We moved from the Moses Lake Elks to the Spokane Elks lodge today. When we arrived, the host couple came right over and greeted us warmly. The RV spaces were nearly full, and many of the folks were there to attend the National Square Dance Convention. We got a nice site in the shade by a line of trees. Of course that meant that the DirecTV dish couldn't find the satellites, but the over the air TV was fine.
We drove over to the fairgrounds to check out the RV camping situation. There's a large area inside the gate where we can meet Evans and Johnsons so that we can camp together.
The truck has started to give us notice that our DEF (Diesel Exhaust Fluid) is about to run out. We stopped at the Flying J at Broadway and I-90 and found out that they have the 2.5 gallon carton for $13.99. We'll need two.
I talked with Terri. She told me about her visit to the hospital. It reminded me a lot of the final hours of Mom's life, holding her hands and hoping that she knew we were there loving her. Kathy called. She had seen the kids' postings on Facebook about Fran's passing and wondered what had happened.
We called New Horizons first thing in the morning and left a message for Ken Ullmer (Service and Warranty Manager). He called us back, and when we explained the problem with our fallen MCD shade, he said that the screws for the shades for the two windows in the slide ceiling were screwed into metal plates. They've been having trouble with the heavy shades needing more support and have found that E-Z Ancor plastic #8 anchors with a 30 lb. rating work well, and he said they could be found at any hardware store. He also said that if we could handle a Phillips head screwdriver, the quickest and most straightforward fix would be for us to reinstall the shade ourselves (although he wasn't asking us to do that).
Of course we were in favor of getting the shade reinstalled before we moved to the Fairgrounds so we could show off the coach to our friends. That wouldn't work so well with a tablecloth on the window! On our way out of Moses Lake, we stopped at Lowe's, where we found some E-Z Ancor products like the ones Ken Ullmer had described, but they were rated for 75 lbs. We bought them anyhow, but in Spokane Valley we went out to the Home Depot to try to find the 30 lb. "lite" variety. No luck, so we decided to use the 75 lb. ones.
The job ended up being more involved than we expected. We had to take down the valance/lambrequins to get access to the wiring. Then we had to remove the hard plastic casing that was used to join the wiring from the coach to the wires from the shade. We wanted to preserve as much of the wire as possible, because the wires from the wall were quite short, and of course we had to strip them to make the connection, which we had to tape.
This was an awkward and difficult job, partly because we don't have the proper tools, and some of the wires are quite thin, so it would be easy to cut the wires while trying to strip them. Both the shades and the valance/lambrequin are heavy, and one of us had to hold them up while the other made connections or screwed them in. We were pretty proud of ourselves when the motor worked properly to raise and lower the night shade. Unfortunately there were some black spots on the white shade that we don't know how to remove.
On top of that, we found out that the valance/lambrequin over the dining table was attached to the wall by only two screws, and one of those was coming loose from the wall. We had to take that valance/lambrequin down too and figure out a way to stabilize the screw that was pulling out. We tried putting dental floss around the screw, but that didn't work. We thought about using tape, but decided that probably wouldn't work too well either. Ken found some small plastic anchors we had in our toolkit, and one of them ended up working. We found some of our extra screws that fit the spaces where it appeared that either none were installed at the factory, or they had both fallen out.
Altogether a job that could have been done with the proper tools and expertise in an hour took us over three hours, at the end of which it was very late, and we were very tired.
Meanwhile we found that our printer shelf had fallen. The support strips were installed too far from the front left corner, so we'll have to get that taken care of when we go back to NH too.
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