The Laffertys' Life

My most sincere heartfelt wishes to all the mothers in our family who have been a source of love, strength & inspiration to me. The Laffertys & Wideners must have the most awesome Moms anywhere!

I spent the week before at my folks. My mom had an echo cardiogram on the 7th as her doctor said she has mild congenital heart failure (along with a heart murmur) & he wanted to see to what extent. He also told her she has high blood sugar but fell short of calling it diabetes. This news had us all concerned & Julie asked if I could come. So off I went for a week of cleaning out cupboards (getting rid of all the high sodium & high sugar items), taking them to doctor’s appts., shopping for healthy foods with the caregiver, etc. I’ve asked the caregiver to be there longer in order to cook their evening meal as it will now require more work. Mom got her lab results Sat. which showed her to be in the normal range so now we’re wondering how careful she really needs to be. I guess only another visit to the doctor will tell.

The family all came up Sat. for a work day for Mom & Dad. The ladies weeded & planted a lot of flowers in their front & back yards. The guys installed a turbine in the garage to help keep it cooler in the summer (their washer/dryer are in there) and helped with some yard work. We also celebrated their 60th anniversary as most of us won’t be here in Aug. to do so. It was a wonderful family weekend.

Richard ended up working many extra hours last week so it was a good week to be gone. He worked for one of the park aides who decided to clean the kiosk a couple of weeks ago and ended up in the hospital as a result. Mice had found a home in a back room & when the aide cleaned he stirred up the droppings giving him a very serious lung infection.  We’re hoping they get professionals in to clean it soon.

Camping season starts today so our days will be busier than ever. Camp hosts don’t normally work the kiosk & do camp checks but the person doing the schedule forgot so we’re going to be working our fingers to the bone until we leave in a couple of weeks.

I broke a tooth over the weekend which will require a crown. This is not what we had planned on spending over $700 on just before our trip! It’s going to be tight to get it done before we go. I would have thought our lives would be more relaxed now that we’re retired but it seems like it’s always something!

Chris finally found a job last week! He starts on the 21st at Raytheon. He is being hired at the highest salary for his position as all his experience is on equipment they use in the Raytheon plant. That’s still $9/hr less than what he was making at Peterbilt but he will probably get a promotion and pay raise after his 60 day probation period.

Other than Katie being in a car accident with one of her grandmas in TN Sunday morning that’s about all our news. She was the only one hurt as she wasn’t wearing a seat belt. Fortunately it’s just a minor sprain. Bet she wears one in the future!

Things were pretty sad around here for a while. I just wish Don knew how many people missed him.

There is some good news regarding Don’s dogs. Zulu was adopted by another park aide and Bernadette was adopted by a gal who works in the local vet’s office. Both of them now have good homes, but they obviously miss Don very much.

It turns out that Don’s brother lives in Brussels, Belgium. The “brother” living in Hawaii is a foster brother, and the Brussels brother is the one who came to take care of the arrangements. We had an opportunity to meet him and express our condolences.

Don left his motorhome and van to a friend here in San Clemente. She finally was able to remove them this past week. Seeing them sitting here in the park for a week and a half was hard on all the employees.

As we said, life goes on. Last Tuesday I had to make a quick trip to Dallas for a Wed. morning Dr.’s appointment. The whole trip took about 30 hours. It was my one year follow up on my back surgery. Everything is fine and I don’t need to go back for another year. It was an expensive Dr.’s appointment. The actual appointment was cheap, but the airfare and rental car was not. I was in the Dr.’s office for less than 30 minutes total, including x-rays. The good part was being able to spend the night at Chris and Dayna’s so I had a chance to see them and Deidra and Dom for a couple hours. Grandkid fixes are good.

There is not a lot else to report about activities here. We are working in the kiosk a couple days a week and just being lazy, hiking in the park or exploring on the scooter when we feel like it. The park opens for camping in about two weeks and the grandkids will be here in about three weeks. In four weeks we leave for Alaska!

This is going to be long so be prepared.

The week began with us working in the Kiosk here at the park on Monday. It was a pretty routine day with the normal number of visitors and questions. It was a good day and fun to do something other than pick up litter in the park.

