Well, I didn’t make my goal of getting the new issue of the Gypsy Journal finished yesterday, but I’m close enough that I see the light at the end of the tunnel. Unless that light is from an oncoming train, we’re still in good shape. Today I’ll put the finishing touches on the new issue, Miss Terry will proof it again, and tomorrow we’ll take it to our printer in Michigan.

With the paper about done, it’s time to start finishing things up for our Eastern Gypsy Gathering rally, which starts in just two weeks. Greg and Jan are out soliciting door prizes from local merchants today, and will be most of the week. I need to get the artwork to the screen printer for our rally t-shirts, and finish tweaking the seminar schedule.

One new seminar being presented by Whit Reeder, a district manager for a Verizon Wireless provider, will cover smart phone such as the Droids, Blackberrys, and Palms.  Whit says the seminar will introduce folks to a lot of free applications to make life a little smoother, and will save most people up to an hour a day.

We took a short break yesterday to chat with Terry and Dale Pace, who stopped in to say hello. Terry just got out of the hospital, and it’s good to see him up and about.

Later on, we went to dinner at Texas Roadhouse with Greg and Jan, and Al Hesselbart from the RV Hall of Fame Museum. They make an excellent steak at Texas Roadhouse, but why do they always have to have the darned music so loud? For me, when I go to dinner with people, the opportunity to talk is a big part of the experience. At Texas Roadhouse, you have to shout to be heard most the time.

Back at Elkhart Campground, our friends Susie Orr, Marlene Hinman, and Carol Hill stopped in to say hello. With that many pretty ladies in our motorhome, and Miss Terry too, I was about to overdose on cute!

I got an e-mail in response to yesterday’s blog, in which I said I raised eyebrows when I referred to Greg White as my “wife” at a local gun show, telling me that I was insensitive to gay people. No, I am just terribly politically incorrect, and I have a sense of humor.

I can’t say that “some of my best friends” are gay, but I do have several gay friends that I really care about, and I think we know each other well enough that they would have let me know if I had offended them. I won’t go into an entire Bad Nick thing here, but lighten up people. Not everything in life has to be drama. If you can’t laugh once in a while, you’re in big trouble.

But Bad Nick knows that some things are not laughing matters, as you’ll read in his new Bad Nick Blog post Ground Zero Mosque. Check it out and leave a comment.

Okay, back to work. I have a paper to finish!

Thought For The Day – When you can’t control the wind, adjust your sails.

Click Here To Register For Our Eastern Gypsy Gathering Rally!

I can only spend so many days in a row stuck at my desk, and then I have to escape for at least a little while. I reached that point yesterday, so I took a break from working on the new issue of the Gypsy Journal, and Greg White and I drove out to Shipshewana to check out the goodies at the gun show.

I think we may have cause to be concerned, when we see the Amish stocking up on guns and ammo! At the Shipshewana gun show last year, I saw several Amish men looking over the hunting rifles and shotguns, but yesterday the exhibit hall was full of them. And I swear, one was buying a 9mm handgun!

Sometimes I forget that not everybody gets my sense of humor. While Greg was looking at something else, I found a nice toy on a display table, and was talking to the man who had it for sale, when Greg walked up. Being the typical wise guy that I am, I said to the fellow at the table, “Well, before I can buy anything, I have to ask my wife here if it’s okay.” The guy looked at his friend, back at me, and suddenly he wasn’t nearly as friendly as he had been just a few minutes earlier. “You’re not those kind of people, are you?” he asked.

Miss Terry and Greg’s wife, Jan, were off having a girl day, and when we left the gun show, we met them for a late lunch/early dinner at El Maguey, one of our favorite Mexican restaurants. Terry, Jan, and I had the shrimp enchiladas, and they were delicious. Greg had a chicken plate, and was just as pleased with his choice.

Back at Elkhart Campground, longtime Gypsy Journal subscriber George Bartley stopped by to say hello, and drop off his two year renewal check. Soon afterward, somebody else came by who is staying at the campground all month, and wanted to register to attend our Eastern Gypsy Gathering rally.

