time is flying by in Indiana

Happy Easter everyone! Hard to believe we are 2/3 of the way through April already. We have been running pretty hard since we have been back in Indiana "mooch docking" in our daughters driveway. Rudee's Mom was taken to the hospital a few days after we arrived and has since been moved into a rehabilitation facility. She is getting stronger everyday and they expect her to go home soon, I'm not sure if that will happen before we leave though.
Larry and Sue Hatton, whom we met at Amazon and have become good friends, stopped in to visit for a couple of days before finishing their trip to Michigan where they will start their very first camp hosting jobs. We had a great time showing them around our old stomping grounds. We visited the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, home of the Indy 500, and we all enjoyed touring their museum.

Here is the actual trophy presented to the winning driver each year in victory lane. The winner gets a smaller replica to keep and their bust is etched onto this trophy for posterity.

The following day we toured Parke County Indiana which is the "Covered Bridge Capitol" where we took one of several driving tours to see the bridges. Here is Larry and Sue with the town of Bridgeton, Indiana in the background.

We had a fantastic couple of days with these great friends. 'We'll see ya at Amazon in the fall". :-)

Friday was a work day for me. I have written about our air conditioner woes and even after replacing all the capacitors we still could not get the compressors to run. We had two options at this point, repair what we have at an unknown cost or purchase a new unit to mount onto the roof in place of one of the vents. Putting a unit on top would require it to be hooked up to the breaker box that is mounted to the foot of our bed. I did some preliminary planning and felt like it would not be impossible to do the wiring run so we decided to give up on the old unit and ordered the new one and had it shipped here. We chose an Atwood 15,000 BTU non-ducted unit with heat pump and purchased it from Tweety's in Texas.

The unit was shipped very quickly and arrived in only a few days. Now to get busy and get it hooked up. The first thing was to "fish" the wire through the ceiling. I decided to use the existing air conditioning duct work as a wire run and, using a "fish tape" was able to feed that line across the roof inside the duct and then it goes down the back wall to a point I could access the duct work next to the basement air unit. I hooked two electrical wires to the fish tape and it was just a process of pulling the wires back up into the ceiling where I started from. I ran two wires so I could leave one "dead ended" near the bedroom vent for another roof unit that we can install later if we feel the need. The basement air is fed by two separate circuits from two individual circuit breakers so I just "unwired" the old a/c and tied the new wiring into the old feeds. All in all it was a pretty simple process getting the power up to the roof and we will just leave the breaker controlling the bedroom feed turned off for now. My good buddy Rob Runion came by after he got off work and together we were able to carry the 100 lb unit up onto the roof. Once that was done it was a pretty easy process of hooking up the wires and bolting the unit down.

Ahhhh cold air and no smoke or fire! :-)

We have one more week here and then will be heading to our summer job at Crazy Horse. So far we have at least a couple of motorcycle rides planned, a get together with friends from High School and our church is having a golf tournament Saturday where I will play and Rudee has volunteered to help with registration. Looks like there will be no slowing down for us! :-) I'll keep you posted.