Going Nuts!

This gosh awful lack of reliable communicating is driving me nuts!  15 years and no problems and all of a sudden nothing works as it should.  Today my phone calls said “cannot be completed as dialed.”  Everyone’s phone isn’t a viable number?  Off to park under the tower to do what we needed!  I may be home sooner than planned.

A friend had her hip replaced and needed a companion to sit with her while her daughter took her father to the dementia doctor.  I volunteered and spent a few hours visiting with her.  The next day I played Yahtzee again with Sue and Kathy, the widow across the street who is starting to show signs of dementia.  We can help her decide how to play her dice throws and she can add her score which I find remarkable.  My corporal works of mercy for this week.   

Thursday was ladies’ breakfast again.  Sharon has been driving me and Marisa each week.  Marisa does not drive and with only one car here, I don’t have to coordinate availability with Ted.  He usually keeps Thursday morning free but so far our breakfast threesome has done fine.  There was quite a crowd today!    

There was no card bingo this week, it will be on Saturday.  Next week we have an invitation to a shooter pal’s home for a cook out and our field trip to Boca Chico is coming up.  The best part of leaving this immediate area is we can get our phone to download all kinds of things hanging out there in space!

Friday night was pizza at the Pizzeria again. Niles is taking chemo so when he says he wants something to eat, we all go along with it. 

Saturday we attended Mass again with Bill and Ornell. They are enjoying Fr. Roy!  We went to 492 BBQ, just awarded restaurant award for cleanest restaurant and best ribs, then played card bingo. Ted up once. me up once, Ornell twice - but no luck!

The excitement yesterday was a transformer blew right before the Bengals game!  It was hot so Ted started up the generator so we had AC and TV until it was fixed.  Do not mention #58 of the Bengals please!  What a way to lose a game!  

This morning I made a chocolate eclair cake for our cook out this afternoon over in Alamo. 

A couple are coming tomorrow from Brownsville to look at the motorhome tomorrow.  They said afternoon. I will go ahead and play mahjong and let Ted be the salesman!  

Cindy and Tim are leaving for Aruba on Wednesday but my Valentine to Karen arrived in time for them to take it to the home for her before leaving.  They have to hide it from her or she would eat it all at once. The nurses give her a piece at a time. 

Living With Spotty Communications

We spent an inordinate amount of time to learn Verizon knows their tower is faulty and have no intention of doing anything about it.  T Mobile was upfront and said our address was listed as no internet service and ATT swore we would be good.  So we bought a prepaid hotspot from Walmart, loaded 15 gigs on it.  It was ok, not a lot to write home about though.  And in 5 days we were out of gigs!  I tried the website they gave us to load more time, and the ATT.com/prepaid did not work.  So off we went again.  To make a long story short, they swore we could not have used that much bandwidth unless we were streaming.  All we did was check our emails.  They finally wrote a note to Walmart to take back the hotspot because it did not work!  So we spent $100 and retrieved $50 of it.  And we are back to Verizon and most of the time I can’t get on the internet.  Messages is the most reliable communication so I have no idea what is going out and what isn’t without paying very close attention.  However, Jay called me when I was in Mexico and it worked fine on Mexican T Cell and Rafi our neighbor butt dialed me from Israel at 5 am and it came through.  But I can’t call Sue down the street!  

Tuesday we bought tickets for a tour of Space X in Boca Chica at South Padre Island, it is the launching area for Leon Musk’s Space launches.  I think it will be interesting.  I played mahjong and won a game.  Wednesday we met up with the Newmar owners group for lunch and stopped at Macy’s to shop a bit.  Sue and I joined Kathy (new widow with dementia) for a game of Yahtzee.  It is a game we can assist her with and she did ok.  Thursday we got a bite to eat before I got a haircut and we played Card Bingo next door at Bentsen Palms.  We didn’t win, didn’t even get close.  Friday was shooting and mahjong.  In the meantime we made arrangements with Steve next door to use his Wi-Fi in a pinch and also gave his phone numbers to our kids to use in an emergency if it becomes evident we are not getting the message and not responding, 

Everything is going fine not withstanding the dead body found in the river at the foot of our street.  We have not heard any particulars.  We were totally unaware until the people at the Newmar lunch asked what was going on at our end of the road.  We had to ask around to find out.

