Month: May 2013

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Town Day

I’m crazy busy, but today was the one to go into town as I needed gas, propane, drinking water, groceries, and to send and receive some massive digital files.

Propane in Assiniboia can be had at the Co-Op gas station, which is next to the Co-Op hardware store. I stopped at the latter also to get prices and options for cement pavers on which to park Miranda.

I then stopped to check out The Bargain Shop!, a discount retailer, to see what they have. I found better prices for paper products than at the Co-Op grocery store, so I stocked up.

Next, got my groceries, including a pre-roasted chicken and everything I need to turn its carcass into soup. Meat is otherwise too expensive in town and I’ve been eating pretty much vegetarian since I got here. The chicken and a loaf of fresh baked bread will be a real treat tonight!

I almost forgot about my files, so now I’m parked at the top of the hill waiting for the download to finish. I can’t wait to get home; the smell of that chicken is about to send me over the edge!

I really need to come up with a better solution for drinking water. In the US, I could buy a gallon for $0.70. The same gallon here is $4.00!!!!!!! Now, I don’t drink anything else, so I don’t mind buying water, but this is getting to be expensive. The tap water in the village isn’t potable without using a ceramic filter, so I need to find one of those. I was going to go with the undercounter kind, but that makes no sense for when my fresh water tank is empty. So I need to find a countertop or pitcher unit.

I’m surprised that I wasn’t itching to go to town today and would have gladly waited if I didn’t have such pressing needs. I think that once I come back in July with a truck full of supplies, I could easily not go into town for weeks. I’m simply not having any trouble at all filling my days and I have enough social engagements to keep me from going stir crazy.

Yay, my download is just about done. Back to work I go.

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Wilson Electronics Over Promises and Under Delivers

Call me whatever you like, I will always get angry at businesses that don’t care about their customers. I work really hard for the little money I have and spend it carefully it makes me mad when a company takes that for granted.

I purchased a Wilson Sleek cell booster and high gain antenna after doing a lot of research and getting opinions from people. Nowhere was there any mention that you need an adapter to couple these two devices. The antenna even says “Works on all cellular devices” with no mention of the adapter.

The only way to know that you need an adapter is to understand that FME female and SMA female connectors are incompatible. It’s not my job to know that or even to research it. The products are Wilson’s and it’s their job to make purchase easy for their customers by providing compatible products or at least making a note that X is not compatible with Y without Z. I have found several reviews of the Sleek and the coupler chastising Wilson for this same issue.

I have now been waiting 11 days for my damn coupler to come and it likely won’t be here for another week.

I don’t want to count how much money I have lost in that time because I am barely able to get online. I spent $190 on this device, which seriously ate into my gas budget, so going up the hill three or four times a day is no longer an option.

Yes, I can get online a little at home, after pages hang and hang and hang and connections time out. What is infuriating me (and I don’t use the word lightly) is that I get 1 bar at the top of the hill with the Mifi only and can download a 330MB file in five minutes flat. Down here, with the Sleek giving me 2 to 3 bars, it would take three hours to download that same file, if the connection didn’t keep timing out. I’d give photographic evidence of this, but I can’t upload pictures tonight. In fact, I never know what I will and won’t be able to do at any given time.

Just a half hour ago, Netflix was streaming nicely and pages were loading and now I know that if I don’t manually save this post to a text file, I will lose it because the connection will time out as I press save. I know this for a fact because this is what happened last night when I wrote the bulk of this post and then set it aside until I’d had some time to cool off. You don’t want to read what I had to say last night.

In other words, don’t buy all the testimonials that rave about how many extra bars the Sleek will give you. Bars means squat! I would have been so much better off putting that $190 into Miranda’s gas tank and making an arrangement with a farmer up the hill to park in his field for a month.

Now, I’m hopeful that the Sleek will work better with the high gain antenna, but what if it doesn’t? I’ll have lost almost a month and wasted $190 because Wilson Electronics is too lazy to put on their literature that you need a $6 coupler to marry their products.

