Aaaaaaaaaand away we go! It's been a long long LONG 17 months (I know white people problems right?) sorting through (and ditching most of!) 59 years of accumulated stuff...quite cathartic though really. We had stuff from when we were little bitty babies still hanging around. Anyway on to the good stuff, here's a picture of the view of a Little SoCal Bluff and the Great Big Frothy Green-Blue Sea Pacificus Oceanus out our window from our first day on the Wrongway Road:
Not bad...
So far the only thing that's gone wrong with the RV was I somehow deeply discharged the house batteries while it was parked in Torrance, so much so that I was unable to start the generator and the diesel motor was unable to recharge them (which makes no sense to me, there should never be an issue under any scenario other than equipment failure with the diesel motor recharging the house batteries) and I had to plug it into the wall. I think there still may be something screwy but we have an appointment on July 17th for service.
SO let's go back to January of 2016, after I got fired, I spent a lot of time doing nothing (well there's the story of Julie's dad (and my dad too) but we'll save that for another post) other than working on my book "Beware The Grizzly Bear", walking and riding the train around LA and going to the gym, then about in November I think I started to scan all the pictures we have stored in photo albums. For anyone under the age of about 30, back in the olden days when you wanted a selfie (if it was a selfie you wanted you had to use a tripod and a timer) or a picture you had to use "film" which was a kind of chemical plastic that came in rolls, you loaded the "film" into your "film camera" and then as you took pictures the "film" would play out until it was all used up. Then you had to remove it from the "film camera" and pay someone a small fortune to have it "developed" which was the process of converting the images on the "film" onto a piece of paper that you could hold in your hand or frame or, mostly in our case, put into a "photo album" (think analog computer desktop file folder) which you then never opened again forever and ever and ever.
SO there were about 5000 or so pictures to scan, one at a time on my trusty HP printer I bought when I was on HK 6 and 7 (fun fact - we were in the same building where Seth McFarland lives in the top two floors, at Wilshire and Hauser) for $50. I spent a lot of time scanning and finally completed the bulk of it long about the end of March. The process started with me scanning EVERY SINGLE PICTURE then I realized we don't really need 173 pictures of a trip we took to Las Vegas in 1995 so I started to cull them as I scanned them. I would take out two or three albums and remove all the pictures, culling them as I went along, then sort them more or less by size - the thing about pictures is they come in many sizes from about a half a inch square to 8"x10" and bigger, and it's efficient to try and scan the same sizes all at the same time each day so you don't have to continually do an overview scan and adjust the borders. Albums have a thing called "cellophane" which hold the pictures in place, in theory the pictures just slide out but in practice it's a pain in the ass getting them out cleanly, I finally figured a way to tear the "cellophane" without damaging the pictures as the most efficient way to make them available to scan. Even so I still tore more than a couple on the way out of the albums.
Also as I went along I realized there was a lot more to scan than just pictures, I scanned diaries and concert tickets and wedding invitations and birth announcements and greeting cards and postcards and campground receipts and UCLA football tickets and CD and DVD covers and newspaper articles and instruction manuals and many various sized pieces of paper and plastic and cardboard and fiber and fabric saved for the memories of what was written or pictured thereupon and just to give you an idea here's a screenshot of my scan folder showing some of the folders inside and part of the contents of scans done on December 22:
I think there's between 150-200 scans in that one folder. Anyway that information is mostly for those of you that are considering a scan project of your own (I used a 300 DPI setting and JPEGS for pictures and a 200 DPI setting and PDFs for documents, also I adjusted the borders as I went along so there's not a lot of white space, I most emphatically DID NOT name every scan, the default is scan 1 scan 2 scan 3 and so on and so forth. Our plan is to get one a them digital frames and load all the scans into it and watch them over the years as they rotate...yeah sure we will...here's a sample:
Anyway you get the idea, multiply that by about 5000 or so...
All the while we were slowly going through our stuff and deciding what we want to keep or what to give away or throw out all day every day, like for example a puzzle or a load of books or a chair or a lamp or an old leather hippy fringe jacket or thirteen extra spatulas and you get the idea right? (I may or may not post more about this part of the process but it was a HUGE part of it).
SO this whole time I was desperately scanning everything I could lay my hands on I was also doing RV research all the damn time, morning, noon, night, and midnight snack time. We were also starting to lay in RV supplies, Amazon was a regular visitor to our door with electricity voltage surge protectors and RV toilet chemicals and special fresh water hookup hoses and Julie was ordering special supplies like a stovetop grill and a down feather mattress pad and on and on and on and on and on and on it went for months...
We discussed it over and over and over and over and over and finally came to the conclusion that we wanted something brand new (well I did at least) and we needed to prioritize floor plan since we were gong to be living in it full time. We also came to the conclusion that what we needed was what they call a Diesel Pusher, basically a bus with a diesel motor in the back. After going to every RV show for the last 6 years or so and looking at 10,000 or so RVs, we decided on a Tiffin Allegro Red 33aa:
A small house right? So more pictures to follow in a future post...
For some reason dealers only order RVs with blonde cabinets for their lots, we wanted dark cabinets (incidentally Tiffin's sales brochure shows the 33aa with the dark cabinets so even Tiffin thinks dark is best), so to get exactly what we wanted we were going to have to do a special order...We ordered it on March 3, hoping for a mid May delivery, we ordered a 2017 but lo and behold the salesman soon called with distressing news: 2017s were no longer available, we had to order a 2018 and it would cost an additional $5000 (again with the white people problems!)...Julie negotiated it down to half of that so then all was happy happy joy joy...until time goes by and NO RV NEWS. I'm seeing 2018s all over the internet so I know they are making them but nevertheless ours is nowhere to be seen and the dealer doesn't seem too concerned about it...and now all of a sudden it's the end of April and the salesman can't give us a firm delivery date so I'm back on the internet scouring every dealer in the US of A and not a single one of them has a 33aa with the options we want...
