Couldn't stop reading the Another Man's Treasure series

This Bitter Treasure,
Treasure in Exile
Treasure Built of Sand
by S W Hubbard

I liked This Bitter Treasure so much I started the next one immediately. There is only one more after these--I think?--so I should have waited.

This time Audrey gets to run an estate sale at an house that's still occupied--by an old lady who is dying any minute...supposedly. But the lady is "not quite dead yet" and the other people who mysteriously appear in the house are strange and sinister indeed. Plus there's the wrinkle that her assistant Jill has gone off to college leaving Audrey to cope with her sister-in-law as a helper. On first acquaintance, the sister-in-law is hopeless--a woman made idle and rich by marriage to a man who's not feeling it anymore but has to keep up appearances--and his trophy wife--at all costs.

Treasure in Exile was even better than the last, and this time Audrey and Ty hire a new assistant, who turns out to be a hoot. And it takes them (plus Sean, her husband) on a journey into time when she investigates the reclusive life of the deceased lady and her maid, who leave the property to a local charity for inner city children. Issues of race and prejudice are mixed in with the mystery.

And then, that one being so good, I got Treasure Built of Sand almost immediately. It was maybe not as twisty and convoluted as the other plots--I felt like some of the complexities "fell out" in a more obvious manner than her usual. But I still loved it and savored every word.

read: The Bookish Life of Nina Hill

Odd book. Not a mystery but centered around the question of what will Nina inherit from her recently deceased father? Not a romance but with a strong potential romantic interest. And central to the story is one big problem: Nina is a severe introvert who is unable to function "in society" without experiencing panic attacks.

But she doesn't. Not at first, anyway. Reading it, I felt like there was all this build-up of her as a malfunctioning societal oddball, but she behaved perfectly normally. It was very inconsistent in that regard.

Enjoyable, though, and amusing. I could see some people giving it a perfect rating.

Leaving Belton Lake. Again.

Wednesday, December 30, 2020

Travel day and rain. We knew it was likely to rain, in fact, it was as near a certainty as Texas ever gets. So the guys had taken down the satellite dish the day before and we'd tidied up most of the stuff outdoors. The one thing we left was the big outdoor rug--we knew it would get wet, but that seemed better than tracking mud into the Mammoth RV.

So we got up Wednesday morning to find it was still very warm outside. I put on gloves to walk the dogs and soon pulled them off again. I needed my hands free to scrape up the large pile of very smelly loose stool Molly deposited in a neighboring campsite. All that junk she'd been eating off the ground had finally got to work on her bowels.

When we returned I found that her brand-new dog bed in the cage had an even bigger pile on it. To our infinite good fortune, she'd put the pile in a corner on the bed and not a single bit escaped to the edges of the cage, the motor home floor, or even the pad underneath her bed. It was all contained on the dog pillow and it washed off pretty well. Of course we'll take it home and run it through the washer, but all the same we were incredibly lucky on that.

So we got as early a start as we could manage and were at the dump station at around 10:45. During breakfast it had come a shower, but it conveniently stopped while we were loading up things outside. I was wearing a tee shirt and no jacket at that point.

But when we were finished dumping and headed out (9:59 a.m.) the rain started in earnest. We stopped at the usual place, Buc'ees in Temple, and did a quick fill-up. It probably took ten minutes. Then we headed north on I-35 and it rained. Every single setting on the intermittent wipers was used on the trip over to Corsicana. When we got through Corsicana--the traffic wasn't too bad there; it was right around noon and I guess people decided to stay at home--we headed north on I-45 and it rained harder. And harder. Not the kind where you have to use high-speed wipers continuously, but the kind where when you passed a big truck you had to put them on in hopes of seeing the road in front of you. (You couldn't)

And the wind! It was horrid. Ed said that on the trip east on highway 31 he could never get Mammoth's engine to shift into high gear. It insisted on thinking it was going uphill the whole way. The wind appeared to be shifting from south to east to north, because it was pretty much in our faces the whole way. I later read that there had been a tornado, an EF0 or EF1, reported in Corsicana. ...before the lunch hour on December 30.  Well, there we were. We had no idea. I definitely didn't hear any sirens.

