It's starting to look like Halloween

 Riverton, Utah        High 84 Low 57

It's starting to get a little cooler. We still have some smoke in the Salt Lake Valley but not as bad as it was. It is supposed to cool off a lot by Thursday.

Penny makes (as if she were big enough to make me do anything I don't want to do) me take her for a walk most evenings. More about that later.

One of our neighbors that really gets into Halloween is getting ready to have her annual show. Last year they won first place for the Riverton Halloween Decorating Contest. I asked her if she was trying to win again, and she told me she doesn't know if they are having the contest this year.

These look a lot better with the lights on, rather than during the daytime. They are going to light them up at the end of this week and I'll try to put more pictures on the post then.

Cindy found a really nice cabinet for her Fat Quarters for $20.00 at a yard sale in our neighborhood. It is the perfect size for the small fabric pieces.  

And of course I have been fairly busy quilting. Cindy made some baby quilts.

I also finished a small quilt for my customer. She made it for a new grand-daughter.

Today I went to the Doctor for my annual wellness check. I had visited the vampires earlier for the blood tests. The Doctor said not much change in a year, so he felt like I would continue to live. Actually he told me I was in pretty good shape for my age. 

One of the questions the technician asked was if I did any exercise. She was happy to hear that I went for walks with Penny, and said that did count as exercise, even though I walk two miles and Penny probably walks three. She has a favorite route and has to smell all the pee-mail every day. Maybe to make sure there haven't been any new dogs on her grass along the way. 

Now you might think Penny is a little spoiled, but you would be wrong. She is a lot spoiled. She really is the Queen of the roost.

Thanks for visiting.

I've Been Busy

 Riverton, Utah       High 88 Low 55

I've had a project that has been waiting on me since we went to Panguitch. While we were there we noticed that every time we used the kitchen sink, we could see water coming out from underneath the fifth wheel. I almost decided to see what the problem was while we were there, but the burrs in our spot were bad enough that I decided to wait until we got back to Riverton. Now I'm glad I waited.

Meanwhile it has been so hot that I really didn't want to work outside at all. It finally cooled off enough, and I'm all caught up with quilting Cindy's quilts, so I decided to tear into the under-belly cover and see what was going on. 

It was a lot of work getting the bottom cover off with out tearing it, which would be hard to do anyway, but I had to cut around some hydraulic lines and a brake line.

I was hoping for an easy fix, but no such luck. after I got the cover down, I could see some cracks in the tank, which meant take it out. There are sensor wires and I knew the intake pipe had to be disconnected, but I didn't know about the vent, which gave me fits getting to it so I could cut the elbow out of the top enough to get it down. This later made for a lot rougher time putting the tank back, but I solved that problem by using plumber's couplings which use hose clamps around a stainless band around the rubber coupling (in case it ever need to come out again).

I thought at first maybe a rock had flown up and cracked the tank, but after thinking about it, it might have been damaged when we broke the spring in Oregon, I think that because I had a brake line rust through after a few trips from then. 

These pictures don't quite show all the damage, because the rib in the middle of the tank had a crack

 about halfway along the rib. I tried to see if I could get a replacement tank, but with shipping it would have cost almost $1000, not to mention the time it would take to get it, so I looked on YouTube to see if there were anyone that had repaired a tank. There were several and most of them just used ABS glue using acetone to clean the tank. The method I used said to make a little thicker paste using shavings from cutting ABS pipe and using fiberglass window screen instead of fiberglass fabric for reinforcement. The cloth doesn't allow enough glue to get through.

The next picture has the fiberglass on top of the tank ready for another coat of glue.

And here it is finished waiting to dry. From the glue you can now see how far the crack extended along the rib. 

It takes a while for the glue to dry properly between coats, but I got it repaired to the point I felt good about putting it back in, so this morning early I started to replace the tank. It really would have been easier with help, but I finally got it done.

By the time I got to where I could put the under-belly back, it was almost too warm to work outside again, but I decided to finish it. At this point, all I have left are the inside pipe and the vent pipe to hook up, but they will wait until tomorrow morning.

Thanks for visiting.

Time For An Update

 Riverton, Utah       High 90 Low 66

It has been hot and smoky for the past while. Salt Lake City set a new record high today (again).

Cindy and I have been doing some work around the yard and of course quilting. 

We don't have any plans to go anywhere until we leave for Yuma in about 6 weeks. 

I have more pictures of quilts we have finished lately. I finally had a baby quilt that took me longer to quilt than it took Cindy to make. It was a large panel That she just had to put borders around. The actual quilting didn't take too long but we decided to make the clouds puffy and that is what took the time.

 

We also made a flannel thrown that didn't take either of us very long. The top is just three pieces sewed together with a flannel back. I had trouble quilting it because it wanted to stretch very much, so I couldn't pull it tight at all. 

Another quilt is a large quilt with many, many pieces. This one took Cindy quite a while to piece. She let me do an overall pattern, so I wasn't very long quilting it. She does like her pieced quilts.

We have a planter box on our downstairs patio that used to have a weeping cherry tree in it. When the tree died we put a large pot in the center of it that is raised up with area around the pot to plant flowers. This year Cindy planted nasturtiums several places around the pot (which measures 3 feet in diameter and is 2 feet tall above the planter). The planter is two feet off the concrete and the nasturtiums have gone crazy, so what ever we are doing must work.

You can see how large they got, even reaching the ground and almost covering the pot, which is not visible.

And finally, one last quilt which I finished today. Cindy made two of them that are identical.

I still have the other one to finish and I am putting different patterns in the borders. 

We have been eating fresh tomatoes and cucumbers out of the garden, along with eating peaches that the birds have knocked off the peach tree. The peaches aren't quite ready, but when the birds have pecked them and made them fall, I can't see wasting all of the peach.

I hope you don't get too tired of all the quilt pictures.

Thanks for visiting.