Terry and Jan dropped off some stuff at the motorhome from their trip to the farmers’ market, then took off again for a WalMart run, Greg went off to do whatever it is he does, and I started back in on the paper. That didn’t last long, because somebody else stopped by to chat, and about the time I excused myself and said I really needed to get back to work, a series of telephone calls started coming in. I was finishing up the last of them when Terry and Jan got back home.

I worked the rest of the afternoon, and past midnight local time, except for a break to go to Dairy Queen with Terry, Greg, and Jan about 7 p.m. After our late lunch, nobody was very hungry, but there’s always room for dessert!

If I get an early start, and really, really work hard, I can get most of the new issue done today, making up for the time I spent goofing off yesterday. But it was worth it, I needed the break.

Thought For The Day – One of the many things no one tells you about aging is that it is such a nice change from being young.

Click Here To Register For Our Eastern Gypsy Gathering Rally!

Yeah, that’s pretty much what I’m still doing, just plugging away on the new issue of the Gypsy Journal, just like I have been most of the week. I wish I had something new and exciting to tell you about, but you probably wouldn’t find the details of adding paper to my HP laser printer or running spell check on a draft of an article all that thrilling, so I’ll spare you the details.

Yesterday afternoon I got away from my desk long enough to stop in at Heartland Recreational Vehicles for a quick visit with Director of Sales Coley Brady to work out the details of a factory tour for folks attending our Eastern Gypsy Gathering rally. We have such a busy schedule of seminars during the rally that we couldn’t find the time for the tour until Friday morning, after the rally officially ends.

Anybody who wants to take the tour can meet in the main vendor room at 9:30 a.m., and a representative from the factory will lead a caravan the couple of miles from Elkhart Campground to the factory. Even if you’re not in the market for a new RV, it’s always interesting to see how the different companies build them. We learn something new with every factory tour we take. Elkhart Campground has plenty of room if you want to stay around for the tour, and maybe hang out with all of us who will still be here for the weekend.

Later in the afternoon, we went to Ryan’s Buffet, another favorite restaurant of ours, for dinner with Greg and Jan. The food was good, and the conversation with our friends was fun and interesting, as always.

I am going to take a break for a little while today, to go to the gun show in Shipshewana with Greg, and drool over all of the big boy toys we can’t afford and have no room for anyway.

While we’re doing that, Jan and Miss Terry are going to have some girl time and check out the big American Countryside Market. We were sad to learn that this big indoor bazaar, which features Amish foods and crafts, will be closing its doors in early September, and that its future is unknown. We always enjoyed browsing all of the vendor stalls and admiring everything on sale there.

I think parking everybody who will be coming in for our rally is going to be pretty easy, since a good number of the people who registered for the rally are already here, and more are coming in every day. Several people have stopped by to say hello, and while I haven’t have much time to visit, I’m looking forward to getting the paper done so we can get out and have some fun.

I’m starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel; by last night I had 25 of 36 pages of the new issue finished, and I’ll wrap it up by Monday, giving Miss Terry plenty of time to proof it, and to get it to our printer on Tuesday.

I’m not the only one working hard. Bad Nick posted a new Bad Nick Blog titled You’ve Got To Be Kidding Me! Check it out and leave a comment.

Thought For The Day – Good parenting is only gained by experience, and therefore only available to grandchildren.

Click Here To Register For Our Eastern Gypsy Gathering Rally!

Fortunately, most RVers we know are pretty mellow people who, aside from a heightened sense of adventure and a love for seeing what’s over the next hill and around the next bend in the road, are pretty much like anybody else you’d encounter anywhere.

Most RVers, especially fulltimers, seem to be pretty tolerant people, and accept everybody for who they are. We’ve sat around campfires where the group included everybody from retired surgeons to former schoolteachers, truck drivers, and mailmen. Nobody cares what you did in your past life, they just want to know where you were yesterday, and where you’re headed next week.

However, every once in a while we run into a snob. Such was the case recently when we had a conversation with somebody who proceeded to let us know that anyone who didn’t own the same type of upscale diesel pusher they did was certainly not on a equal level, and was probably mentally or morally suspect as well.

When talking about our Gypsy Gathering rallies, this person made the comment that they were not comfortable at our event because we let “everybody” in, even people in cheap used RVs, and that you never know what to expect from those kind of people. I was tempted to reply that until recently, Terry and I lived and traveled in a 34 year old homebuilt bus conversion. I guess that means we certainly qualified as those kind of people!

