Barb to the Rescue

Sarah and Barb text each other using Barb's iPod and Sarah's iPhone.

One night a couple of weeks ago, Sarah sent a panicked text message to Barb. Apparently, Sarah had two savings accounts at PC Financial. One was an Interest First account with a zero balance, the second an Interest Plus account with her savings in it.

She had called the people at PC Financial a couple of weeks ago and asked them to close the Interest First account. The lady said that she would do that and since it had a zero balance there would be nothing to change.

When Sarah got around to checking it out, she found out the the lady had made a mistake and closed the Interest Plus account with all her savings in it. She tried to phone PC Financial but they were only open until 11 pm and it was now about midnight.

So Barb got on Facetime with her and tried to calm Sarah down.  Barb told her that everything would be alright once she talked to them at PC Financial. 

Sarah was hard to calm down. So Barb decided she would email Sarah some money to hold her over until the bank account was straightened out. 

Barb had some trouble with the PC Finanacial email system. So she got me to do it. We sent Sarah $500.  Barb thought it would only take about 30 minutes to clear.  So she wanted to keep Sarah on Facetime until the email cleared. Unfortunately, it landed in her junk mail and she didn't find it until the next day.  So Sarah finally calmed down and we got to bed around 2 am.

The PC Financial offices opened at 7 am. Barb got up early and texted Sarah to tell her that she was going phone PC Financial. She thought that it would be okay because Barb had a joint account with Sarah. It turned out that Sarah had opened the Interest Plus account herself. So Barb was not included as a joint account holder and couldn't get the problem fixed.

However, Barb was told that the people at PC Financial had found the problem and were trying to correct it. They said that everything would be okay in a few days and Sarah would get all her money.  And it was.  Sarah got all her money back.

Sarah was relieved and now she was $500 richer.

Play Commercial, Then Repeat Every 30 Minutes

Our house came with a great built-in sound system that lets us to listen to the radio.

Barb found a local station that she really likes. During the day, it doesn't have a DJ. It just plays hits from the 70's to today.  It has very few commercials.

In the evening, John Tesh's “Intelligence For Your Life” comes on from 7 pm to midnight. John Tesh provides a lot of pop psychology and alternative medicine information in-between the music. The music is pretty much like the music that the station plays all day. So it should be okay.

The problem with the John Tesh show is that they play the same commercial over and over again. It has something to do with childhood asthma. Three and four year-olds explain how it feels like to have asthma in their own words. It is supposed to be cute. Only it drives Barb crazy.

Eventually, Barb can't stand it.  She stops sewing and watchs television.

If she wants to quilt, she plays Hot 89.9 from Ottawa on the computer.

Lost and Found

Barb is finding that she needs reading glasses most of the time. She brought a pretty pair of glasses with clear pink frames. She is constantly putting them down and then can't find them because they are almost invisible. The other day, she couldn't find her glasses. She said she just had them. She had put them down and now they were gone. She retraced her steps around the house and they were nowhere to be found. She was looking for about 15 minutes. The house is not that big. There are not that many places they could be. She was getting more and more frustrated. I was leaving for my softball game and was just out the door. I was leaveing in her time of need. Then I heard her scream that she found them. She called me back for me to see where she found them. She had just finished charging her iPod. She had pulled the cable from the wall and put it on her foot stool on top of her glasses. Then, she was cleaning up and she put the cable in the basket under the table beside my chair. It holds all our of charging cables, MP3 players and headphones. Her glasses got hooked on the charging cable and ended up in the basket under the table. It was so unlikely. She is always saying she should have a chain for her glasses. Then hang them around her neck so is always wearing them. She doesn't want to look like an the old ladies that have to do that, though.

Its a Small World After All

I like to take walks or ride a stationary bike for exercise.  I find that listening to books on MP3 can be a way to make exercise more interesting.  I used to walk in the evenings both winter and summer in Ottawa.  Then Barb got me a nice stationary bike, so I didn't have to go outside in the bad weather.

Here in Florida, there is seldom bad weather and now that I am retired I can walk in the afternoon.  It has been very pleasant to walk around the park for an hour at 4 o'clock in the afternoon when it is not too hot or too cold outside.

I was listening to a good book a couple of weeks ago called Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking .  In the book, there is a story of a Harvard professor who was the winner of a major international award for the quality of his teaching.  His classes are always oversubscribed and he often gets a standing ovation after his lectures.  However, he is an classic introvert who overcomes his introversion to speak in public.

That is not the story though that I want to tell you.  Apparently, he lives half the year in a country home just outside Ottawa.  It also turns out that his wife is Susan Phillips, a professor in the School of Public Administration and Policy at Carleton University.  Susan was the department director when I applied for entry into the school to do my PhD.  I met with her back then and she signed my papers to allow me into the school.

