Since we seem to have lost most of the entries for the month of May in our fight with WebHost4Life as our domain host, I will attempt to reconstruct most of what was there. I was able to recover the pictures that were there and they now follow.
We arrived back at Lavon Lake in the Dallas area on Saturday, May 1 and this time were staying in the Lavonia Park campground. The Corps 
of Engineers was kind enough to welcome us back, even though we had only three weeks to stay this time. With all of the doctor visits to be accomplished in a short time, Pam is not working for the Corps this time but I will be. Our volunteer coordinator asked me to run a class of tractor operation while here and to also take charge of a timber removal project in the heel area of the dam.
Another couple who are from the area and who we worked with two years ago is also here for a 
short stay. Kurt & Virginia will be helping me with the timber project for the the first week of our stay.
I began the project by first taking the tractor and mower out and cutting the tall growth of vegetation in order to at least see what needs removal! It took a day and a half just to get things cut back to where we could see the number of trees that were to be removed. After the first afternoon of mowing, Kurt & Virgina joined the job, with a pole saw and a chain saw and began cutting of the smaller trees. Since our campground was very near to the heel area, I just kept the tractor at our RV site for several days while starting the job.
On Monday of our second week at Lavon, I took the tractor back over to the park HQ for the class which the rangers had asked me to run. An interesting side note to this is that I have been appointed to be the instructor for "tractor operator certification" for Lavon Lake on a permanent basis. It seems the COE requires some 300 hours of operation to instruct and none of the paid staff qualify. The good thing of this is that it means that each time we come, we have a free place to stay as long as I run at least one operator training class!
Next began the process of cutting the trees with chainsaws. I found that there were far more trees to be cut than we originally thought and this turned out to be a pretty major project. I spent as much time as I had available working on it. As a boy, I once dreamed of being a 
lumberjack some day, so now I know what that might feel like! It turns out to be darned hard work, but I did enjoy myself even so. I have always liked to work on things pretty much independently so this job fit me well as I just worked whenever I happened to have time and need something to do. I did put in quite a few hours in the three weeks that we were there and I learned to appreciate the lumberjack's trade a lot more.
In the midst of all of this I also got my annual physical and made my six month visit to get checked by the dermatologist. I passed both of those, with no more melanoma, but did have one new basil cell carcinoma removed. I guess that is going to be one of the frequent experiences for the rest of my life as a result of all of the sunburns that I had as a boy. 
The three weeks flew past and before we knew it, the time had come to begin our migration to the north for summer. Despite all of the hard work, I didn't manage to get all of the trees cut, but the majority of them were cut and stacked and ready to be burned next winter.
It has been rainy here most of the time for the past several days, but last night it got heavy. But that was just the warm-up! About 7am it began to rain heavily and
seemed that it was not about to let up. At about 9am I checked and emptied our little cheap rain gauge and it had 3 1/2' in it. Then just after that the park rangers contacted both volunteer couples to say that if we wished to 
leave we should do so now as the road would soon be blocked by the water. All of the canyons here seem to be flooding and it was raining so hard that there was water standing on all pavement because it could not drain as fast as it was coming down.
At about 10:30 am I checked it again and it had another 3 1/2" ! The rain has now tapered off to just a light but steady rain now and the stream our road crosses is now dropping I went out and shot some pictures and if you look closely you can see that the high water line is at least 2' above the level when the picture was taken. Never a dull moment! As of 1 pm, we have now had more than 8" of rain in the less than 24 hours.
Rain, rain, and more of the same. The forecast is still for more of the same for several more days. So I am looking at pictures again to keep the spirits up. This does 
make me understand the attraction for retired folks of the desert country. Actually, San Antonio is considered to be semi-arid, but lately that has not been quite the case. I do believe that it is probably safe to say that the drought here is over! It has been a very light and sporadic rain, with nearly an inch of it in the past day or so. But I sure hope those flowers and such don't drown!
We have found that with the number of times that we have visited the San Antonio area, we really don't have a great deal of new things to see. As much as we enjoy this area, I doubt that we will return to this area again, at least not soon. We definitely need to find new territories. We have about two more weeks here and then it will be back to doctor country once again. We are counting on good reports so that we can be quickly back on the road and heading north. Sure do get tired of doctors setting our schedules!
I did receive one bit of good news by email yesterday. My latest literary effort has been accepted by Escapees 
Magazine for publishing in the July/August issue. I don't yet know what it will pay, but anything is nice. Escapees don't pay as well as the more commercial magazines, but they do give preference to members so that is worth something and as a member, I guess I feel some duty to help keep costs down for all of us. I have long been amazed by the quality of articles in that magazine, written by the members mostly and I feel pretty honored to have been selected once again.
Actually, it seems to me that the rain has already done it's work and the flowers are here in force! Since today is rainy, I just thought we all need to be reminded that nature needs the rain. Most of all, I need to be reminded of such things at times. It is a wonderful day for flowers!
