Kaimusailing

The saga continues. The lovely cell phone has been kicked around by Straight Talk and now
T-mobile. The hours and hours of having “experts” reduce the phone to a whimpering nonentity ended with finally getting a T-mobile plan with a temporary number (until we can port over your old number) and the phone responding like a returning war veteran who has lost some of his abilities. A lot of my photos are gone, although I saved them. My old phone number is now just a memory, and the task at hand is to port it over from Straight Talk, who are not just incompetent, but dangerous. They had me do a factory data reset, you will loose all your personal data, sorry, but we must do it. That eliminated any phoneness the phone had, it was now a sophisticated device that worked well with an internet connection, but my phone provider just blew the phone part away. Factory data reset wipes out things like passwords, account #’s, and makes it nearly impossible to get back to square one.
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Straight Talk was bought out by Verizon who then offered free SIM cards and sent me one in the mail. The phone had been working fine, brilliantly fine, and it was on T-mobile’s network of towers, etc. Of course when I tried to activate the new SIM provided by Straight Talk’s new owner, Verizon, it didn’t work. It’s a T-mobile phone, idiot, it won’t work with Verizon’s SIM. But I went to Straight Talk’s support site and spent two days with “experts”. They didn’t get the hint, they ended up doing a lot of nothing, try this, try that. I guess we have to do a factory reset. Wrong, that was a bad move. I could no longer use the phone as a phone. The internet functions worked very well, if I had internet, good internet. They all gave up, maybe you should get a new phone. So, I have to give up a Galaxy S20+ for an S21+, at $999. Or just get an ordinary phone for only a hundred bucks or so.
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The morning after calling Hawaii and my older brother who seems to be doing OK after a heart attack, I tackled the last remaining (or so I think) phone hurdle. I needed to get my old phone number ported to the phone. This required conversing with someone at Straight Talk’s number porting unit, which requires going through all the same delays, requests for information already given out a million times, is it really me?, we’re not sure of your identity, plus, the voice on the line was rapid, almost a joke, no, this can’t be real, talking so fast with an accent, no less, please talk slower, no, they are doing it on purpose. When you are leaving and no longer paying, they won’t do squat, plus they relish making whatever you want almost impossible to get. But I survived that, then had to work with my new antagonists, T-mobile, to actually get the number ported. You have to go to the dark side, work with them, which is almost impossible, then come back and pretend you’re not affected, work with your new providers, and the same requests for information come at you. Then a request for my password that I used eons ago. Is it 4 digit? Yes. Could it be ****? Yes, that is correct. We have confirmation that your request to port your number has been accepted. I guessed at the password.
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My phone was missing some recent photos, but had a bunch of older ones. I had tried recovering as many as I could. Eve texted me, I had given her my temporary (I hope) phone number, and asked how the phone situation was going. She had dropped her old phone, cracked it, and bought a very nice Galaxy S2* FE, showing it off recently, paying for it by the month, not too bad of an arrangement. Plus others had suggested to me, just get a new phone, why are you struggling so? I had already complimented her on her phone purchase several times, and now I said things were finally getting to where I could have my old phone number back, but I couldn’t find recent pictures of her puppies. And while texting her I landed on Google photos, that’s where they ended up. There was a photo of her with her hand up to block the shot, and it did, but off to one side was her face. Her hand filled the screen, but it didn’t blot her face out. I sent it to her, guess I found the photos, terrible photo she replied. Love endures without mercy.
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The dull gray sky slowly encroaches from the North and West. I know better than to fight the elements. I had been annoyed by music that I had saved, but had been badly recorded. In a play list of 148, it’s hard to single out the bad recordings, but after a week and a half of phone training I could sit and parse through the songs, not listening to the whole song, but listening to 5 or 6 parts of the song, making notes of the offenders, and also listening for a song I yearned to know the details, who, when, well mainly who. That song wasn’t in the 148, but the offenders were sent to trash. Then I had a much larger task, to do the same thing with a whole bunch of New Age music. Instead I chose to call it a day, listen, and if a bad song crops up, deals with it, otherwise enjoy the music you don’t hear anymore, not even in elevators.
