Quick Deletion

Barb was trying to iMessage her pickleball partner in Florida.  She just replied to the last message she had received.  It turned out that she had messaged her quilting rival instead of her pickleball partner.  Fortunately, Barb quickly found a way to delete the message before her rival read it and all was good.

Barb’s Big Purchase

Barb loved the low fat hotdogs she bought last year when she was in Florida.  At first, she couldn’t find the hotdogs when she got back.  When she finally found them at Walmart, she bought all that were in the store.  It turned out that she bought 112 hotdogs.  I quickly calculated how many hotdogs she would have to eat per day to eat all those hotdogs over the winter.  I figured out that we would be taking hotdogs back to Canada with us in the Spring.

Taylorizing It

One of Barb’s quilting friends came over to see us and welcome us to Florida.  She came in to our house and looked at Barb’s work.  She said that when she was back in Nova Scotia with her quilting friends she talked about her friend in Florida who was a perfectionist.  She said her Florida friend was always ripping out her work to fix things if it wasn't exactly right.  She told her friends in Nova Scotia when she was fixing her quilts she was Taylorizing it.

Lady’s Router Problem

One morning I was sitting on the porch and Barb was out shopping.  Two ladies came up to the door.  I thought they wanted to see Barb but they said they were looking for someone who knew something about computers to help with one of the ladies’ computers.  I said I could try to help them.

So we walked over to their house.  They set up their two laptops in the porch on a desk beside each other.  They were both old Vista laptops.  One of the computers worked and the other didn’t.  The ladies said that they had been on the phone with the Internet Service Provider for two hours that morning.  The person on the phone couldn’t help them but said there was some problem with the IP address.

I spent six hours working on the problem to find out what was wrong with the IP address.  The computer that wasn’t working said it was connected to a router but when we tried to look something up on the web it came up with the message “Page Not Found”.  It was not connected to the same router as the computer that was working.  I found the router in the bedroom that the working computer was hooked up to and when I tried to hook up the other computer to it I just got an error message.

I spent hours looking up things on the internet on one computer and trying out fixes of the IP address on the other computer.

I was about to give up.  I was very hungry because I hadn’t had any lunch and it was almost dinner time.  I decided to try just one more thing.  I typed the error message for the router into Google and it suggested that I uninstall the wireless card and reinstall it.

So I uninstalled the wireless card.  Then I turned off the computer and turned it back on again.  The computer automatically found the wireless card and reinstalled it.  Then I could see the router with no error message and was able to hook up the internet.

The two ladies and their husbands were relaxing outside drinking wine and eating cheese and crackers.  I sat with them and gobbled down some food.  Then Barb drove up in our golf cart and joined us.  The lady with the fixed computer was so happy.  She had sat with me the whole time and she was impressed at how I could work for so long on the broken computer and never get upset and swear.  It was a good thing because I found out later that she was a very religious lady.

She asked how she could pay me back.  I said that she could pay me back in Diet Pepsi.  The next day she and her husband came back with a carton of 36 Diet Pepsi.

Barb’s First E-book

Barb follows the Pickleball Guru’s Blog on the internet.  She was excited because he was publishing a strategy e-book and for the first day it was on sale on Amazon for 99 cents.  She was able to read the first chapter for free.  She thought it was good.  So I bought the book for her.  It came as a Kindle e-book.  So we had to download the Kindle e-book reader software for our computers.  But we couldn’t put the Kindle formatted e-book on my e-book reader.  Amazon is hoping to monopolize the e-book market by making everyone buy Kindle readers to read their e-books.  Fortunately, I found an e-book reader package that could convert Kindle format e-books to Epub format which is the standard for most e-book readers.  Barb was then able to read her Pickleball book on my e-reader.  She had never used it before and thought it was pretty cool.

Forgot Something

One night, Barb couldn’t sleep because of my loud snoring.  She thought my CPAP was mask wasn’t on properly.  So she checked it on my face.  She noticed there was no air flowing through it.  She then realized that I had forgotten to turn it on.  She got up and turned on the CPAP.  Then she and I were able to get a good night’s sleep.

Peter’s Question

It was not long after we arrived in Florida that Barb started meeting old friends when she was out and about.  One day, she met Peter and Kimberly at Walmart.  Barb asked them how they were doing and how their summer had been.  They asked Barb how she was doing and how her summer had been.

Then to be polite Peter asked Barb how is Ivan.  Then he thought for a while and said, “Is Ivan still tall?”

Barb’s Close Call

Barb had hurt her arm but she thought it might be better and she wanted to say good-bye to her pickleball friends in Ottawa before she left for Florida.  So she went to Pickleball in the east end on the Tuesday before the Thursday that we were leaving.