NEXT TIME ON WRONGWAYFELDMAN.BLOGSPOT.COM
Rusty grows increasingly concerned (that's putting it mildly 007) about the lack of an RV. Julie remains calm and serene, but reads the riot act to the dealer...
So far the only thing that's gone wrong with the RV was I somehow deeply discharged the house batteries while it was parked in Torrance, so much so that I was unable to start the generator and the diesel motor was unable to recharge them (which makes no sense to me, there should never be an issue under any scenario other than equipment failure with the diesel motor recharging the house batteries) and I had to plug it into the wall. I think there still may be something screwy but we have an appointment on July 17th for service.
SO let's go back to January of 2016, after I got fired, I spent a lot of time doing nothing (well there's the story of Julie's dad (and my dad too) but we'll save that for another post) other than working on my book "Beware The Grizzly Bear", walking and riding the train around LA and going to the gym, then about in November I think I started to scan all the pictures we have stored in photo albums. For anyone under the age of about 30, back in the olden days when you wanted a selfie (if it was a selfie you wanted you had to use a tripod and a timer) or a picture you had to use "film" which was a kind of chemical plastic that came in rolls, you loaded the "film" into your "film camera" and then as you took pictures the "film" would play out until it was all used up. Then you had to remove it from the "film camera" and pay someone a small fortune to have it "developed" which was the process of converting the images on the "film" onto a piece of paper that you could hold in your hand or frame or, mostly in our case, put into a "photo album" (think analog computer desktop file folder) which you then never opened again forever and ever and ever.
SO there were about 5000 or so pictures to scan, one at a time on my trusty HP printer I bought when I was on HK 6 and 7 (fun fact - we were in the same building where Seth McFarland lives in the top two floors, at Wilshire and Hauser) for $50. I spent a lot of time scanning and finally completed the bulk of it long about the end of March. The process started with me scanning EVERY SINGLE PICTURE then I realized we don't really need 173 pictures of a trip we took to Las Vegas in 1995 so I started to cull them as I scanned them. I would take out two or three albums and remove all the pictures, culling them as I went along, then sort them more or less by size - the thing about pictures is they come in many sizes from about a half a inch square to 8"x10" and bigger, and it's efficient to try and scan the same sizes all at the same time each day so you don't have to continually do an overview scan and adjust the borders. Albums have a thing called "cellophane" which hold the pictures in place, in theory the pictures just slide out but in practice it's a pain in the ass getting them out cleanly, I finally figured a way to tear the "cellophane" without damaging the pictures as the most efficient way to make them available to scan. Even so I still tore more than a couple on the way out of the albums.
Also as I went along I realized there was a lot more to scan than just pictures, I scanned diaries and concert tickets and wedding invitations and birth announcements and greeting cards and postcards and campground receipts and UCLA football tickets and CD and DVD covers and newspaper articles and instruction manuals and many various sized pieces of paper and plastic and cardboard and fiber and fabric saved for the memories of what was written or pictured thereupon and just to give you an idea here's a screenshot of my scan folder showing some of the folders inside and part of the contents of scans done on December 22:
All the while we were slowly going through our stuff and deciding what we want to keep or what to give away or throw out all day every day, like for example a puzzle or a load of books or a chair or a lamp or an old leather hippy fringe jacket or thirteen extra spatulas and you get the idea right? (I may or may not post more about this part of the process but it was a HUGE part of it).
SO this whole time I was desperately scanning everything I could lay my hands on I was also doing RV research all the damn time, morning, noon, night, and midnight snack time. We were also starting to lay in RV supplies, Amazon was a regular visitor to our door with electricity voltage surge protectors and RV toilet chemicals and special fresh water hookup hoses and Julie was ordering special supplies like a stovetop grill and a down feather mattress pad and on and on and on and on and on and on it went for months...
We discussed it over and over and over and over and over and finally came to the conclusion that we wanted something brand new (well I did at least) and we needed to prioritize floor plan since we were gong to be living in it full time. We also came to the conclusion that what we needed was what they call a Diesel Pusher, basically a bus with a diesel motor in the back. After going to every RV show for the last 6 years or so and looking at 10,000 or so RVs, we decided on a Tiffin Allegro Red 33aa:
For some reason dealers only order RVs with blonde cabinets for their lots, we wanted dark cabinets (incidentally Tiffin's sales brochure shows the 33aa with the dark cabinets so even Tiffin thinks dark is best), so to get exactly what we wanted we were going to have to do a special order...We ordered it on March 3, hoping for a mid May delivery, we ordered a 2017 but lo and behold the salesman soon called with distressing news: 2017s were no longer available, we had to order a 2018 and it would cost an additional $5000 (again with the white people problems!)...Julie negotiated it down to half of that so then all was happy happy joy joy...until time goes by and NO RV NEWS. I'm seeing 2018s all over the internet so I know they are making them but nevertheless ours is nowhere to be seen and the dealer doesn't seem too concerned about it...and now all of a sudden it's the end of April and the salesman can't give us a firm delivery date so I'm back on the internet scouring every dealer in the US of A and not a single one of them has a 33aa with the options we want...
NEXT TIME ON WRONGWAYFELDMAN.BLOGSPOT.COM
Rusty grows increasingly concerned (that's putting it mildly 007) about the lack of an RV. Julie remains calm and serene, but reads the riot act to the dealer...
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