Our RV Adventures

It went down to 67 degrees here last night, cool enough that with the slight wind, I went inside and grabbed my windbreaker. But it sure was nice.

According to The Weather Channel we’ve got one more day of low 90’s, Friday, and then Saturday the front moves through with temps in the 80’s and thunderstorms. With pretty much the same Sunday, on Monday, it’s more rain, with 78 and 60.

Then it settles down to Sunny with mid-80’s and mid-60’s as far as the eye can see. Of course The Weather Channel said this once before and then change its mind and we got summer and high 90’s back.

Of course in a couple of months, we’ll be wearing two pair of sweats and a pair of jeans, two long-sleeved shirts, a hoodie, and a windbreaker, while we’re huddled around 3 heaters and wondering where summer went.

There’s just no pleasing us.

As is usual for a Thursday, I headed into B/CS for Wal-Mart and lunch. I first went to the pharmacy to pick up Jan’s three prescriptions that I had called in yesterday, but found one of them not ready because it had come in this morning . . . the product, not my order.

They said it would be about 30 minutes, so I headed out to get the groceries. At some point here I had planned to get a haircut, but I guess since it wasn’t on the list, I forgot about it. When I got home, I told her to put it on next week’s list.

I can’t wait too much longer because I’m starting to get into ponytail territory here, or at least one of those little short ones that turns up at the end about a couple of inches past the rubber band.

Finishing up with the groceries, I picked up the now-ready prescriptions, and headed across the parking lot to get our Chick-fil-a lunch.

They have a new app that lets you submit your order and pay online and then pick it up at the designated store. But I’m not sure it’s needed, at least for me.

I walked in the door, right up to the counter, where there were 5 cashiers working(you never see this at McD’s), placed my order, and swiped my card. A minute or so later I had my two large lemonades in a nice cardboard carrier, and turned to get straws and napkins. By the time I turned back around, I heard my name called and was handed my bag of stuff. And my Spicy Chicken Deluxe Sandwich was a special order to add bacon. BTW you’ve gotta try their bacon, on anything. It’s thick cut, fried very crisp, and really flavorful.

Hmm! I wonder if you can just order bacon?

Anyway I was back out the door in less than seven minutes. Take that, McD’s.

One thing interesting about their new app is all the changes and additions to your foood that it allows you that aren’t shown on the menu board at the store. But one thing annoying about the app is that it won’t let you peruse the menu if the store is closed. What’s up with that?

It should let you at least look at the menu, but just not order. Or even pre-do your order and then submit it when you’re ready.

As I mentioned yesterday, before I went into CFA, I did try the Open Signal program to see what I got in B/CS. And it showed me the tower I was connected to just a few blocks away on the other side of the Hwy 6 main drag.

I then ran a speed test and found I had 12 Mbps down and 5 up, with a 49 ms ping. My signal strength was – 92 dbm and 90%. A good strong signal. I also wrote down the actual lat/long coordinates to double check that it wasn’t showing the tower was in Missouri like it does from here.

So this just reinforces my thought that there is something screwy about the tower I’m connected to here. And reinforcing that reinforcement, is the fact later this afternoon while I was outside on the gate, I picked up my phone to make a call and notice that it was again showing 3G data.

Now normally here I show 2 bars of 4G data, but as I noticed the other day when I was in Open Signal and this happened, my 3G signal was much stronger than my 4G one. In fact I was showing 5 bars of 3G!

But before I could run SpeedTest.net, or the one in OS, my phone jumped back to 2 bars of 4G again.

And FWIW I have another app, Network Signal Info, that is also supposed to show me the lat/long and distance of a tower. But when I try it here, it will not give me any values, but instead says, ‘Cell has wrong values’. Like I said, just screwy.

At least my new desktop Wi-Fi card to supposed to be here tomorrow. So maybe that will fixed my Internet problems. But somehow I kinda doubt it.

I was reading through the manual for our new TV last night and discovered a couple of things. One is that there is an Amplify command on the Sound Settings menu. And it certainly seems to work.

The manual says that it “. . . increases the overall intensity of high-frequency sounds for a better listening experience. It is designed for hearing-impaired listeners.”

Well,except for the part where it calls me ‘deaf’, I like it.

And I’m not deaf. I just have a loud A/C right over my head.

I also found out that we have PIP (Picture in Picture) but I don’t think it will do any thing for us, since it only has selections for Air or Cable inputs. So there is no way to do PIP from the DirecTV DVR. Bummer!

Another thing I found that I haven’t tried yet is a setting under the Sound Effects Menu called ‘DTS TruDialog’. It says, it “Increases voice intensity to make dialog clearer”, so it will be interesting to see what difference this one makes.

But whatever it does, it looks like based on ‘Amplify’ alone, that I won’t have to buy a sound bar.

Thought for the Day:

The only time to eat diet food is while you’re waiting for steak to cook. — Julia Child

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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.

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 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.

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.

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

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