO good.

Our appetizer of crab cakes…

My Chicken Jolie Blonde with Corn Maque Choux (which was like a corn succotash)

Harry’s Cajun Seared Tuna

I also enjoyed a Rhythm and Blues Margarita.

It was a really wonderful birthday meal. Harry’s has locations in several other Florida cities, including Tallahassee and St. Augustine. If you happen to find yourself near one, check it out!

Rig Repair Results and Back to Work

Every summer when we have gone back up to NY, we have made it a point to get the yearly maintenance done, as well as any repairs that have cropped up. This past summer on our way back from Florida, we noticed that one of the back landing jacks was wet. So we decided to have the guys at the repair place take a look at it. And in addition to that, one of the back windows came open a bit as we were traveling and when I went in to close it, we discovered that the adhesive in between the panes had given way, and the window was actually coming apart. Big thing #2 on the list!

We had purchased an extended warranty, which was going to be UP on June 21st. Our appointment at Deiderich’s was on June 14th. Talk about just squeaking under the wire! After they evaluated the situation, we found out that both back hydraulic jacks had to be replaced, and the entire window as well. When they called the warranty company, we were told that glass wasn’t covered but the jacks were. Both good and bad news at the same time.

The window and jacks had to be ordered, but since the claim had been placed while we were still in our warranty period, we were fine waiting a bit for the repairs to be done. That was right before the boys were due to arrive, so we decided to wait until the boys went home and then just drive the rig back to Coxsackie from our seasonal site in Peru, about a 2.5 hour trip.

Since that was a bit much to do in one day, we decided that I would stay at my mother’s house with the cats while Harry drove back with the rig. He had an uneventful trip (first time driving the rig by himself) and dropped it off at the repair place right around 9 am. Then he drove over to my sister’s for the rest of the day. The repairs were completed successfully, and then the next morning he went back over and picked the fiver up for the trip back to Peru.

I got a nice shot of him coming in with the rig, as my mother had driven me over to our site so I could be there for the backing up.

So. The numbers. Our normal maintenance type stuff and the small repairs that we needed done in June, like a replacement of the fan in the fridge – $327.70. The portion of the repair that was covered by the warranty company was $1,809.00. The window replacement that we had to pay for came out to $1651.49. We are so glad that the hydraulic jack replacement happened while we were still under warranty. Phew!

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On a happier note, Harry is right now at his third day of work. We had the same shift yesterday so I was able to get this picture of him while we were both on our lunch break. He is really excited to be working at Home Depot. He has seriously been saying for as long as I’ve known him that his long-term goal was to retire from his job for the State of NY and work part-time at Home Depot. It took a few years after his retirement, but he’s finally achieved his goal!

Meanwhile, I am almost at the one year point! I had my interview last year on my birthday, which is coming up this week, so that’s really easy to remember. I have to say, I really love my job. I like what I’m doing and I like the people I work with. I am so lucky.

Where Do I Begin?

I think one of the hardest parts about getting back to blogging after a break is figuring out where to begin! I’ve thought about settling down to the computer and doing a post several times in recent weeks, but it just seems so overwhelming trying to figure out where to start.

So I guess I’ll just jump right in where we are and then hopefully will get some blog posts in over the next weeks about our summer – which was completely awesome, by the way.

When I left off, we were just finding out about the warranty results for our rig repairs and getting ready for the boys’ summer visit. I’ll say more later about both, but just for this post, I’ll say we got the rig repaired and had a great five weeks with the boys. I wasn’t sure how easy it would be to have a 4 year old and a 9 year old for five weeks in an rv, but it really went very well. I’m already looking forward to our next summer visit next year.

So, to jump to more recent events, in mid-September we were getting ready to leave Peru to head back home to Florida.

(This picture shows our seasonal site. We really loved it. We had enough trees around us that we had hardly any direct sunshine on us at all. Even though it was the warmest July and August they had ever had in that area, we didn’t have to turn the a/c on once!)

Right at the same time we were getting ready to leave, Florence was heading for the Carolina area. We had intended to head down our usual route to Charlotte to visit Harry’s son and daughter-in-law and then down to Jacksonville for another family visit on the way home. But given the storm, we decided to go on a more westerly route past Atlanta instead. Because of this, we actually got home almost a whole week earlier than we had expected.  We were pretty lucky. There was one day when we were going through Virginia where we were passing along the outskirts of rain from Florence, but for the most part we were able to avoid the storm with our adjusted route.

It was really good to get home. I had called Home Depot in late August and given the HR person my return date. Wow, how easy that all was. She reactivated me Sept. 1st so she could get me back on the schedule right away (they schedule 3 weeks out), and last Thursday I went back to work. I’ve already worked several days, and I got back into the routine like  I had never been gone. I’ve even been back on the forklift. And, in other exciting news, shortly after we got back, Harry had an interview at Home Depot also. He had a little bit of a wait while they were doing a few more hires, and as I type this, he is at Home Depot for his first day. So now we are both employed which will make our  bank account very happy.

The other most exciting news is that we have bought a car! We’ve been thinking about it for a couple years. Using the truck all the time costs a decent amount in diesel, given that it takes about $75 to $80 per fill up. On top of that, there have been at least 1 or 2 times a year that we have needed to rent a car, so that is another added expense. Last year for one of our rentals, we had a Nissan Altima, and we just loved it. So once we knew for sure that Harry had a job, we went off to do some car shopping and came home with this 2018 Nissan Altima. I am so enjoying having a car again.

So it’s been a good start to our winter season in Florida. We’ve settled back in and are enjoying being back. We won’t be doing any big projects this year around the house. We are going to take this winter off from that kind of stuff, and only do any emergency type things for the most part. Hopefully there won’t be many!