Sarah’s Birthday Present

Sarah needed a car.  So Barb got on the internet and started looking around Ottawa for Sarah.  Barb found a used Honda Civic being sold privately by a little Indian lady.  The lady was moving to the United States to be with her husband who had moved there for work.

Sarah paid for the car but Barb paid for the licence plates and the ownership transfer as a birthday present to Sarah.  Sarah got the car on Father’s Day.  She drove Barb and me to CORA’s to celebrate Father’s Day and the new car.

Then Sarah and I washed the car inside and out before she drove it back to Deep River.

Sarah Snubbed

One night during a rained out fastball game, I went out for coffee with David Waller.  I had just finished reading a book from the library called “The Neutrino Hunters”.  So I wanted to talk to him about all that I had learned.  He is a neutrino physicist by the way.

While we were talking, I mentioned that Sarah was working in Chalk River at the Atomic Energy lab.  I knew David’s work project had moved there from Carleton University.  David said he was going to Chalk River the next day to show his new summer research assistant the project.

I told him to call Sarah when he got there and Sarah would meet him to say hi.  He never did.  Sarah had been waiting for his call.  So Sarah felt snubbed and no longer likes David Waller.

Barb and the Nationals

Barb and her female pickleball partner were last year’s Senior Games Eastern Ontario Champions.  So they qualified for the National Senior Games which were held in Edmonton this summer.  Barb thought her partner wanted to go and her partner thought Barb wanted to go.  It turned out the neither of them particularly wanted to go.  It was going to be very expensive to fly to Edmonton and stay in a hotel for a few days.  Also, she didn’t think there was going to be any competition.  Barb is not into just playing tournaments for the prestige of winning.  She wants to play good games.  She finds that her group in Ottawa is so good that she doesn’t need to travel to get good competition.  So in the end, they didn’t go to the Nationals in Edmonton.

Router with a Mind of Its Own

When I got back from Florida, I disconnected the desktop computer in the basement because it had a Windows XP operating system.  Microsoft was no longer supporting Windows XP.  I had read that there were hackers waiting to attack the XP computers.

The old XP computer had a printer hooked to it that the other computers in the house could access through the home network.  So I decided to buy a new router with a USB port to hook up the printer to the router.  Then we wouldn’t have to bring our computers downstairs and hook them up to the printer directly if we wanted to print something.

I plugged the printer into the new router.  I made sure all of the computers in the house could access the printer.  I thought everything was good.  So I stacked the printer with paper before I went to bed.  The next morning while I was sleeping, Barb decided to use the printer.  She wanted to print one page.  When she went downstairs to get her page, the printer was printing the page over and over again.  She turned off the printer and turned it back on. It started printing the page again.  So she took all the paper out of the printer and it stopped because it ran out of paper.

When I got up, the first thing I had to do was figure out why the printer wouldn’t stop printing.  There was an obscure checkbox that needed to be clicked off on the setup screen of the printer.  When I clicked it off, the printer worked properly.

A few weeks later, Barb couldn’t access her live.ca email on her laptop.  She could access it on her iPod.  I couldn’t access her email on my laptop either.  I tried my hotmail account on her computer and didn’t have the problem.  So I thought it was something wrong with live.ca.  I tried to get help from Microsoft but they only support the hotmail accounts that you pay for. 

I phoned Rogers to see if they could help.  The first person I talked to couldn’t help me.  Then I got on a Rogers help desk chat line.  The lady took control of my computer.  She found the problem was the router.  When I hooked the computer directly to the Rogers box, I had no problem accessing live.ca.  Fortunately, I still had my old router and was able to hook it up again.  It worked fine for live.ca.

I tried to take the router back to the store where I bought it.  They wouldn’t believe me that the router could have a problem with just one website and not with any others.  They also said that my 30 day return policy had just run out and they wouldn’t refund my money. 

So I brought the router home.  I decided to try to hook it up again.  This time it had no trouble with live.ca.  But now I couldn’t seem to get the printer working through the router.  So we have the new router again but have to bring our computers downstairs and hook them up to the printer directly to print things out.  Maybe next year, I will try to get it all working properly with the new router.

Too Many Starbucks

I meet with my friend, Tony, for coffee about once a month.  We usually meet at a Starbucks on the corner of Hunt Club and Merivale in the parking lot of Rona.

When I arranged to meet with Tony this month, he said he would meet me at the Starbucks on Hunt Club in the Lowe’s parking lot.  I didn’t realize this wasn’t the same place we usually meet.

I drove to the old Starbucks at the right time and waited there for a half hour.  Tony didn’t show up.  So I walked around the parking lot to check that this was the right place.

Then I got in my car and was going to drive home.  Instead, I drove around the area to see if there was another Starbucks anywhere.  I drove around and around making U-turns all over the place; up and down Hunt Club and up and down Merivale. 

Finally, I drove further East down Hunt Club and found the Lowe’s with the Starbucks in the parking lot.  I couldn’t believe that there was another Starbucks so close to the other one that we used to go to.  Fortunately, Tony was still there and we had an abbreviated coffee.

Laura in Deep River

Laura likes to stay busy.  So I had made a number of plans for us.  One of the plans was to take her up to Deep River to see Sarah during the week that she was visiting.  Unfortunately there was some miscommunication and Sarah didn’t know we were coming.  Sarah was going out for dinner with her friends from the residence the night we came to visit.  They were saying goodbye to one of the guys who was leaving at the end of the term.  Sarah really didn’t have time for us.  But she invited us to dinner with all of her friends at a local Mexican restaurant.  Then after dinner, she played the good host and showed Laura around Deep River.

A couple of days later, Laura and I drove to Deep River again to pick up Sarah and bring her back to Ottawa for the weekend.  There was no need to drive to Deep River during the week.

Laura’s Passport Problem

Laura decided to go to New York for her birthday then visit us on the way back to Halifax.  

First, though, she had to find her passport.  She didn’t realize that she needed her passport until the last minute.  Then she couldn’t find it.  She had packed up all of her stuff.  A friend took all the stuff to a farm out of town and put in a storage shed.  Laura doesn’t have a car in Halifax.  So she had to get a ride to her friend’s house.  She and her friend’s boyfriend searched the shed, unpacking all of her stuff, throwing it around the shed.  They finally found the passport.  Then she had to rush to the airport to make her flight.

Laura had a complicated itinerary.  She flew from Halifax to New York where she stayed with a friend from NSCAD who had already graduated and was working as an artist in New York.  She stayed there for a few days. Then she took an overnight bus from New York to Ottawa and Barb picked her up at the bus station early in the morning.  She stayed with us for a week.  Then she went back to Halifax with a friend and her friend's boyfriend by car.  I dropped her off at her friend’s boyfriend’s mother’s house in Orleans on the night before she went back.