On the other end of the spectrum, I had an e-mail exchange with a fellow who wants to buy a cheap used diesel powered transit or school bus for about $3,000 to $5,000, spend a couple of thousand dollars converting it, and hit the road.

He told me that he doesn’t plan to put in a bed, just get a fold out couch from a thrift store, and that he won’t be adding a bathroom. He plans to spend a week or two at a time in different towns, staying at WalMart stores and truck stops, and that he can use their bathrooms to clean up in, when he needs to.

He went on to tell me that he won’t have to buy fuel, because restaurants are eager to give away their waste vegetable oil, and he can pour it directly into his fuel tank and go on down the road. He figures he could live easily on a couple of hundred dollars a month.

I tried to explain to him the hundred and one reasons why his plan wouldn’t work, from the fact that waste vegetable oil isn’t quite that easy to come by, and that you can’t just pour it in your tank and go, and that living in WalMart parking lots wasn’t exactly RVing. But the response was basically of the mindset of “My mind’s already made up, don’t confuse me with facts.”

So we have a prima donna who pulls up to a dump station and says “Well, ours doesn’t stink,” and somebody who basically wants to be a motorized hobo. Aren’t you glad most of the folks who park next to you at your favorite campground fall somewhere in the middle of these two? I sure am!

Thought For The Day -  Except for ending slavery, Fascism, Nazism and Communism, war has never solved anything.

Click Here To Register For Our Eastern Gypsy Gathering Rally!

As of yesterday afternoon, the FMCA website is down, the victim of a virus attack that hit sometime Monday. The computer savvy folks I know recommend that if you visited the FMCA website in the last few days, you should run a complete system scan to ensure your computer is not infected.  Roger Marble also suggested that, in addition to whatever antivirus software you have, you also download and run the free MalwareBytes program, to increase the chance of finding any problems.

Speaking of computers, I wrote in yesterday’s blog that my monitor was acting up, and I thought it was getting ready to die. Several of you wrote, suggesting that I check the connections between the computer and monitor. I did and didn’t see anything wrong, but then Greg White started fooling around with things, tightened this and tweaked that, and voila, the monitor is working perfectly again!

That darned Greg is just full of surprises! Besides being a computer geek, a Mr. Fix-It for whatever I break, a great RV rally parking helper, and (when teamed up with his pretty wife, Jan) an excellent RV rally door prize solicitor, Greg is also always coming up with something I never knew existed, such as RunPee What is RunPee, you ask? I’m not going to tell you, but if you read Greg’s blog post titled Sex And RunPee from yesterday, you’ll learn all about it.

I’m afraid that some readers misunderstood what I was trying to say in yesterday’s blog entry, Plugging Away. I got e-mails from people who thought that I was leading up to announcing that we were no longer going to publish the paper, or at least not the printed edition.

Not at all. I love our job, and wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world. Terry and I have often said that even if we were to win a multi-million dollar lottery (which is pretty hard to do when you don’t buy lottery tickets), we’d still keep right on doing what we’re doing, because we enjoy it so much. I was just saying that the actual work of formatting and putting together the printed issue of the Gypsy Journal is not as much fun as the traveling and actually gathering the stories for each issue.  That doesn’t mean I hate or resent our work in any way.

I spent most of yesterday plugging away, just like I’ll be doing today, except for a coupe of brief breaks when people stopped in to visit. During the afternoon, we checked out the new main rally room here at the campground, and were really impressed with it. It’s going to be great for RV rallies and special events, and I predict that Ellkhart Campground is going to start seeing a lot more rally business with all of the improvements they have made.

As of right now, we have about 40 indoor vendor booths reserved, as well as two outside vendors for our Eastern Gypsy Gathering rally, and we may pick up a few more between now and the start of the rally. I think it’s going to be a fun event!

Sometime during the evening, Bad Nick pushed me away from the desk long enough to post a new Bad Nick Blog titled It’s Not Rape, It’s Religion. Check it out and leave a comment.

Thought For The Day – If you’re talking behind my back, you’re in a good position to kiss my butt!

Click Here To Register For Our Eastern Gypsy Gathering Rally!