It has been a very “up and down” week this past week, at least when it came to the weather up here in New Hampshire. Some days the daytime temps were in the 60’s or 70’s in central parts of the state and others only in the lower 40’s. Nighttime temps ran anywhere from just above 32°F to somewhere in the mid-50’s. The windows at The Gulch were open on more than a few days…and nights. And now we’re headed for cooler temps over the next couple of days and then back into 50’s and 60’s. It’s been sunny on most of the warm days…but fully cloudy, too. We also had thunderstorms sweep through right around bedtime just the other night. (It was really kind of neat seeing the flashes of lightning lighting up the lake and the surrounding hills and mountains as they swept across the lake and hearing the rumble of thunder echoing off the hills and along the lake.)
I’ve seen the landscaping crews that take care of the neighborhood around The Gulch cleaning up the post-winter detritus. Some neighbors have already picked up mulch to spread around their homes. (It’s mostly mulch around the homes here so there’s no lawn to mow.) I will be doing likewise once I take care of few things prior to picking up some mulch.
Starting next week, I’ll be prepping to get the Official Weekend Pundit Lake Winnipesaukee out of storage, get it cleaned up, mount a new fire extinguisher near the helm, install a new out-drive angle indicator, ‘new’ being a relative term seeing as I bought it from a salvage yard. There will also be some cleanup in the cockpit as I wasn’t able to remove all the dog hair from the carpeting before the boat was stored for the winter. There are also a few small fiberglass repairs that will need to be taken care of before the end of the boating season, the damage being cosmetic rather than structural. If things work out then I’ll be launching to boat sometime during the second week of May.
The last of the work needed to restore the two WP computers is almost done, having made sure that I have downloaded the last of the configuration files I need so I won’t have to reconfigure the desktop and apps manually. I am also making sure I have copies of all the files from both computers backed up on external drives. I have been taking my time as I didn’t want to screw anything up that might cause any issues. I have also been looking at resurrecting another desktop computer with the idea of turning it into a backup server for all computers here at The Gulch with the exception of my work laptop. That gets backed up to the servers at work and any active files I’m working on are copied to a separate external drive “just in case”. (That’s saved me more than a few times when our work network was down or when I lost my Internet connection due to bad weather.) I hope to have everything back up and running by next weekend.
And in other technology news, I finally made the changeover from my old Samsung Galaxy A50 to the new Galaxy A54 I picked up a few months ago. My carrier had offered me one heck of a deal, and I couldn’t turn it down. My A50 wasn’t in the greatest shape but it worked. But it got to the point where I was having some problems and the battery didn’t have the capacity it once had, so I made the changeover. It wasn’t bad as Samsung had clear instructions about how to activate the new phone and deactivate the old one. There was also an app that allowed me to transfer over all of the settings, apps, files, photos, messages, contacts and so on from the old phone to the new one. There were also a couple of YouTube videos I watched that ran through the process step by step.
The difference between the A50 and A54 isn’t anything startling. Yes, the menus looked a little different. The A54 is a 5G phone while the A50 is a 4G/LTE phone. I haven’t really noticed any difference in connectivity to the cell network so far, but then I didn’t really expect any. I don’t have any better connectivity to the cell network here at The Gulch than I did before and will still rely heavily on my WiFi network to make calls and to text.
One last thing, that being gas prices. My ‘go to’ gas station where I buy my gas for the trusty RAM 1500 reached a high of $3.89/gallon for regular before it fell to $3.71 towards the end of last week. It will ne interesting to see where it will be when I pass by Monday morning while on my way into work.