But what angers me the most is that I wrote a polite email to Wilson last week about this issue and got an autoresponder telling me a human would answer me in two business days. More than two business days later, nothing. Not even a canned insincere ‘sorry, we’ll try to do better.’ Having no serious competition is no excuse to treat your customers like they don’t count.

Wilson Electronics, you suck.

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Boardwalk Empire

The internet being absolutely useless today and therefore not being able to do any paid work worth mentioning, I started my day by sending an email to Amazon requesting a refund for the shipping I paid for the high gain antenna/booster coupler since it is now very, very late and DHL says it won’t be here for another week. It’s in Calgary. WTF DHL? Amazon gave me the refund, of course ($16, paid to have the part in four to six days business days and it’s been eight!).

I went to the post office to check for mail (fliers and the local papers) and then did a bunch of chores around the house.

Mid-afternoon, I got the trash together and put it in the wheelbarrow along with the rakes and shovel I’d borrowed, as well as two gallon jugs to fill with water.

Caroline was outside and helped me bring everything in, filled my jugs, then invited me in for coffee. We chatted for about an hour and then another neighbour dropped in to help her with something. I headed out just as Charles came in and he asked if I wanted to borrow their dolly to move pallets. Indeed. He’s so thoughtful!

Having gone through a bunch of the pallets, I’ve conceded they are too weathered to be of any real value for interior projects, but they’re still in too good shape to be left to rot. I noticed that many of of them are very solid with planks spaced closely together.

Having walked across the wet and muddy yard a few times today in my full skirt, I decided that that was going to get old fast. So I got started on a boardwalk:

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I even found one that was solid, with no space between the slats, for the other half of my porch! No more risking the chair falling into the cracks!

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Taking the Eastbound Road

I went for another long walk after supper last night, this time taking the eastbound gravel road towards Willow Bunch. I hoped to find the infamous lagoon where I can dump my black water, but I’m not sure I did. I’ll need to get confirmation.

It was a beautiful clear evening with a bright blue sky and fluffy white clouds, and yet there was spitting rain. Very odd!

I came home and finished raking the lawn so I could return C&C’s gardening equipment today.

Then, I baptized the new porch with my last Texas beer. I had been saving it for the first really hot sunny day, but I doubt I’ll work this hard on such a day! Tonight felt right to have it, like I was firmly letting go of winter and settling into my summer.

The internet gets really bad soon as it’s humid and overcast, so I wasn’t able to post this last night. Today isn’t been much better AND the latest version of WordPress is broken and won’t let me add captions to galleries or input pictures manually so I can add text below them (I have given up hope that WP designers will ever get adding media right). I have put numbered picture descriptions below.

#1 is main road extending east towards Willow Bunch.
#2 is looking south from the main road at the western edge of the village
#3 is looking north from the main road at the western edge of the village
#4 is looking east back towards the village
#5 is about halfway down lagoon road looking towards main street
#6 is looking from lagoon road to the village
#7 is looking north from the top of a very steep hill across from lagoon road
#8 is looking northeast to the village from the top of the steep hill
#9 is same as #8 but zooming in
#10 is looking north to Montague Lake (very alkaline, so no swimming or boating)
#11 is a closeup of the lake
#12 is our mostly French welcome sign (“The beautiful village.”)
#13 is our village bunny (I saw a massive hare up in the hills, but he was too fast to get a picture!)
#14 is half of my new porch (there’s a third chair behind me)
#15 is my last Lone Star beer

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Bug Out

This afternoon has reminded me of the M*A*S*H episode where the 4077th moved across the road. 🙂

My charging situation is really dire. The batteries are now around 70% and I just can’t get them up. I’m on the computer all day for work and Miranda has been parked between some trees with increasingly thick foliage. We also haven’t had full sun in eons.

So I decided this afternoon that spongy ground be damned, I had to get out into the open part of the lot.

Of course, the minute I got back in the rig after, the clouds came in and it started to rain. *sighs*

But hey, at least I get a nice view from the back of the rig now! And the neighbour’s shed is much more attractive than his kitchen patio door.

And, hey, I think the sun’s come back out…