not slowing down much

Thursday morning I made a few more calls trying to find the motor I needed to fix the slide outs and jacks. None of the RV dealers here in central Indiana carried them but they all offered to order one for me. :-(
I took my search back to the internet and after trying several search phrases stumbled across a company in Fort Wayne, In. who boasted of having a large warehouse full of hard to find items for hydraulic systems. I knew it would be a long shot but gave them a call anyway. Sure enough they could order one but had none on the shelf. The guy asked me what I needed it for so I explained our situation, full time RVer's visiting family for the holidays and trying to live in a leaning, skinny motor home. I left out the part about not having any underwear, it didn't seem like appropriate "guy" talk. :-)
He told me they actually manufacture hydraulic systems to sell and said he would check the systems they had built to see if any had the motor I needed already installed on them and would call me back. I didn't hold out much hope for him to even call back much less luck out and they actually have the motor but sure enough, about 30 minutes later, he called and said he had not one but two motors! I told him I could be there shortly after noon and he said he would remove it and have it ready to go for me. Now all I had to do was get Rudee out of bed and convince her that driving 3 hours (one way!) was a good idea. :-)
She was a good sport about it though and we were soon headed North, I guess she was as ready to get back to normal living as I was.
The drive was a long one but I finally got my hands on a brand new replacement motor! We made it back to the motor home about 3:30 pm and I got it installed about 10 minutes later. Here is a photo, the new motor is behind all those bundles of wires and relays. I still have another motor being shipped to us and we'll hang onto that one for a spare so we are not in this predicament again.

ahhh, now we're living! I never realized blue jeans were so ...... scratchy. :-)

Friday I decided to tackle another project. One of the advantages of working at Amazon is the 10% employee discount on their products. We took advantage of it by purchasing two new flat screen TV's. Our motor home is a 2002 so the TV's in it are pre-digital, large, heavy monstrosities. We decided to tackle the living room first. The old TV was removed along with the DVD player and the separate VCR.

I moved our Dish Network receiver to sit below the new TV instead of in the cabinet beside it. I also ran the cables for the new Blue Ray Disk player Rudee got me for Christmas which will sit in the right side cabinet where the VCR used to be. Once all that was done I attached the swing arm mount to the side of the steel TV "box" that serves as the framework for our entertainment console above the dash. Next it was time to hook everything up and see if we could get it all to work right. I guess I measured pretty good because the TV fits perfectly and we even get a picture on it! :-)

Looks pretty good up there. We still have to figure something out to fill the space between the bottom of the TV and the satellite box. We are thinking of just covering some cardboard material with black cloth and attaching it to the cabinet but I may look for a "sound bar" that would fit so we can blast away on those Blue Ray movies. :-)
We still have the bedroom TV to replace but I'm hoping it will not be as intimidating as the front one was. I'll keep you posted.