I rolled up the driveway about 1pm after dropping Shirley and Janet at their homes—I am exhausted! The retreat started on Wednesday at Medicine Flower Lodge in Red Lodge, MT and that extra day (we usually start retreat on Thursday) was marvelous!! I finished lots of projects—and am even caught up on my Winter Solstice block of the month project!!
Our quilt retreat group is just the best and the location for the retreat can’t be beat!
I am off to Billings tonight—spending the night as I have an early flight in the morning to Wisconsin. Will be back Wednesday night—may or may not blog—we will see. I’ve been offered a job—YIKES—a JOB!!! I am attending the company national sales meeting and meeting the people with whom I would be working—haven’t made up my mind whether or not to take the job!
The cowboy and little Emmi are all alone again and not happy about it!
My car rolled down the driveway bright and early Wednesday morning leaving the cowboy and Ms. Emmi to fend for themselves. You see, I am off to Red Lodge, MT and the Medicine Flower Lodge for a FOUR day quilt retreat—yes, four days!! I will try to post some photos of the beautiful creations which always seem to come out of these sewing sessions but I may be too busy having fun!
Michael and Nat went back to Billings today for routine dermatologist appointments—they will both looks as if they have chicken pox in the days to come!
Rick wanted to know which iPhone we got—the iPhone 5c. The deal Verizon was offering was a good one we thought, $20 for the phone and sign up for a two year contract. We stuck with a lower end data plan—unlimited talk and text with 2GB of data. As we only use the phone when we are in town or traveling to Billings/Bozeman/Livingston, we didn’t see the need for more data. We are still going to wait until the end of October to make any more decisions about data and internet providers.
Our aspen trees are golden right now, here’s a shot from our backyard:
See you all when I get back!
The cowboy and I celebrate our birthdays just one month apart—we won’t say how much older the cowboy is!! We met in August, 1994 and both celebrated our birthdays shortly thereafter—doesn’t seem that long ago!! Happy Birthday Michael, you make my life complete!
Last night we took a drive right about sunset and I caught the big moon rising:
Michael wanted to celebrate his birthday by taking a drive—off we went to Billings of all places—I think he also wanted a CJ’s hamburger for lunch!
-- Frederick A. Scheel, a German immigrant, opened his first store in Sabin, Minn., in 1902 and sold hardware and general merchandise.
-- Scheels is a privately held, employee-owned company with more than 4,500 associates.
-- Eight costumed sculptures of Scheels' favorite U.S. presidents will be displayed in the store.
-- The store will present a collection of bronze statues of athletes and outdoorsmen.
-- More than 300 taxidermy mounts will be featured.
The outdoor bronze sculptures were awesome—very, very well done!
Well readers, I succumbed! To Apple fever that is! I’ve never been an Apple fan—I despise iTunes—it’s one of the most user un-friendly applications I’ve ever tried to use. But with that said, I love my iPad for what it is—a gadget, a way to get on the internet quickly, and a place to read books using a Kindle app. Computer it is not and I can’t ever see myself having an Apple as my main computer. But I did buy an iPhone. I’m waiting for Verizon to “port” my cell number into the iPhone—seems if you are an “off brand” carrier user (Wal Mart Straight Talk) that process can take 24-48 hours!!!
We returned the Wilson booster and MiFi device today—the Verizon store was great, giving us a full refund for those devices as we could not get enough useable signal here at home. Check out Nina’s great post about the news from Verizon and AT&T. In the month of October both companies are offering SIGNIFICANT increases in the number of GB’s you can get for your dollar. Both companies claim this offer is only good for the month of October. We are going to wait until the end of the month to see if Millenicom jumps on the band wagon.
Millenicom works for us. As we can’t get a cellular signal here at home, we only use a mobile internet device about 4 months of each year. We’ve used a Novatel aircard and a 3G Store router with Millenicom for several years and it works—well! With Millenicom you can turn your service on and off at will—we turn it off when in Montana and back on when we travel. This used to be a free service but now it cost $20 to turn the service back on. Verizon is getting there—as they should be. We will see how this month shakes out with all the different carriers. Unless the cellular signal improves in our neck of the woods, we are sticking with our land line and DSL while in Montana.
A great day spent with my birthday husband!
Remember me saying I was a city girl, raised on a farm but sure didn’t want to go back there ever. Then I met the cowboy. When we first got married Michael was managing a large ranch east of Big Timber plus he had the place where we now live. Two places to cut hay plus he was also installing satellite dishes and doing a little excavating—busy!! So, he decides I need to learn to drive the hay swather.
Off we go for a lesson in this huge, massive, gigantic machine with a 12 foot cutter bar out in front. We had two swathers at the time and I think the cowboy gave me the worst one! 
I pushed the cowboy off the running board, climbed down and stomped off muttering something about, “you can cut your own *^%#$ hay!!!” Needless to say he persevered and I learned to cut hay, I spent many, many hours going round and round in the hay fields, growing to enjoy it.
Check out Angie’s blog tonight, she and Ralph visited the Little Bighorn National Battlefield on their way to Wyoming from our house.
This Christmas cactus belonged to Michael’s mother and after she died in 2000, LoraLee inherited this one. The plant came to live with me after LoraLee died and I think it’s a little confused about the season—kind of like Wal Mart and Costco???
Life is good!
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.
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