Tag Archives: older than dirt

Friday 7-12-2024

Good Housekeeping
Psychology Today – Shutterstock

Do you ever feel you’re being ignored?

There are two instances staring me in the face right now. I’ve been trying to resolve each of them for a couple of weeks or more, and I’m getting NO action. NO resolution of the problem. NO answers, even.

The one thing that I’ve gained from achieving the status of ‘older than dirt’ is that I don’t give up easily. I’m relentless. I don’t give up and I keep good records. EVENTUALLY good things happen, or at least I get some satisfaction.

Can you see me gritting my teeth and preparing to dive in once again?

Red Dirt Maui

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Thoughts on a Tuesday 6-11-2024

Wayfair.com

Things will hopefully be quiet around here today. We have some errands, but I’m hoping to spend a good amount of time in the yard weeding the flower planters today. We’re having a nice day, with sunshine, and the high temperature today only in the mid 80’s and kinder level of humidity. We have the doors open now, with a nice breeze coming through. :0)

___________

We had a demonstration yesterday of how we are, indeed, older than dirt. We went to meet our new insurance agent. We took a CD with information we needed added to one of our policies. Our agent was a nice man with a very appealing smile and good manner. When we gave him the CD, he looked flustered for a minute and then said he had no way to read what was on the CD. Technology has once again bypassed us. We have some thumb drives, but none large enough to handle all the data we have on a DVD of info and pics about house items in our safe deposit box. Thankfully, my SIL sent me a URL to data storage options, so we’ll research that and decide what we need to do.

Meanwhile, we came home, gathered the little bit of information we needed to give the new agent and emailed it to him. At least we were able to do that.

We realize that we’re no spring chickens, but it’s a bit demoralizing to be hit with how very OLD we’re getting when stuff like this hits us right in the nose…

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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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Older than Dirt

Commander Bill

My husband and I are being dragged – kicking and screaming – into the current century.

We like gadgets, but keep discovering we are living in the stone age on some things.

We had to replace our old land line phones because rats got under the house and ATE through the wiring. Since we didn’t want to crawl around under there trying to replace all the wiring, and couldn’t find anyone willing to do it for us, we bought essentially a cell phone on a base to replace our system. We’ve used that for a long time, adding an answering machine that we liked better than the one provided,  and then my husband designed a call screening program that had callers pressing 1 “if they were a real person and weren’t selling anything” in order for the phone to ring here.

This got wonky, not recognizing callers we had put on our list, and hanging up on people after they pressed 1. We’ve been living with NO caller screening for awhile, and I’ve been going nuts.

We got a new phone system yesterday and my husband and son set it up. We’ve ordered two more phones and charging bases so we can have phones everywhere we would like them. I managed to ANSWER my phone last night, patting myself on the head. This morning I actually manged to MAKE a call, after fumbling around awhile. My husband has just finished creating a directory.

We have gotten several reminders that the rest of the world has gone on past us, while we stayed in our cocoon –

  • We installed a geothermal heat and air system several years ago. Our thermostats have been misbehaving and we were having trouble getting them set correctly. The guy who checks our system out twice a year tactfully suggested that since our thermostats were older than he was (he didn’t say that) maybe we should get ones that were made to work with geothermal, which doesn’t need ’emergency heat.. He helped us decide which ones to get and installed them for us. We’re now doing fine, able to control the temperatures in our house just fine for the most efficiency.
  • We have actually donated several items that were causing havoc and tension around here, rather than ‘helping’ us or making our lives simpler. :0)
  • We were even reminded how old we are when we got a Synology – a device that allows us to record our DVD collection, making them available to play on our television and get rid of the physical DVDs. I looked each of them up on Amazon with the idea of selling them. I had DVDs that had the same cover picture – and many were Blu-rays, but the production date on ours was so old Amazon sneered at us and wouldn’t allow me to list them. We ended up listing the ones that were ‘acceptable’ and giving 217 DVDs to the local library for their next fundraising sale…

We may be older than dirt, but we’re still able to kick and scream as we’re forced to enter the current century!

 

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Filed under Are YOU also older than Dirt?, Attitude, Challenges, Changes