Good Morning! 41F @ 9:30AM. Some clouds this morning will give way to generally sunny skies for the afternoon. High 59F. Winds W at 10 to 20 mph.
Have been making a lot of calls the last few days setting up appointments with various tradesmen for the work needed on the parent's house. Hired a realtor Wednesday, she recommended an exterminator for the wasps (the photo is yesterday's kill, ugh, just killed another one, and there are five more buzzing round the mantle piece) and Asian beetles that are swarming inside, oh and the Asian cockroaches. They were here yesterday and pointed out the missing pieces of cedar siding on the north side of the house that are letting not only the bugs in, but also enough rain water to damage some of the drywall. The old boy that was living here wasn't keeping his promise on maintaining the place very well, and there's more water damage to the first floor subfloor as well. The asphalt driveway is in pretty rough shape as well, and those folks will be out for an estimate Monday or Tuesday next week. The septic folks'll be here today to pump what the old man proudly claims is almost 20 years of "accumulation". I do have a very reasonable quote to have the carpets cleaned, but that'll have to wait until after the house is empty. That's the one bright spot, as I spent a few hours with an auctioneer yesterday afternoon trying to get an idea of what could and could not be gotten rid of that way. It turns out he's very knowledgeable about art, coins, and guns, of which there seems to be a fair amount of here. I don't think it'll be enough to offset the needed repairs, but every little bit will help.
And speaking of the siding gaps, I was searching in the basement for some trash bags and came across some plastic grocery bags full of short ends for the cedar that was used as siding for the home. I'm hoping there'll be enough to make the repairs, and with snow due in tomorrow, it looks like I'll be spending some quality time up on a ladder today. Now if only I could find the ladder...
The other great news is that yesterday I finally got a working Internet connection for the laptop, so can easily type instead of using that ridiculous voice recognition robot on the iPhone. That was a real goat rope, with my old cell provider informing me that they don't allow tethering, and actively block it, and moving to another one called Straight Talk, who's people did anything but, promising tethering in the sales department then claiming it was not allowed when I contacted their off shore tech support to find out why it wouldn't work. In the middle there somewhere I stopped into a local Verizon store to see if they could help, and while they had plans that permitted tethering somehow they all required me to give them a Social Security number for a credit check. That's not info I readily give out, especially to phone company low life. But after the Straight Talk fiasco, I tried calling Verizon to see if I could get a different answer. There's no land line here, so my only phone was the same iPhone I'd be porting to their system. Their phone robots kept hanging up on me when I gave them the iPhone's number, claiming that I wasn't a Verizon customer and to call my own provider. Talk about being their own worst enemy! This, even on the sales phone line! But I eventually got through to a live person, who took my info (less SSN) and promised 24-48 hours to activation. By the next day there still was no transfer, to I called again and ran through another five or so people, each of whom performed one step of the transfer process while I was still on the line. When it got to the network person, he said that the phone number was still with my original provider, and had never been transferred to Straight Talk (this in spite of the $55 charge made against the ol' credit card), so that's another item for today's agenda. But after an hour and a half or so I finally got to hang up, and lo and behold the phone and the laptop work together and I can relate my boring stories once again to my TBN buddies.
Well that's enough catching up, and I'm glad to see a few new faces here and that everyone and their animal friends) are mostly doing well.
TGIF gang!
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