The Shakedown

Hi, I’m Max the voice of sanity and clear thought in the Laswell family.

Larry and Marsha, the two lead inmates in our asylum, got this crazy idea to take a two or three month vacation in their RV. I am sure they will tell you all about it, but I am here to tell you the real story.

Let me introduce the cast of characters. Me, I am a 5 Year old lab / bird dog mix. There is really not much to say about me. I am highly intelligent, a gentleman and generally perfect in every way. In the photo I am under the dinette table in the RV - it’s the only safe place with all of the commotion that goes on here abouts. Remember I said I was the voice of sanity and clear thought. In the RV out of the way is good. I feel that I really should be a California dog since I am naturally laid back and never unnecessarily expend energy. If I see a bird, rabbit, squirrel I don’t go crazy like Sasha. She hasn’t figured out that she will never catch it, and if she did she wouldn’t know what to do with it anyway. I on the other hand, take a much more mature approach. Instead of throwing a hissy fit, I calmly go into a point to let everyone else know there is an animal nearby so THEY can go crazy. In the meantime, I will sit back and enjoy the show.

Sasha, the boss. If there ever was an alpha-bitch she is it. Contrary to what Larry and Marsh think she is running the show. She is constantly interrupting my nap time, is always in my face, bugging me, or wanting me to play with her. She is going to be interesting to watch on this trip. I can already tell she is not an outdoors type of dog. This morning was a beautiful morning and I took Larry outside so he could drink his coffee and enjoy the morning air, while I laid down and played sentry. Well it was chilly and there was no soft couch outside. Well, Sasha threw a fit scratching at Larry and whining to go back into the RV. Brother is she going to be a pain.

Marsha, Secretary of the Interior. It looks like Marsha and Larry have figured out this division of labor stuff. Marsha appears to be in charge of everything inside the RV while Larry, Secretary of the Exterior, is responsible for everything outside the RV. For a human, Marsha is pretty smart and displays an extraordinary amount of common sense, but she has her moments. More on this later.

Larry, Secretary of the Exterior. I have to hand it to Larry, he is almost as smart as I am but he has no common sense - lucky he found Marsha. His only problem is that his mind goes ten directions at once and he TRIES to keep up. The result is that he can’t keep up and he loses things, forgets what he was doing and occasionally mentally lands so far out in space it takes a rescue mission to haul his ass back to earth.

Anyway, they don’t know exactly when they will leave on this “dream vacation” but my guess is it will be around June 1st. For the last week, under my careful supervision, they have been outfitting the RV to do two things: make sure we have everything they need and to make sure they have a place for everything. Marsha is pretty anal when it comes to this type of thing, she doesn’t realize that if they forgot something there will be stores around so she can get it. Marsha tends to be a perfectionist in such matters - everything has to be right, everything has to be in ITS place and she has to know where everything is. As for Larry, he’s more of a “If I can’t find it now, I’ll go buy one, if I can’t buy one it will turn up later.” type of guy.

As I write this, I am sitting in our RV in a campground in central Indiana. This is an initial shakedown cruise to make sure everything is as it should be. They have had a few glitches.

Larry, the electrical engineer he is, installed a satellite radio but there it is picking up interference from the engine and there is a high pitched whine under the music or voice on the radio. This isn’t a problem for Larry. His solution is to take his hearing aids out and the whine goes away. It does drive Marsha to distraction though. My bet is she will get Larry to fix it.

Our RV has four leveling jacks and the right front jack does not want to go down all the way at times. Marsha has mentioned this to Larry about six times now and Larry has been firm with her that it is not a problem and not to worry about it. Hopefully, it is just low on hydraulic fluid or something ‘cause he hasn’t figured it out yet, but he is going to have to fix it.

Marsha freaked out because she looked down the floor-mounted heating register in the bedroom and saw light. Her reaction: “Larry, there’s a hole in the RV!” Well, the heat duct to the bedroom also feeds into the water storage compartment which is heated so the water doesn’t freeze in cold weather. It turns out that the heat vent comes out in the access compartment which has a translucent plastic bottom. That’s the light she saw.

Also had to replace the engine battery because it was old and a bit weak. Again this was no problem for Larry since the RV has an auxiliary battery connection to the house batteries that you can use to start the engine, if and when needed. Remember what I said about Marsha being a bit anal? Well, Larry replaced the battery. I have hope for him that he will figure this out sooner or later.

Our RV is a 2005 29 footer. It is pretty small and a bit on the cramped side one we get all of our gear and the humans aboard. I do believe the astronauts on the space station have more tail-wagging room than we do. It’s probably somewhere between an Apollo space capsule and the space shuttle. This will be our land capsule for our extended vacation. It is going to be interesting to see if they can live in close quarters like this for two or three months without killing each other. Stay tuned.