Thursday January 4th 2024

Dear Journal:

The weather is chilly, dipping to 40ºF (4ºC) over night but 60ºF (15ºC) each afternoon, which while not warm the sunshine makes it feel much warmer. It is winter in Arizona and we are at 2400 feet of elevation so it runs close to ten degrees colder here that it does in the Phoenix valley, so in the summer it is still about ten degrees cooler as well. The Arboretum has appeared busy this week being open on New Years day, followed by half-price Tuesday, as well as school being out all help boost the attendance numbers.

Today was pretty much chill in the Buchanan household, just keeping warm and preparing for work tomorrow. Other than some blogging the most physical thing that I accomplished was switching out our shower head. Many years ago when we first moved into Thunder I changed the shower head to what was toted as being the best option for RVs and I bought into the whole hype so I ordered an “Oxygenics” shower head and from day one I have to admit I was disappointed with its operation.

A number of YouTube creators were doing reviews and raving about how much better it was than their previous shower heads, the data from Oxygenics is that 1.8 gallons per minute which sounds excellent for an RV application, it also boosts a shut off valve right at the head which would be great for quick RV showers (also referred to as Navy showers), but the valve never totally shut off the flow and the spray was poor at best. We whined between ourselves for way too long before replacing it with a standard residential shower heat, it may use more water per shower but we decided that we were worth it. And although I had been browsing Amazon for a new shower head, I had not made any decision but recently while shopping for other items one of Amazons snap sales popped up for a shower head that I had looked at but it was 40% off for an hour, so I added it to my cart.

Well way back in out stick and brick life I had built a shower in out downstairs bathroom that had a great shower with both a hand held shower head as well as a huge rain head that was marvelous. This new hand held shower is not a true replacement for that this is a drastic improvement over our Oxygenics shower head, and if it uses a couple of extra gallons of water we are ok with that.

Miss Laurie and Mister Sam spent some of our down day watching the humming birds at the window feeder and after road testing our new shower head we were treated to an amazing sunset, well technically a reverse sunset.

This amazing photo is taken from the passenger side of Thunder, looking eastward as the setting sun just highlights the tops of the ridges. A beautiful end to a dreary day.

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