Saturday, February 9, 2008

A Little of This and a Little of That . . .

Well, I still haven't completed the Cholula Red site, but I figured I'd better catch up here or who knows how long I could go on not posting?

We moved down to Oliver Lee State Park a week or so ago and have we ever been busy since we got here!

We knew that we would be meeting our good friend Andy here, and also Dave and Marlene, the camp hosts we met last year. So you can imagine our surprise when we got here to find our friends Kae and Cokie and their wonderful yellow Lab Bo were also staying here. And to add to everything, there was another Lazy Daze, which it turns out is owned by a great fellow named John Coxon! Have we been having fun or what?

As always when we get together with Andy, rig improvements just seem to happen. And now, John has joined our group and, boy howdy have we been busy! The other day we all went trooping into Alamogordo to vist Lowes and Home Depot. For us, this is a day on the town, we ALWAYS find something wonderful.

On this day, we discovered some great solar lights. They were created as fence post lights, but they work wonderfully well as a porch light for the rigs. They have a good size solar collector and two amber LED lights which provide a perfect amount of light for the doorway. At just $10.00 each, they were a real find.

And now a bit about our new friend John. He is a truly talented leather artist and cabinet maker, so of course we had to take some time and look at the improvements he's made to his rig (a 1992 mid bath). He has a great website that you might want to check out.

I was immediately taken with his curtains, which were unlike anything I had ever seen. Lots of folks change their window coverings but John has come up with a unique way to hang his curtains.

He manufactured curtain rods from aluminum tubing (with little brass balls for the ends, really attractive). Then he hung these from the bottoms of the cabinets with leather hangers that he manufactured himself. For the curtains, he measured where to put the rod holes so that the curtains would hang perfectly and also be super easy to slide open or closed. When he had the measurements perfect, he cut holes in the curtains with a leather punch. While I'm not describing this well, they are really classy looking. In fact, they were so nice I asked him to make me a set for my kitchen and bathroom curtains.

And he did! What a great improvement!

Besides working on the rigs, we've been enjoying the beautiful vistas of White Sands (which I'm embarrassed to say I haven't photographed in the week plus we've been here).

And cooking, of course. I have a wonderful meatloaf recipe I will be posting soon, but just today, I discovered an exceptional new dish. While shopping locally, I found a bag of "Toasted Dried Sweet Corn", manufactured by John Cope's Food Products. It's 100% dried toasted corn, nothing added, just a blend of different strains of sweet corn. On the back are three recipes, and I decided to make the stewed corn, a really simple recipe.

You take the dried corn, add water, a bit of salt, some butter and milk. Then you stir it all together and microwave it for ten minutes. Then let it sit for fifteen minutes, then cook it again for another fifteen minutes. I really had no idea what to expect from this concoction, but I have to tell you, this is one yummy dish, extra sweet and tasty!

Tomorrow I'm going into town to get more and start experimenting with other ways to use this wondreful product. If I come up with something extra special, Ill share it here.

And I will REALLY try to get some pictures and continue to post here on a regular basis.

Life is Good.

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