Week Three

Another week down!

The treatments are going well. As of this writing, I have completed sixteen treatments and have twenty-nine more to go.

Yaaay! Only twenty-nine balloons to go!

This week I have definitely noticed my urine stream has been more restricted than last week. My Doctor said this is normal during treatment as the prostate is being bombarded with radiation.

I've been working out at the gym and trying to stay active but sometimes it's hard to get motivated especially when I'm feeling tired.

I spent Monday afternoon washing my trailer from top to bottom. It really needed it especially the roof.

Thursday night I met my friend Carlos and his family at Downtown Disney, which is a mall area outside Disneyland with shops, restaurants, and outdoor entertainment. We had dinner at a pizza place and walked around the mall area and listened to some of the musicians that were performing there. It was a very enjoyable night and a nice break from the RV park.

If it wasn't for bad luck I'd have no luck at all.

I decided to take a trip back home and left Friday morning after my treatment. While getting ready and packing up the truck I put some sodas and water in my cooler. When I put the ice in the cooler a chunk of ice pierced a soda can and spewed Coke all over the trailer that I had just washed. After hosing it off I finally hit the road at about 10:00 A.M.

I was making good time and made it to the outskirts of Phoenix when the traffic stopped dead in it's tracks. Apparently there was a roll over accident that was blocking the left lane. The traffic was at a crawl when I decided to get off the freeway at Litchfield Park and take some side streets and then get back on the freeway past the accident. As soon as I got off the freeway, I looked behind me and noticed the traffic on the freeway was starting to flow pretty good again. Now I had to deal with rush hour traffic in Avondale until I finally got back on to the freeway.

Man! When am I ever going to learn! Just like when you're in line at the grocery store and you see the line next to you going faster, and you switch to that line and you see the line you were in now going faster then the one you switched to. Oh well!

I finally made it home about two hours later than I should have. Besides the traffic jams we deal with in the valley, it was nice to be back in Arizona. You really appreciate the things you have and where you live after being away for a while. California is a nice place to visit, but I'm glad I don't have to live there permanently.

I had a nice relaxing time at home. I fixed our TV set while I was there and saved a $380 service call. That was good! Did some pool maintenance, washed the truck, and started back to California Monday morning for my treatment scheduled at 7:30 P.M.

Everything was going good and I was about ten miles east of Blythe, California, making good time when all of the sudden all my gages and the electrical system went out. I've had this happen to me before in other vehicles and I knew it had to be the alternator. Plus I just replaced the batteries in it two weeks ago. So I pulled into a rest area soon after the electrical system went out and tried to restart it. The truck was dead in the water.

I purchased an extended warranty when I bought the truck so I called the 1-800 number and asked for a tow.

About an hour later I get a call from the tow company asking where I was. I told the driver that I was right here, I haven't left. He said, "I'm looking all around and I don't see a white Ford anywhere." Come to find out, the service contract company told them I was at the rest area west of Blythe, which is about thirty miles west of Blythe. I'm at the rest area ten miles east of Blythe in Arizona. So I'm sitting there in my truck on the phone with the tow truck driver and I glance over to my GPS unit thinking, is GPS Suzy still angry at me and now she has somehow infiltrated through the service contract company's computer to make my life more miserable. Just at that moment, I swear I heard GPS Suzy say in her robotic voice, "Do you want to play-ay-ay?" No just kidding! That happened in that Matthew Broderick movie, WarGames.

So the driver had to turn around and drive another 50 miles to my destination. Meanwhile, I called the Ford dealership in Blythe to let them know I was getting towed there and see if they would honor my service contract. The service advisor told me he wasn't sure and wasn't even sure they had an alternator for my truck. So he transferred me to the parts department and they told me they had one in stock and it was $499. $499! You got to be kidding me!

The tow truck finally arrived and towed my broken down heap to the Ford dealership in Blythe. I spoke to the same Service Advisor I had just spoken to on the phone and asked him politely if there was any way he could expedite the repair. The advisor snapped back at me and said, "You want me to just drop everything I'm doing to take care of you?" Uhhh Yeah! (I didn't really say that but I was thinking it). I told him I was just asking, because I needed to be in San Bernardino by 7:30 P.M. He then told me he wouldn't even be able to look at it until 3 or 4 P.M. I then thanked him and told him I would just do it myself. I then had the tow truck driver take me to the nearest auto parts store where I purchased a new alternator for $199 and installed it in less then an hour.

After installing the alternator and getting a jump start, I was finally back on the road. I arrived back in town and came home to an RV full of ants. Yes, it seems the ants knew I was gone for the weekend and decided to have a party in my RV. So now it was back to The Battle of The Planet of The Ants, Part II.

Since I had washed the trailer a few days ago I washed the comet barrier away and forgot to reapply it, plus I spilled soda all over the place before I left, which I'm sure attracted them back to the party barge. So I sprayed insecticide, sprinkled comet, and rubbed Vaseline in the appropriate areas and went to get my treatment.

On the way back I went to the local Wal-Mart to get some more ant traps and decided to get a burger at the nearby Burger King. I grabbed my Whopper with cheese combo meal with a Diet Coke that I had ordered and headed back to the RV to finally relax after being stranded in the desert for three hours, fighting swarms of killer ants, and being sodomized by a balloon.

I arrived at my trailer and exited the truck with my combo meal in one hand and Diet Coke in the other. My mouth was watering as I was anticipating to take that first bite out of my juicy burger and take a sip from my ice cold Diet Coke. With all that anticipation, I set my Coke down on the steps, and reached into my pocket for my keys to unlock the door to the RV. As I unlocked the door and opened it, everything went into slow motion. As it began to swing open. I yelled (in slow motion) OHHHHH NOOOOO! as I watched the door knock my Diet Coke off the stairs and on to the ground below, splashing Coke all over the side of the trailer in the same spot, just as I had done before I left for the weekend. Man! What a way to end a weekend!

If it wasn't for bad luck I'd have no luck at all!