Week five @ CMR

Sunday June 12th – Saturday June 18th 2022

Sunday morning immediately following yesterdays afternoon shift, and I have to admit, I’m a little slow to get up and started, but I get some breakfast and head out the door by eight o’clock. This is my second week of dayshift work, the extra hours are welcome but there are lots of tasks that are dirty, difficult and just not appealing. But I just do what I’m asked as the decisions are made way above my pay grade. So this morning I was tasked with replacing a roof vent on a trailer, not a difficult task, but it’s not a job that anyone would step forward and say pick me. The park has purchased an older fifth wheel trailer and they are planning on renting it out, which is a fine idea if the trailer they had purchased was in better shape. From what I have been able to gather they paid top dollar for this trailer and it has needed a lot of work to bring it up to a standard that is acceptable for rental. But today my task is remove an old vent and replace it with a new unit, the worst part of the job is the clean-up time after removing the old vent and preparing the area for the new vent, which has to be sealed properly.

Some of the difficulty is always picking up where someone left off, so the person had ordered the new vent, ordered Dicor sealant but did not get any butyl to install the vent, we had some old product in the workshop, but it was very old and therefore not the best for sealing the new vents but I was told to carry on and use it anyway, so I did. My thinking was if it leaks later on, it won’t be my problem, and that has been a hard hurdle for me to get past, I don’t want to come across as being bitter, but for a long time I have either made decisions or at least had some input into the process, and here and now I have no input. And it is just hard for me to just let it go, when I see something that is wrong, I just report it now and then have to let it go, which is so much not my way.

The afternoon my first job was repairing the brakes on one of the golf carts, apparently Bruce was asked to look at it but he never got it done, so now it is my job, there is a fleet of ten or so carts, and they are all gas powered, and to say that they are all in need of some repair would be a safe statement. On this particular cart the brakes actually worked fine, the problem was the pedal would not return properly, and golf carts are designed that when the accelerator is pressed it releases the parking brake as well as starts the cart motor. But in this case the pedal was not returning, holding the brakes on, the problem was that the pivot point on the brake pedal, was seized onto the pivot bolt, so lots of penetrating oil and manual operation I was able to free up the pedal so that it would return when released. This was not a complete and proper repair, as I should have taken the pivot bolt out and cleaned and lubed it properly, but that was not the way I was told to repair it, so again I just did what I was told to do. And the rest of my day was spent moving picnic tables, we are in a ongoing process of replacing the boards on picnic tables, repainting them, so every few every week we remove and replace tables with refurbished, repainted tables.

Monday morning and back for another dayshift, and again this morning I am tasked with installing a second roof vent on the rental trailer, this time it is a power vent, one that can be set to automatically open and start the fan at a certain temperature, it is a new fan but obviously one that has been sitting around for a while. but the actual task is the same as yesterday, and takes about the same length of time, to clean up the area and properly seal the new vent into place.

After lunch we have another water leak reported, on same water line, but this leak is between the other two breaks, here is an issue with the Kubota tractor, the back hoe is not operating, Bruce broke some linkage and bent a hydraulic cylinder ram trying to remove a stump, just after the last leak, so we have to get a rental unit in before we can start the repair. So we know where we need to dig, now we are waiting for the equipment to arrive. So I use the bucket on the tractor to fill move the picnic table and steps away from the rental, as there is a contractor building a deck in the next day or two, and with the deck we will no longer need the set of temporary steps, so I moved them to the maintenance compound.

Around three o’clock the truck gets here with the rental back hoe, it is another Kubota with a back hoe but it is a much smaller unit that ours, so as we start the digging process the rocky soil around here is being a little tough on the unit but we find the leak, it at one of the original glued connection, and needs a new piece of pipe, a connector as well as a mechanical connector, so two glued connections and the mechanical, the problem is that there is a constant flow of water, so we are bailing water while trying to glue the new fittings, not the ideal situation, but we succeed and have the water back on by six o’clock, I’m getting tired of these water leaks, as I’m always the guy in the hole.