Tuesday I was scheduled to work in the Kiosk at Surf Beach, a day use facility just for surfing located about a mile up the beach. I was scheduled to work from 8 am to 4 pm but I arrived early and had the kiosk open by 7:15. Normally Surf Beach is rather quiet during the week but this Tuesday we had some of the biggest, best surfing waves in several months and I got slammed. I barely sat down all day and sold almost $4,000 worth of passes. That was the most in several weeks. Some initiation.

About 4 pm, as I was just getting ready to close up, I saw a young surfer wearing a wet suit walking up the road from the beach. The kiosk is located at the top of the bluff and the road down to the beach is about 1/4 mile long. He walked over to my kiosk and acted very strange. I asked him if I could help him and he said he was lost. I questioned him a bit and he was very, very confused. He did not know how he got there, where he was, what he was doing there or much of anything else.

I radioed for assistance and soon both on-duty lifeguards, who serve as EMT’s, arrived. They could find not figure out what was going on either and soon called the paramedics who arrived with a squad truck and a fire engine. They called for an ambulance and he was finally taken to the hospital. By then it was about 5:30 pm and I was still running the kiosk, selling tickets, talking to dispatch on the radio and with all the responders, including a park ranger.

The young man was about 18 and seemed very nice, just confused. My thought, and that of the lifeguards and medics, was that he was either diabetic, on drugs or he had hurt himself in the heavy surf. I had reports all day of people getting pounded in the huge surf so that was a distinct possibility.

Friday morning I had an opportunity to talk with the ranger who had been there. He told me they finally got to the bottom of it and it turned out to be a combination of bad acid and marijuana. It was certainly more excitement than I needed. I worked over 11 hours that day and I did not finish my close out until almost 6:30.

The reason I had an opportunity to talk with the ranger on Friday is the next part of our week. That morning about 9 am we heard emergency vehicles going past our campsite toward the south end of the campground. I took the cart down there and discovered four Military Police cars, two San Diego County Sheriff’s cars, two lifeguard trucks, three Park Ranger’s cars and the fire engine and paramedic team from Tuesday. I talked to one of the rangers who told me that a body had been found down on the beach. That was about all we knew at that point. There was no identification on the body.

The rest of Friday was pretty routine. We did some litter pickup and I made a run to the post office. It was during our litter pickup runs and while I was driving through the park on the way to the post office that I noticed Don’s van sitting at the group camping area.

Don Wells is a park aid who has been here in the park for almost 20 years. He lives in his beat up old motorhome with his 2 dogs in the camping spot right next to us. Don is a very nice guy, although a little reserved. Don and we are the only campers in the park this time of year, except for one other park aide who lives in his Class B motorhome about a mile north of where we stay. We met Don last year when we first arrived and got to know him pretty well. We talked almost every day and saw each other often. We have traded and loaned each other DVD’s, discussed park operations, and occasionally talked a little about our personal lives, although not much. Don is a pretty private person. The only relative we know of is a brother who lives in Hawaii who visited him last year. A few weeks ago Don came over and asked us to look up some information on the internet for him. His brother had offered to help him find work in Hawaii if Don wanted to move there. Unfortunately, because of Hawaiian restrictions, Don would not be able to take his dogs with him without incurring a significant expense so he finally decided it would not work out.

Don’s dogs are his children. They go everywhere with him and he never leaves them alone for more than a couple hours at a time. Zulu, the male, is a large, mean looking dog, but who is really friendly once he knows you. Bernadette, the female, is a dalmatian cross and a real sweetie.

Seeing Don’s van parked near the group camping area was not that unusual. It was a beat up clunker that he had recently purchased. He had already had a lot of trouble with it so I just figured it had broken down again while he was doing his restroom cleaning rounds. It was still there yesterday, Saturday, when Dianna and I were doing some litter pick up in that part of the park. I didn’t think much about it at first, but Dianna was concerned and wanted to check it out. It was empty, but then I started thinking about the last time I had seen Don. It was Thursday afternoon. We then realized that we had not seen him walk his dogs on Friday or Saturday and our anxiety levels really started to rise.

