OK, so now we’ve been to Freightliner for a new EGR valve, let’s see what it looks like. Yep, we live an exciting life down here in Arizona - nothing like a peek at an EGR valve to get us riled up. First Gary has to open up the engine compartment which he accesses through a 2’ x 3’ door in the floor in our bedroom.
So, the door is off and this is our diesel engine. Guess which part is new. I’m betting that it is that bright red shiny metal piece in the upper left corner.
There, wasn’t that exciting?
We also have an active shuffleboard group and the tournament is coming up so they are out in force practicing.
There’s tennis and pickleball, water polo, golf tournaments, an active biking club, 2 hiking clubs - quite frankly, I can’t name all the active sport around here.
I put this picture of our site in several weeks ago but want to call your attention to the fine grapefruit tree growing in front. Now, we’ve been at Val Vista for 4 years and never had a tree before. And, this one is full of grapefruit. It seems to be ahead of the other trees in the park because the grapefruits are quite yellow. And, they taste so good.
We’re not thinking that there will be any grapefruits on the tree on January 1, when we leave. (by the way, I don’t want any jokes about grapefruits.)
Speaking of the tree, here’s another one with the tree in the background. Gary’s father always bought his 3 kids a box of Russel Stover chocolates for Christmas. We always looked for them. Once he bought a 2 lb box. Whoo-eee. He died in January of 2013 and, every year, in his memory the kids buy Russel Stover chocolates. And, part of the memory is to buy them on sale since their father always did. I found these at Walmart when I was shopping for a water filter and knew my Christmas quest was filled. (Check out that ripe grapefruit.)
One last topic in this potpourri of things in this blog. Gary and I have always kept account of our expenses. Firstly we aren’t rich by any means and secondly, that’s just our nature. Of course, we were both brought up by thrifty parents (Gary’s father kept a Dome book record until he died). Thus being thrifty is in our genes and we want to know where our money is going. We got married in 1973 and began our expense book. Back then, no one had computers so it was all by hand. On green accounting paper. A bit of history here, I had been a bookkeeper for several organizations and had taken several accounting courses so I was used to green accounting paper.
We’ve kept so much over the years and one thing we’ve always kept is our old accounting records. Now, we’ve got them stored in our storage unit back in Iowa but, slowly but surely, Gary is taking things out of the unit to scan and - TOSS. Yippee. Let’s get rid of some of this stuff. Condense that storage unit.
But, back to the green accounting paper. Here are some of our pages. Gary’s got these scanned and I just took a picture for the blog. Here are 4 pages - 4 months of expenses and income. June, July, August and September of 1978.
Now, here is a single page showing our expenses and income for the month of June in 1978. Our paychecks were pretty small back then. One says that Gary got $269.18 one week and I got $320.60. However, our expenses were much smaller back then also. We spent $130.41 for groceries and $687.40 for our home, including a mortgage payment of $355.53. We were lucky that we got bought a home and took out a mortgage when the interest rates were around 13%. Back in the 1970’s.
We actually built a house from a company called Deck House, a New England company which is still in operation. Because we did most of the interior staining and painting, the house cost us less than it might have. That’s the thrifty genes kicking in.
And, here’s a final picture showing our auto expense column. Big auto expenses since we bought a Fiat that month. What a waste of money. No wonder it was being sold. Cute car but it had rust issues. I’m thinking it could go 0 to 60 in 5 minutes. Big deal.
We drove it for 2 years, used lots of bondo and then sold it for about what we had paid for it. A real mistake. But it was not our only auto mistake.
So there, a potpourri of things in the blog.
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