Tuesday, and I will spend most of today working on sites, today it was site 44, which was previously a narrow tent site near the base of the entry hill, now I’m not an engineer or anything but I have learned over the years is that water will always run downhill and it will find the path of least resistance, so this project had no real designing, other than someone just thought it would work. The plan last fall was to dig in what I would call a French drain, using washed stone, surrounding a perforated drainage pipe that would carry the run off water to a tank that was buried underground with a sump pump that would pump the water back up the hill to the other side of the entrance road. Then they covered that washed stone with soil, the idea of the French drain is to leave the stone exposed and open to allow the water to enter it, as soon as it was covered the water just went in a different direction, so now the previously narrow dry tent campsite is now a wide wet tent campsite, and with a rainy year so far, lets just call this project an epic fail, and to add to the fail, we are just keep adding more soil to site, acting like a dam, again I’m just doing as instructed, while I know the only way to correct the problem is to re-dig the French drain all across the back of the site and leave it open and exposed, but as our Arizona buddy Lincoln would say “not my monkey, not my circus”, and I will just leave it there.

Wednesday which is my Saturday, a day off “oh yeah”, but I’ve got a lot of things to do today, the radiator for the toad is in and Miss Laurie is going grocery shopping, so after a cup of coffee, and some breakfast we head off to Duncan to gather our needed items, and we attacked the tasks as if we were on a mission, which we were. I wanted to get the new radiator installed as well as the new front brake pads on the toad, we were back at the coach by eleven o’clock and I proceeded to start the radiator change, and it turned out to be a bigger problem than I had first realized, you may remember back in March I had that collision in Arizona well the radiator was damaged then, actually I have never seen a radiator bent out of shape like this one, so it was a bit of a job to get it out and then the new one will not bolt up properly because of the damage, but it is in place and will work just fine until we get to the body shop, next the front brakes, which is just a simple brake pad replacement, the brake rotors look fine, so I saved another couple of hundred dollars there.

I usually don’t do a lot of my own mechanical repairs any more, it is just hard doing some of these repairs with out the use of a hoist, but when quoted $375 labour for a couple of very simple tasks, I can get my hands dirty and I was able to reduce a $1600 estimate down to only $500 worth of parts, after all my last name is Buchanan not Rockefeller. The repairs are done, I’m all showered and kicking back in my chair by four o’clock, we will see how much pain the old joints are in tomorrow, but right now I’m feeling quite satisfied.

Thursday, my Sunday, and I’m actually feeling pretty good this morning, it rained overnight and we are expecting more rain today, this is why the toad repairs had to get done yesterday. Today I have a few small jobs around the coach and I need to sit and catch up on the blog. Miss Laurie is working in the gardens today but all I have outside is some trimming of the grass with the weed wacker, it has been a couple of weeks since I did it, and it is starting to show. Inside I have to fix my chair, there are a number of loose screws that need to be tightened, then there is the propane alarm that has been going off every couple of days, a check of the date shows it is over five years old, time to be replace, and then there are the drawers under the refrigerator, we don’t have a lot of storage drawers and we have overloaded these two drawers with canned goods and now have broken the supports for the rails, there aren’t a lot of items that I would call cheap or poor build choices in our coach but all the drawer slides are one, so I have ordered a couple of rails that will support fifty pounds of weight, more than strong enough to handle our canned goods, but delivery is over a week away so it may be a week or two before I get a chance to change them.

An update on our streaming service, I contacted “RiverTV” to get the service switched to British Columbia, it was a bit of a task, because our billing address is in Ontario, so they had to verify that we were actually in British Columbia, which took a few days but we are now watching local news and broadcasts from “RiverTV” and well as “CityTV+”, it is just nicer to hear and see local information, when watching our morning television. We are on a two month promotional rate of $9.99 per month then it goes to $16.99 per month, but we have no contract so when we leave Canada near the end of October we can just cancel it with no issues.

