Hot spot

I'm back. They moved everything back in on a Friday. Now the house is jam packed with boxes and odds and ends. In the week since it all came in, I've managed to get one room clean and usable, and that room is the bathroom. The kitchen is usable but not clean.

When I tried to log onto the internet on my laptop, I couldn't get on. At first I thought, Oh, no, something's happened to my cable service while I've been gone. But after a little while I realized that what's missing is the little box and antenna thingy that passes on the wireless signal. It's in any one of a hundred boxes.

So all week my internet browsing was limited to my phone, which has 4G. I couldn't get new books for my Kindle and had to re-read from those already on the device. On my laptop, I just played solitaire and mah jong. When I looked at Facebook, I had my tiny phone screen, and when I wrote an email, I had to use the little screen keyboard on the phone. I'm not as fast at that as I am at touch-typing, as it was called, back when I took typing class using a machine originally owned by Fred Flintstone. I was going through kind of an internet withdrawal.

I was complaining to a co-worker and she asked if I couldn't use a hot spot. I said I had looked them up, but the hardware was expensive and you had to subscribe to some phone plan to use it. She asked if I couldn't use my phone as a hotspot. I indicated that, as far as I knew, I could not. She asked what provider I use and then asked to see my phone. She briskly found the place where I could turn my phone into a hotspot. We  tried it on my kindle, and it worked.

Well. File that under "Learn something new every day."

Just this evening after work, a man came to hook up the washer and dryer, which both use gas. When he turned on the dryer to try it out, it ran with a loud squeaking sound. I said it had done that before the accident behind it all. He took the dryer apart, vacuumed out all the lint (with his own vacuum), replace a few parts, and now it runs better than before. So not just restoration, but improvement!