Went for my first physical therapy appointment yesterday. It went fairly smoothly; she poked and prodded and measured. Made me stand on one foot and then the other. Walked up and down the hallway.
She showed me four exercises to start with – one with a strap and one with a stretchy thing. Two on steps. All fairly straightforward but when I got home I realized that a couple only get done once a day, one gets done twice and day and the last one gets done three times a day. I sat with the paper in my hands for about a minute before I knew what I had to do. A spreadsheet! It’s pretty simple, just a chart with each exercise listed the prerequisite number of times for each day of the next week. I imagine, since I’m a morning person, I’ll do the four together in the morning and then slot in the rest as the day goes on.
Spreadsheet isn’t pretty, but enough to keep track of what I’m doing on a daily basis… a rustic spreadsheet as it were. What in heaven’s name did I do before Excel?
Do you have a daily routine (with or without a spreadsheet!)?
Over the past month I have had to move from one suite of offices to another suite of offices three computers we use for psychological testing at work. Our tech guy has been instructed by his superiors that he can’t assist me with the move. He is only responsible for making sure the electrical outlets in the new rooms are working. He is allowed to help if we have trouble getting the computers to work if they don’t work after I move them and reconnect all the cords.
Well, it is the reconnecting the cords that is the challenge. I am proud that I was able to keep the computers and monitors connected while I moved them so the set up wasn’t too hard. It was somewhat of a challenge to make sure the speakers were set up correctly, since I had to unplug them for the move. I used a cart to make the move.
Now that the gas stove is set up and working again in the family room, I face the task of reconnecting the TV, cable box, DVD player, and ancient VHS player to one another and get them working. When we disconnected them to move them so that the carpet installers could do their work, I tried to keep the cords plugged in to the players as much as I could. We couldn’t keep all the things connected like I did at work. I fear I may need to phone the cable company, who is also our internet and land line provider to come and help with the set up, which they will do, but I hope I can figure it out on my own. I just hope all the cords are there and not somewhere odd in the furnace room where everything was stored and where we still have too much clutter. I also have to figure out how to clean the lens on the cd player in the living room. Uffda!
What has been your greatest technological set up challenge? Is it hard or easy for you to ask for help?
As I started writing this, I wasn’t sure yet what I had to write about this week, so I was not sure where this was going to end up.
We got some rain Thursday morning and evening. I don’t think it amounted to much. It didn’t help the muddy areas. I did spread out four bales of straw in front of the chickens’ pen as it was just a muddy mess down there. And the mud over by the shed is full of tracks and ruts. That’s worse than usual because it was fresh dirt last fall after the concrete work. Maybe I can get it smoothed out as the weather gets colder in the coming week so it’s not frozen ruts, and it will be better next year, but for now, Ish-da.
I have a young man helping me on weekends; I got to know him as a college student. He’s really interested in working with his hands and willing to try anything. And he never gets frustrated or gives up. He’s working a delivery job now, and he says he’d love to get into one of the trades like electrical or sheet metal or construction, but he really has no experience. It’s kinda cute, whenever we do a job, at the end of the day he says, “OK, what tools did I learn today?” We’ve talked a lot about which companies would hire him “green”. Meaning no school. And as I’ve talked with the HVAC guys working at the theaters or my nephew who works with a remodeling company, they are all willing to give him a chance as long as he’d plan on sticking around for a few years. And it helps I that tell them this young man isn’t a jerk. His biggest issue right now is he only has 1 pair of shoes. Loafers. Which have been terribly impractical in this mud. I’ve got nothing that fits him. I do pay him; he really should buy some boots.
Last week he and I put new batteries in my truck, we mounted some more 2×4’s on the shop walls, and we worked on changing an electrical box. Then I had him frame up the electrical box and add trim steel around it. Then I could add the “J” channel and get the pole barn steel around it.
There was an old, old fuse box here from when my Dad built the shed. I had new electrical service installed to the shed last summer
but I still need the old service. I had bought this new circuit breaker box 10 years ago and never got that installed. So, this was the time. A job well done.
I plan on working hard on the farm financial bookwork this weekend. I meet the accountant on April 9th, but I should have 3 months of 2024 done by then, not still finishing 2023.
Yesterday YA had to leave her car at the dealership for a recall of some sort so I picked her up there and delivered her to the office. When we pulled up, the front parking area was blocked off on both sides. This, in and of itself, isn’t too extraordinary. The building in which the travel division resides is also the “client building” and occasionally the front will be blocked off for a client arrival (which is usually accompanied by the cheering throngs). But it soon became clear that something else was up as there were just a few parked cars on the side of the building and a couple of people were lounging about their parked vehicles.
