It’s Hard To Know What To Do

The last blog I wrote was on Tuesday—a quilt-y blog.  On Monday I mentioned Nat had been under the weather—well things went from being under the weather to being in the hospital.  He has spent a couple nights in the little clinic based hospital in Big Timber under the care of an awesome nurse practitioner, Hannah.  I spent the day in town with Nat and spent some time giving his house a good cleaning—I left the clinic about 5:30pm and wouldn’t you know it, I left right before Hannah walked in the room.

But, Hannah did call us at home and her plans are to discharge Nat tomorrow morning.  Nat is 92 years old and very independent.  He is not one to ask for help, he doesn’t want to bother anyone.  It’s probably past the time he should be living alone but he is sharp as a tack, can still drive and makes his own decisions—so what do you do—at this point in time, it isn’t our decision to make. 

Yesterday we were in Billings all day—I had my yearly stuff, mammogram, etc. and the cowboy had a yearly checkup with his internist who told him, “you are way too healthy to be seeing me—I can’t help you!”  

We enjoyed a delicious lunch at CJ’s and made for us, a minor run to Costco.  Then we made a mistake—we stopped at a Verizon store—good grief!!  Our intent was to purchase a MiFi device, perhaps a booster and maybe a phone—all to see if Michael could boost enough signal into our home so we could rid ourselves of our land line.  We live miles and miles and miles from a cell phone tower but sometimes we can get one bar of signal inside the house—not enough to make a call but maybe enough to boost and make a call.  We can go up into our hay field above the house—often referred to by our friends as the phone booth—and make calls. 

In the state of Montana a law was passed many years ago allowing individuals to “freeze” their credit to prevent identity theft.  We completed the appropriate paperwork and “froze” our credit seven years ago.  No one can access our credit to open any new accounts, not even us.  To release the freeze we must call one of the three credit bureaus such as Equifax, provide a pin number and confirm our identity using various methods of identification.  The charge to unfreeze your credit is $3 and the freeze can be lifted for a specific time frame such as 24 hours or two weeks, etc.  For people who aren’t opening new accounts all the time or trying to obtain mortgages, it works and works well!

Well—we had service with Verizon for probably 10+ years before we went to a Wal Mart Straight Talk phone—you would think they could access our previous account, see that we were good paying customers and go from there.  Nope, not happening so we had to lift the credit freeze.  The young man helping us was good but some glitch in Verizon’s computer was telling him our credit was still frozen.  Well, the third person I got at Equifax said, “Janna, this is NOT your problem, your credit is unfrozen, this is Verizon’s problem, they have a computer issue.”  When I told the young man I was leaving unless he got us out of there pronto—we had been in the store for over 2 hours—he finally managed to find someone in the Verizon world who could resolve the issue.

Unfortunately the cowboy had no success with getting a useable signal into our house so with the 14 day return policy, we will return all the pieces to Verizon soon.  Bummer!!

A chilly, breezy nasty day!  Coming up the Boulder tonight I had to stop and take this photo—a gorgeous scene.