One Last Camping Trip

     My wife and I wanted to make one more trip with the Puma Ultralight camper we bought this year, one last road trip before we winterize our new trailer and put it in mothballs for the winter.

    Our choice this time was not to go to a state park or some other back-to-nature setting, but instead to venture to Shipshewana, Indiana. This is Amish country with horse-drawn buggies clip-clopping down roads and streets, clothes hanging outside on the line, and stores that sell electrical appliances are non-existent.

    That's not the main reason I wanted to travel here. I got us tickets to see Tommy James and the Shondells which was playing at a local theatre. We haven't been to a rock concert in ages. Why not?

    Of course, while we're there we'll do some shopping: soup mixes, jams and perhaps a shoofly pie if we can find one. At many Amish stores, they only accept cash. No credit or debit cards. That's fine with me as I can get rid of some of the pennies I've collected over many months.

    At one store, I was charged $2.49 for something I bought. I didn't have 49 cents in change, but I give him $3 and four pennies. At least I can get a nickel along with two quarters. I would rather have one nickel than four pennies.

    But the clerk gave me back my pennies, telling me petulantly, “It's $2.49.” Then he gave me two quarters in change. So not only did I not get my nickel, he short-changed me a penny. I let it go. I didn't really want another penny anyway.

    This wasn't an Amish-run store though. We did go to a variety store that actually catered to the locals. There were racks and racks of broad-brimmed black hats worn by men. There also was a large collection of dark-colored stocking hats. Another aisle displayed shoes and boots, almost all of them black. My wife was tempted by their kitchenware. I noticed a few pressure-cookers on the shelves.

    Anyway, there was one display that puzzled me. It was a collection of various computer printer ink cartridges, the kind where you spend about $25 to print a hundred or so pages on your HP printer. If the Amish avoid electrical appliances generally, why would they need printer ink? I didn't see any printers for sale, nor any other electrical gadgets on display.

    Perhaps if Amish do use computers and printers, maybe there's an Amish blogger out there who could clue me in.

    By the way, there were no Amish buggies in the parking lot of the concert we attended. I guess that makes sense since they're not likely to have ever heard Tommy James and the Shondells over radio, TV or stereo. And at this concert believe me when I say the band and singers used every volt of electricity in town for their amplifiers. I'm sure the Amish didn't miss it.

Facing Your Fears

[Warning: Some violent content. Reader discretion advised.]

    So my wife and I were watching TV rather late one evening when a bat startled the hang out of us, circling the family room where we were ensconced in our recliners. Bats have invaded our home before but after our chimneys were patched up last year, we were told, “No more bats.”

    Obviously, this fellow didn't get the memo.

    He flew out of view as quickly as he'd come in and I figured he had gone upstairs. Our bedrooms are upstairs and there was no way we would sleep until this creature was neutralized. I went out to the garage to grab a couple tennis rackets—I've not played tennis in ages but I figured my Jimmy Connors vintage wooden racket would come in handy in this instance.

    Meanwhile, my wife was Googling on her Kindle ways of getting rid of an unwanted bat in the house. Hmmmm, I think “unwanted” bat is being redundant. However, Wendy said the YouTube videos she was reading strongly advised against using a tennis racket, saying instead to live capture the bat with a bucket and releasing it out of doors.

    What??!! So he can come back inside and maybe bring friends? “Hey guys, follow me. I found this neat old home.”

    Nope. This bat must be dispatched for good and now. I could feel my heart pounding in my chest as I climbed up the stairs one by one. Could I be too old to be doing this? My son lives just across town. Maybe I should just give him a call. But I recalled an incident over 20 years ago when we were similarly buzzed by a bat in our home. My son and I ascended the stairs together to confront the bat but when he flew into the upstairs hallway, my son ducked into the bathroom and quickly slammed the door. Maybe in 20 years he's added more courage. Then again, maybe not.

    When I climbed the last step, the hallway was empty and quiet. My idea was to trap him in one of the bedrooms or try to swat him if he flew by me. I opened the door to the first bedroom, not really expecting to see him since the door was nearly closed. But there he was. And here he came. I flailed my racket like I was trying to swat a fly, but the bat escaped into another of the upstairs bedrooms. I closed the door, trapping him inside.

    But now what to do? I waited till the rustling inside the bedroom had subsided. I'd rather not have him confronting me Dracula-style when I opened the door. So when all was quiet, I slowly opened the bedroom door to have a peek.