Turns out the company internet was down. There were a handful of times that the internet was done in the past twenty years, the most notorious being when a squirrel committed suicide on a power line on top to Building 3. A few times the power went with the internet which always led to flocks of folks at Caribou down the street, colloquially known as Building 7. Most of the time though we just muddled on, working on documents, jumping into quick meetings or making phone calls until cyberspace was clear.
But these days it’s a different story. EVERYTHING is tied to “the cloud”. The phone is through the internet, document storage is on the cloud, the meeting platforms are online. If the internet is down, there is no point in even going into the building. So YA and I headed back home, with a quick stop at the Dunkin drive-through, and she quickly got her laptop fired up on the dining room table. Luckily her using our home wifi for work doesn’t increase the cost. And it was a shorter drive to take her to the dealership later in the day than to pick her up at the office. Win-win!
If the internet were a real person, would they be a friend of yours?
Well, now it looks and feels like January in Minnesota. Snow and cold and we haven’t seen the sun in weeks.
Days like this, I don’t miss the cow chores. Taking care of the chickens fills me with a sense of satisfaction like I used to get from the cows, without nearly the amount of work. With the cold weather predicted I’ll need to pay more attention to keeping the chickens water bucket filled. They drink a surprising amount in a day. It’s fun to watch them drink; they take “sips”, then tip their head back to swallow. Repeat. Just now I googled “how do chickens drink” and it says they don’t have an epiglottis, and their tongue isn’t helpful in this regard, so,… gravity. Google also says chickens drink about a pint or more per day. That means my 45 chickens are going through 5.6 gallons / day. Which seems about right. And with them staying inside more with the snow and cold, it’s a good thing we have a heated bucket. And I’ll need to collect eggs more often before they freeze.
I’ve ordered seed, fertilizer, and chemicals for spring, so that’s encouraging and exciting and a sign this snow and cold will end. Prices, jeepers. Corn seed is about $300 / bag and plants about 2.5 acres. Soybeans are $60 / bag and does about 1 acre. Oats is $13/ bag and does less than an acre. I don’t even want to tell you how much the fertilizer and spraying totals. It’s over $26,000. Sigh. And I’m a small farmer! It’s crazy.
Last week talking about clocks and I should have included this one. I inherited this clock at the college. It was in a cabinet, so it came with the place.
Peter Max design. Ebay shows them at $600. That’s the thing about Ebay; just because they list that amount doesn’t mean anyone has PAID that amount.
This cleaver (knife) has been hanging in the machine shed for years.
I recently found it hanging on a nail in a back corner. And considering it’s been there a long time, it’s in really good shape. What’s the best way to ‘preserve’ it or save it? Oil the wooden handle? Remove the rust on the blade? I don’t know what I would ever do with it besides hang it on a wall, and I’m not up on my antiques. The only printing on it says “Genuine Warranty” and below that a numeral 8. Eight inch blade. I suggested to my family that it’s the actual knife dad dropped on his head when he was 4 years old that he said his mother poured Absorbine Jr. on his head and wrapped it with brown paper, see the scar?? My siblings were dubious and pointed out it was a hatchet, not a knife that he says he split his head with. Spoil sports.
Tell a story about being groovy. Or a knife story.
I used to watch that show “Monk” with Tony Shalhoub. When someone would marvel at his talent for solving crime, he would say “it’s a gift…. and a curse”. That’s how I feel about my cell phone.
After four years, YA wore me down about getting new phones. I didn’t remember any angst about the last time we did phones, but it was four years ago. The purchase of the phones was pretty straight forward; YA had done all the research so after we dickered with the salesperson about the pricing a bit, we bought the phones. If it had been up to me, I would have coughed up the $25 to have them transfer all my stuff from the old phone to the new but YA was adamant that she could do this.
Aiy yi yi. That’s when it got ugly. Since we were using the old phones for trade-in, YA said I had to log onto all my various apps/accounts to make sure my logins worked before she “wiped” the old phone. This turned out to be not as easy as you’d think…. too many times I’ve reset a password and then not written it down when I got home (think the bagel place and the gym). So there was a fair amount of password resetting to get through. She wasn’t exactly patient about this.
Then it turned out that my sticky note app isn’t available any longer from the app store. At this point YA was tired of me and my techie problems. She suggested I use the Notes that is already on my phone. “What Notes?” was my question. She took the phone from my hand, did a few clicks and voila… there it was. However because she had done it instead of telling me how, I couldn’t get it back a few minutes later. Suffice it to say we had words. AND as I’ve looked at it, I don’t like the Notes anyway… guess I’ll have to go find myself a new sticky note app that I like. Sigh.
