I took it easy last weekend. My allergies have escalated to the severe category and I developed a bit of a sinus infection. On Saturday, Donna played in a pickleball tournament. I went to watch and ended up being a line judge. Donna had a good time playing.

On Sunday, Donna rode the Spyder to the park-and-ride lot at Gilbert and McDowell Road. She met up there with her friend, Julia, and they went to a movie theater in Tempe. Meanwhile I laid low, taking benadryl allergy tabs and rinsing my sinuses with a neti pot.

I stayed off the pickleball court Monday and took it easy again. I mostly relaxed and read a book. Donna got her exercise by running to Red Mountain Park and back – a distance of four miles. Then she hit the gym here at Viewpoint Golf and RV Resort. She made a new recipe for dinner – a Korean beef bowl with noodles. It was spicy and yummy.

Korean beef bowl

On Tuesday morning, we had a rain shower. It was okay with me, I wasn’t up for pickleball. I had a delivery though and a project to complete. Our coach, like many RVs, has day and night window shades on our bedroom windows. Day and night shades have two panels, one that’s opaque for privacy but allows sunlight to illuminate the room. It also blocks some of the radiant heat. The second panel is a night shade that blocks light from entering the room.

Night shade half-way down

The night panel is attached to the top plate and center plate. It can be pulled all the way down, left all the way up or set to any point in-between.

Night panel half -way down, day panel covering the rest of the window

The day panel attaches to the center plate and the lower plate. Like the night panel, it can be left all the way up, pulled all the way down or set at any point in between. The day and night shades work through friction on cords that are strung through the plates and panels. One of the cords on our shade was frayed and the night panel wouldn’t go all the way up – in the photos, it’s up as far as we could get it. I ordered a kit to re-string the cords in the shade.

Kit

I removed the shade from the window frame and popped the end caps from all three plates. Then I cut the old cords at the top plate and pulled them off of the panels. The cord is constructed similarly to paracord, but much thinner. The cord in the kit was 1.4mm in diameter – slightly thicker than the cross section of 16-gauge wire. The kit also included new plastic bushings and a nifty tool for pulling the cord. The interesting thing was, the instructions never mention the cord pulling tool. In fact, the instructions were a little sketchy, but it wasn’t too difficult to figure out how to do it.

I measured and cut two lengths of cord – in this case, I needed about 93 inches for each side. This allowed some fudge factor for tying the cord ends. I pulled both panels out of the end plates and center plate. The cords criss-cross through the center plate and pass through plastic bushings. Wear on these bushings is what ultimately causes the cords to fray. I replaced the plastic bushings by inserting a small punch through the opening and pushing them out of the plate and panel. I used the same punch to snap the new bushings in place.

Old worn bushings

I started at the top panel by the tying the end of each cord to the springs mounted there. Then I collapsed the night shade pleats flat against the upper plate and used the cord tool to pull the cord through the plate and panel pleats.

The instructions warned about stringing the center plate as being a tricky operation. The cords must cross – the left cord comes out of the center panel on the right side and right cord goes to the left side through the bushings. I found an easy way to do this. I slid the lower day shade into the center panel taking care to keep the strings centered in the plate. Again with pleats collapsed I inserted the tool before I had the panel all the way into the plate. This allowed me to easily capture the cord and pull it through the panel pleats and bushings.

This made stringing through the center panel easy

The instructions didn’t offer any advice on doing this step. Next I slid the panel through the plate until the bushing on the other end was exposed and did the same trick to pull the cord through the panel. Then I was able to center the panel with cords strung through.

After I pulled the cord through the bottom plate, I tied large knots in the end of the cords so I wouldn’t accidentally pull them back up. Then I snapped the end caps in place and I was ready to install the shade.

With the top panel secured to the window frame, the last step is to secure the ends of the cords at the bottom of the window. This is the trickiest part of the whole operation. There are plastic tabs screwed to the bottom of the window frame to secure the cords. Proper tensioning of the cords is critical. Too loose and the shades don’t have sufficient friction to stay in place – the shades fall from gravity. Too tight and the shade is difficult to operate and the plastic bushings will wear prematurely. The other thing is the cords need to pull against the springs in the top plate with fairly equal tension or the center plate and bottom plate won’t stay horizontal. I played around with it for a while before taking a break. I left plenty of extra cord where it ties to the tabs so I can make further adjustments to get it right. That was my project for the day.

Donna’s project for the day was a green curry shrimp dinner. Tasty!

Green curry shrimp

Earlier in the day, she rode her bike to Orangewood Shadows RV Park to visit Debi and Lowell Hartvikson, who we met when we stayed there several years ago. Afterward, she continued on to Trader Joe’s at Baseline and Gilbert to pick up the brown rice she needed for dinner plus bananas and lemons which she carried home in a small backpack. Altogether, she got in a 25-mile ride.

This morning is cool and cloudy and rain is imminent. I played in the 3.0-3.5 pickleball round robin and it was a mistake. I felt a little lightheaded at times and played poorly. I’ll take it easy for the rest of the day. We planned to go to Roma Cafe for Valentine’s dinner, but we’ll see how that works out. Riding the Spyder to dinner in the rain is not an option.