John and Brenda's place..... Maricopa, Az

Wednesday I was the guest of John and Brenda Brown at their ranch West of Maricopa, Arizona....

I was a little unsure if I actually remembered how to get out to their place, but just like typing... you don't forget once you've done it before....    Still, I was glad for the GPS in the Jeep...

I should have taken some pictures, and had the camera in the Jeep, but we were talking about everything under the sun, and I never got it done....  Brenda took a few, but I don't know what she did with them....  I know they're on Facebook....










There we go swiped without shame.......  LOL   Biscuit was working her crowd using her charm to get free hugs and bits of food...   Aww come on gimme some ribs....

Of course Brenda did her best to make everything so scrumptious...  Baked Golden Potatoes and wonderful slabs of ribs in tangy Bar Be Cue sauce....  Salad and garlic bread.....    Oh did I mention the fresh hot apple pie with ice cream melting all over the plate......   My cheeks are bulging.......  Well all of me bulges.....  But forget that part...

Anyway it was a wonderfully warm day and the sun and weather was delightful..
As were John and Brenda...  I had wished that I could have been out there a week earlier to meet Mike and Janna from Montana, but just couldn't make the schedule work out....  Maybe next year...

Anyway, there is no way I can ever pay back such a meal and hospitality that the Brown's have always extended us....  But next year this is on me.................!!

We did have a few laughs over the Roomba experience..... but I'm not certain that Brenda will ever come to visit me in Mesa again.. Unless she brings a bucket and some spic and span.... LOL

Retired Rod

Roomba Update

I received an email from Roomba...  They can't have the old machine back yet as I mailed it from Arizona ground...  UPS said it should be there the 11th....

In the email, Roomba sent a tracking number for a package that is supposed to contain another replacement Roomba 650...  So perhaps they are not even waiting to see my old Roomba...

This seems incomprehensible to me, but if they have decided, they have decided.....

I'll check out the tracking number and let you know what's in the package..  I didn't threaten these folks in any way with blogging about this experience...    What ever they are doing for me is of their own decision...   Maybe they are sitting in Pennsylvania laughing their butts off at me as well.....

Ya think..?

Retired Rod

Roomba !!!!!

So we did get that rain all weekend....  Over an inch and it was mighty welcome...!!  On the cool side too with highs in the 60s but we just went back to long pants and muddled on...

And muddle on it was as every time I tried my temporary credit card over the weekend it was declined..... See it doesn't have my name on it...  It just says "Preferred Customer."  The lady at Wal Mart thought it was a dummy card mailed out as a promotion.... She wanted to throw it away....

It seems like all of this is just me complaining....  And I don't want to just write blogs about what isn't going right...  But I have to explain this next story in the light of reporting the facts rather than whining...

You do remember the Roomba vacuum that the kids got me for Christmas... And that Biscuit didn't like it and charged at it barking...??   I had set it to do scheduled cleanings....  At noon, but its clock was set in the Central time zone...

I had another dental consultation on Monday at 11 AM... Which was noon in the Central time zone...  I had forgotten Roomba all together...

It must have backed itself off of its docking station and began to clean... This must have alarmed Biscuit...   Of course I don't know the order of what happened, but I do know that Biscuit hasn't had any bad accidents in the house since we came here last October...

So did Roomba scare the Poo out of her...?  Or did she fail to take care of her business an hour before when she was outside....  She was out there for more than a half hour....  Who knows?  But she left a big pile of doo doo on the carpet in the living room right in front of the patio door....

Well Roomba sees this steaming excrement knowing that it shouldn't be there............  And it has to get this cleaned up!!!!!   So it runs over the gooey mess... over and over... winding the stuff up into its brushes and cleaning bin and all over its rubber tires...  It did pirouettes over the pile smearing the mess on all sides of itself...

Its blue light must have been blazing that it had found cleaning heaven....  So once completely covered, it marched off to continue to clean elsewhere.........  Remember it was now covered like it had rolled in the mess like the very pet model it is supposed to be.....