We went up to the kiosk and tried to phone the other park aide who has known Don for about 20 years, to see if he knew where he was. This was about 5 pm Saturday night. Unfortunately we were not able to reach him. We went back to our camp site to check on the dogs and see once again if Don had returned. He was not there and we knew we needed to report this. We had a really bad feeling.

I called dispatch at about 6 pm and asked for the duty ranger to be sent down. It was just shift change so the oncoming senior ranger arrived at about 6:45 pm. He also had known Don for about 20 years so when we told him Don was missing, he too immediately realized something was really wrong. With some trepidation I asked him if they had identified the body found on the beach. He said no, but had the same thought I did. He immediately placed a call to the detective who was handling the case. They had done an autopsy in the morning but still did not have an identification. They said it was a man of about 60 with grey hair and mustache, about 5 foot 9 and 200 pounds. At that point we all knew, but no one wanted to say it.

The detectives met the ranger at the main office so they could get Don’s personnel file. They then came here to interview us and search Don’s motorhome. The detectives confirmed that the picture on Don’s drivers license looked like the man that had been found.

At this point there was still an open question as to whether this was a homicide or suicide. The coroner had not made a determination. While we waited for the animal control officers to arrive to remove the dogs from the motorhome, Dianna and I were interviewed by the homicide detectives. That was a first, and hopefully last, for us. We told them all we could about the circumstances and our impressions of Don’s mental state, visitors, activities and anything else relevant we could think of.

Just about the time the interview was completed, about 10 pm, the animal control officer arrived. It was tough getting the dogs out of the motorhome. They were scared and confused. Zulu wanted to defend his home so they had to use the rope on a stick to get control of him. While they were removing him, Bernadette managed to get out as well. I called to her and she came right over to me and hid behind me. We really felt sorry for them.

The detectives entered the motorhome and a few minutes later they found a suicide note. It did not say much, just that he was tired of living and didn’t want to deal with it any more.

Everyone who knew him is really shocked. No one saw it coming. We will all miss him. He was a kind man who apparently just decided he did not want to live a lonely life anymore.

One of the issues we have to deal with while living here on the bluffs is the wildlife. In particular we have a healthy population of squirrels, rabbits and field mice. The squirrels and rabbits stay outside where they belong, but the mice do what most mice do and try to get into everywhere. Although our trailer is completely enclosed underneath and is sitting on wheels, the mice find their way in. We don’t have them all the time, but when one finds his way in he tends to revisit regularly until caught.

Last year while we were here I purchased a couple of regular mouse traps and used them with marginal success. These mice are quite small and they do not set off the trap. I really don’t enjoy feeding them peanut butter to help them grow up big and strong, but it would usually take several rebaitings of the trap until we finally had success.

Setting the original, regular mouse traps is always a tense proposition. Getting that little bar to hook in place without snapping is a real challenge. I never actually got caught but I sure scared myself many times. Over the winter I found some newer style mouse traps that look like big clips. These are made out of plastic and are very easy to set since you just squeeze them like a clothes pin. I purchased a couple and thought this might be the better mouse trap I had been looking for.

After we had been here a couple weeks we found evidence of a nocturnal visitor. I fearlessly set my new traps and waited. Next day the peanut butter was gone but no mouse. The same thing occurred for three nights in a row. Here we go again fattening up mice. Then one evening while watching TV I heard the trap go off followed by noises. I went over and looked under the counter where the trap was, only to find a tiny mouse caught by one leg and pulling the trap behind him. He was trying to get through a place the trap would not fit, but he was only mad — not dead. So much for that better mousetrap.

So my search continued. I found some discussion about similar problems on an RV forum I frequent and learned about something called The RatZapper. It is an electronic mousetrap that many people said was the only thing they had found to work. It is a high tech electric chair for mice. It uses batteries to form a very high electrical charge in a small box and sensors to determine when something is inside. It then delivers a deadly zap which is supposed to kill the mouse or squirrel or rat. They guarantee it will work for the smallest mouse or the largest rat.

