Daily Archives: October 3, 2013
Jan’s no longer an illegal . . .
unlicensed security guard. After 18 months of waiting she finally got her license.
We both applied when we started gate guarding in April 2012, and mine came back in about 5 weeks. But hers never did. I told that it was probably due to her very shady past, and she couldn’t pass the background check. She threw something at me. So now I’m thinking it was probably a felony assault conviction.
But as it turned out, it was probably a problem with her fingerprint card. Maybe. And possibly some government incompetence in there as well.
I kept checking back with Gate Guard Services after we left here in August 2012, and finally in January 2013, the Texas Department of Public Safety told GGS there was a problem with her fingerprint card. So before we left Houston for our travels, we submitted a new one. And waited.
And waited.
And when we started gate guarding again this past August and it still hadn’t shown up, I decided to just forget about it. After all I wasn’t the one that was guarding without a license. But maybe that did the trick.
I got a call from the GGS Corpus office about a week ago and was told that it had finally come in. And unlike my license that was just printed on piece of paper, she got a nifty drivers license-type of plastic card. So I guess good things do come to those who wait. I’m jealous.
The licenses are good for two years from the issue date, so mine expires in May of 2014 and Jan’s expires in September of 2015, so we’ll have to keep track of when to renew them.
Blog readers and our new friends Margaret and Rich Bergen showed up at the gate again Wednesday afternoon. And they brought food!
After they left here Tuesday after their visit to our gate, they drove on down to Corpus Christi and spent the night. Then coming back to San Antonio Wednesday afternoon they stopped off at the BBQ place out on the Interstate and brought us sandwiches.
Jan’s anniversary present finally showed up today. I had ordered her one of the new KIndle Paperwhite models, but being brand-new, they didn’t ship until September 30th.
Jan was really surprised and happy to get one. She said she’d thought about asking for one because she reads a lot when she’s out on the gate and has to use her old Kindle in the daytime and then switch to the Kindle Fire at night. But with the Paperwhite she can do both.
This is because the Paperwhite has a built-in backlight so it can be read in the daylight or at night in complete darkness. Even in daylight the screen is much brighter and clearer than our old Kindles. And because it uses a faster processor, the page turns are much smoother too.
Being cheap, I decided to save $20 and get the Paperwhite with “Special Offers”. This is Amazon’s polite way of saying “Ads”. But they’re pretty unobtrusive. Where our old Kindle has a rotating set of blockprint-looking pictures when it’s turned off, “Special Offers” shows you ads for other books. And there’s also a half inch high banner ad at the bottom of the home page. There are NO ads shown within the books themselves. I also like the fact that you can get the Paperwhite with ads to try it out, and if you think they’re still too annoying, you can pay the $20 difference and they go away.
Personally I don’t find them a problem, and in fact bought one of the books that was advertised on the off screen. So I guess they work.
Once Jan had seen the Paperwhite, I ordered her a cover for it. They come in 15 different colors, and she wanted red. So red she gets.
Another neat thing about this cover is that it utilizes the Paperwhite’s Auto Wake/Sleep mode. Closing the cover turns off the Kindle, and opening the cover turns it back on. All automagically. Neat!
Under the heading of The Butterfly Effect, the butterflies are back, and in force. One semi pulled into the gate this afternoon and said he was running hot because so many butterflies were clogging his radiator.
This is the 3rd time we’ve seen this here at the gate, and they always fly in the same direction. Amazing.
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More Student Errors:
The inhabitants of ancient Egypt were called mummies. They lived in the Sarah Dessert and traveled by Camelot. The climate of the Sarah is such that the inhabitants had to live elsewhere, so certain areas of the dessert are cultivated by irritation. The Egyptians built the pyramids in the shape of a huge triangular cube. The Pyramids are a range of mountains between France and Spain.
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