Saskatchewan

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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…

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Soaked

I needed some fresh air and exercise last night, so well after supper, probably around 7:30, I decided to hike up to the lower petroglyphs viewing area, a distance of just over 4KM round trip. The sky was threatening rain, but I didn’t let it stop me since I’ve seen tons of sky like that in the last months and no rain has ever come.

It was a beautiful evening and the quiet country gravel road felt very isolated. I did pass a few vehicles, with the drivers waving at me, but I still felt rather alone in the world.

The hill up to the petroglyphs looks really steep so I thought getting to the top would be good exercise. Ha. I just kept up my brisk pace and before I knew it, I was at the top and not an iota out of breath. This is apparently the most challenging road to walk from the village, so I guess I’ll have to stick to it if I want to get a semblance of exercise. At 4KM round trip, I really should do it at least three times a week.

There is a campground at the very top of the hill with electrical hookups only and a VERY steep gravel access road. The campground gate was shut when I went down there a little while ago, so I don’t know what the sites are like.

The sky was starting to spit by this point, but I wasn’t concerned, being only about 15 minutes from home. I enjoyed the view for a bit, inhaled as much of that delicious damp prairie air as I could, and then started back down.

About a third of the way home, it started to rain lightly. Right at this point, I was passed by a truck and the driver offered me a lift. I thanked him and said I was fine.

The rain started to pick up a little, so I increased my pace. I was within view of main street when the rain began to come down hard in icy cold little needles. Another truck passed (!) and I again refused a ride. I was already sopping wet, so I might as well finish the walk properly.

By the time I got over the hump, I had gone from sopping wet to soaked. My skirt was completely sodden and very heavy. The roads were mini rivers. I kept up the pace, trying to look as dignified as I could to the drivers on main street (geeze there was a lot of traffic last night). A couple of minutes later, I was home. I hadn’t been wet long enough to be chilled, so a towel and flannel jammies later, I was very comfy.

The storm continued into the night, well after I went to bed. I couldn’t get internet, so I read the magazines I’d bought earlier in the day, then went to bed with a book.

It’s still very damp out there this morning and I’m selfishly disappointed that this rain has once again set me back in being able to movie Miranda to the back of the lot. I’m having charging issues and am hoping that I’ll get a bit more sun in the back, but the ground is still much too spongy.

Getting soaked not withstanding, I really enjoyed my walk last night and think it’s high time I got a couple of audio books onto my iPod Touch and got back into my beach habit of going for several long walks a day.