The new cut-off valve I installed for the shower wand yesterday let through as much water as the old one. I had my normal breakfast while J showered. After she finished, she said the new cut-off valve didn't leak — huh? Turns out that the leak she didn't like was water spraying out of the valve directly from the valve, and I had never seen that leak in the old valve. I finished a blog entry, then we prepped the RV to move. We went to the dump station in the campground at 9:55. After dumping, we hooked up the Jeep to tow and departed at 10:25.

We went to Peppers Supermarket in Deming at 11:09. It was a nice independent grocery store. We left at 12:03.

We went to the WalMart parking lot in Deming and J walked next door to get Wendy's take-away while I made my usual ham-and-Swiss sandwich. After we finished lunch, we went into WalMart at 12:39 and J got her glasses repaired. A screw had fallen out last night and disappeared into the carpet of the RV. We left at 1:28.

We went to the Sav-O-Mat gas station in Deming to fill up the RV at $2.619/gal. We left at 1:57.

I listened to an episode of Car Talk.

We reached Caballo Lake State Park at 3:13. It was the first time we had been there. Caballo Lake was created by the Bureau of Reclamation as part of a two-dam system on the Rio Grande. The first dam is at Elephant Butte Lake and it provides hydro-electric power. Water discharged from the Elephant Butte Powerplant during winter power generation is impounded at Caballo Dam for irrigation use during the summer.

We occupied Site 18 in the Appaloosa Campground which has a decent view of Caballo Lake. We took on water at our site, then I backed up the RV to get a better view of the lake without so much of the shelter for our site in the way. Got the RV leveled and hooked up to electricity by 3:55. There was a nice Verizon Wireless Broadband Access signal when I went online. :)

Klipsch iFi

We have a really nice Klipsch iFi speaker system for our iPods. It has an 8-inch subwoofer with a 200 watt amplifier and two satellite speakers each with a 3.5-inch driver and a 0.75-inch tweeter. Klipsch stopped making it before we moved into the RV, and I was fortunate to get a used one through Craig's List. The Jamo i300 is a similar and slightly smaller system (Jamo is a subsidiary of Klipsch.) that was released after the iFi, but it has also been discontinued.

The sound from the iFi is fantastic — at least when it works. It stopped working back in May 2009 as I was installing a pantry in the office. I think I overloaded it when I turned up the volume so I could hear the music over the noise of a vacuum cleaner as I was drilling holes to mount the pantry. Since then, we've been listening to our iPods through the much smaller Logitech mm50 Portable Speaker System for iPods. The Logitech is adequate, and the portability is great, but the sound doesn't match up to the Klipsch.

I was motivated to look into the problem with the iFi today because I saw that there's an iFi on eBay that was going for a reasonable price and the auction is ending tomorrow. So, in case I can't fix the iFi, this would be a great opportunity to get a replacement. I took apart the subwoofer and found a blown fuse for the power input. Then I saw that one of the capacitors in the power supply had gone bad. Radio Shack carries a suitable replacement, so I'll go there tomorrow and see if I can fix the iFi before the eBay auction ends.

We had dinner around 6:00, and J "ran a restaurant". That is, she made different dishes for each of us. I had chicken in Doña María Mole Sauce (view the Google translation from Spanish here) over brown rice. I discovered mole sauce at the Fiesta Mexicana restaurant in Moab, Utah, several years ago, and I love it. Mole sauce is a dark brown sauce made with peanuts and chocolate! J had chicken in gravy with mashed potatoes and leftover green bean casserole.

After dinner, I did some computer work. I was on a roll, and didn't go to bed until 1:30!