Back from Kalifornia...

Sorry for not keeping up with this blog for the last month. I thought I had posted this post but just found it. I guess I must have had to reboot the system before I finished. As usual, there has been so much happening here in DaHo that I haven't had time to do it. We were very busy getting ready for our first trip for over a year to Kalifornia to visit all the family and some business contacts. And then catching up with everything after coming back.

The reason for the trip was to attend Grandson Oliver's high school graduation. He is also now an official ENT and as of last Friday, he is visiting Europe with his cousin and grandmother. They flew into Switserland and will spend the next month without any preliminary plans to limit their travel.

We drove the Lincoln on the trip and shortly after it got hot in the middle of Nevada, the air condictioner went out and we traveled much of the way at temps up to 104 - big fun...

It took us about 12 hours to get to Kalifornia and we pretty worn out by the time we got there. We stayed in a Best Western hotel that was right by the Newport Freeway in the middle of everything. We are very grateful to our little Tom Tom GPS to help us get around while we were there as we had forgotten a lot of the little details needed to find everything.

We spend much of our trip time visiting Aaron and Tara and our two awesome granddaugthers, Alana and Asha. This was our first time that we had met Asha and she is really a cutie. We were there for a week and had time to visit most all of the family while there.

The main event of the trip was Oliver's graduation celebration. It was at a local community college. He had about 800 kids in his class and the event over filled the colleges football stadium. We happened to park in the wrong handicaped parking area and ended up having to walk about a quarter mile to get in. That is more than I have walked in the past year and really did me in. I am still trying to recover from it...

We visited some of our local dealers, our contact at Shimano and our product beta tester that has been instrumental in testing our products for us. We have a lot of business contacts that are local to Orange County, CA.

During the week there, our air conditioning worked well on our short trips and mostly cool weather. But, when we started our return trip, it went out again around Barstow. We stayed at the Circus Circus in Las Vegas on the way back. It is very large. I had to go from bench to bench to make it up to the room at times. We didn't do much there except for taking a taxi to the Gold and Sliver Pawn Shop that is freatured in one of our favorite TV shows on the History Channel called "Pawn Stars". There was a line outside and our taxi driver was saying that it is very popular these days. We missed all of the stars of the show by a few minutes, but it was very interesting to visit the place and see it all first hand.

Our trip back from Las Vegas was very hot and long. We were pretty much worn out by the time we got back home. But, it was very good to get back home again. Roberta, Pam's sister, had been taking care of the dogs and she had them here when we got home. It was very nice to see them and they were very happy to see us.

It took me most of a week after our return to catch up on the open orders and to finish making some changes that I have been working on...

For the 9th time, I am changing the product packaging labels on the plastic tubes. Of all the challenges that I have had to work out developing our products, the one that has caused more problems since day one has been the tube labels. I think I have fimally found some that will work good, but I have said that 8 times now and was wrong...

I have finaly found a use for the gaming steering wheel and pedal hardware that I have had for years and never had a use for. He has given me a one month subscription to IRacing, an online auto racing 'environment'. It is amazingly real and it works much better than I could have imagined. I haven't played with it too much yet, but the little part that I have use it has been big fun.

Johnny also told Pam about this device that he got for his racing environment. Its called the Butt Kicker. It is a device that you attach to your seating you use to watch movies and it turns the lower end of the sound sytem into vibrations that you can feel along with the sounds. It is pretty amazing and stuns everybody that has been over and checked out the new "TV" . I got it for Pam's birthday. But the last few days it has been acting broken so I don't know if it is a user problem or not.

Well, that is about all there is to write about here in DaHo...