The calm before the storm

This week is literally the calm before the storm... It's about to be rainy season, something that officially begins late June-early July, but overnight we have been having the promise of rain, I've heard a few sprinkles and seen some lightening flashes, it's supposed to rain later today and I think it's actually going to happen. We really REALLY need this rain, I'm hoping it's just a nice rain and not a gully washer. I do have to go to work in a few hours, it's going to be a long day, I plan on working 2, possibly 3 stores today. The reason I'm working so many stores (typically I spend one day a week in one store) is because of what I have going on the rest of the week...

I have a funeral to attend mid-week, a good friend, someone we have known and loved since moving to our community in 2007. As the music director of my church, I'm involved in the music part of the service, I sat down yesterday after church with the pastor's wife and the family of the deceased to work out the order of service and what songs they want. That was when I realized that I needed to seriously cut my work week short. Fortunately I am able to do that, I have a fairly light week anyhow, I just need to have my boss move one big job to next week, it's no big deal.

The following day (Thursday) we have family coming out for a visit, I'll remain vague about who it is until after they go home. It's going to be an exciting visit though, it's basically going to be a long weekend with them going home on Monday,

My house is getting full, the little SkyCastle, PB's brother has purchased the property to the west of us, he is working on getting his place setup for him to live there. And just recently, PB's grown son moved out here, he is in the process of buying a property out here as well, it's a little farther away but still in the neighborhood. He is converting a cargo trailer into a tiny house, he's been staying in that at the bottom of our property until his property closes. I am so happy to be getting more and more of our family moving out here, I enjoy having them closeby. 

I hope your week is going well, I must get ready for work now, have a blessed week!

All written text from this blog are copyrighted and owned by Wretha unless otherwise stated. All rights reserved, You may download or copy for your own personal enjoyment, but please do not distribute without written permission. You may post a portion of this (or any) message from this blog on another site as long as you include a link back to this site and the original message.

Wretha,

Thanks for visiting!

I'm a member...

Spring has sprung, it almost feels like summer, getting into the upper 90s during the day, but it will not really be summer until it stays warm overnight. Currently, it still drops down into the upper 40s and 50s during the nighttime. I really love that about where I live, being in the high desert mountains of far west Texas, pretty much no matter how hot it gets during the day, it cools off nicely at night. I keep a long sleeve flannel shirt in my truck year round, I don't have to use it often, but it's nice to have around on those cooler evenings. How is it where you live?

Here's something new I'm doing... Since I live in a very rural area, I have no big stores nearby, the closest town to me is around 20 miles away, and that is a microscopic town, one small grocery store, one dollar store and that's about it. The nearest "big" town is a couple of hours away (at highway speeds), those towns have Walmart, bigger grocery stores and other smaller stores. As a result, I don't go shopping much, I much prefer using delivery/shipping services being offered by some of the bigger retailers.

I of course have the obligatory Amazon Prime account, I also do some shopping (for delivery) at Walmart, but the newest addition to my delivery companies is Sam's Club Join for $45 and get $45 off your next in-club purchase of $45 or more.. I used to have a membership when I lived near Fort Worth and used it quite often. Where I live now, the nearest Sam's Club is a minimum of 3 hours away (at highway speeds), it just didn't make any sense to maintain my membership, until now.

I actually had a need for a specific kind of product that isn't easily found, a generic "clear" nicotine patch, Sam's Club carries a Member's Mark brand of nicotine patches at a very reasonable price, I had been getting a friend to pick them up for me when they went into town, but that became rather inconvenient, I'd much rather be able to get them when I want or need them. I decided the price savings on that item alone made it worth renewing my Sam's Club membership, and when I discovered I could get free shipping for just a little more, I jumped on that!

I am now a full on Sam's Club Plus member. I've been ordering on average, once or twice a month. I don't go too crazy, but the savings I get from ordering there is so incredible, especially with the free shipping. Unfortunately I live too far away to get the fresh foods (fruit, veg, meats...) delivered, but the other things I can get are great. Where I live, the price of food and other retail items tends to be high, I am getting a major savings shopping like this.

For now, I've mainly been ordering PB's kind of powdered creamer Coffee Mate The Original Powdered Coffee Creamer (56 oz.), nicotine patches, liquid Tylenol Children's Tylenol Oral Suspension, Cherry (4 oz, 3 pk.), instant coffee Folgers Classic Roast Instant Coffee Crystals (16 oz.) .... I recently ordered these giant bags of Skinny Pop popcorn SkinnyPop Original Popcorn, Value Size (14 oz.) for PB, I couldn't believe how big the bags are compared to getting them in the dollar stores that I service. I also purchased a huge bag of almond flour Blue Diamond Almond Flour (48 oz.) , something that was really out of my price range (of what I was willing to spend) locally, the price was really REALLY good!

