Toilet Trouble

The day after the smorgasbord I plugged the toilet.  I have done that before many times in Ottawa and in Florida.  I found on the internet a great way to unblock a toilet.  You fill up a large pot of hot water and some dish detergent.  Then you quickly pour the contents in the toilet.  It usually works the first time.

However, this was a whole different level of blocked toilet.  We had used about 8 pots of hot water and it was still plugged.  Barb even tried plunging it.  That didn’t help either.  We thought we might have to get a plumber in to use a snake or something.

That evening I left the toilet plugged and went to the ballgame at the college.

When I got home, I found that Barb had been able to unplug the toilet using more hot water and more plunging.

Barb wears a nighty with a red hat lady holding a plunger on it.  It seemed very appropriate that night.  Also the toilet trouble is probably another reason not to go back to the smorgasbord.

Smorgasbord

On the spur of the moment, we decided to use the gift certificate the lady whose computer I had fixed had given me for a local restaurant.  My sister told me it was a smorgasbord.  She said we should make sure we were hungry before we went.

We found the restaurant and found out the gift certificate paid for both of us.  We paid at the entrance and found a table.  Then we helped ourselves to the buffet.  We skipped the salad and went straight for the spare ribs.  We had fried green tomatoes.  I had fried fish and tartar sauce.  We both had fried chicken.  I had bean soup.  Barb had a couple of desserts but didn’t like them.  We had a number of glasses of Diet Coke.

When we left, we felt terrible. We were so stuffed.  Barb had to undo the button on her shorts when we got to the car.  The next day we found out that we had both gained four pounds.

eBay Confusion

Barb brought a lot of things with her from Canada to Florida to sell on eBay while she was down here because the shipping costs are more reasonable.  However, she was afraid to try.  I got her a couple books on eBay for Dummies but she didn’t read them.

Finally, she broke down and just learned herself.  She listed a couple of items and they sold.  She had some trouble with the shipping labels because they were American and her account was in Canada.  So she printed out her own labels and mailed them.  The mail service is great here.  The mail lady picks up the mail right out of our mailbox.  It couldn’t be more convenient.

Barb thought because the Canadian dollar was low she would be losing money on her sales.  Then I explained that no because the Canadian dollar was low, she would be making even more money.  She would be selling in US dollars which were worth more than Canadian dollars.  That got her even more excited about selling on eBay.

Soon she had sold a whole lot of stuff and was an expert on eBay selling.  She was sad that she hadn’t started sooner.  But she was excited about bringing back even more stuff next year to sell.  She is selling things that she bought many years ago that she is never going to make.  So they are just sitting on her shelves.  It is like free money.

Snoring Video

When I can’t get to sleep at night, I take a sleeping pill.  When I take a sleeping pill, I sleep so soundly that I snore even through my CPAP.  Barb usually tries to fix my CPAP for me but I just wake up and stop snoring.

One day Barb was up and I was snoring in bed.  She decided to video tape me using her iPod.  However, when she turned on the light, I woke up.  I was wondering why she was standing over me with her iPod.

iPod Disaster

One day Barb found her iPod couldn’t receive iMessages.  She lives by communicating by iMessage.  The iMessage button would ask her to login with her Apple ID and password.  Then it would ask to verify her email address.  Then it would go back and ask for her Apple ID and password.  I looked it up on the internet.  Other people had had the same problems.  I tried the things they told me to do.  It didn’t help.

My iPod worked fine.  Barb’s email still worked.  I found her old broken iPod and even though the menu button didn’t work iMessages worked on it.  So she had to carry around two iPods for a while.

I phoned Apple and was on hold for a long time.  Then when I finally got through I pushed the wrong button and hung up accidently.  So I phoned back and waited a long time again.  When I finally got through, the tech verified my serial number and told me to do most of the stuff I did before.  It still didn’t work.  So he sent me to his supervisor.  She told me to go through a few other things and it still didn’t work.  So she wrote up a report and gave me a reference number.  She said she would send it to the tech people.

Each time we went through the steps of resetting the iPod Barb lost her old settings even though we backed it up on my computer and restored it from the backup.  Barb found it really annoying.

A couple of days later, the supervisor phoned back and we went through a couple more things and it still didn’t work but it looked like they were making progress.  The supervisor phoned back a couple of times more over the next few days and said they were still working on it and it was a problem at their end.

Then one day Barb just decided to try to sign in again and it worked.  She was so happy to have her iPod back.

The Blue Screen of Death

I got a call from the lady who had trouble with double clicking.  She said she had a serious problem with her computer.  The computer had an error message on it and she didn’t understand it and didn’t want to touch it.  I knew she had a problem shutting down her system.  She had to push the off/on switch to shut down.  Windows wouldn’t shut down by itself.  She said her husband was nagging her that she was wasting electricity by having her computer on all the time.  So in her madness, she just pushed the off/on button without shutting down.  The next time she started the computer up, she got the error message.

I rushed over to her house.  I found she was right she had the blue screen of death.  I couldn’t understand the error message either.  I pushed the off/on button to shut it down and the error message came up again.

