Day 1689

I woke up at 7 and then went back to sleep until a little after 8.  I'd intended to get up at 7:30.  Then it was pet stuff and breakfast.I went outside and cut a piece of scrap wood to put under the new stairs.  Then I used a tie down to hold it to the stairs.

By then Ellen was finished with breakfast so we went to Harbor Freight to buy a bottle jack.  I got a $30 one to make sure we could balance the stairs on it's end.  Then it was back home.

Removing the old stairs wasn't hard.  We did have a little trouble removing a couple of the bolts.  A hammer was involved.  That's when I discovered my work on the new stairs was in vain.  The tie down interfered with the placement of the stairs.  So I removed it and we just stacked it on a board.

The first attempt to attach the new stairs failed because we ran out of lift on the jack.  We sat the jack on the step stool and that worked fine.  The only other problem was that the threads on one of the bolts were damaged when I removed it.  I managed to get it to work though.

Once the stairs were installed we couldn't get them to open.  Remember, there were no instructions.  I finally figured out that there were two shipping bolts that had to be removed.  Then everything worked fine.  When we extended them Lucy walked up into the trailer with no problem.  The safety pin didn't work though.  The holes for it don't line up. 

Gerry walked up while just as we finished.  We talked for awhile.  Then we told him to go out on the course and we'd catch up with him once we'd put everything away.  We met up with him on station 4.  I actually did a little better today.  I just have to get more targets under my belt.

We finished about 3.  We hadn't had any lunch, so we went to AC Greasy.  We also stopped at the hardware store and picked up a clip to use as a safety.  It isn't ideal, but it is a good stop gap.

When we got home I loaded everything into the car to go to a shoot at Tri-county tomorrow.  I don't really want to go, but I needed to shoot some competition targets.

The camp table and the mounts for the dash cam came today.  The camp table is perfect.  The mounts had the wrong size balls.  After a lot of searching I came to the conclusion that Kenwood just used non-standard balls.  Luckily I could wrap tape around one of the Kenwood mounts to make it work.  I still needed to order another mount to make everything work.  I also ordered a small case for the Nikon and a strap to hold the plants

The rest of the evening was surfing and TV.  Dinner was leftovers.