Friday morning and I’m awake early, no particular reason, other than it just seemed like the right time, today I’m on shift from 8 to 4 again and I can only imagine what they have planned for me today. After a bowl of cereal, I head off to the swimming pool, this is the priority every morning, it must be vacuumed and open for the adult swim at 9 o’clock, then to the clubhouse which also needs to be opened, just a simple task, just unlock four door, turn on some lights, and start the television, as the remote for the television is kept locked in a cabinet, a quick check of the washrooms, unlock the laundry room door and all is well. Then I’m off to get the firewood truck to restock the wood shed at the store, a quick look in the shed told me it would need a whole truck load … but there was a problem, the people that supply the firewood had dumped a load of firewood in the road blocking the route of our firewood truck, so I needed to take the tractor up the hill to clear the wood out of the way, to get the truck out.

Now we get into the fun stuff, and today we are going to install a (I really don’t know what to call it so for lack of better titles, I’m going to call it) a water manifold. It is going onto a new two inch water line up near the office. Now some background on this project, the water line was installed over the winter, it feeds the managers park model home, and the irrigation system around the entrance and office, but this part of the water line simply runs under the managers trailer and was brought through the skirting at a terrible angle, it also stuck out from the trailer 8” at the bottom and 4” near the top, and stood nearly three feet off of the ground, then they had added a 2” brass ball valve sticking out from the trailer then the plan was to add this manifold piece, to support this plastic water line there was to be a post dug into the ground beside the trailer, the manifold has five water hose spigots, and was so large I felt it might need a post to support it as well, because it was protruding over a foot out from the newly added post by the trailer.

My job, was to dig the post hole, and I did that 18” deep was my orders, but when the post was put in place, the handle for the ball valve would not turn because it hit the top of the post, so the decision was made to cut the post off at the level of the pipe, it was right about now the manager came out, and quite literally put me in a difficult spot, she asked my opinion, that’s never a good thing, because I always have an opinion. And it could have been my reference to this job looking like a pimple on a pigs ass, I’m not sure, but she did like my opinion on how I thought it should have been done.

Now bring in my immediate supervisor, and the discussion moves along to the fact that if the water line came out of the skirting at the correct angle the manifold system could be mounted to the trailer and held securely into place the valve mounted on the riser pipe, but it would mean someone crawling in under the trailer to cut and repair the waterline, so it came out straight. Now I’m sure you can guess who got that job. Correct little old me, it is times like this that I curse myself for opening my mouth, but it was the only correct way to fix the mess that was actually was. So between crawling under the trailer to realign the waterline and cleaning the departure sites for the day, that was pretty much the balance of my work day.

**Realigning the water line, in the crawl space**

Saturday and I’m back on the afternoon, lock-up & security shift, and thank goodness after it rained off and on all day, and the sun finally came out late afternoon, the park is nearly at capacity, and there are some groups of baseball players in the park, which may or may not be an issue. So I went to do the firewood run with the truck and wouldn’t you know, the firewood people had dumped another truckload of firewood, blocking my path!

So after I hand bombed enough fire food to get the old Mazda pick-up out, I made my way around the park to sell only one whole bag of firewood, but at least I was able to restock the the wood shed at the store, before returning to reload the truck. Miss Laurie is working the evening shift at the store tonight so my dinner break was just a quick bowl of soup before heading off to close down the swimming pool.

There were not a lot of tasks for me to accomplish tonight but some were a bit of a pain in the butt, it seems that we are sometimes on a make work project, so here is todays example. The rental trailer needed a new propane detector, just as our coach does. There are a variety of styles and sizes, some are surface mount, some are recessed into a wall, so it would just seem natural to replace the defective unit with the same style, and because I need a new one as well I have been looking at the choices and options, as well as the pricing. The rental had a recessed sensor, and someone purchased a surface mount, and rather than get the correct one, it was decided to try to make the surface mount unit work. The prices vary from $55 to $95 and they come in three colours, so the rental had a brown recessed unit and we are installing a black surface mount, so we have a hole in the wall that the surface mount will fall right through. Now I’m just trying to paint a picture here and the phrase “a pimple on a pigs ass” come back to my mind. This sensor is located just inside the only entrance to the trailer, so lets call it a high traffic area, where people will be removing shoes and the like, so to have the surface mount style sticking out is not desirable, so lets take a piece of wood and cut and router it and then verathane it to try and resess the sensor, then get the new guy to try and install it into the previous recessed unit opening. So I wasted close to an hour enlarging the opening to accommodate the larger block of wood which I’m sure has at least a couple of hours worth of work, so three hours at minimum wage is over $50 in labour and it still looks like “a pimple on a pigs ass”.