    There he was, clinging to a window curtain. That posed another problem. To get a good lick at him with my tennis racket where he was, I could easily break the window. So I added another step to the process. That was to hit him with a broom first, then the tennis racket. Finding a broom, I returned back upstairs and into the bedroom, my heart pounding even harder.

    I approached him cautiously, then with a burst of adrenaline-fueled terror whacked him with the broom. But where was he? He wasn't lying on the floor as I expected. I prodded the curtain with the broom and saw him lying on the window sill, I used the broom to brush him to the floor.

    Then my bat hunt took a rather nightmarish turn. Have you ever seen a live bat walk? It's a grotesque shamble that makes it appear that he's walking with stumps for legs with wings held above his head as if he were the devil. I don't even think I've seen anything like it in any horror movie . . . and I've seen lots of them though in times like these I wished I hadn't.

    Now it was racket time. Jimmy Connors and I took down the creature with a few heavy blows before he found another hiding place. I could finally breathe a nervous sigh of relief.

    One of my grandsons told me this week that he wants to go trick-or-treating dressed as Batman this Halloween. I think I might try to talk him out of it. Might bring back too many bad memories.

Coaching Rehab

    My wife has suffered with a painfully arthritic knee for many, many years. Radiological tests showed that her left knee had almost zero mobility. But with technological advances in medicine, we have reached what one physician's assistant termed, “The golden age of joint replacement.” Earlier this month my wife took the plunge and had her knee replaced.

    While she was recuperating at home, curbing her pain by wearing a nerve block pump and only taking brief steps with the aid of a walker, my responsibilities increased. I grew more adept at using the washer and dryer, and prepared a few meals on our outdoor Weber grill. Wendy's never trusted me in the kitchen beyond making tuna noodle and that was a casserole she had no desire for. That was fine as I had no desire to learn to become a chef.

    Another assignment was to be her “coach.” I'm not sure exactly what entailed. I did read some of the literature Wendy was given to prepare her for the procedure but I have a terrible short term memory for details. Anyway I figured what does a coach do but offer encouragement and push her to rehab her knee to get better.

    “Did you do your exercises?” I asked her once. She said icily that she had already done her required exercises and had told me so hours ago. Again, a coach with short term memory issues probably isn't going to make the pros. I know I won't.

    I do feel somewhat responsible for her predicament. When we took a second honeymoon at the Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island for our 25^th anniversary almost 20 years ago, I insisted we play tennis on their grass court. I'd never played tennis on a grass court and Wendy rarely played tennis at all. After just a few minutes, she came up lame, limping on her injured knee. Mackinac Island is famous for allowing travel only on horses and bikes, no motor vehicles being permitted. I suspect if one of the local horses had come up similarly lame, they would have shot him on the spot.

    Then there was a hike I suggested in the Smoky Mountains years afterwards where she slipped and fell on the same knee, bruising it badly. Most recently, while vacationing in Utah, I signed us up for a sunset jeep ride in the mountains, not realizing it was on a trail infamously entitled, “Hell's Revenge.” Wendy barely walked the rest of our trip out west.

    But, honestly, my only have experience coaching is with youth soccer when my boys were young. Ironically, soccer and football are two sports that Wendy's orthopedic surgeon said she should never attempt again.

    Wait a minute. I remember that TV series The Bionic Woman. Wasn't the tagline for that show “faster, better, stronger” when they rebuilt her legs? Can you imagine how great the bionic woman would be on the soccer field? Now Wendy has a similarly reconstructed knee.

    Maybe my coaching experience may come in handy yet. 

A Smile, A Groan, and A Surprise

     We invited our seven-year-old grandson Owen to come camping with us one night this week. Our tiny camping trailer can only accommodate one grandchild overnight since it has only one extra bed. That's not necessarily a bad thing either. This is true especially if it rains, which it did a lot one morning.

    So to keep the little guy entertained, we played an I Spy card game, watched the lightning flash through the windows and played a time-tested game my wife and I played with our kids when we took long road trips with them as youngsters: the ABC game. You're given a category and each player needs to come up with a word that fits the category beginning with A then continuing down the alphabet.