Here is a sunset as we came home one early evening.  We have been here two weeks and most nights our sunsets are spectacular.  

All my days are running together, broken up only by our quest for good communications.  We went to church/dinner/Neil Diamond legend show on Saturday.  We ran into Boomer friends from home at church and went for burgers with them plus Jay and Stella on Sunday.  The Expo was this week and we went one afternoon.  Boy can you see the recession in play there.  Even H‑E‑B known for their generous coupon books were not passing any out.  That evening we went with those same folks to Margarita Wednesday and stayed pretty late.  

Thursday was busy!  Breakfast with the ladies in the morning, a drive to Edinburgh for a funeral visitation for Rafi’s (our next door neighbor at home) house sitter’s mother.  Marina is a dear and we pick up the slack when she travels which is frequently.  She is going to stay in this area to take her father to Texas Oncology for treatment so Rafi asked us to have Nancy get the house key, the mailbox key and the current collected mail together for another friend who is stepping in!  Whew!  A quick stop at McDonald’s and on to card bingo.  I got down to one card twice but Bingo was called on the next card both times.

Friday was back to mahjong and I won a closed hand!  The highlight of the day!

We learned something Saturday.  Progresso, MX is crowded!  The lines looked as if the Americans were invading the Mexican border!  We had to stand in line to get in and out!  We bought Ted’s eye drops, back analgesic cream, some antibiotics, vanilla, etc.  We had a cinnamon roll at Renee’s while the mariachis entertained.

We went to church with Bill and Ornell, ate dinner at a Mexican restaurant and then saw a yodeling cowgirl show.  She has some voice!  

Sunday was mahjong and I won 3 games … first time ever.  I had stuff out for dinner but Sue called after dropping me off and said Niles wanted to go for pizza so we agreed. Bonnie joined us and we got caught up some since she just returned from vacation.

An Entire Week Searching For Phone and Internet Service

Not having communication service is frustrating as h*ll when you are used to having it at your fingertips! Verizon was useless in communicating with us and basically said they were not going to address it again.  From the Verizon folks here in Retama, there is an outage on the tower a mile from us and it has been for months!  Most everyone had to address it.  If you have Wi-Fi in your house, Verizon gave you a net extender so you could have calls over Wi-Fi.  Our motorhome does not have Wi-Fi, my Verizon phone Hot Spot was our internet.  So we tried T Mobile.  A friend came over with her T Mobile phone but only had one bar.  I checked their coverage and our address had no coverage it said.  So we tried ATT and they assured us their mobile hot spot would work.  And so far we have been ok.  What are the odds Verizon will give me credit for “no service” to pay for my ATT service?  Slim and none!  We spent an inordinate amount of time this week on that problem.  

Ted, Sue and I made a trip to Mexico and was it crowded!  Sue and I hit the pharmacies while we waited for Ted.  We will make several more trips over in the next 3 months!  I love lonches and no Mexican restaurant I have found in Houston makes them.  So a stop for lunch and also a cinnamon roll and coffee, with mariachi trio, at Renee’s is still on the back burner.

I played mahjong but didn’t win any games.  Ted went shooting in Edinburgh again and our crowd met for dinner at Southern Fried.  Best catfish ever!  So week one has been pretty routine except for the communication part!  Let’s hope ATT keeps working!  

Saturday we attended Mass with good old Fr. Roy.  Since it was the Epiphany I knew the three wise men would arrive complete with Philomena the llama serving as a camel!  And they did!  In the first photo if you look next to the brown head cover, the two white ears are the llama’s.  Once she bolted and jumped 5 pews.  

We were given a gold coin (chocolate wrapped in gold foil) from the wise men when we left.  

We had dinner out and went to a Branson show at Lemon Tree Park to see Goldwing Express.  $9 a ticket and I won a free appetizer at one steakhouse, a dessert at another and a free entree at Cowboy Chicken!  Three places to eat on Saturday nights!