Closing the pool this evening was challenging, with the sunshine finally out the pool was busy, and no one was in a rush to leave the 80 degree pool, but I managed to roust everyone out by 8:10, then off to check the office area for being locked, close the woodlot gate and do my first security round, because it rained most of the day people are trying to get some outdoor time, but there were no signs of possible party zones. I get the clubhouse closed up by nine o’clock. Around nine thirty I take Miss Laurie up to the office with the store sales from the day, because the office is so far away, it is necessary to have a golf cart ride, after returning Laurie back to the coach I make security round number two. it is now near ten o’clock and I had to take a photo of the western sky.

**The western sky at 10:00 pm Saturday evening**

After a couple of small projects in the work shop I made my final security round of the park, only one group of people that were a little on the noisy side, but after being asked to quiet it down, they decided to break up and shut it down, and I was able to head to the coach feeling confident that there would be no noise complaints tonight.

Now – “monkeypox” – like seriously?

Blog 424

Day 1720

Week four @ CMR

Sunday June 5th to Saturday June 11th 2022

As much as we were starting to get use to our new work schedule as being normal, it was turned around without us even knowing, that is what happened today, as usual on Sunday morning we were enjoying a quiet morning watching our regular television shows and there is a knock at the coach door. It was Larry wondering if I knew that I was suppose to be on shift today, well the quick answer to that, was obviously no, or I would have been there, and my only copy of the schedule showed me still on the afternoon shift. Apparently there had been a revision made to the schedule, but no one had sent me a revised copy, so I said I would be out to work shortly after lunch.

Oh boy an unexpected work shift, what could be more fun you might ask? Well how about a major water line repair, the first thing that comes to my mind is that it could be hard finding a water leak when there has been so much rain, everything is wet, pot holes and puddles everywhere. But when you have a leak in a 3″ watermain with 125 psi, i guess it becomes much easier, especially when there was a bubbling of clear water on the side of one of the park roads.

As we dig down to the water main with the backhoe we find the leak is at a 45 elbow in which we find a split, this will require us cutting out a chunk of the water line and replacing it with new line. This is actually the easy part, because of the size of this line the most likely cause of the split was the force of the water itself. When moving this much water at this kind of pressure any elbow becomes an automatic weak point, just because when you are changing the direction of a large volume moving at high pressure there is a lot of force that comes into play. The main water line is referred to as schedule 40 pipe, which can withstand pressures near 225 psi while a schedule 80 water line it can withstand pressure a hundred pound higher, and the main reason is because of the pipe thickness is just simply greater, the neat thing about the plastic pipe is that schedule 40 and 80, all the fitting fit both pipes, so we could replace the schedule 40 elbow (white in colour) with a schedule 80 elbow (grey in colour), the other thing we did was to place a cement block at the elbow to help support the elbow when the water line was charged.

Turning the water back on is a slow process, a water line this large usually has a drain to allow it to be repaired, when you need to glue these pipes together, water is not a good thing when trying to glue pipes together. So after the repair the main water line valve is just cracked open to start a slow flow of water, then a high point valve is opened to release air as the drain valve is closed to allow pressure to start to rebuild till most of the air is released and then main valve can be fully opened. Another inspection of the repaired area and then it is time to start the process of refilling the excavated hole, first sand is used to surround the water line as both support and protection from any rocks in the backfill process. Four hours later and the water is back on and the road reopened.

Now onto the lock-up / security part of my shift, because it is Sunday evening the park is not busy, so a quick trip around the park to check for any areas of concern, nothing sticks out as a problem area. I have a couple little tasks in the workshop, before taking my dinner break. After that the evening was very uneventful, with no issues in the park as I close the pool, clubhouse and confirm everything is locked up.