    The category was food. That's an easy one with the letters at the top of the alphabet. For example, A for apple, B for banana, C for cereal. But when the game goes past the letter “T”, it gets tougher. For the letter “U”, my wife volunteered “Uglifruit”, a citrus product from Jamaica, which didn't pass muster with Owen though we finally thought we convinced him it was legitimate. That is, until we came to the letter “Y” when Owen called out “Yucky fruit,” saying if Uglifruit was okay, so was Yucky fruit.👱

    A little while ago I finally got a response from the Michigan department of treasury to my state income tax problem that I've blogged about previously here. For weeks, the state of Michigan on-line tax assistance service claimed to have no knowledge of my amended tax return I filed at the beginning of May. I wanted to correct a mistake that resulted in my getting shorted $1,000 on my refund.

    But finally, Michigan's automated tax assistance service reported that they received my amended return. So the good news is that they DID receive it. Bad news is that they say it's going to take until November at the earliest to process it. Will I get interest on the additional $1,000 they owe me? I doubt it.😒

    I did get a pleasantly unexpected surprise this week too. My wife and I are regulars at our local Tim Horton's coffee shop. Hardly a day goes by when we don't stop by for our favorite light roast with cream and Sweet N Low sweetener. I always pay with a Tim Hortons gift card, my method of payment since when germaphobes said cash could carry the Covid virus during the pandemic.

    About a month ago, the drive-through clerks at Tim Horton's asked if I was missing a $50 Tim Horton's gift card that someone had ordered, paid for, but neglected to collect before he or she drove off. Not me. A week later, they asked again and I assured them that everything was accounted for and clear on my end. I thought that would be the end of the story.

    But this week when I wanted to re-charge my Tim card with another $50 they asked again if I'd paid for a card that I'd not received. Nobody had claimed it after a month. “Are you sure?” they asked. I said I was positive. It didn't matter this time. They gave me the $50 gift card anyway.😲

    Hey, maybe that means my luck is on the upswing. I could be on a roll here. Maybe the state of Michigan could give a break to a senior and deposit into my bank account the income tax refund I have  coming rather than wait another six months. So I just had my wife check our bank statement.

    Nope. Guess it's too much to expect our government to be compassionate and generous.

Ah, Wilderness

    I marked another birthday this past week, my 71^st. I was at a soccer practice with my four-year-old grandson recently when one of his little teammates came up to me. She said, “Are you very old?” I had to confess that I was. Little snip.

    It feels like I'm at the age where it's better now than never. With that in mind, we bought a camper trailer last month. I've been wanting one ever since I retired ten years ago, over ten years ago actually, but I always chickened out when it was time to make the commitment. This year we went ahead and bought one.

    We've never owned a trailer previously. First-timers. In fact, I've never towed anything with our cars. Trailer camping would be a whole new learning experience for me . . . and a learning experience at an age where I frequently forget, as in where did I leave my keys, my glasses, my hat, etc.

        And there's much to remember when you're camping with a trailer. Just hitching it up to my car involves a complicated series of tasks: attach the hitch to the car, back the car up to align the hitch with the trailer coupler, attach the coupler to the hitch, put the pin into the coupler and raise the trailer with the jack (“height is your friend”), so you can attach the weight distribution bars, make sure you count seven chain links before securing the bars to the trailer . .. .

    Then there's operating all the electronics and appliances on the trailer itself. That's another learning process. Sometimes it's trial and error. For example, I learned, don't turn on the hose to put water into the trailer's water storage tank until the hose is securely connected to the water receptacle outlet. I got myself very wet trying to attach the loose hose to the water storage receptacle on the trailer with the water running.

    We figured out the lights, the radio, the refrigerator, the dumping of waste water and, this last trip out, the propane stove. We still need to learn how to turn on hot water, the furnace and the air conditioner. But we have the whole summer to learn.

    So far we've camped five nights at state parks. It's been years since we've pitched a tent but camping now is reminding me how buggy and dirty camping can become. When I was in the sun, the black flies would bite, when I was in the shade, mosquitoes ambushed me. For my birthday, my son got me a high tech insect repellent device with a heater activated repellent, rechargeable Li-ion battery power and a USB cable. Sooooo add that to the stuff we still need to learn how to use.

    But the outdoor adventure begins. And we get to meet new people, fellow campers. Wendy was in the restroom washing her hands when she encountered this other woman, also washing up. There was a big spider in Wendy's sink so the lady offered to let Wendy use her own sink. Wendy declined and began to flush the spider down the drain.

    “Oh, please don't,” the lady said, reaching over and putting the spider into a receptacle to rescue it. She carried it off saying, “It's a life.”

    Paraphrasing that Dr. Seuss book—Oh the Places You Will Go (And the People You Will Meet).

Taxes. Ughh.