Ted went to shoot on Sunday and no one was there, possibly because there was a tournament the day before.  I went to play mahjong and won two games, one of which was a closed hand!  So proud of myself!  

Rough Ending to 2022

Thursday we took some things to the motorhome and I couldn’t get the freezer drawer open.  With the slides in it was hard to get a tight grip but it felt like it was jammed.  Once we moved it to the park Ted was able to pull it and the glides had gotten “yucky” and were just sticking so Ted used WD40 on them and all is ok now.  These rigs just sitting is not good for them.  

Our microwave handle at home had pulled out at the bottom a good while back.  We glued it and it held until Patrick pulled on it at the bottom versus the top which we had trained ourselves to do and it pulled out again.  No time to do anything about it so we reglued it and will deal with getting a new one installed in March.  It has seen 20 years of service.  Same for the toilet seat that cracked and the washer that gave out on the last load of linens after 25 years of service not to mention hundreds of miles in being moved from Florida to Texas and in and out of storage.  We took the sopping wet sheets and towels to the motorhome where I spun the water out and then we took them home to dry.  One load at home = three in the motorhome dryer.  

So we finally thought all was good.  Decorations put away, motorhome packed up except for the refrigerator and freezer items and then my phone, email, texts and messages went berserk!    Someone was asking about doing a favor for them with my Amazon account.  I have learned many recognized the current scam, some had their filter stop it and everyone else tried to reach me while I was frantically trying to work with Xfinity 

Somewhere in your email set up is a place to have emails forwarded automatically.  Someone was able to put l04donnarae@hotmail in that spot.  Be sure to check yours!  I didn’t even know there was such a feature.  With emails, they were able to use my address book using my real address.  If you got a hotmail one, notice the first letter is a lower case “el” not the number one and of course hotmail was wrong.  Then I had to change my password but was unable to send or receive mail.  Turns out the Xfinity guy used the letter “el” instead of the “one” on his end so I was not being recognized and we wasted a lot of time.  I think it is good for now, at least let’s hope so.

We finally went to church in what we wore all day.  We sat in the back hoping no one took notice of us.  We went back home, did the last of our checklist and went to the new Chik Fil A that we found out is drive thru or eat outside only.  So we took our meals home.  Ted watched Ohio State football, I turned on the bedroom TV and instantly went to sleep.  I assume 2023 arrived with no fanfare from me.  Hopefully we would take off on time in the morning and have an uneventful trip to Mission.  

We left Sunday morning in a heavy fog but traffic was light and after two fuel stops and one pit stop, we arrived at Retama about 4:00.  Steve and Patty next door said we arrived right on time to share a prime rib dinner with them, Steve and Marisa. What a welcome invitation that was!  And delicious.  We got set up and I turned in early.  

The next day was spent mostly on the phone with Verizon because service here is almost non-existent!  We have never had this problem.  With the problems I had with my Xfinity security I really needed to be able to keep close watch on things.  There is a “ticket” out on an outage at our tower.  Let’s hope that gets fixed!  

Steve couldn’t find where to turn our water on and determined Ted had to cut down bushes (really small tress) in the storage area to access “whatever” and also clear it to get the garbage can in and out.  

I guess last year’s renter didn’t take care of things like we try to do.  But we were thankful, as was the owner, to get a new renter immediately when we couldn’t come.

Niles called and told us to meet the group at the Pizzaria at 5:45 and we did.  It took two tables so I didn’t get to talk to Karen. She Messaged me the next day to set up a lunch next week so we can catch up.  

Tuesday Ted went shooting and in the afternoon I played mahjong.  I won the second game and was one tile away from winning a “closed” hand (you are not allowed to pick up discards).  It was 3 tiles away when someone else won.  

We had bean soup I made from our Christmas ham for dinner and called it a day.  No plans for Wednesday but a Thursday trip over to Mexico is set up.  We will make dental appointments for cleaning, Ted will get his pedicure he won’t get in the US and I will start scouting med prices for now.  We are off and running!