Thanksgiving and Friday

Thanksgiving dinner around here was in the form of the Old Country Buffet over at the Superstition Mall complex...  This is where the Fuddruckers hamburger place and the Jeep dealership are located...  Of course there are hundreds of businesses in this area and on the Mall grounds..

They had Steak, Ham, Turkey and Prime rib....  With all the trimmings...  They added dressing and cranberry sauce to the rest of the normal spread...   Pumpkin pie and apple pie were in abundant supply along with the ever present soft serve ice milk machine....

I was in line by 11:15, and had to wait for 30 minutes to get to the desk to purchase a table ticket...  It was about then that they announced that the restaurant was completely full... I and another gentleman teamed up to become a party of two, when a table for two was announced..  Most other groups were much larger, so we slipped in from behind passing about 30 folks all at once..

This fellow turned out to be a mine worker from one of the mines South and East of here..  He seemed to be very mechanical, and I wondered if he was a repair worker.. But he never did offer to much about his job, or why he was alone at the restaurant...  We got along just the same for the duration of our meal, mostly talking about the food and the other folks in the restaurant.

Later in the day, I was back out on the motorcycle on my favorite trip South of the city here...  It never becomes completely rural or desert, but rather an intersperse of all of the above...  I rode thru Queen Creek and then East to Ironwood Crossing...  Some of it at highway speeds, but mostly it is about 45 mph.  Traffic on Thanksgiving was medium to light..  But most of all it was 74 degrees and very pleasant....

The weather man on the 6 PM news reported that we had the warmest and nicest weather in all of the country...  And from the looks of the temperature map, that appeared to be correct...

On black Friday, I was waiting for the Hawkeye football game in the late morning...  I was surprised to find that the game was carried on ABC as a national game..  This increased the coverage of the team exponentially.  

I get so nervous watching these games, I had to continue on my project of writing thank you notes from the funeral.....  Letting the game run in the other room and only checking in on it now and then...  And before anyone wonders, I haven't been able to dig thru the funeral stuff and cards without having grief overwhelm me...

So ever so slowly, I have made a list of the folks that needed to be sent thank you notes...  But today is the first time that I could actually write them without a loss of composure...  I was kind of dual tasking listening to the game and addressing envelopes at the same time...

And while that was happening, my Hawkeyes overwhelmed the Nebraska Cornhuskers.... They stepped away from the start and never looked back.  That makes the team 8 and 4 for the year and should get them a good bowl bid...  Its fun when your school does well....

There was not a bit of black Friday shopping at this address...  I stayed home for the rest of the afternoon once the notes were posted late in the day...

Retired Rod

Happy Thanksgiving!!

What do I have to be Happy For????

Everything!!!!!!    And mostly the wonderful 45 years I was allowed to have with Loyce....

May your day be great in every way....

Retired Rod

Computer fun

I rode the Goldwing out to Saguaro Lake yesterday while the sun was out wall to wall...  Not a cloud in the ski...  As usual, my phone that doesn't take pictures was stalled out in my pocket....

Lately it has been taking photos again.....  I used it the other night at the Eddie Diamond concert to take both the still shot and the video of the too loud music...   And then when I pressed the off button it crashed and said it wasn't working...

Going back to the gallery though proved that the video was there....  The next day was when I updated this computer to W8.1 and I had a dickens of a time getting the stuff off of the phone...  Then when I went to store the You Tube Video I found that the blogger upload didn't work on their client under W8.1...

Next I had to download live writer, which doesn't like w8.1 too well either...   Windows live is now older software as well, and I wonder how long that will be supported...  But once I made a new account on You Tube under my real name and uploaded the 30 second video, I succeeded at running live writer, and finally made the blog posting it...  That took most of Sunday afternoon...

It would seem that 8.1 is yet a further step away from the older and more compatible windows of old..  And also Skype didn't work either...  Rick made a comment to get Skype for 8.1, but I couldn't get the old version to uninstall...  It was their companion program Click to Call that wouldn't go away...

Finally I had to completely remove Chrome and old Skype, then repair Click to Call and then remove it..  What a mess...!  Click to call is an extension that resides in Chrome and somehow was messed up on this old HP machine..

So with a clean install of Chrome and Skype................... it still didn't work!!  I threw my hands up in despair.....

So later that night, I was sitting here watching TV and suddenly out of the clear blue, I hear the computer make that tell tale sound that means skype has logged on.....  WHAT?

And yes you guessed it, it was there and running.....

By now I was completely out of monthly gigs on the verizon mifi...  Today starts another month on that...

So see why I was out riding that motorcycle on the sunny 71 degree afternoon up in the desert... Sometimes one has had about enough of the computer for one day...

Retired Rod

Windows 8.1

Moving on to Windows 8.1....  This was 3.6 gig to down load...  Since I only have 4 gig for the entire month on the verizon mifi, something different had to happen.....

So I found an open wifi...  And looked at it to see if it was unlimited access....  And yes the router was connected to the local cable company...  So I connected and downloaded our really big file...  It took quite a while but it was a done deal after a while....

So now I have my smaller HP up and running on W 8.1....  But all is not well...  Seems as though Skype doesn't like the new operating system....  It just crashes...  Says it is trying to resolve the problem...  But then goes away and doesn't come back...

And I use the blogger interface to write the blogs...  Never did like the MS Live Writer program, found it too involved..  The blogger client doesn't like W8.1 much though..  It seems to get along on text ok, but if you try to add a picture or a video....  You just get a blank screen..

I haven't decided why that is yet either...

And then when I was reading Rick's blog tonight, it didn't like the fact that he was using google + for his comment format...  It just wasn't there....  I messed and messed with that one, and just a mysteriously as it was gone, it came back and started to work...

So while I didn't have a bit of trouble downloading or installing the W8.1 programs, on my 18 month old HP, a number of the features that normally used to work, seem to be gone...  This computer started life as a W7 machine, so perhaps changing it over twice might be an issue....

Who knows..

Retired Rod