New Homes and New Beginnings

It’s been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon…err Chicago, my hometown.  Our family continues to focus on our various housing moves, but activity is also progressing on the “post-career” front as well.

My stepsister, Holley, and her husband Mike, invited the family to Easter dinner to celebrate moving into their new home (my mom’s old townhouse).  They spent the entire winter doing a major remodel and the house looks absolutely fabulous!   Of course, dinner was delicious as well!

 

Now, they are focusing efforts on their old condo to get it ready to be sold this summer.  The work seems to never end, but considering what things looked like a year ago, these two have been absolute dynamos!

Not to be outdone on the dynamo front, my other stepsister, Carol, will finally be graduating from Seminary later this month after over 10 years of continuous late-night and weekend study while holding down a full-time job.  Part of her final degree requirements included having some a few sermons videotaped and uploaded to the University, so I was able to pitch in and help her out with some of those technical hurdles.

With that now done, the family is looking forward to a “road trip” at the end of the month to attend her graduation.  If my two stepsisters are true to form, it should be quite a fun and whacky weekend!

Last week, I had a bit of a “graduation” myself.  While some of us had completed our Illinois Master Naturalist internship hours late last year, we didn’t officially graduate until our group reconvened last week.  A half dozen of us received our diplomas and our engraved University of Illinois Extension name badges to join the ranks of fellow Certified Master Naturalists!

 
Now work begins to keep that certification maintained!  Each year, we commit to volunteer service as well as attending continuing education related to the natural sciences.  I’ll be attending a couple of education events next week at the Morton Arboretum to fulfill this year’s CEUs, and am also starting the research and prep work on my first naturalist presentation to a local library audience this July.  Really looking forward to these events!

Meanwhile, on my home front, I’m happy to report that my ongoing “As the Squirrel Turns” soap opera, has now come to (what will now hopefully be) a final end!  After the trap was reset properly last week, Squirrel # 2 was caught and I thought for sure that my unwanted houseguest was finally captured.  But while that squirrel was still in its cage, I sat in the living room and soon began hearing some further periodic “rustling” in the attic.   Drats! We caught the wrong squirrel! 

So, Squirrel # 2 got a one-way bus ticket to a new home of trees at the nearby nature area, and the empty trap was re-baited with peanuts and returned to my roof.   Finally, last Friday morning, my houseguest (Squirrel # 3) decided to come out for some breakfast and a stroll along the roof where he quickly found his peanuts and his one-way bus ticket to a new home!  To be sure that the attic was now finally clear, my wildlife trapper put another trap on the roof just in case any further critters should come out.  

Fortunately, all has been quiet in the attic since Friday (and the trapper confirmed that my houseguest had indeed been a male, and not a female up there having babies!).  Unfortunately, the trap caught one more “innocent bystander” squirrel (Squirrel # 4) a few hours later, who was soon transferred to their new digs at the nature area to join all the other squirrelly pals!   Since Saturday, though, there have been no further squirrels captured, and no further sounds in the attic, so we’re now thinking the war has been won and we can move on to the permanent closure of my “squirrel hotel” once and for all!

I’m now able to focus uninterrupted on clearing out the inside of the house of all its contents.  It continues to be both a physical and emotional daily struggle to keep things relatively organized and sorted as the Craigslist, eBay, and local sales begin to take shape.  To boost my motivation, I opened the mail the other day to find this year’s property tax bill has now jumped 15% to over $7000/yr!   Oh, how I will miss these joys of homeownership!!! 

 

 

Check out 300 of our most-favorite things!

A few of my favorite things!

Wow, it’s May already.  For most working “weekend warriors” in the northern states, May signals the start of a new camping season!   Time to pull the RV out of storage, or maybe even head on over to the nearby RV dealer to trade-in or buy a first RV for the new camping season!

Around this time of year, I start getting more frequent requests from readers who are looking to get started into RVing and wanting suggestions on how to outfit their new rigs.

But, lets face it, they’re not the only ones!  Around this time of year, us old-timers are usually looking for something fun and new to add to our camping enjoyment too!

With that in mind, I decided to organize a collection of 300 of my most-favorite things for RV travel.  Some of these “finds” are things I’ve blogged about in the past and/or have featured on my RV Gadget Favs or Mobile Tech Favs pages.   But lots more items have never been featured before—even though I love and use them often!

So, today, that changes! 

I’d like to introduce you to the WinnieViews Gear We Love website! 

Here, I’ve gathered 300 of our favorite RVing, Travel, Reading, Tech, Entertainment, Photo, Hiking, Biking, Paddling, 4-wheel drive, and Camping items into (hopefully) a single, easy-to-navigate website.

Not to be left out, Millie has also contributed a collection of her favorite doggie stuff as well!

We’re using Amazon storefront technology to showcase these items, so you’ll not only see our own comments about each item, but Amazon’s customer reviews and pricing as well.

The site also features an Amazon Shopping Cart to facilitate any purchases you might want to make from them (WinnieViews is not at all involved— it’s all “normal Amazon” once you begin the check-out process and you’ll see Amazon’s familiar full website and shopping cart to complete your transaction).

The only thing I’ve not found very intuitive with this new site is how to add items to your Amazon Wishlist (if you want to save something for the future).  The best work-around I can suggest is when you’re on one of Gear We Love item pages (like the screenshot above), click the “customer reviews” link.  That will take you to the full Amazon site, and you can add it to your Wishlist from there.

In the coming days, I’ll be reorganizing my previous RV Gadget Favs page to just show the remaining favorites we could not include on this new website (i.e. the non-Amazon things like my recent discovery of Elgato Software’s EyeTV 3, and others).

You can get to the Gear We Love website via the link below, or from it’s tab along the header of our blog page.

