December Doings re the VRRV (Vehicle Recovery RV)

Stuff I got done when not sitting in front of the TV streaming shows...

Let's see, there was yard work of course, got most of the Fall leaves mulched back into the lawn before we got a couple of inches of snow on the 9th.

I replaced the ladder I'd bought while in Arizona two camping trips ago with a telescoping one from Amazon.  It extends out to 12.5 feet and I tried it out on the VRRV, works fine.

Several of the keys on the laptop I use for blogging and photo processing had been giving me fits over the last few months.  First the N key, then the T key...you get the idea.  So I bought a small wireless keyboard from Amazon and seeing if it'll work as a substitute, sitting atop the laptop's keyboard.

I replaced the house battery on the VRRV as it had degraded from an original 112 Amp Hour battery to perhaps a 40 Ah battery!

At RichardM's suggestion, when I queried him on best way to check water levels on the new flooded battery, I bought a cheap endoscope:

The new battery you see, has the usual caps one can remove to check the water level in each of the six cells.  However, with the battery in place inside the VRRV's battery compartment, it's impossible to look down into the cells.

Since I don't want to be yanking this heavy battery out each month to check water levels; I will use the endoscope's camera to look for a reflection of the camera's LED lights from the water in each cell.  I tried it the other day, worked fine.

Today, the weather was warm enough to install the replacement window blinds on the two main windows of the VRRV.  The stock ones had suffered breaks in the string used to keep tension you see.  They would no longer hold position and we'd come home with velcro straps holding them secure when traveling.

The mini-blinds I got, custom-sized via an outfit on Amazon, proved good in terms of fit but crappy in terms of ease of install!  It was a PITA and I'm still not sure how "locked in" the blinds are, we'll find out next time the VRRV moves I guess.

One similar feature to the stock blinds, you pull down and push up on the lower bar to lower/raise the blinds.  There's no strings to pull like in regular mini-blinds.

Oh, and while compiling the "year in pictures" video for this year, realized the Year in Pictures archive page was missing a couple of years, corrected that.  Apparently, I didn't do one for 2009.