July Takes Its Bow 🙇‍♂️ For Now, And August Cometh! 🦸

Once we were back home it was back to work on our baby as always.

But before we get into our projects, I realized I forgot to tell you a part of our story from before:

Remember those cool removable bumper stickers I had purchased a bunch of?

It looks just like the new ones, but with a single QR scan code on it. Well, when I made those I had used a website claiming to give free QR codes: QR Code Generator.com. We were super excited when we got them, put them on our rig, and handed them out all over the state to people who wanted to see our story and get in touch with us later.

If you’ve been reading this blog you probably already saw what happened: It was a scam. They “give” you a free QR Code alright.

So when we arrived home from our big trip, I received an email saying my free QR code was going to expire, and that I could subscribe to regularly pay a ridiculous amount of money to keep it active. So all of the stickers we had made and shared were now going to be useless in less than a week… 😡

I cancelled it immediately. I wrote the company to tell them that their business approach was a dishonest one, that they should re-evaluate their methods and try to be part of the good in the world. They never answered – and are still out there scamming people today. 😒

But, I did find an awesome site that does offer free QR codes; https://www.qrcode-monkey.com/ . We recreated some QR codes and ordered new stickers that we hand out today using this site- and are very happy with it. 🐵

Alright- enough about the stickers! On to what we were really up to.

I snapped this photo when we were home.

I had wanted a picture of the Ohana with her “landing gear” down on both sides; being the new steps across from the fold down ladder.

On our little trip looking for camp sites, the screen door had began rubbing heavily on top of the stairs- and it looked like I was going to have to address the issue.

I remounted the screen door higher, and added support plates at the corners of the screen door frame to prevent the door from “sagging” out of square.. Though that helped, it still just wasn’t quite enough.

We were going to have to cut the bottom of the door a little bit.

So out came the grinder with the cutting wheel…

… and after 2 cuts we had a nice fit! So with that the screen door was now happily co-existing with its new family member, the steps.

So here we begin another tale… (light spoiler there).

Awhile ago I had replaced the propane tank in the RV. The old tank had ran out of fuel, we were traveling, and no-one would re-fill it because it didn’t have a proper OPD valve. So in the middle of December, in the middle of Wasilla, we replaced the tank at a gas station. In our pinch I also replaced the regulator with a single stage unit from Home Depot.

On our last Soldotna/ Kenai trip, the single stage regulator had began to seize up. I had bought a propane tank that had a fill gauge on it- so I installed that along with a new regulator valve I had ordered. You see, I thought I was really smart because this time I had bought a 2-stage propane regulator… 😔

Yay! We had a new tank with a gauge! We will come back to that story later… 😉

So in other news… Laura and I were out to build our new window screen idea. I began shaping the wire we had purchased to form out screen “frame” when I realized the channel we were going to utilize went down and in.

Though the wire would work, I realized that this channel on the outside was actually a perfect fit for window screen spline. Imagine that… 🤦‍♀️

So that’s what we did, we utilized the channel and stuffed it with screen gasket as we hung the screen.

We still had the issue of the unsupported side being loose, so I took a piece of window screen frame and cut it to size, fed the spline into that and tightly wedged it into the window frame. A perfect fit!

Then it was just a matter of cleaning up (trimming out) the remainder of the gasket and screen.

And before we knew it we finally had a perfect screen!

As we came closer to the departure for our next trip, we had our friend Joey over to talk shop about where we wanted to meet her to go camping. While we were looking over the map, our resident crane family stopped by to visit. Here is the pic I shared with all of you before from the beginning of July. See the little baby over by the mom’s feet?