Starlink

Another week has passed and we have continued the voyage home! We enjoyed a prolonged stay with Scott, Margaret and Tori, and then turned east. We broke the trip to Prince Albert into two segments, enjoying another stop at the Gold Horse Casino in Lloydminster. Once again, as we took the secondary route from Lloyd, we were troubled by the lack of cellular signal to drive our navigation and our music. The children and grandchildren have taken notice of this complaint, and generously provided for a Starlink Mini as my Birthday and Father's Day present—thanks! However, getting it has proven much more difficult than expected. A preliminary search revealed a variety of suppliers including Costco, Home Depot, Walmart... but, it turned out none of them had one is stock—they can order one for me, but it will take some weeks to arrive! Quelle surprise! It took very little additional investigation to reveal the cause—Musk is undercutting his own suppliers! (Not so much of a surprise!) So, I bought one from Starlink dot com for about $50 less, but it will take those same weeks to get delivery. Maybe someone out there has a better solution. After a full week of work (one day) on the renovations in PA, we took up an offer to fly north!

the town is named for these!

Eric/A flew us up to Stony Rapids for a weekend visit. It was lovely, and they don't have any bugs up there (okay, I was lying about the bugs!!). But, hey, the internet connection was good, so life continued! The markets continued to be troubled by the Melon Felon, but at least they're running green this month. The Blue Jays are playing a lot better, but the injury bug continues to bedevil them— they lost two more pitchers this week, but they beat both Boston and New York to move into playoff contention. The Riders played in Hamilton this evening, but they lost, so they fell out of first place. 

Erica writes, "Eric and I are both up in Stony this week and since we couldn’t make it down to PA to host Mom and Dad, we invited them up here for the weekend. We had an adventure on Saturday. We went in search of Elizabeth Falls between Black Lake and Middle Lake. We found the rapids before the falls, and discovered we should take taken a left turn to get to the falls. We drove on and reached a scary looking bridge. What we discovered is that looks can be misleading as the best option would have been to cross the bridge. Instead, I tried to turn around and got completely stuck. After several attempts, I called some contacts and waited for my rescuers to pull me out. Mom and Dad went in search of the falls while Eric and I waited. They found Middle Lake, but not the falls. We got pulled out, picked them up and returned to Stony for the Rider game. All in all, it was a fun day! Liam has been working on his teaching materials for Art Camp next week. Haaken, Greg and Kiersten continue with their regular duties." 

Erin writes, "Weather hasn’t been great lately, but today it turned around, so Kali, Elly and I hung out in our happy place.

Very Productive

My tomato plants are still dying for some reason, but are also still producing. Work is good; we’ve chosen a candidate to offer my position. She doesn’t have much experience and timing is an issue, too. If I don’t start training someone soon, I’m going to run into year end and won’t have the extra time to work with a rookie. We give three months probation, so if I don’t feel good about her I can still say no. If that happens, we won’t start looking again until after year end because that time of year is very taxing. I took Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday off—I need quiet time by myself, so I can breathe, and turn 48. ☺️" Kristian adds, "Nothing too exciting this week. We had a work bbq yesterday featuring gourmet hotdogs. Lately for walk arounds, Terry has us using a specific app where we take pictures, because some of the others were missing some damages."

Travis and Joanna are taking care of business back in Thunder Bay. Trav rescued me this week as I misplaced my pills, so he sent me my next batch. BucketDecals is getting busy. Marigold is still recovering from an ear infection, but no report back from her dermatology doctor yet. 

And that's enough for this week!