Needless to say it went on to cover the entire room  with this stinking mess...   Well more than one room.......  All I could think of was if Loyce was still with me, and how utterly mortified she would have been....  So now you know how I spent yesterday, with soap and bucket.... Rags, mops, and the like.....

Biscuit was hiding behind my chair in the den and wouldn't come out.....  I told her she was a bad dog, but she already knew instinctively how bad this was.... So I wasn't at all hard on her...

Roomba was showing a charger error and as I tried to clean the outside of her with a damp cloth, making sure not to get her wet....  She exclaimed a big OH,OH... noise and died right before my eyes...    I could not get her restarted....  She was completely dark....

I called the Roomba gods in Pennsylvania...........  They claimed her as killed, and told me I was on my own....  I would just have to go buy another one....  I told them not in a million years...

Well they had my phone number by then as they had made me register the device before they would talk to me....  And after about 10 minutes they called me back...

Seems they do want her back.....   So I cleaned her up a bit more so she didn't have poo hanging all over and boxed her up..

Sent her off this afternoon, UPS..... The package smelled bad in the back seat of the car...  They said that I might get another one, If I hadn't killed it myself....  What ever that might mean....

Are you Rolling on the Floor Laughing your A off by now????   The UPS kid quickly hiked  the package back to the shipping area once it was posted....  Ewwww.. I was glad to get it out of the car too....

Retired Rod

As an addendum, Roomba came thru with an entirely new unit arriving on March 11th....  See blog for that day....  Here!!!!

Biscuit quit hiding!!

Biscuit..... get out from under that bed!!

 Well, you see she is mad at me because yesterday she had to go to the dog shop and get all of her winter hair cut off...   I was too ashamed to take a before picture...

But the dog shop was overwhelmed before Valentine's day, and they weren't even taking appointments they were so far behind...  But on the 15th, I went over and told them they had to take her...  Well OK, the first date was the 27th of Feb...  Fine!

So by then Biscuit had another two weeks on her already too long coat.  I guess this shop and its ladies are really liked by everyone, and they are located across from Leisure World which gives them a big audience of people and dogs....

I found them when Biscuit was still a puppy and they gave her the very first hair cut...

Well now she is all squirrelly because her hair is all gone.... She slept under the covers last night, and she never does that...

She would run under the bed anytime I tried to take her picture....  But she messed up and got on my lap tonight...  I grabbed the phone and got a quick shot...  The flash lit up, and she scowled at me like she often does....

They put those cute little green bows on her ears for St Patrick's day, but she hates those... She has rolled on the floor trying to scrape them off..  But she hasn't been successful yet..  For a while she can forget them, but then something bumps them and reminds her that they are there...  That causes the rolling to start all over again....

This morning Wal Mart declined my US Bank credit card again...  Remember last fall on the way out here I was denied after pumping over a hundred bucks of diesel...  I came burning home on the motorcycle with fire in my eyes....  Now Rod.........!  Remember its not the CSR's fault....!!

So after a call to the bank, I learned that I have been compromised with the Target scandal...  They are even now still finding out that more folks are on the list..  So they cancelled my card....  Well the short story here is the replacement card was mailed to my home in Kansas...

They have very few branch banks out here, and most of them are in Safeway grocery stores...  The guy on the phone told me I had to go to the local store in person because I wasn't in Kansas.. So I did.... to three different groceries and the last one dressed me down because I was told to go there...  By golly they had no intentions of issuing me a temporary card.......

Finally I ended up at the San Tan Mall where they actually had a branch bank...  It took the lady over an hour on the phone to the very same people that I had been calling on the phone to get a workable solution to my problem...  I had to ask them for a cashiers check for the entire bank balance before they got the point...

The temporary card they issued me will not last long enough to get me home to Kansas, and they had to void the card they already sent there, so having my son go try and find it in the pile of mail won't work either...  It was 5:30 and the branch closed before they got me handled...

So I spent all day from before noon...

Some days are like that..........   Its supposed to rain here tomorrow.....  We haven't had rain here for months...  everyone is looking forward to a good long rain storm....

In the desert, that is kind of rare...  Overcast and a few sprinkles is a storm around here.....  LOL

Retired Rod