My adventure

On Tuesday afternoon I went shopping in Duncan and while I was at Superstore I again looked at the cell phone Kiosk. Made up my mind what to get and now have a Galaxy SIII cell phone and decided to also get 300 Mb of data. So instead of paying $ 28.00 we pay $ 40.00 a months. 300 daytime minutes are included as well as evening and weekends free.

Evenings start at 5 PM and goes to 8 in the morning. What a learning curve that phone is!!! My head smoked so much that I had a really bad sleep always figuring out in my head how I could do stuff and if I made the right decision. Because it is an older model phone I got it on "the Tab" meaning I did not pay for it but every month they take 10% of my tab which means in about 2 years that phone is paid off. That's what I did with my old phone and it was paid in full and even $ 50.00 ahead for a new phone.

On Wednesday my husband went to 2 meetings and he left at around 10 AM came back around 3 PM and left again an hour later. All this time I spent reading PDF instructions for the new phone on my iPad and followed them on the cell phone. Learned a lot and consequently slept very well the next night.

Yesterday I decided we needed a cover for that phone because it is kind of slippery and when it drops it might break. So off I went back to Superstore in the afternoon. They did not have the proper kind (you need exactly the cover for your specific phone) and offered to order one for me, keep in mind that this model came out 3 years ago and since then several new models are offered. I declined the offer because I wanted one NOW ;-) I then went to London Drugs, same results...off to The Source, no cover there either but they sent me to the Cell Store on Trunk Road where I finally was able to buy one. There is also a GPS in the phone which is what my husband was interested in. When I am at home I put it on our own Wifi so I don't use up my data which is not very much each month.

I parked the car at Superstore and did all that walking to the stores mentioned before. By the time I got to the Cell Store I was pooped but luckily they had some chairs to I could rest while they put the protective shield and the back on the phone.

So now I am a happy camper. Hopefully I will not have any problems with it.
Hope everyone is having a good day.

A mishap in the morning

Old age is setting in with a vengeance!

As usual I asked hubby if he would like a second cup of coffee around 9 AM this morning and as usual I asked “mau minum copi lagi?” which is indonesian for “would you like coffee again?”. He said yes and I put 2 mugs of water, a filter and coffee into our little coffeemaker and started the machine. While I was doing that I was wondering if that was the right Indonesian way to ask that question so I did what I always do when I have a question I used my iPad to google that sentence. It took me quite a while to find out that yes, I was right. In the meantime I forgot I had coffee waiting, or so I thought. As soon as that thought entered my mind I knew what I would find when I turned the corner into the kitchen… Yup, I forgot to put the glass carafe on the base and 2 mugs worth of coffee ran all over the counter. Grrrrr. My counter has not been as clean as it is now for a long time. So I am not doing that bad in the old age department because I remembered I forgot about the carafe it’s just too bad I remembered it too late.



Wish me luck for next time

Learning new tricks

I use Yahoo for my emails. When I want to send pictures I can only send them as attachments. Today I learned how to insert pictures right into the body of my emails. It is only possible to do that when the pictures have appeared on a website. It cannot be done with pictures that I took and saved on my computer. I tried using Dropbox, but that did not work. I found ImageShack on the web. I can download pictures from my own computer to that website and from there copy them and insert them into the body of my Yahoo emails. The catch is though that that website seems only to be free for about a month and then I would have to pay. Hmmm, not good Now I will try to use my Blog to do the same thing.
So here are some pictures:

Now let’s see how that works???

A Surprise

I had a real surprise yesterday morning. The phone rang but it was "unavailable" which I never answer because it is crap all the time. I arranged with my family and friends in Germany, which also come up as unavailable, to hang up and then call again right away. Well, that happened yesterday and I thought I would hear either my cousin's, or friend's voice, but the voice was that of a stranger. It turned out it was the daughter of my cousin Horty's from Cologne. You could have knocked me over. Horty was in an auto accident when she and her husband drove back home from our place in Suemmern, where we were stationed. She died 3 weeks later without regaining conscience. It actually was a blessing because she had a totally broken body. Isabel was at that time about 9 months old. My aunt, Isabel's grandma took care of her for about 3 years and then Isabel’s father married again and my aunt saw her only once about every month. That was very hard on my aunt.

I was in contact with Isabel off and on until my Aunt died at 93 years old. Isabel told me all about it but then the email contact somehow broke up over 10 years ago. You can imagine how surprised I was to hear her on the phone. We talked about half an hour and have since exchanged photos. Isabel's computer crashed and she lost all he email addresses for awhile and then tried to email again but by that time I changed my email address and her emails to me came back to her.

In the meantime Isabel has been divorced. She has two grown daughters who live with her at the moment finishing their education. Looking through old photos and correspondence from my aunt the other day she found our telephone number and decided to see if we still had the same number.

I am so happy to have contact with her again. She and my other cousin are the only relatives I still have in Germany. We were a small family, nobody had many children.

See you next time something nice happens

Kubotcha Tale

Years ago when we were still snowbirding in Arizona we usually camped together with our friends on the North side of Tom Wells Road which is half way between Quartzsite and Blythe.

Travelling from there to Blythe is a weigh station where trucks will have to stop when it is open. Most of the time it was closed though.

Two of my friends and I would walk across the desert to a service station by the highway. It was a very old one and has since been replaced with a Texaco Station. Using the old but still functioning station we used the pay phones to retrieve our emails with the then popular pocketmail devices.

All three of us had one of those and in the days without access to the internet in the desert, much different from now, we were happy to stay in contact with friends and family that way.

Some days we arrived at the service station parking lot, which was just a gravel area, to find mounds of fruit or vegetable in a back corner of the lot.

The truckers who hauled those goods along the highway knew that most of the time the weigh station was closed so quite often they would be overloaded. Since they all have CBs and alert each other to obstructions etc. they knew when the station was open for a change and stop at the old service station to drop off the surplus goods in a back corner.

When we passed the lot and saw there was new goodies we usually got our mail, went back to the campsite and returned to the parking lot with our containers to fill up on the free bounty.

One day we found a big hill of kubotcha squashes! Bonus! We picked up as many as we could carry and from then on we were eating squash for days and later on took a few home with us when out time in the South as up.

That spring we planted some of the seeds of the kabotcha and we have had squash ever since, which is about 12 years now. At first the results were all kinds of different squashes and there was even a pumpkin and spaghetti squash amongst them but by now they all come up as honey nut squashes.

I got reminded of this when we were having a good squash meal at dinner time.

Rant for today

First off… I love my iPad and some days my laptop sits idle because I am satisfied with the iPad.

Now for the rant:

After the last operating system update I am having a lot of problems. Sometimes it takes many clicks to get from an app back to the home screen. It happens so often that I am tempted to throw the thing in the fireplace but of course that will never happen. This morning I could not even open the iPad. After pressing the little round button a screen comes up to unlock the iPad. That would not work at all, I could not move the slider. In the end I had to power down the unit twice before I could move the slider to let me get to the desktop. The unit also works slower than it did before the update.

So far I have not heard anybody else complain and I am wondering if the problem lies with MY unit although somebody else complained about the slower working.

I have done the update Apple brought out after the new iOS 8, so my iPad is up to date, at least that is what it tells me. Now I am hoping there will be another update soon to rectify the problems I am having.

Rant over

Trial Post

Not blogging for a long time I don't seem to be able to download Live Writer to my new Windows 8.1 computer. Hmmmm
Must poke around some more.

Got it back!!!