Despite the crummy driving conditions, it was a pretty easy trip. We passed two wrecks--one when we were just starting out, and one huge one at the I-635 / US-175 intersection in Dallas. Both were in the opposite direction, so all we head to deal with were a few crazy onlookers driving stupidly. We arrived to a wet and soggy home at 1:53 p.m.  But it was nice and dry and remarkably clean inside--I'd cleaned up before the trip--and we were soon comfortable again.

TRIP NOTES:
1. Now that the fear is off the convection oven, consider other kinds of bread. Like cheese biscuits or muffins.

Tuesday at Belton Lake

 Tuesday, December 29

Only three more days left in this crummy year. It should have been a wonderful year--the year of my retirement and my improved life habits and our expanded travels. But none of that came to be--Coronavirus ruined it all. We're unwilling to go into public places other than the gas stations, donut shops, and groceries like the HEB we snuck into a few days ago. I've had a bit of a cough and been worrying about that, but it seems to have disappeared.

I'm fighting a very sore right leg, but I can't blame that on Coronavirus. I have no idea what caused it, but my suspicion is that it came from driving Ed's truck so far. I was distracted and tense for both of our two drives and I barely noticed the scenery. Basically, I just sat in one place and drove. On a normal, expected, and relaxed long drive, I'll adjust my position and play with the cruise control to move my legs around a lot. But these last two times, no.

The flock of turkeys were over at our previous campsite (from the last trip here) in the morning when we walked the dogs. It was about 7:15 and the sun hadn't peeked out yet. It was very windy with a cold front working its way through. The sunrise was scary orangish-red and the rain is expected to start at about four p.m. We will see.

Anyway, after our walk and my morning coffee outdoors, we came in for breakfast. I'd barely gotten the ingredients out of the refrigerator when I glanced out the window and saw this:

 

I guess they know human habits!

 

 

 

Later I took Molly on a long walk, out and around the cliffs to the boat ramp. We detoured at the Turkey Roost Group Camp and took the Scout trail there. I'd said in my campground review that there were no trails here, but that was a mistake.

It was a nice little trail once I got past all the trash at the beginning. I think the prevailing winds from the parking areas and the group camp are directed so as to deposit a lot of airborne trash at the edge of that woods. We enjoyed the trail, but I needed to go pee out all that coffee I'd drunk for breakfast so we only went part way along. I'm not sure how far it went, but it couldn't have been far--the park ends a little ways from the lake and there is a private residence back in there, plus the screen shelters.

During my walk I picked up a Walmart bag and used it to carry a handful of trash that I picked up on the road. I drew the line at plastic water bottles that were still full of water--they're too heavy to carry without pouring the water out first, so why bother when there's plenty of other trash to fill my bags?

Sadly, before the bag was full I found another empty bag, so I picked that up. It didn't get full before I had finished my loop and returned. Which is good. Mind you, I wasn't aggressively climbing around in the undergrowth to retrieve litter. I was just hitting the easy pickings.

The only birds I saw for the duration were vultures, yellow-rumped warblers, and a  possible titmouse by the boat ramp. I didn't get my binocs focused quickly enough for that one.

After lunch I took both dogs on a long walk. Zack got plenty of excitement from all the deer. He acted like a teenager, pulling and straining and practically leaping in the air. He survived for the long loop around the campsite--halfway down to the water to avoid the campers, alone the road to the gate, then along back through the grass. With a lot of smelling. I wrote: I hope his legs hurt as bad as mine do tonight.

Monday, Mammoth travels back to Cedar Ridge

 12/28 Monday

Inca Doves, a bunch of 'em. So for this park, that makes: Canada Goose, Cormorant, White Pelican, Mallard, Coot, Gull, probably ring-billed, those two annoying confusing diving ducks, mockingbird, Common Ground Dove (probably), Osprey, Turkey Vulture, Black Vulture, Black-crested titmouse, no chickadees at all--strange, Bewick's Wren, Carolina Wren, Fox Squirrel and Feral Cat.  

Monday was the day to head over to Cedar Ridge COE campground so as to give Edward a shorter drive. He's working half days the next couple of days. He'll be leaving--with any luck--on January 6 to go back to Korea. Fingers crossed on that--he's going to try to attend May's interview with her.

