Arrrgh!

Sonia Figueroa

I’m feeling older than dirt after our morning errands.

• First, we drove to Fort Smith to give a donation to the Disabled Veterans Thrift Store. They are always very nice, but the man today was looking at the fake Christmas tree, clearly puzzled. He said he had never seen a tree like this one. (It’s in two pieces, the top pole fitting into the bottom pole, and both fitting into the larger pole in the base my husband made.) He asked if WE had made this tree by hand! I told him we had bought it years ago. Then he was amazed that it was in such good shape, which got my nose back in joint a little bit….
• We stopped at the AT&T store when we got back to Greenwood. My husband decided, all of a sudden, that he wanted me to upgrade to an iPhone from the android ones we both had. I was happy, because I wanted to do this years ago and he was adamant he didn’t want to do it. What changed his mind was that he found something on the net saying if you pushed two buttons on the android phone simultaneously, a message would pop up, asking you where you wanted to send the photo you just took. He tried it. It didn’t work. So, he finally decided “I” should upgrade. We went for a two-year contract on an iPhone 8 – not the newest model, but more affordable. I now have a pretty new phone. No manual came with it, so the nice girl – who said, “Wow. You’ve really had this phone a LONG time, haven’t you?” was nice enough to transfer my contacts from the old phone to the new and get me signed up. I very graciously did NOT bite her in the leg for insulting me via insulting my OLD phone….

Now we’ve ordered a manual for it on the net. I’ve just spent quite awhile figuring out how to get the main screen to show. I also found the texting app and the make a call app. This was such a delight that I took a break and peeled, de-veined, and cooked the shrimp for our dinner tonight to rest up for the next ‘figure-out’ session…

• I guess being shown that you’re older than dirt is one of the many perks of living this long. We’ve endured exclamations about our thermostats – and have now changed them out for the latest that is good with our geothermal heating and cooling system. We have a security system for the house now and have managed to set it off erroneously only once since we’ve had it, managing to enter the code before police/fire/ambulance, etc. descending upon us. We have a new phone system that actually screens our calls pretty well, allows people who follow the directions to leave a message, etc.
• One of the latest assaults on our advancing age was when I was trying to list our DVD collection on Amazon for resale. They are quite specific on what is acceptable and what is not – particularly on DVDs, rather than books – requiring not only that the picture match, you indicate regular or Blu-ray, etc., and ALSO that your DVD is not considered too old. We matched on all but the copyright year, and Amazon wouldn’t list it. I guess the different copyright dates might indicate a different format. We ended up listing the ones that were ‘acceptable’ and giving the rest to the local library for their next fundraiser.

Otherwise, except for being shown time after time that we are OLD, we’re doing quite well, thank you!

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