Rattlesnakes!!?

These pics won't click themselves.... Thank goodness for that!

The Florida mountains home of the Rockhound State Park....

Definition of Florida---a place theboondork once lived, and the Spanish word for "full of flowers."

I moved to a new spot this morning; not my favorite site to be, but it's only for one night, and then I will move over to a water and electric site for about four or five days. I don't need the water and electricity; my solar power and batteries provide all the electricity I need, but a water and electric site was all that was available in this new reservation-only world, so I'm taking what they're given cause I'm camping for a living.... My apologies to Huey Lewis and the news.

The host just dropped by and told me some rattlesnakes had been spotted in the campground. Snakes as a whole don't bother me, but I don't want to step on a rattlesnake accidentally, so I will confine my walking to prepared trails and remember to carry a flashlight at night so as not to bother any sneaky snakes with my presence.

Rockhound isn't a very good place for walking off trails anyway; too many Cactus around especially prickly pears. And I'm out of the Sonoran Desert now, so there's no Saguaros in sight.

Kind of breezy today, not too bad, more of an annoyance than a problem, but the skies are clear blue, 80° for a high and 40s at night, with single-digit humidity, great sleeping weather.

The work I did on my refrigerator helped a little, but it's still not right. I need to be able to remove the propane burner from the fridge so I can clean it out properly. Now that I'm in an electric campsite, I can run the refrigerator on AC, and so far, it seems to be working perfectly.

The fact that it runs great on AC and not on propane enables me to come to the obvious conclusion that there's a problem in the propane system somewhere and not with the refrigerator itself. This is a relief because I read that 10 to 12 years is the normal lifespan for an RV refrigerator, and this one is right at 12 years old.

The most common problem with these refrigerators running on propane is the propane burner gets clogged up and does not make a hot enough flame, and that's what I tried to fix the other day by blowing it out with the compressor at the same time, it was still hooked up to the refrigerator because I didn't have a tool I needed to remove it. But I bought a couple of tools the other day in Deming that hopefully will help me remove the propane burner.

All I need now is to find a scintilla of ambition and a smidgen of motivation to get started with the project... Once I start a project, I'll finish it; it's getting started that's the problem.

Theboondork

The little Lance camper is barely visible above the Prickly Pear cactus in my boondocking site

The beginnings of cactus flowers are all over the Prickly Pear cactus.

When I was a young kid, and did something I shouldn't have done, and knew I shouldn't have done it, I got more than my share of spankings, largely thanks to my blabbermouth younger sister. Informed of my misdeeds by the aforementioned sister, My mom would go out in the backyard and cut a "switch" from a bush, and use this switch to spank me.... Looking back on what feels like ancient times, I sure am glad we didn't have this thing growing in the backyard.