Time elapsed inescapably, but we weren't really in a hurry. It turned out we really weren't in a hurry--check in time at Cedar Ridge wasn't until 2pm. We were at the dump station by around eleven and we arrived at the new place by 1:00 or so.  Or maybe even earlier. I heard the news twice on the radio (note to self--the Austin public radio station is 90.5 and it can be picked up scratchily here at Belton Lake).  So I'm thinking I heard the 11:00 news and the 12:00. I know I heard the end of "Texas Standard", a public ratio program they broadcast on our Dallas station also. They remarked that although it was 75 degrees yesterday and that later this week there was a chance of freezing rain or snow in the Dallas/Fort Worth area. Yippee.

Anyway we got here and had our site occupied and everything hooked up before Edward arrived. Although I think he was waiting for us to text him, so we might have got him here earlier to help with the hookups. No matter--we're used to doing it alone.

This time we had a prime spot, right by the bathroom. (sarcasm there) We did have a lake view, but the roof of our covered picnic table blocked it from inside the motor home. It was foggy and misty outside but fairly warm--light sweater weather. I dawdled over lunch and jelly beans until I could wait no longer...

Later. Round about four o'clock I finally got the legs moving on a long jog. I'd like to say 55 minutes, but with all the times Molly stopped to smell or eat junk off the ground, it was really a lot less. We went over to the Turkey Roost Group Camp and found all the turkeys there, plus the deer I hadn't been seeing around the campsites. They seemed a lot larger than they had last time I saw them.

I also jogged around the screened shelter area. It was pretty much deserted. But a very pretty place to be in the spring.  I found a bilboard with some history of the area posted....

I returned to find the ham cooking in the convection oven. So we were finally getting over our mistrust of the convection oven--up until this trip, we had only used its microwave feature. Frankly, with it being so old--presumably ten years old, same as the Mammoth RV--I was worried it might catch fire.

But no, it performed like a champ. Maybe we'll try some baking next! We'd cooked the brown-and-serve rolls in in the day before, and they were just fine. I mean, the rolls themselves were a little flat because I didn't let them rise long enough. But the taste and brownness were great. And now we've done ham, and tomorrow is going to be the big test--pot roast.

Ed and Edward finished the Charmed! episodes and started watching Castle. The episodes were pretty old but I didn't remember them, and I watched pretty much one entire episode before getting bored and starting back into reading a novel. I'm just not a television person, I'm afraid. Unless I have something to do with my hands, like knit. Which reminds me--I have a knitting project I've been carrying around for months and not started. It's time.

Sunday at Inks Lake, family time

December 27

Today felt like Christmas Day for us. We got up and had a large, late breakfast--pancakes on our new, two-burner griddle. We wanted it because with a single large skillet on the small gas burners, we could only cook about four small pancakes at a time. And that time was a long time.  On the first attempt, they turned out perfectly but cooking a half recipe took forever--by the time we had one serving of cakes ready, half of them were cold.

On the second attempt I turned up the heat a little and ended up with my historical norm for pancakes--burned on the outsides, raw on the insides.  So we decided to see if you could get a griddle that would cover two burners at once, and at the same time distribute the heat better so we could at least cook a single serving all at the same time.

The one Ed found was iron, and while it was heavy as a chunk of lead and almost too large for the stove, it still worked a lot better than the single large skillet did.  They weren't the best pancakes I ever made, but they were a whole lot better than my previous attempts.

So, after all that, the guys sat around idly for a while and then I cajoled them into coming for a walk with me. It was about 11:00 and a whole lot of other people had the same idea--the parking lot at the trailhead to Devil's Waterhole was nearly full and the trail pretty much so. (We walked over there, not needing the parking lot, but I happened to notice.)

We used the walk as a training exercise for Molly--every time (and there were a lot of those) we passed another dog, she had to go off the trail and sit at attention until it went on by. She didn't like that, but she enjoyed it.

We stopped short of going on around the trail to the scenic overlook, but that was okay. Ed's back was bothering him and that was more than enough hiking for him--probably about two miles total. At least we all got outside in the sunshine and fresh air--we should sleep well.