Back to the coach at nine o’clock, to enjoy a few YouTube videos, and review my new work schedule, with day shifts on Monday & Tuesday, the change is for this week and next, kind of like the manager realized what I was thinking about getting the backlog of work caught up.

My Monday shift and my task for today is working with the tractor, trying to get a number of campsites finished and back into the mix. Last fall the park was offered a number of loads of fill, and the plan last fall was to add the fill to a number of the lower tenting sites enlarging them and eliminating some water collection areas. But the rainy season came along and so far has not left for a long enough period to get them leveled and ready for occupancy, so now the big push is on to get them ready for the July 1st weekend, so today was the first day of moving many truckloads of fill, this is how I spent most of my Monday shift.

Tuesday was a day filled with different jobs with the tractor, repairing pot holes on the hill to the office, some site repairs, and starting to address some of the pot holes in the park roads all of this happening while another crew is trimming trees around the park and cleaning up as we have all five of the maintenance crew on shift today.

Wednesday and I just have an hours worth of work to finish up a project from yesterday then I’m off for a couple of days. So I had ordered that new radiator for the toad from a local jobber (an aftermarket automotive parts supplier) and now I’m heading to Duncan now to pick it up, I also have a short shopping list from Laurie, I need to buy some fuel for the toad (the first fuel since Washington), and I’m going to make my first visit to a B.C. liquor store. Laurie is working today so I’m on my own in the town of Duncan, so as I checked off all my items on my list, I was feeling pretty good having accomplished everything, at least till I got back to the coach.

I got the groceries put away, and as I pulled the radiator box out of the truck I took a look in the box and was horrified to see a huge cut through the top radiator support, so I packaged it back up and returned it to the jobber, to get a credit and a new one ordered. I was not happy but at least I checked it before I had removed the original one. Then on my return I decided to sit in the Clam with Mr. Sam, and while I was looking at my iPad he decided to escape, and I capture him at the end of our site, just as Miss Laurie is coming home from work shift. What else can possibly happen?

Well that question got answered almost immediately, the internet police seem to have caught up with our American streaming service so now with no television I need to find a streaming service here in Canada. For our American friends up here in the great white north we have four main broadcasters CBC, CTV, Global & CITY. But unlike in America there is no streaming service that carries all four so it is a case of using a number of different apps and picking the ones that work best for us, a year ago we tried “Stack TV” but this year we are going to try “River TV” as it carries CBC & Global, and we have the CITY-TV app which allows us to stream it live as well, I will let you know how it all comes together.

What the hell is an atmospheric river? And when is it going to end?

It is Thursday my only whole day off this week, and it has been raining since before midnight and has not quit all day, it’s not raining hard, but it just continues to rain. A year ago the area was under a heat dome, it was near the same time of year that the province was suffering horrific forest fires. I recall Laurie saying maybe British Columbia was not a great choice for a summer position on Vancouver Island, and I remember saying the heat they are experiencing is not normal and will be different this year, and it certainly has been different with everyone saying it’s not usually like this.

But the panel to the right shows 7 out of ten days have rain in the forecast and halfway through the month of June and we still have a heater on because of the cold damp weather. The daily high temperatures only gets to 19°C (67°F) and the humidity to-day is 95% and in the last 24 hours we have received 25 millimeters (1 inch) of rain.

It’s Friday which is my Monday, just a little eight hour day, I started the day at the swimming pool, Bruce vacuuming the pool as I cleaned skimmer socks, and then I helped where I could. Today it’s just Bruce and myself on shift, and I’m hearing about another water leak on the main water line, the same one that Larry and I had worked on Sunday but this leak was at the other end of the park.

Now just to put everything into perspective this repair was caused by the removal of a tree by the tree removal guy, apparently it fell as he had planned but then it rolled, and when it rolled it broke the water line to one of our fire hydrants. The park is fed with municipal water, and to keep insurance rates as low as possible the park added a number of fire hydrants, but cheaped out, and instead of buying real fire hydrants like you are all are picturing, but these are what I would call standpipes a 2-1/2” but to meet codes it has to be steel pipe. Here is where it get interesting, when you take plastic pipe that is glued together, and introduce big steel pipe that threads together and add the leverage of a six foot long stand pipe, I mean what could possibly go wrong.

