No More Ants or Tornadoes

~Friday, March 31, 2023~

Day 1,021

How is this possible? Our grandson is 3 years old today! HAPPY BIRTHDAY CARSON 🎉🥳🎈! We love your curiosity, sweetness and sense of wonder and can’t wait to be with you again very soon. Too much precious time has gone by but we’ll have those hugs and storytimes again very soon. Have a wonderful 3rd BIRTHDAY!

While having my morning cup of ‘joe’, I couldn’t help but notice the loud rumble coming from the lake directly behind our campsite. It was an airboat with 2 pilots on board and it appeared they were either doing shore maintenance or relocating alligators perhaps? It is prime habitat for them after all, which is why we have a cyclone fence separating us from the lake. 🐊😳Good thing!

If it’s not caterpillars and mosquitos, it’s ants. Yep. Our first issue with these annoying creatures. Little did I know that you should never kill an ant in your house, because more of them will come. When ants sense danger, they want to investigate what caused the death of their fellow ant mate before carrying the dead ant away to their chamber. In order to really see where our ants were coming from, Jeff had to take off a few things…..the door threshold and the valance above the door. The caterpillars didn’t hitch a ride from our last campground but we think these ants did. There is no evidence that they are climbing up from the ground here into our trailer.

Yep, there they were coming from inside the wall above the door out through an electrical wiring hole and down to the threshold. This, like many occasions, prompted another project. The threshold. The screws they used to install it were rusting and the holes for them, softening a bit. So obviously moisture from all the coming in and out of the door eventually got underneath. So to combat both the ant problem and the threshold issue, Jeff made a trip to ACE Hardware to pick up some stainless steel, beefier screws and ant bait. We’ll wait and see how long it takes for the ants to find their way to our tiny dungeon before that takes effect. I’ve heard it can take up to a full day for them to find it. The threshold is better than new as Jeff removed the loose sawdust in the screw holes, filled them with silicone, then screwed the thing down, putting even more silicone right underneath the head of the screws. Now if that doesn’t do the trick, we don’t know what will.

Another ongoing project is the ventilation fan in the bathroom. Jeff doesn’t know who to be more mad at….Dometic or MaxxAir. Our old vent covers never gave us any trouble in terms of clearance between the fan door and the vent cover itself. But these newer vent covers we purchased from MaxxAir (the same company as before) gives us very little room when opening the vent door. In fact it keeps hitting and catching on it. And it appears the acrylic door on our new fan has a broken piece on it. So I called Dometic to see if they could send a replacement door to which I was told they were in the middle of moving warehouses and that they had none in stock. What she did offer me was a reimbursement form that we could fill out if we found one elsewhere. That’s pretty good customer service, though we would have preferred they had them in stock. And we soon learned that everyone else is out of them as well. It is annoying, but a project that can be wrapped up hopefully once we’re in Illinois.

Well, it looks like we’re back to watching Ryan Hall Y’all with all these violent storms happening in the middle of the country. Our biggest concern was Hannah, Devin and the grandkid’s safety. You can imagine that we were in constant contact with them throughout the day, especially into the evening when one tornado struck just 20 miles north of their town. The sirens oddly didn’t go off, but they did receive a Nixle alert telling them to seek shelter. What a way to celebrate Carson’s birthday than in their basement, under the stairs. At 5 years old, of course Easton was really scared which ultimately made Carson scared. Ten minutes later they received the all-clear, though they still had awful wind, heavy rain and lightning. From Ryan’s live feed on YouTube, he said these series of tornadoes and tornado warnings were of historic significance. So sad to see so much destruction in Arkansas, Mississippi and Tennessee. Evidently Wynne, Arkansas got the worst of it, destroying half of the county seat city.