     We mailed out federal and state of Michigan tax returns out on Monday, April 15^th, the deadline for filing taxes. Only problem was that this was our second try on both this year. We had to file amended returns to correct our initial tax filings we made back in February.

    Our initial federal return sailed through apparently without a hitch as we got our refund promptly. But our state return seemed stalled. I checked on-line to find it was “under review.” Oh, oh. Not good. Sure enough, when my refund came, it was over a thousand dollars less than expected. A letter of explanation came too saying that I had calculated my senior deduction incorrectly.

    But I didn't. My mistake occurred when I put my senior deduction on the wrong line of the tax return. The state of Michigan gives seniors two ways to calculate their old age deduction for lack of a better term. I took the one that gave me the bigger refund, but entered that amount on the line that gave me a smaller refund.

    That's not the only amount I put on the wrong line, I also put my total tax liability on a line that asked “allocated share of tax paid by an electing flow-through entity.” The state corrected that one in my favor on their own. But the other mistake they corrected their way, not in my favor, costing me $1,000.

    The letter of explanation sent by the state said I could file an appeal or amend my return. But which one should I do? I called their help line. It's an automatic help line where you give them the information on your tax return after which they say you can speak to a customer service representative. So I entered all my information, and they told me the amount of the refund sent and the date—which I already knew—then the recording said, “Thank you. Goodbye.” There was no live customer service help.

    With no help on their so-called help line, I tried on-line at a state of Michigan website where I entered my tax information, then I asked “do I appeal or amend?” to which I should receive a response on-line after seven business days. After seven days, my response appeared. “Resolution provided,” it said. I thought, great, my missing refund was on its way to the bank. But then I clicked on a prompt that offered further detail. That detail told me the amount of the refund sent and the date—which I already knew—with no answer to my question of whether to appeal or amend.

    So I went ahead and amended my state return. In doing so, I discovered that I had under-reported my gross adjusted income by $1,000. I misread a 6 for a 5 on my W-2. Can I just say that 70-year-old eyes and seven-point type on an IRS withholding statement are not compatible. But this meant I had to amend my federal return as well.

    I amended both returns and after a thorough examination that included re-doing all my calculations, I gave them to my wife Wendy to give a quick check of her own. “I'm 99.9 percent sure I have everything correct,” I said. But I didn't. She found another error. Good thing I had purchased a bottle of white-out.

    I'm creating a new word for myself for the next time I do taxes. The word is FORCUS,. The meaning is “Forcing oneself to focus.”

Bonding With My Granddaughter

      My wife Wendy and I have babysat all our eight grandchildren at one time or another. But my backyard sports games and more physical past-times have favored the grandsons, which comprise seven out of our eight grands. Wendy thought I should do something special with my seven-year-old and only granddaughter Gwen, just the two of us.

     She likes creating craft projects, certainly more than her four younger brothers, so we drove to a small store that sold scraps, leftovers and recycled materials of every type. There was a barrel full of used crayons, drawers of stickers, threads, yarn and beads galore. I thought the place was run-down, making the local Goodwill look like Saks Fifth Avenue in comparison. This store's cast-offs included rusted bike parts and dusty fabric remnants. But Gwen exclaimed, “This place is terrific.”

     She filled a small basket with sundry items planning to make something she called a “snow globe.” I wasn't seeing it myself in her collection. She didn't even have anything that looked like a globe. She did pick out a ring for herself and a small toy for the boys to share. After she put things on the counter for the clerk to tally up, she said, “I've just got to get one more thing.” Then she went to the other end of the store to pick up some more fabric. I didn't see the urgency in making the clerk wait for that, but I was going to indulge my granddaughter in whatever.

     Though she was in a hurry to get home and show off her 'treasures' I said we had to stop at a Tim Hortons first to get coffee. “Why? You can just make coffee at home.” she said.

     “I don't like the taste of the coffee we brew at home,”

     “Just put milk and sugar in it,” she advised.

     "It still doesn't taste as good,” I said.

     “Then put more sugar in it,” she replied.

     I had to smile at the thought that a little more sugar makes everything taste better, at least in the eyes of a seven-year-old girl.

     As we got closer to home, she said, “This was the funnest day ever.”

     Wow! Success! But it surprised me that an outing with grandpa would rank higher than a fun day spent with her Nana. Gwen spends lots of time with her nana who takes her swimming in hotel pools, even for weekends at posh hotels in Chicago.

     “Even more fun than with your Nana?” I asked

     “The funnest with you I meant,” she said.

`     Well, I'll still take it.