After that I sat around outside while they watched Charmed episodes on the DVR. I read a little and watched birds a little. I got a pretty decent look at the black-capped titmouses in the tree nearby. Tufted Titmice have a dark forehead and a gray crest; Black-Capped Titmice have a white forehead and a black crest. I for sure saw the black crest and I think I got a glimpse of the forehead.

I wish I'd gotten a picture of the: the faucet at the nearby campsite was dripping ever so slowly, maybe at the rate of two drops per minute. The titmouse would cling upside-down on the faucet and sip a drop or so--it was very amusing.

And so was Molly--she was tied to the aluminum/wood picnic table and when a squirrel taunted her from a nearby tree, she moved the table several feet over.

Our nearest neighbors had been a little noisy for the last two days but on this day they finally left. Not noisy in a bad way--they were just young. A family with a couple of preteen aged sons, I would have guessed. No reason to use your "inside voices" if you're outdoors at a picnic table.

But they were hardly gone an hour before they were replaced. This new set of neighbors just had a tent and an SUV and they were even quieter than us.

In the morning, we'd gone off and left Zack behind and I'm happy--and surprised--to report that he wasn't yap-yap-yapping when we returned. On other occasions he's barked his annoying little Shi-tzu bark for hours.

It was a lovely afternoon, way too warm for December. The high was probably mid-seventies, or even 77 as the weather forecast predicted. It was clearly "shorts" weather, and guess who'd left all her shorts behind?  Yes, me. When I was packing, I pulled out the shorts from my clothes cabinet and replaced them with pants. I was lucky to have left a few short-sleeved teeshirts.

As much as I enjoyed the weather, it worried me. Of course Texas weather is screwy and has been screwy since time began. But still--seventies in December? Not right. I saw several bees out searching for the flowers which were still dormant for winter. I can hope that at least the aluminum can dispensers supplied a diet of sugar rich soda for them.

By the way, here's one of the evil stickers from a previous camping trip. Found in my sock:

After a lonesome lunch at the picnic table, I read a little in my book and tried to take tufted titmouse pictures. After a long, lazy--and a little lonely--while, I went for another hike. This time Molly and I went back to the trails that start by the amphitheater. The parking lot there, which is for both hikers and primitive campers, was pretty full but beginning to empty out at about 3:30. Still, we had a lot of opportunities to practice "off the road" and "sit" while we waited for dogs and groups of people to pass us by.

The plan was to go to the big slope of bare-ish rock and climb all the way to the top. But when we got there, it was already occupied. A couple of young ladies and a handful of children were playing on it. I found a sitting spot and waited while one of t e ladies let her girl go almost halfway up, only calling her back because she was out of eyesight. Way to go, mom!  Girl power rules!

It wasn't long before they went on down the trail and Molly and I could ascend. I found myself getting winded several times, heart beating way too fast. It wasn't really a climb, just an uphill walk. Much like stairs, and probably no more than 30 feet of ascent. But it was nice up there.

And back. I don't understand why I was feeling lonesome, exactly, and it was only a little bit. I called my brother and got it out of my system.

Gumbo for supper, and with it we baked one of my two pans of brown-and-serve rolls from the "red checked" cookbook.  The history of this is that I wanted to device a method I could make rolls to take camping (for Christmas dinner). the first recipe I found had me  do a first rise, then shape the rolls and freeze them. Then, four hours before you wanted to bake the rolls, you set them out and let them rise slowly from the frozen state until time to bake. I tried that recipe too, and while the rolls were nice and fluffy, they weren't great tasting.

Then I tried the recipe from the cookbook, but I accidentally disturbed the dough during the second rise and they ended up flat. They tasted okay on the outsides, but they didn't cook correctly because there was no air inside.

Then I noticed the cookbook had a cooking method that had you do all the steps for making the rolls, two risings and all, and then bake them partially at a low tempraerature before freezing. Once frozen, when ready to cook you thawed them briefly and finished browning them in the oven. So that's what I did. I ended up with three 9-inch pie plates of rolls, the first two fo which I did with the partial baking method.  I froze them to bring with, then baked the remaining batch to try at home.

Well, that remaining batch ended up getting 20 extra minutes of rise time, and they were excellent. if only I'd let the first two have that extra time, they'd have been awesome.

Anyway, they were more than adequate and certaiinly better than most supermarket bread. We had one of the two plates today, cooked in the convection oven, and will have the second one when we eat our Christmas ham.