One more thing I have started ordering from Sam's, 5-hour ENERGY Shot, Extra Strength, Watermelon, (1.93 oz, 24 pk.) 5 Hour Energy drinks I tend to drink one of those a day when I work, the vitamins and amino acids in them help me stay alert, I will occasionally drink one at home when I am having a clean up day and need to stay motivated, focused and moving. These tiny bottles of varoom juice costs nearly $4 each, I found them at Sam's Club for just under $2 a bottle. Of course I have to order a 24 pack to get that price break, but since I'm already spending the money on them each week, it is truly a no brainer to go ahead and order in bulk. I have tried other brands and types of energy drinks and either they didn't work well, or were so full of questionable ingredients that I'm just not interested, I find the 5 Hour ones work, they taste terrible (I'm just being honest), I don't drink them for their taste, I drink them because they work. I found the watermelon flavor is the best one for me, it reminds me of watermelon flavored Jolly Rancher candy, I can deal with that... 

When I order, it typically takes 3-4 days to arrive, not bad considering how far away I live from their stores, it's shipped via FedEx, I wish I could choose UPS, I much prefer UPS but honestly I haven't had any real issues with FedEx, none worth mentioning anyhow. I can't complain when the boxes are delivered pretty much straight to my front door.

Do you have a Sam's Club membership? How about an Amazon Prime membership? What do you think of them?  Do you use the free delivery very often?

All written text from this blog are copyrighted and owned by Wretha unless otherwise stated. All rights reserved, You may download or copy for your own personal enjoyment, but please do not distribute without written permission. You may post a portion of this (or any) message from this blog on another site as long as you include a link back to this site and the original message.

Wretha,

Thanks for visiting!

New Digital Devices

Well I hope everyone is doing OK today, I did something kind of fun, my devices have been aging, some well, some not so well, so I decided to upgrade to the newest Samsung phone and tablet. I have the phone now, I've had it a few days, it was real easy to transfer everything over from my old Samsung phone, it was funny, it seems that all of my Samsung devices knew I had a new phone, it was very much like a family gathering around a new baby. 

Anyhoo, I've been in the process over the last few days of setting up the phone the way I like it, the way I want it to look, the way I want it to work, and I've made some decisions, I decided not to install a couple of apps that I had on my old phone, mainly in the social media realm, the two biggest offenders being Facebook, and Instagram. 

I figure out that I can access them on my desktop through Chrome, I can log into them there, without having to have the app. I believe the apps are a lot more intrusive, for example, and I'm using this example very loosely, I can discuss purple tomatoes, and an hour later, I have ads on my Facebook app for purple tomatoes, now they tell us that they are not listening to us, and trust me I have not done a Google search for purple tomatoes, and yet there are the ads are, popping up in my face saying look at me, look at me... So I'm going to see how this works now using the browser to log in and access those two specific apps, and see just what happens. 

Something I noticed was going on with my last phone, I have a driving app call Onmyway that tracks my driving without me being on my phone (gives me points), I also have an app that will shut off anything running in the background, so I noticed that every time I would start up the driving app, Facebook would also become active in the background, I would shut Facebook off, and I don't mean just minimizing it, I mean actually forcing it to stop, on a few minutes later it seems the driving app has pulled up Facebook again. 

I have searched high and low to try to figure out why this driving app is also starting Facebook in the background, and I can't find anything about it, no one else seems to have said anything online about it, I'm not real happy about that, so if the Facebook app is no longer on my phone, then no other apps can pull it up and have it running in the background for whatever reason. 

Am I paranoid? Probably a little bit, do I have a reason to be? Probably. I'm not ready to give up Facebook, at least not yet, I do use it to keep up with family and friends, I also run a handful of groups, it's nice to have around.

So my new phone, it is the Samsung S22 Ultra, the phone itself is physically pretty big, I'm going to have to dig out my old LG v20 and see if it's the same size or bigger, this looks like it's a little bit bigger, definitely heavy. I want to get back into phone photography or they call that, phonetography? Whatever it's called I enjoy doing it, and have seriously missed having a phone with really really good cameras and really really good apps to take and edit the pictures.

I am hoping this week to get out and get some good pictures, you will see them when I do. So tell me, did you jump on the new Samsung devices bandwagon? If so what did you get? Do you have it yet? 

When I ordered this phone I was able to get a few accessories to go with it, so I ordered this silicone case, I'm not extremely happy with it oh, it does protect the phone, I feel a lot better about it if I drop it while it has this case on it, and I like the color, it's kind of a light olive green color, easy to put on easy to take off, the thing I don't care about is it's actually is kind of slick, meaning as I'm holding this somewhat heavy phone, I feel it slowly sliding through my fingers, so I ordered a couple of new cases, they were fairly inexpensive so I didn't mind ordering two, I'm hoping to find one that I really like, these two cases seem to have some extra texture or something like that on the edges the side edges so that I don't feel like I'm going to drop my phone. 

So this phone the Galaxy Series it seems that they have combined it with the Note series, so it has a built-in S Pen, and I've had a really good time playing with that. The pen itself is rather small, which is fine, to fit inside of the phone you need something small, I do wish it had some sort of a texture on it, it is somewhat slick but since it's lightweight oh, I don't worry about it dropping out of my fingers.

All written text from this blog are copyrighted and owned by Wretha unless otherwise stated. All rights reserved, You may download or copy for your own personal enjoyment, but please do not distribute without written permission. You may post a portion of this (or any) message from this blog on another site as long as you include a link back to this site and the original message.

Wretha,

Thanks for visiting!