Well, I suppose that he really didn't stop by our house, but we will forgive him for that. Rattlesnakes are part of the natural environment in this 
area and in many ways, an important part. The main diet of such snakes is rodents and since mice can be a problem, I suppose that they are not all bad. Even so, I don't know that I want any in our RV site!
Rattlesnakes do show up pretty commonly in this area each spring when they come
out of their dens and are seeking sunny spots to get warmed up and back into their summer habits. In fact, it is pretty common for one to choose the deck near the visitor center as a choice spot in the spring time. The staff here keep a snake hook around to move them when they get too comfortable. In this case, I was driving up to the visitor center to do some photography of butterflies for the naturalist staff to use in a program for kids. As I neared the parking lot, I had to stop for this one to cross the road, so I got a few pictures of him as well.
Even though we do have a pretty significant population of snakes here, they are really not seen that often and there have been no reported snake bites to the public. We do have several areas that are posted to avoid because of the high density of the snake populations.
Thus farm this one is the only one that I have seen since we arrived here. In route to my appointment I also got a shot of a scorpion that was trying to hide in a crack in the rock of the fee booth.
I suppose that it happens everywhere but some of us get really offended when it hits "our park!" What really strikes me as aggravating is the fact that it was pretty obvious from the tracks through the heavy vegetation, where the people came into the park from, and the are our immediate 
neighbors. Just outside of the property is a small, gated community with perhaps 20 or 30 homes at most. They are the nearest to the developed part of the park and there were clear tracks through the weeds next to the private road, a fence pushed down and then tracks on about 1/4 mile to where they had obviously first attempted to steal one of the 2" X 16" X 4' wooden signs. When they could not get the sign off of the two posts it was mounted to, they then spray painted it and the painted words on the road to demonstrate the vast brilliance of the people who do these things.
The picture here shows part of the "artwork" that they left on the road. If you click on it, then you get the crude part, but if easily offended, don't click on the picture as it was intended to shock. I replaced the painted sign the next morning and last evening two rangers and I managed to remove the worst of the graffiti from the road with chemicals and a pressure washer.
On last Monday, we went hiking in the park, covering between three and four miles on one of our trails here. It was a pretty warm and muggy day and we all got pretty warm, but Muffie was with us and we were very concerned because we felt that she didn't drink as much water as she should 
have. As most long bodied dogs do, she has developed some arthritis with her eight years of age and she was one very tired dog when we got back to the truck. The next day she was very lethargic and ate very little. On Wednesday she remained that same way and by evening she declined to eat even her special treats and we also didn't see her drinking what we would consider to be normal for her. It was rainy all day, but when morning came we were still very concerned, so off we went to a recommended veterinarian. Now who would have connected her lethargy to the sinus headaches that we were both experiencing?
The diagnosis was that Muffie was suffering from reaction to the record high levels of pollens in the air here. The vet told us that there have been a rash of pets with reactions to this unusually high pollen just as his doctor told hin was true for people. We were sent off to get her some Pepsid for her upset stomach and Claritin for her sinus issues! We also were to give her a doggy aspirin twice a day. Now, some12 hours later our Muffie is pretty much her old self and hungry as could be. But we were thrilled to see her back eating again and she even wanted seconds. What a relief it was to be such a simple problem and cure!
Well, yesterday the gremlins won! I reported here on March 9 that I had upgraded my Panasonic camera to a new one by Canon. It didn't take long to begin to really appreciate the improvements in newer technology of the new camera as well as the additional zoom power and increased resolution, as the old camera was 12X zoom with 7.5 meg-pixels and the Canon was a 20X zoom with 12 meg. pictures, along with some other really nice features. But the story does not end there. One really neat feature of the Canon Power Shot IS20 is the LCD display which closed is facing the camera body to protect the screen, and you simply swing it open and it turns on, in any shooting mode. Or that is supposed to happen!
Just 8 days after I began to use the new Canon, that swing out LCD failed to turn on. Well I have been a tech long enough to know that every 
manufacturer has a bad product get out into the market place on occasion. I packed up the camera in it's original box, grabbed the receipt and headed off to Best Buy to get it replaced. When we got to the store there was no problem at all, in just a matter of a few minutes I was off again, heading home to set up my new camera and continue enjoying the new abilities. It did strike me as interesting that the person in customer service had commented that they had seen several of the Canons of that model returned for that same problem, but I dismissed that and went on my way.
This one lasted exactly 13 days and the very same problem! No way could I have gotten two bad cameras. I spent hours pouring over the manual looking for some way that it could be returned to normal. I thought that perhaps there was something that I had been doing? But it was not to be. The only conclusion was that once again the LCD had failed. I packed up the camera and off to Best Buy one more time. I did a lot of thinking about this and the decision was to reconsider what camera to use. When shopping before I had selected between the Canon and one from Nikon which I now own. The Nikon, Cool PIX P100 is now my camera. It has more zoom with a bit less resolution at 26X and 10.1 mp. It don't have the neat LCD, but it has a very functional one. With most of my pictures being used on the internet, the extra resolution is seldom used and the added zoom is really great! So far I am not that sorry that I made the change, and I would probably never have fully trusted the Cannon again. I sure hope that this story ends here.