Our RV Adventures

Not about the Rattlesnakes, but about the Cell service here at this gate.

Last night and tonight, it’s been all over the map. Sometimes it works great, and then sometimes nothing. And pretty much everything in between.

Sometimes my AirCard shows that it has Internet Access but no data will flow. My laptop says it doesn’t have an Internet Connection. Then for a while it will work fine.

Later last night my S5 phone showed 3 bars of 4G and I got good data rates, but I couldn’t make phone calls. When I tried, all I got was dead silence, with no ringing.

Hopefully they’ll get it fixed soon.

I slept in until about 12:15 this afternoon, about an hour later than normal. I’ll keep pushing it back until I’m comfortable not taking a nap later in the afternoon before I go into work.

About 12:45 Jan and I headed off to Barth’s for their Fried Chicken and Roast Beef lunch.

Need I say more.

Hard to believe that food this good is only $6.50 for all you can eat. And this one plate was more than enough to fill me up.

Next up was a stop at the bank to pick up the checks ordered. While I was there I also ask them to check on a problem I’m having with my MasterCard Debit Card that I have for my account there.

Normally it works fine, but anytime I’m asked for my billing address zip code, like at a gas pump or sometimes online, it tells me the number is incorrect. My zip code on all my mail from them is correct, but maybe it’s screwed up on the debit card address somehow. But the cashier found nothing wrong with it.

On the way home I was mulling over the problem and remembered a similar occurrence at a client’s quite a few years ago. Their payroll system would not recognize an new employee’s SS number and kept saying it was invalid. But it looked fine on the screen.

So I went in and looked at the actual code of the file and instantly saw the problem. Somehow the secretary, when she entered the SS# originally, entered a non-printing character as the first entry in the SS# field. Probably she accidently hit the ALT key in combination with some other key which can cause the problem.

Non-Printing characters are ones that the computer sees but you don’t. An example some of you may be familiar with is the Show Non-Print Formatting Characters command in Microsoft Word. When you use this command you see Paragraph Markers, Manual Page Breaks, etc. Otherwise they’re invisible.

The secretary had deleted and reentered the number several times without fixing the problem because she just backspaced over the old number and just typed in the new one again. But in doing this she stopped backspacing at the first VISIBLE number in the field.

If she had just backspaced one more character, even though she couldn’t see it, or if she had clicked in the field and hit the Delete key, she would have fixed the problem herself.

So hopefully I’ll be able to talk to some of the computer people at the bank and have them look at the problem.

After a quick stop at the HEB it was back to the rig for the afternoon until I was on the gate at 5pm.

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This might turn out to be a pretty decent gate.

But then I’ve only been told about the snakes secondhand. But the scrub brush terrain is perfect for them, so it’s quite possible. I’ll definitely keep my eyes, and my ears, open.

This seems to be a new gate that’s just getting started up, and coincidently it’s only a couple of miles away from our very first Marathon drill rig gate back in 2012.

Besides the snakes, the only other problem is with the Verizon phone and data service. When I got here at 5 pm the guard I was relieving said that he had no service inside and sometimes a little outside. And my phone showed pretty much the same thing. And of course no signal on my AirCard. Bummer!

I did make a call to Jan from outside with some success, but the voices were crackly. But then about an hour later I looked at my phone and had 3 bars of 4G and good data service. But still nothing on my AirCard.

So then I moved my AirCard antenna to a different side of the shack, rebooted it, and now I have good 3G data.

So now I only have to worry about the rattlesnakes.

Jan and I are to the point in our lives where we really don’t need more ‘stuff’, especially living in an RV. So our Christmas presents are pretty laid back. Like for her birthday this past October I got her a new electric can opener because that’s what she wanted. She said she was giddy.

So for Christmas I got her one of these Silicone Non-Stick Baking Mats.

You bake right on it, it spreads the heat evenly, and channels away any grease from the food. Neat.

For lunch today we had the second half of our Barth’s Christmas Turkey & Dressing meal.

All delicous, especially the green beans like I said yesterday. You can tell that their cornmeal mix is only cornmeal and not this half cornmeal/half flour mix that a lot of places use. Their cornbread ends up having the texture of cake. No, this is good ole coarse-ground cornmeal.

And we’ve still got two more meals to go because of the large portions.

I mentioned last week that we used the RV park’s free laundry to do some heavy rugs, and while we were there I saw this notice.

I can only guess that when times are slow in the ‘patch’, people start taking in laundry to make ends meet?