As they say on the kiddie ride at Disney World, "Its a Small World After All".

Sarah to the Rescue

Barb likes to watch her favourite TV shows when she is knitting or crocheting. The people who we bought the house from left the furniture but took the television. They did leave us a large glass TV stand that sits in the corner of the livingroom.

Barb planned to watch her favourite TV shows over the internet. She got unlimited bandwidth interent service. I bought her a refurbished laptop computer with a big screen from Walmart.

Barb found her favourite TV shows on a free internet site called Hulu.com. However, when she tried to watch them, the programs would stop part of the way through to buffer. It was very frustrating.

I wanted to help her out. So I called the internet service provider and asked them about the buffering problem. They checked my download speed and said everything was okay from their end. Barb kept trying and the programs kept stopping to buffer.

So I called the internet service provider again. They said we were using the new type of modem and they were getting a lot of complaints about that type. They said they would send us an older type of modem and we could return the original modem.

When the other modem came, I set it up. Barb found the problem was even worse with this type of modem. So we kept the original modem and Barb suffered.

A little while later, one of our friends in the park, who knew we didn't have a TV, told me about a person in the park who was giving away an old TV. Barb was out. So Daphne drove me over to the house and I looked at TV. It looked too old to hook up to a computer. While coming home, Daphne said they had a big screen plasma TV that they weren't using. She said it had problems turning on and off. Also the sound wasn't working. It was taking up space in her spare bedroom. She said we could have it if we wanted.

I next day Truman brought the TV over in his SUV. It looked nice on the glass TV stand in the living room. But we didn't know if we would ever get it to work.

We had to figure out how to hook the computer up to the television. I looked at the TV manual and the on the internet to find the cable we needed. I ordered the 15 foot cable from Amazon and it came in a few days.  Sarah happened to be here visiting.

It was not easy to figure out how to set it all up but Sarah found the right computer settings and the TV worked fine. Then she had figure out a way to reliably turn the TV on and off.  Barb was off and running and Sarah and Barb watched a lot of TV while Sarah was here and while Sarah was learning to knit.

Barb had to listen to the TV through the computer speakers.

When Barb found that this didn't work great, she bought some cheap speakers from Walmart and hooked them up to her computer headphone jack.

She still had to suffer with the buffering problem on Hulu.com.

Sarah came to the rescue again.  She showed Barb a website that listed all of the websites that broadcast her favourite shows. Barb found that some of them didn't have the buffering problem that Hulu.com has. One of the best sites, doesn't have the buffering problem but limits the amount of time she can watch consecutively to 73 minutes. She uses that sometimes. There are other sites that work but don't broadcast all the shows she wants to watch. Fortunately, there are many sites listed on the webpage from which she can pick and choose.

Now it all good. Barb is getting her crocheting and knitting done while watching all of her favourite shows. Some of the shows that she is watching are no longer available on the cable service we have back in Canada. So she is very happy.  Thanks Sarah.

A Christmas Story

Barb felt that, since being in Florida for Christmas was the best present we could ask for, we didn't need to exchange presents this year. Instead, we needed to develop new simpler Christmas traditions.

This plan did not go over well with our daughter Sarah, who was visiting us for Christmas. She wanted lots of presents and wanted to continue all of our family traditions.

She was very convincing. Barb bought her lots of candy for her socking.  Sarah didn't have enough room in her suitcase to take any presents home with her. So Sarah had to open her socking presents and eat a little candy each day. This way she would have it all eaten by the time she was planning to return to Canada on December 27^th.

Barb also got her way. We started a new Christmas tradition of going to the beach with Daphne and Truman on Christmas day. Sarah had never been to the ocean. So she was happy to go.

Sarah convinced us to watch some Christmas movies in the evenings while she was here. I wasn't hard to convince since she wanted us to watch my favourite Christmas movie, Jean Shepard's A Christmas Story . Barb thinks the movie is silly but I think it is similar to my boyhood experiences.

I get a kick out of all the funny stories in the movie. Especially, the one when the father gets a major award in the mail. It turns out to be a lamp shaped like Marilyn Monroe's leg in a net stocking with a lamp shade that looks like a fringed mini-skirt.

After watching the movie and seeing me laughing about the leg lamp, Barb and Sarah found that leg lamps were selling at the local drugstore. They wanted to buy me one for Christmas. I didn't want them to waste money on such a frivolous present.

They got leg lamp anyway and gave it to me as a Christmas present. It turned out to be kind of neat. Sarah put took of a picture of me holding it up after I had it assembled. I put the picture up as my Facebook profile.

I now have a lovely leg lamp in our Florida room that Barb turns on every night. I get to look at it all evening from my comfy chair in the livingroom. I am sure the neighbours are very jealous.