Sunshine, memories and other miscellany

The sun hasn't actually showed itself yet but the rain seems to be letting up. I've said 100 times that there's no good comes of looking at or listening to weather forecasts but I broke down and checked Accuweather and it looks promising. The trouble with weather forecasts is that, when you look at them, you either like what's coming or you don't. And then down the road it either does what the forecast said it would or it doesn't. No matter what the outcome, checking a forecast just increases the odds you are going to be disappointed either with the forecast, with the eventual outcome or with the correlation between the forecast and the outcome. Somebody once told me that there is a higher statistical correlation between subsequent day's weather than there is between the forecast weather and the actual weather. If that is true then you are further ahead to look at the sky and assume tomorrow will be similar. It that turns out to be the case then tomorrow will be gray and foreboding but not actually raining.

We've got about 5000 images on a memory card playing on our Sony picture frame. We've got another one that doesn't hold nearly as many images - maybe 3 or 400. That one gets tiresome because we recognize the pictures and can almost predict which one comes next. The Sony has enough that we still see segments that aren't familiar. Its set up on an endless loop so it keeps cycling through the card. Lately I've noticed myself watching it intently when pictures of Mother appear. Particularly when she was younger. I've got a lot of father's scanned slides on that card and the bulk of them come from the Shellbrook years when they were in their 40's, younger then than we are now. Its hard for children to remember that their parents were once younger than they presently are.

Life is a one way highway ending in the cemetary. At times I envy people of faith their certainty that there is something else beyond the cemetary but I don't share that faith and I don't envy the lack of critical thinking that gets too many of them to that point. We have made a conscious decision to enjoy this period of our lives to the fullest because neither one of us believes there is something better waiting for us and we believe it is important to grab as much life as possible while it is present. Slowly, inexorably we move toward the point where we will gather as an extended family, look around the room and realize that we are the "old ones". When we reach that point we intend to have our heads full of memories of places, people and adventures that will sustain us to whatever the end turns out to be.

I suppose this black train of thought has been driven by father and Anne's deterioration over the last couple of years. In father's case the deterioration has been slow but steady for 2 years now. Its hard to pin down time but I can clearly remember father striding down to the basement of Broadway Terrace in the fall of 2007 when we stopped there with Karla's parents. I can't remember exactly what he wanted us to take from the storeroom at that time but I clearly remember how he walked to get down there. In Anne's case it is a scant two years since Christmas 2006 when we took her to Regina with us. In both their cases the physical deterioration in that time has been extreme. In Anne's case the mental deterioration hasn't been nearly as dramatic but even that durable old brain is starting to let her down now.

This morning between rain squalls that knocked out our satellite service I ordered a Wilson cell antenna and booster. I'm not 100% sure how I am going to mount that once it arrives but I'll figure something out. Our cell antenna situation has been like a leaky roof - when we have cell coverage I didn't worry about improving it and when we didn't have cell coverage it was too late to fix the problem. I did try valiantly to fix it at Arcadia. I thought I was in luck - there was an actual vendor there - at least that's what he called himself - idiot would have been a more accurate description.

This guy had a little display set up with Wilson antenna advertising and something else - I can't remember what else he was trying to sell. I sincerely hope he was more successful selling whatever else it was because he will surely starve to death if he is depending on his Wilson sales to put food on the table. I spent about half an hour with this clown before eventually figuring out that I was dealing with a complete fool.

The last straw was when I asked him how I was going to hook my Blackberry up to the Wilson antenna that he was going to sell me. He said, "Oh they make an adapter cable for that." That made sense. Then he wanted to look at my Blackberry. I said "Its a Blackberry". Blank look. He needs to look at it. So he turns it over and peers at the back and the bottom and the sides of it and then announces that it is a Qualcomm 3G CDMA. Strange that, I always thought it was a Blackberry Curve. It does have Qualcomm printed on the battery cover but I'm guessing when he phoned his Wilson contact and told him what kind of phone I had the guy said "Huh?" It seemed completely beyond his understanding that the word "Blackberry" was in any way important so I'm betting he phoned his guy and gave him the Qualcomm name and nothing else.

I left the proposed sale in his court and he said he would get back to me. Either he couldn't find any information to get back to me with or he has a worse memory than the cat because we ended up spending time together at Jack & Paula's and he never brought the subject up again. For my part I had already decided I was dealing with an idiot and I wasn't about to go out of my way to give an obvious fool my money. Today I asked for and got a recommendation for an online vendor, placed the order and had it shipped to some friends in Arizona. If all goes well I'll figure out how to mount it while we are in Mexico. Or maybe we'll end up mounting the long awaited awning and the cell phone booster at the same time.