These devices are not cheap (about $35 internet) but if I was to maintain domestic tranquility I needed to find a solution. I found a feed store in San Juan Capistrano that carried the RatZapper and purchased one. It takes four AA batteries and comes with a small bag of dry dog food which they recommend for bait. I tossed 3 dog food chunks into the box, armed it and placed it under the counter where the traps had been.

Later that evening while watching TV I heard a buzz. I looked at the trap and the indicator light was flashing, indicating that the trap had gone off. Sure enough, one dead mouse! I just picked up the trap and emptied the contents into the dumpster outside. You don’t even have to look inside or see the mouse if you don’t want to.

I tossed a couple more dog food nuggets into the trap and reset it. Next morning we had another victim. Whoopee! We have had no more mice since the first two, and also no evidence of any although I check it every morning. Thanks to “a better mousetrap” domestic tranquility has been restored to my happy home on wheels.

Otherwise things are going along nicely here. We finally finished the processes necessary for us to work the entrance kiosk, so that has begun. We sell entrance passes and answer questions for visitors to the park. It’s enjoyable work. We only work a couple days a week from nine to five so it really does not get in the way of being retired. We still volunteer to do liter pickups on a pretty regular basis as well. We enjoy keeping the park looking good.

The winter camp hosts, Dick and Shirley Sacco, left on the first of April. They spend their summers working as interpretive guides at Founders Grove in Humboldt Redwoods State Park in Northern California. It was nice having another couple living here in the park near us. They are nice people and we enjoyed getting to know them.

We will be going up to Widener’s for Easter this weekend. Otherwise, there is not a lot of new news to share. We are just enjoying ourselves here by the sea.

I just got back from spending a few days with my folks. My dad had another cancer surgery on Monday. This time it was on his back. It was probably the biggest tumor that’s been removed. The incision is about 5″ long and he’s recovering nicely.

My mom went in for a hearing exam yesterday and has “significant” hearing loss. So next month she goes in to be fitted for hearing aids, much to her dismay.

Greg, Julie & I told her a few weeks ago that we don’t want her driving anymore. She tells everyone who will listen that her “kids won’t let her drive anymore”. She’s still very angry about it. But she’s obeying our request and that’s all we can ask for.

I have to do some bragging now. Our niece, Patricia, was just accepted to MIT! That was her first choice of many Ivy League colleges so we are very thrilled for her. Her family is moving to Rochester, NY the first of July. They will be much closer which will be a blessing for her. Greg works for Xerox whose headquarters is in Rochester. The plant he’s at has had a staff reduction from 5,000 to 500 employees so there’s no room for further advancement for him in Santa Monica. Xerox is paying all their selling & moving costs which will help greatly.

Tina recently had her thyroid removed. She had a nodule on the side of her neck which they removed half of in January. The biopsy showed it was cancerous so they removed the remainder in February. Greg says if you have to have cancer, thyroid cancer is the best as it’s the slowest growing. She’s fully recovered and is back at work.

My mom and I went up to visit her brother Art, sister-in-law Mary and cousin Calvin who flew in from Nebraska (that’s where the Flanagin siblings were all born) on Tuesday. Uncle Art has been a pilot for over 60 years, beginning with the Navy in WWII. He was part of the Berlin airlift operation. He’s recently decided to sell his plane as he can’t physically do the maintenance on it so this will be a major adjustment for him. I’m so grateful there are so many of my aging relatives still around and we can share family times.

Richard’s snoozing and since I have no clue how to upload pictures new photos of recent embroidery projects will have to wait.

Some people have expressed interest in how we carry our motorcycle with us so this post is to explain that. It will not be of interest to many family members but there are others who travel and want to carry their motorcycles who will be interested.

I purchased a Rampage motorcycle loader that is designed to be used in the back of a pickup truck. The normal installation is to install three special nuts in the bed of the truck so you can remove the loader when you are not using it. Of course, we do not have a pickup truck and wanted to load from the side instead of the rear. I also wanted to be able to move the loader forward and back to allow turning room for the trailer when we are hooked up and to allow access to the storage box when needed.