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I’m afraid to erase or throw out any numbers I’ve recorded.
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I wanted to text something to Cornelia Marie, but I won’t, I’ll just write it here. If she reads the blog she’ll get it, but no one else will. “Please text to Eve, Andy can’t make it, give the Trade Routes lecture.”
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Ah, the Trade Routes lecture. But I digress.
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We were playing with the bluetooth speaker and a song jumped out at me and I had to find out who sang it. The recurring theme was “a new day for you”, and bingo, the singer is a Polish lady whose professional name is Basia. I had actually met a Polish lady named Basia who looked a lot like the one I saw online, on wikipedia. But it couldn’t have been. We did some things together and ended up in Alexandria, Virginia, on New Year’s Eve. The fireworks went off and I kissed her. She was flustered. We were actually house sitting together with a third person even weirder than us. I didn’t know she was a singer and songwriter.
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I have a lot of various music on the laptop and it’s hard to sift through the gigabytes of music to find one thing or another. Using linux operating system gives me free software like Rhythm Box. It kind of makes a data base with music like Calibre makes a database out of books. So, you can search a database and actually find everything, such as everything from the artist Basia. I ended up with 6 songs that I could play through my recently purchased bluetooth speaker. Don’t get flustered when someone kisses you, they might be a fan.
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I have to report on Flowmax. My doctor thought it might kill 3 birds with one stone, kind of a beneficial drug for an old geezer. It is supposed to shrink the prostate and associated tissues, it typically lowers blood pressure by about 10 points, and it helps shrink swelling due to edema. I really don’t see any of these as long term effects. There is a period of lower blood pressure, but our bodies want to maintain a stasis, whatever that is, so anything that actively affects bloodpressure will be counteracted by stasis, the body will go back to where it was, in spite of the drug. So I don’t see long lasting effects. I don’t see any harm, but I will not renew the prescription. Plus I have no renewals anyway.
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As long as I am writing, I may as well continue. I’ve battened down the hatches for a big storm, but the gray clouds to the West have surrendered to higher clouds, I think they say alto-. I know it’s going to hit us, maybe later than sooner.
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A song called Kelper sounds like cell phone sounds. I was looking around, where could this be coming from. Not a song. How awful. They called it techno back then. I suppose I might create in the same way, but you never know. Cliche after cliché. Not from a bad local station, from my laptop. Good bass, sounds like a nautical warning in the background. The bluetooth speaker is too bassy, but that’s how it’s advertised.
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*EDITOR, the writer has passed out and needs CPR from that redhead in the EMT truck, no, not him, the other one.
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The blog is not real time, so I could get away with that, unfortunately.
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Part of zen is being like an animal, like a cat who’s dozing, but if something moves, that cat isn’t dozing at all. What am I missing?
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Said thunderstorm is caught in traffic. Kebler came on again, so soon. I don’t like music to get too mathematical, although it intrinsically is. You have the Pachabel.
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Said thunderstorm hits with a vengeance. I was experimenting with fly traps, one with yeast and honey, one with an internet recommended mixture of vinegar, sugar, and aromatic dish detergent, and one with the liquid drained off contents of a can of tuna. Oily, fishy, and probably perfect for the flies to come and get. They could get in, but they could not get out. Of course the thunderstorm and gusts put us over a bit, and the one fly trap experiment you don’t want falling down, spreading its contents, is the tuna juice one, and that was the one that went over. I got it up, did not overturn, put it in the galley sink, well supported. I guess I would be out in this if I went out on the bike.
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Still real time, in the middle of a storm, rain, wind, the music is something called Mystery, by a group called Lorellei. I listened to this new age music all night and slept well. In the morning Eve texted want to go to Pocomoke, not code for something else, not a song title, Pocomoke is the nearest town with Walmart, Tractor Supply, etc. I needed propane for Pizza Night and a few other odds and ends. She wanted to post a new Puppy for Sale flyer. Now there were only 3 pups unspoken for. They are identified by the color of their collars, pink, brown, and my favorite, blue. I edited the old puppy flyer and added new photos that Eve took with her Galaxy S21 FE. I sent her the new flyer to print out if she approved.
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The image of of the blue collar labrador.