(Post 192 of 263)

Friday was more of a prepping than a let’s get ahead kind of day. The concrete guy was here smoothing out the base of more of the walls because I am not going to have baseboards anymore in this room, which will save me precious inches of space. They made progress on some of the electrical work, but I discovered that my “Please change the two existing outlets and the fan control on the living room wall side” was not conveyed to the workers, so now those might be extras in the budget (really not a big deal — I’m just glad I caught them before they reinstalled everything).

What a mess they had to make to improve things!

I love to document every step because construction methods here fascinate me as I have little experience with concrete. It looks so bad but once it’s fixed, you’ll never know they were digging in there.

My photographer friend Jan came over to see if I could restore Gmail access on his new phone. The smart man brought a frozen pizza and wine knowing that I was going to war and would need sustenance.

I’m not a fan of red wine but this, the absolute cheapest bottle at Walmart (Liria, from Spain), was quite good! I love the white version of that same wine and have even passed it off to wine snobs as much more expensive than it is!

I cannot believe the sheer nonsense Android users go through on a daily basis. When I bought my last iPhone, I put it next to my previous iPhone and within minutes, the new phone was all set up. Jan had to pay someone to transfer his old phone to his new phone and could not get his Gmail to work because of a password issue. Excuse me? How was it possible to transfer everything over but not his password?!

I went through what felt like a dozen hoops to try to reset the password and kept getting blocked at this, with there being no help at all online. There was simply no place to enter this code that claimed to be the final step.

Thankfully, he’d brought a folder over full of passwords. I knew I wasn’t going to get a lot of attempts before Gmail would lock me out, but thankfully, the third password I tried worked! So what if someone doesn’t have a folder of passwords or aren’t on Apple with Keychain? They lose access to their Gmail altogether, too bad so sad? As I said, pure nonsense.

Jan offered me this magnificent photo of an uprooted tree that he took at Lake Tahoe, California. It’ll look stunning in my guest room!

Please checked out Jan’s site to see more of his work. If you like what you see, I can arrange for you to get a full-size digital copy of any of his photographs that you could print and have framed: artgrandi.com

Bonita had a great day. She got to supervise the kitchen work and then hang out with her buddy Mr. Frodo. Soon as everyone was gone and I’d had a swim, I crashed with her for a bit and she graced me with a rare snuggle!

She’s been doing this other thing lately where she’ll come sit on her bum next to me, like a human, bottom legs sticking straight out, and then snuggle against my chest. It doesn’t last long, but boy is it wonderful! Four years together and she’s only just discovering how great cuddles are. 💖