I modified the loader by welding brackets on the sides and mounting heavy duty wheels on them. This allows the loader to roll forward and back. It rolls easily both empty and when the motorcycle is mounted. One person on each side is all it takes, or one person running from side to side a few times. On the ends of the loader I welded some plates that hang down over the edge of the bed. I then drilled holes through the plates and through the lip of the bed in the places necessary to hold the loader in its forward and rear position. I use pins with clips on them to hold the loader in place. The motorcycle is also tied down to the bed itself with straps.

This is the loader. Notice the electrical connection. I use a 12V cable with Anderson Power Pole connectors on it that I made from welding cable. I mounted a 12V connector on the rear of the truck.

This is a close of of the bracket welded to the end of the loader.

This is a close up of the holes in the lip of the bed that are used when the loader is in its forward position. Because of the stairwell, I had to use a strap of steel to bridge the gap. If I had realized this before welding the plates on the ends of the loader I would have made the plates longer in the front so I did not need the extra strap.

The ability to move the loader forward and back allows me use of the truck bed for things other than just access to the storage cabinet. I carry a water bladder on the bed when we are boondocking between the cabinet and the loader. I place my portable waste tank on the loader itself. When we travel the bladder folds up and is placed in a small box in the cabinet, and the waste tank is placed on top of the cabinet.

This is the portable waste tank in its travel position.

It would be fairly easy to remove the loader from the bed completely if the need arose for more deck space temporarily. Since it is just held to the bed by the four pins it could be lifted off. It is pretty heavy but disassembles to two parts for removal. Even so, it would be a two man operation to remove.

I hope this answers all the questions. If there is anything that is not clear, leave a comment and I will try to clarify.

I guess we need to catch you all up on our latest comings and goings. The volunteer coordinator ranger dropped by a couple days ago. He chatted, left paperwork for us to fill out, and said do whatever we want (or nothing) until they figure out what they need us to do. Most likely we will be working the kiosk when the other couple here leaves at the end of the month. In the meantime we pick up litter a couple hours a day and call it good. I have no idea why I get such a sense of satisfaction in litter pick up. Probably because this is a nice, unspoiled piece of California coastline that some crummy people feel free to throw bottles and cans on. I enjoy being outside, and helping to make this place look like it should.

We have not done much this week. We made a couple trips to the market but the rest of the time we just stayed here in the park. On one of the trips to the market I decided to try a new route. I found a road that goes up along a ridge to the highest point above San Clemente. The view from the top is fantastic, as are the homes up there.

Today was supposed to be a big warm up, so we decided to take a scooter ride to enjoy the nice weather. Unfortunately, so did a gazillion other people, but that comes with the territory here. We followed the coast from San Clemente up through Dana Point, Laguna Beach, Newport Beach, Huntington Beach, Sunset Beach, Seal Beach, Belmont Shores and into Long Beach. (How did that shores get in among all the beaches?) We cruised up Ocean Blvd. to the downtown Long Beach area and stopped at Shoreline Village, a shopping and restaurant area in Long Beach Harbor across from the Queen Mary.

We were going to have a mid afternoon lunch there but all the restaurants said they had over 1 1/2 hour waits and some were not putting any more names on the list. Oh well. So after wandering around a bit we headed back down to Huntington Beach where we stopped at another restaurant. Unfortunately, we got the same story there. It was a beautiful day which had brought out the masses. However, none of the places were staffed to handle all the people.

We continued south and finally stopped at a Mexican restaurant in Laguna Beach where we were able to be seated immediately. It was OK. Not great, but OK.

Traffic was really bad in all the beach towns, but it opened up pretty good between places. The trip was about 120 miles round trip and our backsides were pretty sore when we got home this evening. Although we have ridden much farther, we probably spent more time sitting on the scooter today than any previous trip. This was because of all the stop and go traffic, stop lights and people out for a Sunday cruise. One thing we have noticed is a continual increase in the number of motorcycles on the roads. I suppose it has something to do with the popularity of shows like Orange County Choppers, expensive gasoline and more affluent older guys who are reliving their youth. Hey, I resemble that remark! Well, maybe not the affluent part.

It was a good day. Dianna is becoming quite the biker momma.