It took about 90 minutes for all this – not a lifetime of suffering, but I do feel like I need to check myself into a convalescent home for a good rest!
In the last seven weeks I haven’t gone more than a day or so without having to stop by either Home Depot or my local hardware store. There are only a couple of bits left until the bathroom is completely finished, but we are now slowly putting it back together. This has driven me to the hardware store several times in the last week. Screws, anchors, springs, plugs, paintbrushes…. I feel like I’m practically living there.
Last Saturday morning, they were slammed; I wasn’t the only one with a home project. Rather than wait around for help, I ventured to the back where the entire wall is filled with drawers and boxes of nails, screws, bolts and the like. I needed some kind of rubber plug for the end of a spring I had bought the day before to hopefully allow us to keep using our current shower caddy. (Anything to staunch the flow of cash into this bathroom!) I did actually find something that would work perfectly.
None of the store employees was at the back of the store and I didn’t trust myself to remember the part number or even the price until I got to the register, as I had a few other things to pick up. Although I had a pen, I didn’t have anything to write on. I was just about to write on my hand when I suddenly realized I could use my phone to take a photo of the price and sku. Not an earth-shattering thought but I’d never thought of it before. Snapped the above picture and headed back to pick up my other items. The young cashier did actually thank me profusely. Apparently most people expect the employees to know all the prices which means a quick trip to the back of the store to check; I got good-customer brownie points!
When was the last time technology pleasantly surprised you?
I’m not a huge fan of the self-checkout. Mostly because I’m not good or fast at it – nor are a lot of folks that I see – meaning an employee still has to come deal with me. In trying to be kind to corporate America (yeah, I know, I know), I like to pretend that the employee hours saved at the check-out areas get shifted around to other parts of the store.
Friday morning, with YA working from home, I was freed up from staying home with the contractor so ran a whole bunch of errands; one of these errands was at Michaels. They installed a couple of self-checkout units in my local Michaels – about 8 months ago. Usually if there is a cashier, I let them do the work. On Friday when I came around the corner, there weren’t any cashiers to be seen and I only had about six items so I went with self-checkout. Of course, since I’ve only done this a couple of times at Michaels, I was VERY slow, checking the sale price on every item and then logging in so I could see if I had any coupons.
While I was poking along, a family of three followed into the check-out area, an older woman and what was probably her daughter and son-in-law. She did not know how to use the self-checkout and she was NOT in the mood to let the younger generation to show her up. So now both of the self units were occupied and the line behind us was piling up. The daughter was getting impatient and called in a very loud voice for casher assistance. As I was finally finishing my session, the daughter called again, even more loudly. As I exited the store, I counted the line waiting to checkout – nine folks – and still not a cashier in sight.
I know that many retail establishments would prefer that all of us just get with the twentieth century and embrace self-checkout but based on what I experienced and witnessed at Michaels, it won’t be happening any time soon!
What are some of the oldest chain stores in America?
Over the weekend I was driving in the left lane on 66th when a white car pulled in front of me. I was started to grumble my usual sarcastic “Thanks for signaling” when I noticed the driver had his left arm sticking straight out of his window. After a bit I thought maybe he was signaling his turn but that seemed so ancient of a gesture that I was sure I was wrong. Then he signaled again with his arm when he moved over into the left-turn lane.
His brake lights were working fine so I don’t know if his turn lights don’t or if he just likes the breeze on his arm on a lovely day. What I do know is that using your arm for a turn signal, while it was taught routinely when I was a kid, is not taught now. YA had no idea what I was talking about when I asked her.
Do you have air-conditioning in your car? Or do you prefer opening the windows to get the breeze?
Wednesday was the most frustrating day. I drove from St. Cloud to near Oshkosh, WI to visit husband’s sister and BIL. I have never encountered such road construction for so many miles. The trip took about six hours. The day before our trip to St. Cloud took seven hours. I haven’t encountered such traffic for a long while. Where are all these people going?
One of the detours near Watoma, WI took us past several huge fields of cabbage. That was lovely to see. When we arrived at the family house, I found that they didn’t have wifi, so I couldn’t use my computer to show them the Ancestry info I had promised them. They have a computer and pay for wifi but have it all unplugged and turned of. This is a low tech household. We will go to the local library to access the wifi there. Whatever works, I guess. One problem is that I couldn’t figure out how to insert a header photo on my phone. Maybe I will add it tomorrow at the library.
Tell about your most memorable trip? How do you deal with being off-line?
