Summer Is Here; What Happened to Spring?

The last two days have been brutally hot. It probably wouldn’t seem so bad if winter hadn’t been so cold and if the cold/cool weather hadn’t lasted until the end of April.

This morning, in the extreme heat, I removed everything from the back of my pickup truck, including all of the stuff I’d put in there from the camper before taking it over to Camping World. My living room is now filled with an interesting assortment (would mess be a better word?) of tools, camper stuff and my cargo box/coffee table.

I had a lot of eBay business to take care of – I sold almost 30 books this weekend. and then had to go to the post office to ship the packages.

After the post office, I went to Home Depot to get a 10’ piece of PVC pipe I plan to attach to the back bumper of my camper to hold the sewer hose. Most people use their hollow bumper for this, but the inside of the metal bumper gets rough and can put holes in your sewer hose. PVC won’t do this.

I was able to get the fittings for the pipe, but the first Home Depot I visited didn’t have the pipe itself. The fellow was very helpful and looked up other stores in the area to see who might have one. The Valrico Home Depot had 68 of these in stock.

Since this was on my way home anyway, I stopped there and got the pipe.  The very helpful clerk cut the pipe into two 5-foot sections so it would fit more easily in my pickup (I’d already decided to do this and one of the fittings I got at the previous Home Depot was a coupler).

I usually shop at Lowe’s for convenience, but in this case, according to the Internet, the pipe at Home Depot was $4 less than at Lowe’s and in this instance at least, the clerks at Home Depot seemed more in tune with good customer service than Lowe’s folks usually are. Isn’t competition a wonderful thing?

My niece graduates college on Saturday in Jackson, TN. My plan was to go, but after all of the flooding, I may not go. If you check out the following link, you can see all of the places the roads are flooded: http://ww2.tdot.state.tn.us/tsw/smartmap.htm

Click on Road Condition and see all of the blue lines indicating flooded roads. My route will take me on I-24 and I-40 (just follow the blue lines and you’ll pretty much have my route :) ).

I can’t help but remember what the roads in the Southern Tier of New York looked like after the flooding caused by Hurricane Agnes during 1972. If we hadn’t had four-wheel drive in our vehicle at that time, we probably would have gotten stuck. My pretty red pickup doesn’t have four-wheel drive.

Until next time…