Now I know Where I Am

Two days it took to install the GPS unit for the phone! Never as easy as the advertisements say. Of course this is not a use exactly intended by Verizon which would rather sell its $10.00 per month subscription, so they locked the handset. There are some smart people out there, though. Three different pieces of (free) software and re-writing some registry keys in Windows got me to where it would initialize but not lock on to 32 satellites by yesterday evening. Tech service where I bought the GPS ( the unit is about the size of two BIC lighters) thought I needed to upgrade the software on the phone. That required backing everything up and reinstalling everything. The second go-round on the GPS installation was much easier than the first. The feeling when I opened Google maps and selected tracking and saw the thing take off was priceless. It is a fairly rudimentary GPS program and will be mostly used for checking rather than continuous routing like the Garmin but it is functional and subscription-free. The receiver is very sensitive-it will work in the house-but I kind of know where I am already when I am in the house.

Overcast days and about a half an inch of rain this evening. Rich said Casper got a cloudburst just after the band concert tonight. The corn and the alfalfa are doing great but the barley crops in the neighborhood are problematic. They went from golden to dun.

Spoke to Mrs. Hall today. Don, son Greg, and Cade (her granddaughter) are there in West Virginia for the family reunion. They fly home Monday. This means the summer is over and school is open for staff. Where did the summer go? She said her son Steve, who lives in Minneapolis and drives the I-35 W bridge that collapsed yesterday is safe. My (our) West Virginia buddies are planning early arrivals in Florida. Jayne wants to be gone at the same time the leaves fall on Wingrove Hill. Howard and Mary Lou are going down in November. We will have to see if a stop-by on the trip down is workable.

The Fremont County Fair is drawing them in. It scares me to see who some of "them" are. It is disconcerting when you catch of glimpse of "God's Plan" and it is nowhere you ever imagined.