Friday and Saturday at Inks Lake

Friday, December 25

Today Edward left at 7:30 to go work a 24-hour shift, leaving us to dawdle over breakfast and then get ready to move sites. Checkout time was 12pm and we wanted to be ready to vacate our site before someone else came in to occupy it. So other than tidying up, vacuuming and talking to folk on the phone, we didn't do anything except wait.

Bye, old site:

Finally, at a little after noon, Ed went ahead and took the Mammoth to the dump station. But the people at our new site still hadn't left--when I took the truck over and parked it at a nearby overflow parking spot, a young guy was perched on the ladder of his RV and flying a remote controlled helicopter. Christmas presents, we supposed, and those things take a while to charge up before you can use them.

But the new people for our site were there, so we just sat around and waited in the parking lot for a bit. Not too awful long, though. So with all that, it was one-thirty or so before we were all done, reparked, re-leveled, rehooked and ready for lunch. It was clearly too lake to do a road trip to Balcones Canyonlands, but not too late to go see the Inks Lake fish hatchery. It was unlikely that would be open on Christmas day, either, so we chose to stay home.

My brain was still mired in the deep fog from the previous day.  The only interesting thing that happened was that Mollydog and I took a long walk over to the trails that started at the ampitheater by the entrance station. We took a nice, well-traveled trail over to the water. At one point it went over a big, rocky slope:

 
On the way back my inner mountaineer emerged and I just had to climb the slope. I got halfway and still didn't have a great view of the lake, so I decided to leave it for another day. Cool rocks, though. I assume this vein of white running through the grayish-black rock is quartz?  Need to check.

Since there was no Edward for Christmas dinner, we ate leftovers. And then it was bedtime.

 

Saturday, December 26

Ed and I left early (about 9:30--for us these day, that was early) to drive over to the Balcones Canyonlands national Wildlife Refuge. We went to the headquarters/visitor center first, but that was closed. Luckily the restroom was not. We didn't take the Headquarters Trail, but it might have been worth a try.

There are a lot of nice, well-maintained and heavily used trails in the Wildlife Refuge. It's not that far from Austin, after all.  the country is very rugged--not exactly what I'd call canyon country, but the cow creek we drove along was forming a half-way decent canyon along one side.

After leaving the closed visitor center, we drove to Doeskin Ranch and Warbler Vista. It was a long, interesting drive along a curvy road over many cattle guards. It appears that the refuge consists of a little pieces of ground loosely strung together amid huge expanses of private ranches. At Doeskin ranch, there were a lot of lovely trailheads and a lot of lovely people preparing to walk them. But that wasn't our goal, we were simply there to look at scenery.

The third--or was it fourth stop--was simply a pavilion in a field which would be prime habitat for all sorts of birds. Shin Oak Observation Deck, per the website, is is set in excellent black-capped vireo habitat. With patience and some good binoculars, you might see one of these beautiful little birds. Definitely listen as they can be heard singing almost continually. Shin Oak is the best available public viewing area for vireos in the refuge. 

But not this time of year. The only birds we saw were mockingbirds and roadrunners.

The dominant plant species, and pretty much the one thing that overwhelms your mind and senses, is the Ashe Juniper (you call it potato; we call it cedar) that covers the hills. They're small  trees, well-spaced from each other, but all together they make a dense cover.

The trip back was a lot shorter than the one out. We stopped at an H.E.B in Burnet and got a gallon of ice cream to go on the apple pie we'd made for Christmas.

Molly and I then took a hike through the campgrounds toward devil's waterhole, but when we got to the trailhead we turned around because there were so many people on the trail. And dogs. Luckily, all under control. Molly got plenty of practice in "sit off trail and let the scary dogs go by." She is improving.

All the birds we saw were Bewick's Wrens, a bunch of infuriating little doves that were probably Common Ground Dove, and an almost certain Black Crested Titmouse or two.

That evening I reviewed the pictures I'd made of the pair of diving ducks out in the lake. I looked at dozens of pictures, and still couldn't fully decide if they were Common Meganser or Red-breasted Merganser.  When I get home and have Wifi, I'll check them against AllAboutBirds.org. (Note: they were Common Merganser)

Christmas present