SaskTel

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Another One About Cats and Connectivity

I must have been quite the picture an hour and a half ago. I had a small wheelbarrow piled high with Neelix’s litter box, bag of food, box of litter, litter scoop, and cushion. And then I had Neelix snuggled against my chest in a cloth bag with my arms through the loops, like wearing a backpack in front of me. He peered out curiously, but without any indication of wanting to jump out. Caroline laughed at me and said I could have borrowed a carrier, but for short distances like these, getting him into a bag is so much easier.

Charles helped me get Neelix settled while Caroline poured wine. Laura soon joined us. C&C are going out of town this weekend, so Laura will be feeding the cats. We had a good gab as the cats got to know each other.

Neelix and K.C. hissed at each other a bit, then Neelix started exploring the house. He eventually found a catnip-filled toy and went nuts playing with it. I have never seen my boy play before! It didn’t take long for him to be high as a kite and his initiation passed, K.C. and he started playing.

So in other words, I’m going to miss him more than he’s going to miss me. *sniffles*

In other news, I’ve discovered a hidden benefit of the Mifi.

One of the reasons I wanted an iPad was to get me out of the office in the evening and into the living room to surf and watch movies on the iPad. But to do that with my Telus stick or Verizon phone, I have to share their wifi connection through the Mac, which means leaving the power-hungry Mac on. And if I’m going to do that, I might as well surf in the office.

Yesterday, I finally drained the motorhome gas tank to the point where I wouldn’t even feel comfortable turning over the engine until I get more in there. So that left me with power concerns for today since it’s still cloudy and I had a ton of transcription to finish up.

By about 9:00 last night, the computer battery started to drain even though I was plugged in. I know that my house batteries aren’t really that low when this happens, even if I unplug and the rating is the 11s as they’ll come right back up overnight after resting a little. So I wasn’t concerned about house power, but rather having enough computer power for today. Forget charging the computer through the house batteries if there’s no sun out.

So I shut down the Mac and took it out to the truck to top up the battery so it would be fresh this morning.

Then, I came in and plugged the booster into a 12V outlet and went to the living room with the iPad and got caught up on my favourite sites before the connection decided it was time for me to go to bed. The connection is as good (or bad) in the living room as it is in the office.

I’ll be doing the same thing tonight, shutting down and packing up the office, and checking my email on my iPad before I leave in the morning.

It’ll be nice to be able to easy offer internet to my guests, crappy as it is. Perhaps I’ll have luck finding another antenna when hit civilization.

And with that, I’m off to pack for what appears to be the armageddon. I have to go grab the camp stove while it’s still light out!

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Data Usage Notification

I just tried to load a webpage and this came up:

warning

If you can’t read that, it’s a data usage notification from Bell. It says that I am at more than 90% usage for this billing period and that I have less than 1.5GB available to me to get me to June 13th. If I exceed that amount, I will be charged $10 per additional gigabyte.

1) I am very proactive in watching my bandwidth usage, but I appreciate the ISP looking out for me.

2) $10 per additional GB?! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Like that’s going to scare me. I once had to pay Telus $220 in overages for TWO GB ($165 billable to a client, however).

Bell sucks, but their bandwidth package definitely doesn’t.

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International Cooperation

Late Wednesday May 29th, I ordered a water filter to be shipped to my friend’s in Virginia. I have an Amazon Prime membership, so the package got there on Friday May 31st, within the two promised business days. My friend promptly checked the order to make sure everything was there, repackaged it, and sent it ‘Express Mail’, which offers delivery to most major international markets within three to five business days.

She had me pay her the $30 or so it would have cost to send the package a slower route and covered the difference for Express herself (THANK YOU, I love you!), only telling me this after the package was processed.

The package left Norfolk on Monday and got stuck in Canadian Customs. It’s always scary to see the ‘item was sent for further processing’ and then ‘item was released from customs’ notes. This was Wednesday. No update yesterday. As far as I knew, the package was languishing in Mississauga.

I checked the status this morning and discovered that it had arrived in Regina at 1AM and left there at 4AM!

I went to the post office around 10, just as the post master was getting into her car, and when she saw me, she got out and told me she had a package for me. My filter was here! AND I didn’t have to pay any taxes on it! So my out of pocket cost was only about $30. Wooho!

This isn’t the first time I’ve been impressed by the expediency of the postal system, but this really was above and beyond what I expected, especially since my friend sent me another package by a slower method and it seemed to be moving along faster.