Finally, I started up the computer in Safe Mode.  I checked her hardware and found that the computer was trying to install four pieces of hardware the computer didn’t even have.  So I shut them down and shut down the computer again.  Then when I started it up again it worked fine.

The lady was so happy a couple of days later she dropped off an envelope with $50 in it.

Kodi

We went to a birthday party for a friend.  I got cornered by a drunk guy who went on and on about how he was telling everyone to see me if they had computer problems.  Fortunately, the people he sent to me decided not to.

However, he also told me about an Open Source program that he uses for watching television by streaming over the internet.  It was called Kodi.  He was very high on it.

So a couple of days later, I looked into it.  I found out how to download it and install it and hook it into the internet.

Barb had been streaming her shows over the internet but the website that she used had lots of pop-ups and didn’t always work.  It often made her frustrated.

Kodi looked like a good system with no pop-ups and no possibility of getting viruses.  So I installed it on Barb’s computer and showed her how to use it.  As she experimented with it, she liked it more and more.  She was able to find shows that she couldn’t find anywhere else.  It had every season of every show she wanted, even reality shows.  Barb was very happy with it and was glad the drunk guy told us about it.

I installed Kodi on my sister’s computer and she found her favourite shows with all the back seasons.  She said she was now addicted to it.  She was watching television all day and getting nothing done.

Funny PDF Problems

A friend of Barb’s is the secretary of the Home Owners Association.  She emails a newsletter every week called the E-Blast.  To make it easier for her, she decided to send the E-Blast as an attachment to the email.  However, people complained they couldn’t open the PDF file.  So Barb’s friend asked me to go around and help the people who had trouble.

I thought maybe some of the people didn’t have Adobe Reader.  I was surprised to find that they all had Adobe Reader but had other problems.

The first lady I helped simply couldn’t double click fast enough.  So I taught her how to right-click and then Open the file.  I also fixed her Facebook account.  She had a terrible time trying to remember her password.  So I got her to reset her password.  Later she dropped off a gift certificate for a local restaurant.

The second lady that I helped said the PDF was too small to read.  She had to put her face up close to the screen.  I showed her how to click the enlarge box in the upper right corner of the Reader to make the PDF normal size.

I went to a few other people’s houses helped most of them but sometimes their problems were harder and I don’t think I was able to help all of them.  Some problems were more with their computers than with the PDFs.  However, I became known as the “go to guy” for computer help.

Fred and Ellen’s Visit

One day, this fellow Fred came to the door and said the Marsha had told him that I was good at fixing computers.  He said he had a problem with his printer and his internet.  So I went over to his house on my bike.  When he plugged his new printer into the USB port in the back of the computer his wireless stopped working.  So I unplugged the printer and connected the wireless again.  He was happy to have his internet back.  It took me a while to figure out they wouldn’t both work together.  Fred was going out for the evening.  So I said I would come back another day and fix his printer.

I didn’t hurry back.  I thought he could probably install his printer himself.  A couple of weeks later, he came back to ask me to install his printer. So I rode my bike over to his house.

I found that I couldn’t install the printer using the USB without interfering with the wireless.  So Fred reminded me that the printer could be installed as a wireless printer.

So I installed the printer as a wireless printer.  It took a little bit of work but when I was finished he and his wife, Ellen, were very happy.  Ellen said she would make me some cookies.

I told Barb that Ellen was going to make me cookies.  Barb said I didn’t need cookies.  But she needed someone to help her fix a dripping faucet in the bathroom.  So I went back to Fred’s house during my afternoon walk and asked him if he could help us with the faucet.  He said he could do plumbing.

He and Ellen came over one day with cookies and to look at Barb’s quilts.  Ellen is also a sewer and a quilter and a knitter.  Fortunately, Barb had just cleaned up the spare bedroom and she could see the quilt on the bed.

A while later Fred came over again by himself.  He fixed our outside faucet and our door.  He also helped Barb with the faucet.

Every time I see Fred, he tells me how great the printer is working.

Sleeveless Seamstress

Barb and her pickleball partner are given tee shirts when they go to tournaments.  They are made of breathable fabric which is good but they have sleeves which Barb and her partner don’t like.  So Barb decided to take put on her seamstress hat and take the sleeves off the tee shirts for her and her pickleball partner.

The same people go to the different pickleball tournaments that are organized by the same people.  When they saw Barb and her partner wearing sleeveless tee shirts, they asked the organizers why they didn’t get sleeveless tee shirts.

Almost Locked Out

We only brought one key for the car to Florida.

I went to the girl’s fastpitch softball game at the college with Daphne.  I bring a chair to sit in the bleachers and the extra cushion and a blanket.  When I was getting my chair out of the trunk, I took my blanket out of my chair and put my cushion in to bring to the ball park.  Then after I closed the trunk, I couldn’t find my car key.  I thought I might have dropped it in the trunk.  I was panicking.  The key wasn’t in any of my pockets.  I opened up my chair and found the key under my cushion.  I was very relieved.