Daily Archives: July 7, 2016

$8 A Day . . .

or maybe not as great a deal as I thought.

I was looking at our Wal-Mart Savings Catcher total today and was really surprised. That’s the one where you scan the QR code at the bottom of all your WM receipts with the WM phone app and they check surrounding competitors to see if they were selling something you bought at WM for a cheaper price.

And in the last year or so we’ve been doing this, we’ve accumulated $72.26. Not bad for 30 seconds on your phone after every WM trip.

Today was also the day I cleaned house on my Galaxy S5 phone. I screen all my calls, so unless you’re in my Contact list, I don’t answer. I let it go to voicemail and then check it out.

But I get 4 or 5 calls a day that either ring once or twice and then hang up, or they go to voicemail but don’t leave a message. They’re trying to entice you into calling them back out of curiosity, or maybe stupidity, I guess.

I’m on all the Do Not Call lists, but it does no good. I still have to check my phone when it rings to see who’s calling. But a while back I discovered Android’s Auto Reject List function which solved the problem.

 
Every week or two, I will go through my phone’s Recent calls list and anyone I don’t recognize, I will type the number into Google as XXX-XXX-XXXX. This will either bring up the company’s name associated with the number, or a bunch of websites where people complain about Spam calls from that number.

Once I know it’s a Spam number, I click on the number in my Recent calls, like I was going to call them back. Then I click on the 3 vertical dots at the top right of the screen, and  select ‘Add to Auto reject list’.

Now when that number calls back, it does show up in your call list, but your phone never rings. And if you put someone on by accident,  just reverse the process.

Nice.

Based on checking my electric meter today, our stay here is not going to be as great a deal as I first thought. We’ve used 278 KWH over the last 4 days, so multiplied by 7 for the 28 days we’ll be here until we leave for Gulf Shores on July 31st, we’ll use about 1950 KWH for the period.

image

And at 12 cents per KWH that means we’ll owe about $235 for the month. So our stay here will be $375 + $235, or $610 total for the month. When means our power is costing us about $8 a day.

Not as good a deal as we first thought. But as Jan said, not having to pack up and move every two weeks in 95°+ heat is worth it.

Cheap as I am, I have to agree.

For dinner tonight Jan fixed us her famous BEC sandwiches. That’s Bacon, Egg, and Cheese. She toasts the bread and melts the cheese on it in the toaster oven, cooks up Hormel Microwave Bacon in the MW, and then whips up a couple of eggs with a little water, and then cooks them separately in the MW in a couple of saucers.

Quick, easy, and delicious.

But about that time, as she was cleaning up, Jan discovered that we were out of kitty food. So, not wanting a hungry, mad kitty with claws tomorrow morning, around 6pm we drove east to the Wal-Mart in Sealy to pick up a few things.

Coming into town we saw the signs that US-90 and SR36 were both closed. This was due to a bridge collapse earlier in the day.

Sealy Wreck

Sealy Bridge Collapse

Apparently a garbage truck driver, driving one of those trucks that picks up the dumpsters in front and then brings them back to dump them, drove under the US-90 bridge with his boom still overhead.

There are warning signs and lights and horns that go off before you get to the bridge, but it looks like they were ignored.

When the bridge section fell, it crushed a car coming from the opposite direction, killing a 12 year old girl.

Sad.

I just put my latest website online this evening. It’s for Olympus Carpet Cleaning and Restoration up in the Dallas area. Check it out.

And if you need carpets cleaned, repaired, or restored up in the Dallas area, give Cody a call.


Thought for the Day:

If someone calls you a crazy freak,  thank them. Nothing throws people off more than a proud, polite, crazy freak.

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