In other news, Skynet has gained self-awareness AND is prescient. I got up this morning and had crazy fast internet with three bars of signal and an RSSI of -86. At the EXACT minute I hit send on an email to a client, the connection dropped and would not come back. I had to scramble to get out the door and up the hill for my deadline. Once up there, I got offered tons of work for the weekend, which meant enough downloads that I would have had to go up the hill even if I had been able to send an email from home. Be very afraid people.

I don’t expect to be back online till Monday as I have 30 hours of work to do by 9PM Sunday. Gary, have a virtual beer for me each evening!

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Grocery Sprint

Even though it looked like the transcription marathon was going to stop at the end of this current (very difficult) job, due tomorrow first thing, getting a few groceries today was absolutely necessary. I had originally planned to leave for Stettler on the 10th and didn’t want to leave too much food in the fridge, so I worked down my stores before realising that I’m actually leaving the 14th and that I would have to eat Neelix at some point to get protein. A gal can’t live off rice, veggies, and the odd bit of almond butter forever. 🙂

Since a) I was in a hurry, b) the truck was full of donations for the thrift store, and c) I didn’t want to do a giant amount of shopping, going to Willow Bunch made sense. To my surprise, my trip took me exactly one hour round trip!

The road to Willow Bunch was in decent shape and I actually drove about 80KPH on it even though it’s gravel.

I found the thrift store and Co-op (right across from each other) without trouble. The lady at the thrift store had me go around back through the alley to unload. It felt good to get that stuff out of my truck! She seemed pleased with the donations.

Then, I circled back around and parked at the Co-op. The food store is tiny, but the more I walked around, the better stocked I found it to be. Since the prices are the same as the Co-op in Assiniboia, I didn’t have the small market sticker shock I was expecting. In fact, once I manage to do a good pantry stocking run in a larger community, it would definitely make sense to just top up in Willow Bunch once a week instead of Assiniboia if I have no other errands to do since it’s half the mileage.

I stocked up on produce, including a 99 cent avocado, and then looked at protein. Like in Assiniboia, there was lots of choice, but everything was so pricey. Every time I have tuna (of the canned, non sushi variety) I think that I should start eating more of it. Since tuna was on sale for $1 a can if you bought two (which I think is a decent price for the Cloverleaf brand), I decided to go that route and I also found some nice looking pre-marinated pork chops for $4 that will make four meals, so that sounded like a fair deal. I am most definitely not a vegetarian anymore! 🙂

Today was the day Co-op members got their equity cheques. Of course, I didn’t have one (I’m told I will next year, though…), but that made me eligible for the BBQ. I wasn’t interested in burgers, but I was somehow talked into grabbing a doughnut and coffee “for the road.” Considering I haven’t had anything resembling junk food in a full week and the last time before that was about a week and a half, I have forgiven myself for my weakness. 🙂

The drive home seemed faster than the drive out, especially once I found the country music station out of Moose Jaw (turns out all the radio shows are on the AM frequency).

I came in and assembled a tasty tuna salad (using sour cream instead of mayo) and slathered it on some fresh cheese buns (couldn’t believe they had those; I am a sucker for them). I asked Neelix if he wanted the tuna juice and he answered by getting up on two paws and reaching for the counter. Still, he appeared dumbfounded when I poured the tuna juice into a bowl for him. He’s been wanting to go outside since we got here and so he’s been getting a lot of nos lately. He really enjoyed his treat!

It’s another beautiful, if not super warm, day and the internet has decided to work. *rolls eyes*

Oh, and before I forget, I have to give a shout out to Joni in Salem who sent me a tripod for my camera! THANK YOU! Having a post office right here in the village is such a bonus. I go once a day just for the walk and didn’t expect her package to be here yet, but the postmaster had seen me coming and had it out for me. I’ll be putting it to good use.

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Irate

Once I got online Monday, the internet worked like a charm. Yesterday, no problem getting on and I stayed connected for FIFTEEN HOURS STRAIGHT.

So when I got up this morning and couldn’t connect, I actually wasted a full hour trying to get the f’in Mifi to not go dormant. I had a strong signal and was getting pages to come up, but then the Mifi would drop the connection. I rebooted and rebooted and rebooted and finally realised that a full hour had gone by and I was not going to get online at home.

I’m having trouble up here on the hill, too, so it looks like the Mifi is the principle culprit of my internet issues now that the boosting problems have been essentially resolved. Of course, it’s now too late to return it and try something else. Especially frustrating is that I love the Mifi when it decides to work because it’s nice to be able to connect several devices at once.

It is just so ridiculous that less than 12 hours ago, I was streaming Netflix and now I can’t even get online. Absolutely nothing has changed except that I turned the service off overnight.

Anyway, I got my files for the day so I’m off to work. I hate getting such a late start. Looks like another loooong day.