Wow... has it ever been busy these last two days here. I was actually up early and on the road to Colorado yesterday morning. No real problems on the drive down, just seemed like it took forever is all. Finally made it into Longmont though and got Esmerelda safely stored in her usual storage spot there at the old sugar factory. Stripped out a bunch of the boxes I had been packing the past couple of days and then stowed some of the trailer stuff that wouldn't be needed up in the front bedroom area. Also got the propane turned off, unhooked the batteries and cleaned out the rest of the fridge and freezer and left the doors open to defrost the whole thing. Will go up in a few days and give it all a good wash down and pack even more stuff that still needs to come out of the trailer, as well as take care of the one tire that I bent the wheel rim on a couple of months ago. That whole wheel will get replaced and the tire, which is still good, re-mounted before becoming my new spare for the trailer.
With the trailer taken care of for the moment, it was off to my post office box to pick up the mail that had been accumulating for the past couple of months. Not a whole box full this time, but still, it was a very respectable pile of it, and there were even a couple of pieces that weren't 'junk' mail. A couple personnel pieces and some bank statements, as well as a small package that turned out to be a model steam engine that I had ordered from an online hobby store a few months back. Sure nice to get some actual mail again and one piece even had a book in it that I am now anxious to start in on.
A quick bite to eat after making a fast first pass through my mail, and then on out to the storage unit to stow away the boxes I had packed and to check on everything inside. Other than being dirty and dusty from a wind storm that passed through last year, it all looked pretty much the same as last time. I try not to think to hard about what all is in there at the moment, but one of these days it is going to be just like Christmas for me since there are boxes in there that I haven't looked into for more than a dozen years. I am sure a lot of it will be headed for Goodwill or the trash at that time, but you can never remember everything that you packed away. I for one would love to find my kilt again before some critter gets into it and makes a nest out of it.
On to Denver after that and finally a place to land at my friends, George and Marge. So good to see them and have a chance to sit and talk to them for a little bit. It didn't last long however as we were all pretty hungry and in need of a good meal and something cold to drink. It was time for Mexican food again, so this time it was off to Los Delicious for a nice combination meal of nearly all of my favorites, including 3 large glasses of freshly brewed ice tea with lots of ice in it. With all of that food and ice tea it's not hard to understand why we were all almost uncomfortably full when we left an hour or so after we arrived.
A pleasant evening with the two of them just talking and goofing off. We actually watched a short video of one of the collage like courses they had ordered on the history of the Vikings. This lesson was on Viking boat building and how they managed to rule most of the Baltic and Western Europe for nearly 400 years around 700-1100 A.D. Very interesting stuff for all of us of course, since we all practically grew up together while 'messing about in boats'. It also drove home the point that you really don't want to mess around with a bunch of angry Norwegians. ;)
Very tired last night but still didn't get to bed very early. I had received an email from my phone carrier, Sprint, telling me that I had used up all of my 450 minutes for the month already, and that any more talking was going to cost me $0.45 per minute now. Totally floored me since I barely remembered that I even had a limit, having never even gotten close to it in the 6-7 years I've had this phone. Plus I wasn't sure what I was going to do since I wasn't planning on giving up talking to my friends and family just because of this little development. So I decided to do the next best thing.... I had been talking for several years about the need for buying a new phone and changing carriers to someone who would actually have coverage in some of the places I like to go instead of only in the middle of larger cities. So I decided this was a perfect time to do something about it.
I had been talking to my nephew Brian about his new phone just the week before because he seemed to be happy with it and it worked pretty well for him. He had bought it at Walmart of all places and had signed up for, or I should say, hadn't signed up for a 2 year contract plan. Instead he pays $45 dollars a month for unlimited talking, texting and data downloading, within certain parameters of course, and he just does it on a month to month basis. So after going on line and checking out the program and all of the different phones you could buy and enroll with there, I picked out one exactly like his and bought it. Of course that was just the beginning of all the hoops that had to be jumped through before I could actually call it mine and use it to make phone calls. The first hurdle was to find out what my Sprint account number and password were so that they could go in there and transfer my existing telephone number onto my new phone. Seemed easy enough but I hadn't actually been on line for better than 5-6 years so who can remember their acct. numbers and such. I even tried to simply go in and set up a whole new profile with new numbers and such, but every time I did that Sprint would tell me they had sent my new info to me via email, and then it wouldn't show up. Turns out they had the wrong email address for me at that site, even though they had emailed me several messages the day before from one or more of their other departments. In the end it meant going through their fraud department so that they could erase everything in my old profile and then I could go in and change everything. It was a very frustrating couple of hours but I have to admit the Sprint people were very polite and tried very hard to be helpful. For my part I just tried not to get too frustrated and blow up at the situation, just reminding myself that it would soon be over and I could start dealing with yet another phone company.... this time Verizon.
In the end it all got done, I went and purchased my phone, $150, and a couple add on's I'll be needing, like a blue tooth ear thingy. The guy at Wal-Mart did all the set up work for me as far as activating the phone, unfortunately what he couldn't do was transfer my contact list over. So I spent more than an hour imputing all of that stuff into the new phone. It did give me a chance to weed out a few old contacts though so that was nice.
Got it all put together just in time for my old phone to go dead and my new phone to come alive. First thing was to try out the phone by calling someone. That went remarkably well considering there is no actual 'how to' book for this thing. So once that was done I was on to receiving a phone call and that is where it gets kind of embarrassing. I had George calling my number and each time his name and number would come up, the phone would ring and I would start pushing buttons that showed up on the screen. After the third or fourth time George finally figured out that you had to punch this center ring icon thingy and then drag it over to the green receiver icon thingy and then you could say hello and start the conversation.
I spent much of the rest of the afternoon and evening setting up email and facebook accounts as well as merging my old search 'favorites' and figuring out how to text. There is a voice to text feature that is pretty neat, not quite 'Siri' quality, but it will come in handy for me since my texting speed falls somewhere down there between turtle and snail. It will get better as time goes on I'm sure. In between all of this George and I were watching old episodes of the 'Firefly' series that was on 5-6 years ago. We both still love watching them even though we have seen them many times over and still bemoan the fact that FOX screwed up when they cancelled it in mid season.
So now the house is quiet again. I'm going to finish this up and then hit the rack myself. I'm hoping for less drama in my life tomorrow. The only excitement I really want is when the boy's go out tomorrow afternoon to watch the new Lone Ranger movie.
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