Maybe You CAN Mess with Mother Nature . . .

Well, after my little rant the other day about where the heck Fall went, it seems like Mother Nature may have gotten back on track.

After another couple of days in the low 90’s, the temps start dropping, until Tuesday it’s supposed to be Partly Sunny with a high of 78 degrees and a low of 60. We’ll see now if that holds up. Supposedly there’ll be some rain mixed in among the intervening days, but you can’t have everything.

Of course the weather guy on the radio also said yesterday that it was going to be “Mostly to Occasionally Partly Cloudy”, so I don’t know how much he can actually be trusted. I mean, isn’t that the whole idea of ‘Partly’?

Here’s hoping.

The FedEx guy stopped in front of the rig about 2:30 today, delivering my new Yagi Wi-Fi antenna, but that was pretty much the high point of entire day. It was all down slope after that, at least as far as antennas go.

I quickly got it mounted on the horizontal arm of the big window awning, pointing it down toward the trailers.

Yagi Antenna Mount

But that was where it stopped for right then. Since I was on the gate until 6pm, I was going to wait until I got up at 10pm tonight to run the coax in the window and hook it up to the desktop.

I was really looking forward to seeing how much my signal level would increase. Would it go from the normal 2 bars to 4 bars? Or maybe even 5 bars! I was like an anxious kid on Christmas morning,

But all I got was the pink bunny suit with feet. Not a Red Ryder BB Gun in sight.

After hooking up the SMA connector to the desktop’s Wi-Fi card, I eagerly looked at the monitor.

And I had a grand total of 2, count’em, 2 bars of signal. Which dropped to 1 bar even as I was watching.

I’m beginning to think that this entire area is just jinxed.

I mentioned last night that as of about midnight I had no 3G or 4G data on my phone, and my Hotspot wouldn’t connection to anything. Well I kept trying and finally about 2:30 it all started working again. The whole area is just flakey, I think.

I’m also beginning to think that I really do have a problem with the Wi-Fi card in my desktop machine. I’ve wondered about this before since even with a decent inside antenna, it couldn’t see near as many Wi-Fi signals as my phone or tablet, or even our Kindles. But I never followed up on it since it’s usually just connecting to the Cradlepoint router that’s six inches away.

So I quickly put in an Amazon order for this TP-Link model.

TP-Link Wi-Fi Card

TP-LINK N900 2.4GHz or 5GHz Dual Band PCI Express Adapter

Besides hopefully fixing my signal problem, it will also give me a 5GHz connection too. So more tomorrow night I guess.

This morning while Jan was on the gate, an NOV guy, one of the facilities support people, came by and gave us our very own garbage can.

New  Garbage Can

Before, I had to put on my hardhat and lug the bags about 75 yards to one of the big cans on the pad. So this is a lot more convenient.

And even better, when Jan ask him if there was a large dumpster or any thing on site where we could get rid of our old TV, he said no problem, that he would take it. And he even went in the rig and brought it out for her.

Even more better, they did all this without waking me.

For dinner tonight Jan fixed us each a plate of her World Famous Gate Guard Nachos. Simple, quick and delicious.

Gate Nachos

I give them 3 YUMS UP!

Tomorrow is Wal-Mart/Chick-fil-a day, and I also want to get a haircut. Luckily the CFA is in the Wal-Mart parking lot, so it’s convenient, and good.


Thought for the Day:

A diplomat is a man who always remembers a woman’s birthday but never remembers her age. – Robert Frost

adsfasdfsd