Hope you find these “favorite things” helpful, and I really hope you might find a little gem in there that delights you as much as it’s delighted me (and Millie)!!!   If you have questions or want further feedback about anything, just contact me via comments below or email me at winnieviews@gmail.com.

Happy camping!

 

Check out 300 of our most-favorite things!

Z = Zipped Up (& Unzipped!)

Well, my second year of participating in the A-to-Z Challenge has come to an end.  This month sure flew by and felt a lot easier to do the daily posts than last year!  I hope you all have enjoyed reading the posts and viewing the pics as much as I did creating them.  Although I doubt I’ll ever get up to doing daily posts all year long, I will try to keep posting as frequently as possible!

I sure wish my squirrel situation was as nicely “zipped up” as the A-to-Z posts!  When the squirrel was captured successfully last week, a black plastic trash bag was put up in the soffit hole and another trap set just in case there might be another “family member” roaming about.

Over the weekend, I kept hearing brief, faint noises in the attic a couple times a day, but I thought I might just be imagining things or else it was just noise from the winds and rains.

Well, yesterday, that all changed!  In the morning, I was now certainly hearing a critter up there again.  When I stopped hearing it in the afternoon, I went out to find the black trash bag now on the ground (with about 20 holes in it from where the squirrel tore through the bag!).  I quickly went around to check the trap and was discouraged to see that the trap door had shut with food still left inside…but no squirrel!

So the unwanted houseguest saga continues!  I got a tall pole and was able to push a new trashbag up into the hole again, and have called my squirrel-catcher man to come try a different trap.  Stay tuned for “As the Squirrel Turns”!

 

 

Y = YouTube Channel

Hey, did you know that there’s a WinnieViews channel on YouTube?  Yes, Sir-y, there sure is!

Follow the link to Subscribe to it and you’ll get to see our WinnieViews videos before they get posted here (although, I must be honest, we likely won’t be shooting many new videos until our house work here in Chicago is done and we start traveling again).

Do you have any favorite YouTube channels that’d you’d like to share?  As a full-timer usually on limited bandwidth,  I like to now subscribe to favorite YouTube channels so that when I do get to a place with solid free WiFi, I can catch up on all the videos I’ve missed via the “My Subscriptions” view in YouTube.  Very handy!

 

 

X = Xenophobia and Beyond

A decade ago, I had absolutely zero desire to vacation in Mexico.  Other than a brief visit to Germany in the 1980’s, and a few visits to Canada, I had never been out of the United States.  Why go elsewhere when there’s so much of this country to see?   Besides, living in Chicago, I had access to every conceivable ethnic cuisine and exposure to people of all races and nationalities. Why look any further?.

I never really thought of myself as being xenophobic.  It wasn’t that I felt “fearful of foreign lands and cultures”, and I was certainly never driven by hatred.  I just didn’t want to spend my vacation seeing (or carefully trying to avoid seeing) people living in “poverty.”  But to be honest, I never spent much of my non-vacation time here in the U.S. seeking out people living in poverty either. 

Looking back on my actions now, I suppose there was no other way to define my behavior than to call it xenophobia.  That term seems to only be thought of to define the most egregious behavior – hate groups, radical racists, and the like.  Behavior that merely ignores others because of being too preoccupied with one’s own people and environment? Well that seems to be just fine and dandy here in America.  It couldn’t possibly ever be considered the least bit xenophobic….could it?

It wasn’t until I traveled to Mexico this past winter that I fully realized how misfortunate I’d been to isolate myself in that way for so long.  But the first few days and weeks in Mexico didn’t immediately lead me to that revelation.

The US media painted a pretty powerful picture of the drug wars in Mexico over the past few years.  So powerful, that many of the frequent snowbird travelers to Mexico chose to avoid the country for the last couple of years.  

When I first crossed the border into Mexico and began seeing the stark contrast in living conditions between the US and Mexican border towns, my mind immediately began to conjure up images of those who might occupy those simple homes.

I’m sad to admit that my first thought conjured up an image something like this one (this photo is of Mexican gang members in Nashville):

(Photo by John Partipilo / The Tennessean)

But, as my days in Mexico went on and I began to meet and interact with the Mexican people on a daily basis, my perceptions quickly began to change.

Road signs, restaurant menus, gas stations, bank ATMs, and corner grocery stores all gradually became more familiar (and thus less “foreign”).  Modest, simply concrete block homes on the Isla started feeling normal (as the more ostentatious homes of the U.S. began feeling uncomfortably abnormal!).

Now, to be honest, I still was living a pretty “gringo” life in Mexico, cocooned in the uniformity and relative opulence of my motorhome in a foreign tourists’ RV park.  But there was sufficient daily interaction and immersion into local Mexican life, that I was able to be transformed by it at a comfortable pace in a very welcoming and positive way. 

My memories now (of those who I encountered in Mexico) could not be further from the photo above!  In over 90% of my experiences, the people I met were consistently polite, courteous, friendly, hard-working, and (without fail) genuinely welcoming.   Completely impossible to maintain any preconceived fears after 3 months in such a beautiful country!

Now that I’m back in Chicago, I’ve discovered something when driving through some of the Hispanic-dominated (and less economically affluent) neighborhoods—I’m no longer as eager to avoid them!  And that makes me feel very pleased to have broadened my internal horizons as much as the geographic ones.

If you’ve followed the blog for the past few months, I hope my images and stories have, in some small way, expanded your horizons and sparked your curiosity and enthusiasm to grow as well!  If you’ve not traveled beyond the U.S. border lately (or have not lately visited a neighborhood within the US where English is a second language), give it a try! 

Your life may just be forever changed and enriched by the experience!