Happy New Year!

Happy New Year!

We started off with a nice New Year's Eve and New Year's Day, but the weather slowly deteriorated into another soaking - our second since we've been here.  As I'm writing this, it's cleared some, but we're getting 30-40 mph winds out of the north.  They say it'll get below freezing overnight and over the weekend.

This past week, Donna finally made it from the state park to Fort Morgan (24 miles) biking.  Her next milestone is to make it to the fort and return.  She also got in a ride with the "Folks on Spokes".   We got in meals at Mikees, Cosmo's, and yogurt at Yogurt+.  The truck's back at a Ford dealer.  We're having them look for & repair an exhaust leak.  So goes life with a truck past 100k miles.  We finished with 2013 as an expensive year, and it looks like it'll continue into 2014.  2014 was our planned year to put new tires on the trailer and new front tires on the truck. Factor in two weeks at Disney World and, yep, it's gonna be an expensive year.  And that doesn't count any of the unplanned stuff like dentists visits for broken caps and emergency room touring.

The new (and also unplanned purchase) computer, itself, is fine.  It has a larger screen, a larger keyboard, a numerical key pad, and a USB 3.0 dedicated USB port.  We got a "Windows 8.1 for Dummies"  book, and it's helped with the Windows 8.1 operating system.  Of course, it's kinda interesting when even the book doesn't like Windows 8.1.  The best line so far:  "Take a deep breath and try to stay calm."   However, once I learned that the front "start" page is really the old start menu, learned an efficient way to shut the computer off, found the "app" to control speakers and headphones, figured out how to get two panes of the "This PC" to open side-by-side (to make file management easier), and learned some of the short cuts from the "Dummies" book, it's gotten easier.  The printer and scanner are now recognized by the computer.  So I'm back at working on spreadsheets, playing with Quicken, playing with old trip planning software, and to Donna's dismay, reading a lot of what's on the internet.  Yep, we're back using a lot of data via the MiFi.

So Happy New Year!  Later, David