So this repair started on Thursday, but the repair failed, and in my opinion it failed because they tried to reuse some parts, so one of the glued connections let go because it was cut too short so the glue surface was only 3/4” instead of the designed 1-1/2”, so as good as the glue was it only took a little nudge of that six foot standpipe to break it loose, so it was left over night leaking. This line feeds the clubhouse which houses our main washrooms, laundry, and showers, that was why it was left leaking until today to be repaired.

So the plan was at 11am we would shut down the water line down and try to correct the failed repair, the problem with plastic and glue, is if it comes apart it can’t be reused, so we had to get new plastic fittings, so at eleven o’clock we started digging to confirm where the failure was, it only took a couple of scoops to tell where the failure was, water at 125 psi makes itself real easy to spot. So we shut the valve to the line, and very near the break was the drain for this line, so the drain was opened to allow the water to escape, then back to digging in a hole full of water (rubber boot time again), this time we had to dig a trench to drain this hole so I could dig the pipe out. Upon inspection the failure was at the plastic joint that that had the short collar, but I suspect the failure was caused when refilling the hole after the repair.

So a new plastic fitting, 2-1/2” threaded end to a 2-1/2” glued end, cut the plastic pipe to get a clean new end, the two stage gluing process, primer (the purple) and the actual glue on both ends of the pieces to be glued, the slide them together, as simple as that, we let the glue set up, then proceeded to turn the water back on slowly just to get water flowing, and only after water was flowing from the drain do we close the drain, then we turn the water line on fully, and proceed to bled off air at the high points. All was good so we install the standpipe, all was going well as we added sand to the hole to act as a cushion and support to the pipe. Then I think we just got too rambunctious and added enough fill to cause the standpipe to move, and then it was all over, the freshly glued joint failed and we have another failure. This failure is leaking worse than before so we will have to start all over again.

Hopefully the third time is a charm, water off, line drained, standpipe removed, line dug out and we are back to where we were two hours earlier. Another new fitting, another fresh cut on the pipe, fresh primer and glue and we are back connected. But this time we are going to move much slower, giving the glue more time to cure and setup, no standpipe this time, but we support the standpipe with cement blocks on both sides, also little sand to support the pipe but just enough to cover it. We placed a plug in the fitting where the stand pipe should go, just to keep the sand out of the pipe as we place sand around the concrete blocks supporting the line. Water on, drain closed, air bled off, and now we let it sit till tomorrow before we fill the hole.

Back to the coach by 4:30 half an our late, for a beverage, and some burgers for dinner, followed by the local news, and some mindless television. I’m still learning how to get the best out of our new streaming service, the biggest issue I see so far is that the stations all seem to be out of Toronto so the news is from Ontario, while the City-TV app is giving us Vancouver news. I am missing the Golf channel, but not enough to pay to stream the TSN channels, which just seem too expensive, and are a stand alone, a couple of ice cream bar for desert and we call it a night

**Mr. Sam and I kicked back in the Clam**

Saturday morning, and I’m on lock-up / security tonight but, I’m going to help finish this water line repair, I devised a way to hold the stand pipe through the backfilling process, and we will gently fill the hole with sand until we are within a few inches of the top, then add the fill until we have reached the top. Now we are just going to rake the area and let the soil settle and solidify before removing the standpipe support, and all this in just an hour and a half later, I have made it back to the coach, where Mr. Sam and I spent some time on the Clam, enjoying a few sunny intervals in between the sprinkles.

Saturday lock-up and security made for a quiet and peaceful evening, there was a group in the tenting section along Arizona row that I had been warned about being a little rowdy, but by shortly after ten they were quiet just enjoying a campfire. It was a strange evening, on my firewood run I only sold one bag of firewood, unusual to say the least, but the woodshed at the store was empty so there was lots of wood sold, just not by me. As we are closing in on the middle of June, we are still quite cool, and a sweatshirt has been necessary most days, but when the sun does peek through it is warm, so bring on the sunshine!

Be well, stay strong, and brave!

Blog 423

Day 1712