If You're Gonna Be A Bear...

 I once saw my Labrador fart into his own mouth.  Buster, probably 8 years old at the time.  A huge derpy goofball of a dog.  He was supposedly bread for hunting but the only thing the dog ever hunted was chicken nuggets and the dirty dishes in the sink.  This all happened years before we left to become nomads. Derp derp This picture is classic Buster.  Hope that defies reason.  Literally.  So full of hope the dog was devoid of all reason.  And he had a partner in crime.  Beezus.   I am too allowed on the table! Pure evil, this one.  Truly an arch-criminal.  If she weren't so cute, she'd be a hat by now.  I've reminded her of that many times.  She doesn't believe me.   Beezus guarding the house. Odd name, Beezus.  It comes from a children's book "Ramona and Beezus".  Because we had a dog named Ramona who we bought after Buster but before Beezus.  My wife named them.  I renamed t...

 Ever heard of sand spurs?  They were what prehistoric man stepped on in the middle of the night the way we step on Legos. But apparently sand spurs didn’t cause enough havoc on their own. No, God was feeling extra cheeky one day and decided to create the Goats Head Sticker. You can read about them here:  https://929thebull.com/goat-head-stickers-are-satans-spurs/ When these angry little earth ornaments are in season, you can’t see them. It all just looks like dead grass. And nobody warns you about them. I mean, they may say, “Hey, it’s goats head season and we have them all over our resort”, but that doesn’t communicate the impending struggle. They should have said, “Hey, for the next few months just go ahead and pretend the floor is lava.”  Or maybe say the ground is covered in razors or thumb tacks.  Fun trivia:  the spiny angry spiky bit on a goats head sticker is longer than the thickness of the sole of your average Croc.  I found this out the sec...

 That's right boys and girls, another bus story.  You have to admit, it's a treasure trove of  hilarious, zany close calls with death. Just look at it. Here, look again. Folks, that's not normal.  You don't see those anymore.  When you do, you think something's up.  Maybe it's a traveling troop of Elvis impersonators!  Maybe it's full of Muppets on some kind of hair-brained world tour!  Maybe it's a mobile meth lab!  HUH?  Who would think that?  Oh, the West Virginia Drug Interdiction squad may think that.  In fact, when they saw me puttering up a steep mountain pass, chuffing black smoke as truckers flew by me, they were certain they'd found themselves the Pablo Escobar of mobile meth. I was just going home.  Sheesh.  I had only recently purchased it and got it out of the shop in Missouri.  The shop owner did his darndest to get me not to drive that bus.  But he was wrong.  I made it! On this trip...

 My wife says I have bacon in my pocket. It’s why all the animals everywhere we go just love me. I literally attract them. Every cat and dog of every neighbor just wants to sit on top of me and roost. I don’t have bacon in my pocket or anywhere else for that matter. I give off some kind of animalistic “this guy is cool” vibe.  It's mystical or may as well be.  I can't explain it. It’s almost as if I was kind to some mythical magical beast long ago who has since vouched for me to every animal everywhere. But that’s so not true. I was never cruel to animals growing up. I loved all our dogs and all the neighborhood cats (my family has always been allergic). But I tormented my dogs as a kid is want to do from time-to-time. I’d blow in their faces to get them to snap at me. Pull tails. Startle them to see them jump. Tease them with table food (I may or may not still do that one). So I can’t imagine having earned any clout in the animal kingdom when I was growing up.  I'll...

 Maybe you guys will find this one funny.  I'm sure it was fun to watch. One of our favorite camp sites is Circle-M in Lancaster PA.  It has a river that surrounds the whole place.  People tube it and fish it and swim in it all summer long.  Anyway, the camp ground is kind of a peninsula because of the way the river (or creek as the locals call it) goes around it.  The middle of the peninsula is raised up high.  The camp sites up there have full hookups (water, sewer, and electric) and some really good shade.  The camp sites at the edges of the peninsula are right on the water.  I guess the ground is just too soft for sewer pipes.  They only have water and electric. So, there's a big loop around the top part that loops down around the river camp sites.  The east side of the loop is a gentle slope and the west side of the loop is an unforgiving monster of a grade.  It's so bad, in fact, sometimes rigs get stuck trying to get up ...

 You guys got a kick out of my last vehicle disaster story so I thought I'd share one of the more comical ones from our past: We own a 1973 Silver Eagle RV bus-conversion.  It was originally built for Trailways, a commuter coach company.  It's a real bus.  It's also a 4-speed manual transmission.  You have to double clutch to shift gears (clutch in and out to remove from gear, clutch in and out to put in new gear).  I didn't know that for a while.  Turns out you can just clutch once for both if you time it right or just no clutch and slam that bad boy if you're feeling squirrelly.  If you can't find it, grind it, amiright? Anyway, it also doesn't have a working alternator.  Well, it has a working alternator but no working voltage controller.  Basically, the controller allows power generated to flow from the generator to the rest of the vehicle.  That means the generator (alternator) effectively provides wattage in the range of 0 to ...