She was driving down the Queensway in the fast lane as usual and there were no cars in the fast lane at all.  There was one car following her but he seemed to be happy with her speed. So she didn’t pull over.

Then she saw the police flashers go off on the car behind her.  She pulled off the highway and policeman in the unmarked car got out.  He told her that he had clocked her going 145 km/hr.  If she had gone 5 km/hr faster, he would have had to take her license away, impound her car and give her 10 demerit points as well as a hefty ticket.

Fortunately, she had a clean record and he only gave her a ticket for $95.  Barb has never been so happy to have to pay $95 dollars before.

More Resume Trouble

I had a meeting with an old friend who is President of an Ottawa consulting firm.  After the meeting, I followed up with a few emails.  He thought I should send him my resume and maybe we could work together.  I whipped up an old resume to send him that evening.   

The next day I thought I should check that my resume was okay.  When I re-examined the resume, I noticed that I had modified an old resume Sarah had put together because I liked the way it looked.  However, when I looked at the resume again I noticed that it said that I had a bachelor’s degree from the University of Guelph.  I quickly corrected the resume and resent it to my friend with a made up thing about making a short version and a long version of the resume telling him he should discard the old I sent before.

Julia's Old Resume

I was working downstairs converting my albums to mp3 when Julia came down to print out her new resume.  She printed a few copies and then remembered that she should add something and made a change and printed it out again.  I took the first resumes that she printed out and put them on the scrap paper pile.  Julia said she could still use the old ones.  So I picked the resumes off the scrap pile and gave them to her.  Then I noticed another resume on the scrap pile.  Julia went away with the resumes and came back a few minutes later saying that I had given her a very old resume.  She asked me how I got the very old resume.  I said I printed it to test the computer connection to the printer.  Julia said it could have been very embarrassing if she had handed in her old resume.

Accounting Trouble

Every month I do some accounting of our expenses and our income.  I was doing some checking of the rental property management fees.  I had made some assumptions about the rent that was collected.  The management company calculates their fees based on the rent collected.  I also calculated the management fee based on the calendar month.  I found that the management fee was all wrong.  Barb asked me to write it all down so she could call the management company and straighten it out.

Barb couldn’t figure out my notes.  So we went over them together with the management company reports that they sent her.  When we looked at the management reports and the bank account, I found out that I had made a lot of bad assumptions and the management fees were actually right on.

Barb was so happy that she had straightened it out before she phoned the management company.  She would have been so embarrassed if she had accused them of messing up their fees only to find out that my accounting was all confused and there was no problem after all.

Thanksgiving Fun

Barb brought Daphne a quilt as a birthday gift that she made during the summer.

On Saturday, I fell asleep under the quilt at Daphne’s place.  Daphne thought my snoring was noise coming from the refrigerator.

Daphne made a wonderful turkey dinner with stuffing and mashed potatoes.  She also made two pies; one apple and one pumpkin.  Daphne asked Sarah to cut the pies.  Daphne brought out her favourite knife to cut the pie.  Daphne said It Was a Wonderful Knife.  We thought of our favourite Christmas movie.

Barb’s Thanksgiving Adventures

We go to Daphne’s place in Pike Lake for Thanksgiving.  We pick up Sarah in Guelph on the way.  Sarah wanted us to bring her some clothes from her room.  We also had to bring Sarah’s snow tires.   

Barb wanted to try out the pickleball in Kitchener.  The best players in Canada play there.  Barb drove down early and stayed with Sarah.  While she was there, she fixed a few things around the house even though the house was lovely.   

First she fixed two toilet seats.  Then Sarah’s roommate was having trouble with the clothes dryer.  It wouldn’t dry her clothes.  The dryer was brand new.  The landlord had just replaced it because the old one didn’t dry clothes either.  Barb figured out that the vent to the outside of the house was clogged with lint.  So there was no air flow.  Barb found a long pole to whack the lint off the vent.  Barb probably saved the Sarah’s house from burning down from a dryer fire.

Barb got lost while driving around Kitchener but she finally found where she was going.  It was a gym with 12 pickleball courts.  She played 5 hours of pickleball with the best player in Canada.  He was definitely good but Barb got a few points and he complimented her some good shots.

The next day Barb had a really sore back.

Barb also drove around Kitchener to look at places for us to live.  She found a nice community in New Hamburg just South of Kitchener.  She gave our her name and email address to a real estate agent and told him to email her if any places in New Hamburg came up for sale.

She did all of this before Thanksgiving started.