The Closet Story

Well, it’s another Monday. Al’s treatment isn’t until 9:25 tonight so we have the whole day to do whatever. I figured that we might go to the gym for a while and then,maybe, do some exploring. It seems like nothing ever quite goes as I think it should. In spite of that, we did accomplish something. The day that we arrived here, the clothes rod in our big (That word is relative. It’s the biggest in the 5th wheel, but it’s NOT big) closet fell right out of the ceiling taking our clothes with it. So all of our clothes have been piled up on the top bunk-bed getting very wrinkled since then. We HAVE talked about fixing it, but it has been all talk and looking at different things that might work until today. Today we did some measuring and Al took off for the local Lowe’s store. While he was gone, I set up my sewing machine long enough for me to finish the machine work on Aeri’s dress and get Nicky’s vest halfway done. I had to rip out the shoulder seams on the vest because Nicky is still too little to work things the way the pattern instructed. I had to do that part by hand. Sewing is a challenge in this rig. I have to set up my machine on the dining table and take everything down every time we want to eat. Al wants to eat three times a day! Who would have thought? Anyway, Al came back just in time for lunch so I had to change things back to a dining area. After lunch, we tackled the closet. We did a complete closet remodel for about $23. We now have a closet with a shelf that it didn’t have before and a lot sturdier clothes rod. Gotta give Al credit. He had a good idea and it worked with only a couple of glitches. He bought a 4 X 8 piece of plywood; had Lowes cut it into the size of the three pieces we needed; bought a roll of contact paper; and knew exactly what we needed to do. The first step was to cover each piece with the contact paper to cover up the not so great looking plywood. After that, we took the first upright piece and put it into the closet……Well, almost. We neglected to notice that there is a bumped out box at the bottom of that side of the closet that gives access to the plumbing for the bathtub. So we did some more measuring to figure out how much we had to cut out of the piece we were working with. Cutting out anything became a problem because all we had in our toolbox to work with was a hacksaw! Al started sawing on the ¾” plywood….not an easy task by hand in any event, but a real problem with only a hacksaw. It was going very slowly . I took pity on him at one point and took over for a bit. I wasn’t accomplishing very much. The blade kept bending. So, Al trotted himself over to George’s (George is the first person that we met at Mission RV Park ---except for the manager --- and he’s proved to be invaluable. I think he has every tool you might need somewhere in his Mini-Winnie or in his Saab convertible. He says he has them but he doesn’t know how to use them. He also likes to talk -- a lot!). Al borrowed his saw, a rusty hand saw, but it was a whole lot better than our hacksaw, which had finally broken. We got the cuts made and took the board back to the closet. Unfortunately, Al had forgotten the old rule “Measure twice. Cut once” and one side of the cut was wrong.
Fortunately, however, he measured 7” when it should have been 11” so it was fixable with only another round of hand sawing. Voila! No more problems and our clothes are now trying to hang out all the wrinkles.

Speaking of George and his tools, yesterday, Al had to borrow his jack and tire iron so he could take a flat off the 5th wheel and take it to get it fixed. Today he borrowed his ladder to put some anti-flap gizmos on our awning. (George told him about them and where to get them …Wal Mart. George buys everything there because Suzie, his wife, works at Wal Mart in Carson City so he has a 10% discount card which he is always offering to use for us.) George started his treatments the day after Al and they’ve become close friends.

Speaking of treatments, it looks like Al will not be having a treatment tonight after all. The guy from the Proton Cancer Center called about 7 PM and told Al that his gantry (that’s what they call the machines. There are three of them but only two are working. The other is down being updated. Al is gantry #2.) had been down for several hours and probably would not be back up for a while. When they did get it running again, they were going to do treatments for the guys who were “graduating” (having their last treatment), and would not have time to get to the “newbies” tonight. Last week, it was the guys in gantry #3 that got bumped. Al has a total of 43 treatments. We planned for his last one being on June 25th, but now it will be on Monday, June 28th -- unless #2 goes down again before then. It’s a good thing that we’re having fun while we’re here.