Live Oak Ridge, Continued

We went on another nice walk Saturday evening, right at sunset, and got a few nice photos of sunset over the cove. It sure was a pretty one.

Sunset from our spot--you can see Ursula's delicate backside at right.

You can see swimmers at the boat ramp in this one.

Lee spent a lot of time trying to get pictures of birds. I will see if he has any good ones and get him to add some.

These guys stopped by to enjoy the sunset with us. The whole family was there.

We both read a lot last night. I finished my book, The Lexicographer’s Dilemma. Wow, I sure liked that book—it is about the history of prescriptivism in English, but way more fun and funny than that sounds. One thing the book has done is make me very self conscious about my writing style. Am I using those words and phrases that make the prescriptivists upset? Have I split an infinitive? Do I care? I really like the author, who seems to be my kind of lexicographer—he says what matters is not whether you are using “good” or “bad” English—everything could be “good” in the right context. What is important is using what is appropriate for your situation. That’s quite along the lines of what I worked on back when I was a linguist, myself! OK, I digressed into a book review. (The history of “OK” is interesting, BTW—hey look, two abbreviations in one sentence.)

Today we spent the morning watching someone try to learn to ski. It was a lot quieter until people started packing up and driving off. After that I made some rather bland tuna salad, since I forgot to put salt and pepper in the pantry, then gave Ursula a nice cleaning. I like arriving and finding her all nice and clean for the next trip. At least the air conditioning is keeping up so far, so I am not too hot. We are off to head home, Put Ursula away and await the next adventure in two weeks, McKinney Falls near the Austin airport. I do hope we get some guests or visitors there.

Trip Report: Live Oak Ridge Park, TX—July 15-17, 2011

Highlight: The highlight for this trip is probably a tie between seeing actual rain over the lake and finally getting some sort of television to watch when it is too hot to be outside.

Lowlight: Really, just the music from the people next to us was the only irritation. None of Ursula’s little burps made us irritated this time.

Meals:

• Peanut butter and banana sandwiches for breakfast for Lee, just bananas for me, due to a temporary crown that likes to fall off.
• Ham/ roast and Swiss/pepper jack cheese sandwiches with tomatoes and baby greens. These were lunches, along with bags of chips from the huge box we have that is nowhere near empty.
• A reprise of the macaroni and cheese (the easy Velveeta kind) with hatch chili tomatoes but without any hot dogs. I ate mine with greens.
• Another frozen pasta and meat bag meal. Yes, we are already into repeats. But these are easy and we like them. I think we will try to do some grilling next time.
• Tuna salad sandwiches for Sunday brunch. I figure we should always keep a can of tuna in here, since it can go in a lot of different things.

They could have named the park Mockingbird Ridge instead of Live Oak Ridge.

Location Review: This is a very nice park, especially the beautiful trees. Most sites have lots of space between them and the next site, though I think a couple of sites are “doubles” for families. You can see at least a bit of lake from most of the park, but where we were is just great. We had beautiful views of the little inlet where the boat ramp was, as well as the main lake. There’s not much to do here other than walk around and look at the lake. Of course, if you have a boat or fishing poles, there is lots to do. We need a kayak. There is a nature center with a nature trail on the other side of the main road, though, so if we ever came here in the spring or fall, we could walk to it. When it’s over 100 you can’t walk too far where there is no shade.

Lessons Learned:
1. You need extension cords to do outdoor lighting.
2. The icemaker is not happy unless the RV is completely level. And what Ursula thinks is level really isn’t.
3. That new inexpensive mattress is GREAT.
4. People really do seem to think their radio is more interesting than the sounds of nature. Sigh.
5. An outdoor chair that has a built-in footstool, or a chaise lounge would enable me to sit outside and not have ants crawling all over my legs.