Your email is bouncing, so I hope I can reach you this way. Just wanted to say thank you for the lovely little surprise this evening and hope to see you here, too!
Blog
New Booster Order
Thanks to the wonderful generosity of many of you and others who are not blog readers, I was able to order my new booster a couple of minutes ago. If I had had to cover the purchase entirely on my own, I would have had to wait till another cheque landed at the end of the month. I really need that new booster now because my internet connection is getting worse as the days pass and I finally have confirmation on why.
Because of the local topography, I can only connect to a tower that is located quite a distance aways in a popular vacationing spot where people camp and have cottages. We are in the heart of holiday season and SaskTel has confirmed that my especial difficulties this past week have been due to the tower being overloaded and my weak signal not being able to get push through the interference. Of course, the congestion on that tower would be diminished if folks in my area could connect to our local tower, something I will bring up with the president’s office when it finally gets back to me.
Shipping for the booster was 95USD/125CAD to my hamlet or Assiniboia or free within the United States, so I’m glad that I’m so close to the US border and have several places in Montana I can ship to. I was nervous about shipping to my usual destination, the bar in Opheim, because they just leave packages out in the open and unsecured. A bit of Googling found a package service in Plentywood, which makes sense since it is directly due south of Regina.
I just called them to make sure that they are still operating because they website hasn’t been updated in a while and they are! I am so glad to know of this service! Plentywood is 163KM from me, versus 100KM to either Opheim or Scobey, so it won’t be my first choice of location to pick up things, but it’s good to have the option for valuable packages. I’ve been trying to plan a touristy trip just northwest of Plentywood on this side of the border, so I’m going to combine the two trips and spend less on fuel than if I did the tourist thing one day and a border run another day, and definitely much less than I would have paid for shipping!
It’s been a financially exhausting month, another case of taking a leap forward financially and another giant one back. Thanks to your help, I’m back on track. It’s been so stressful the last few weeks dealing with a failing computer and increasingly poor internet. I’ll have my new computer and booster by next week and should hopefully be much less stressed in my last couple of months here this year. Thank you again so very much!
Thank You
Over the years, a lot of you lovely readers have allowed me to park my RV on your property and often took on the role of local guide. I’ve always been grateful for your hospitality.
This past month, I was offered hospitality beyond a place to park my house. I was invited into homes and lives. Thanks to lovely readers Kelly, John, and Vicki I was able to get work done, spend money on exploring instead of a bed, and take a break from living out of my truck.
I sometimes find myself wondering why the heck I spend so much time blogging. This past month was a really good reminder. Blogging has brought me in contact with so many generous and wonderful people.
Thank you to each and everyone of you! And remember, RV Park Chez Rae is open for the season!
Down Day
John picked up on something that I hadn’t even noticed myself, that I’m getting road weary. I didn’t realise it until this morning that he’s right! I’ve been on the road 12 days now and I haven’t had a real day of rest. Even though I have a project due tomorrow night, I just may leave it till tomorrow and instead just chill this morning and go hiking in the nearby hills in the afternoon.
I’m out in the country and it is so quiet here! I’ll take pictures later. It is the polar opposite of Isla. T or C wasn’t really that noisy, but I was still in a town. It was lovely to wake up with the sun this morning instead of the roosters or garbage trucks! 🙂
The night was cold and I just burrowed under a pile of bedding like I do at home, getting up around 6:30 to turn on the heat and then go back to bed with my iPad to catch up on blogs… and promptly fell back asleep in the middle of reading Croft‘s latest comment! Someone was more tired than she realised. 😀
The bed is yet another super comfy marshmallowly one, this time with a topper, so now I know that a topper would be a really good investment for me and that I don’t have to spend a lot of money. The bed on Isla is the same size as my bed at home, so the topper could go between both properties.
John has been reading the blog carefully and listening to all my gripes about my accommodations so far, worried about getting a bad review. Heh heh heh. No worries, five-star accommodations here. I mean, clean rig, good bed, good shower, kettle, and SHARP KNIVES. 😀
Why I Don’t Have a PayPal ‘Donate’ Button On My Blog
I’m frequently asked why I don’t have a PayPal ‘donate’ button on my blog. The answer is simple, PayPal doesn’t allow the button to be used for anything but charitable purposes. As I wrote in my How You Can Support This Site post, I don’t consider donations to the blog to be charity and PayPal certainly wouldn’t, so there goes the donation button option! Unfortunately, their donate button is the only one that allows the purchaser to set their own price.
I was going to leave it at that, but I’ve gotten a lot of requests for the donation buttons over the years and I’ve figured out a workaround.
As many of you know, I’ve written a number of ebooks. If you go to my ebooks page, you’ll notice that I have a number of ‘add to cart’ buttons. These come from my online store manager. I was able to go there and create a product called ‘support this site’ and get an add to cart button that will take you to a page where you can put in a donation amount and then checkout by PayPal. You can find this button at the top of my updated How You Can Support This Site post.