Category Archives: Travels

I meant to start this earlier in the day, heck even a few days earlier……lol  Lets see what is going on.

We had a pretty good weekend last week.  We had some of the nicest weather we’ve had since the fall and did a bit of grilling to enjoy it.  Last Sunday night, as we were finishing our dinner, there was a knock at the door.  We pretty much keep to ourselves and was like, what the heck.  Hubby answered the door, the neighbor from across the street was there and seemed to be mumbling……hubby is like, you hit my jeep?  The guy is like yes.  This is not the first time, limited parking and it is on the street, so not a real big deal….exchange info and contact insurance.  So hubby is like, let me get my shoes.  He goes out there, sees a big wide scratch on the rear passenger bumper.  The guy is like I didn’t hit you there, and when asked where, he pointed to the driver side, that is so covered in pollen and dust that there isn’t a mark.  There is no way.

Hubby was going to say no big deal and not to worry, until he lied about it.  Because that scratch was not there this earlier.  He came in, all ticked, I went out to deal with it, asked for his info, he refused to give it to me, saying that he didn’t hit us there.  Sounding real baffled and buffled.  Well, that wasn’t going to work.  My husband started questioning him loudly and called him a liar, I called the police to mediate.  Dispatcher hearing it in the background, got the police here quickly.  We got the info from the wife, we felt totally guilty, she looked so crushed.  The few times we waved and talked in passing, she has always seemed so nice, she even dropped off fudge during the holidays.

The police did ask if the guy had gone back inside during this, we are like yes, well he had been drinking, but no proof if it was before or after he hit us.  I had seen them working out front all day, they had moved their car out of their drive to pull weeds, so I figured it was when he was adjusting from pulling it back in that he hit us.  It was a nice day, many people work out side and have a drink while doing it.  And looking back at how he responded, it makes sense that he had been drinking and you know the wife knew it.

Like my husband told her, he was saying to him to not to worry about it when he denied that it was his damage.  We did draw the neighbors out during this…..ggeezzz

So we have been debating all week whether to get it fix, if he hadn’t lied, we probably won’t.  And then, if to fix it, go through our insurance, pay the $100 deductible and have them deal with the neighbor’s insurance or call their insurance and deal with them and possible denial.  Well, that did get answered today when I got a letter from their insurance and are now have an appointment with their adjuster.

Been having an issue with the mail I sent out on May 31st and June 1st.  I sent out 3 things on the 31st and only 1 of them got there in a normal time frame.  One of them was not received until June 9th!  Icks.  On June 1st, I mailed out 2 netflix (to Salem), 3 cards (MI, IN, & WA)…….netflix FINALLY arrived June 10th, card to MI, June 11th….not sure of the other 2 yet, but I have hope.  What really bugs me about it, is that the card to IN was to mom & dad for their 39th Anniversary and I mailed it to be on time to be there by June 9th…..nope, didn’t happen.  So not happy about that.  But seeing that 3 of the 5 items have been delivered I have hope on the other 2, fingers crossed.  Normally only takes about 3 days to MI and 4 days to IN.

A few weeks ago I spent some time researching about internal hard drives for our macbook pros, what I read it looked easy to do and by doing it ourselves save us $50 for the change out, $50 for the transfer of settings and files and save $100 on the hard drive.  A total win-win, if as simple as they say.  Found us a much bigger hard drive ( hubby’s a 250GB, mine a 160GB at the standard 5400RPM) and even faster : Western Digital Scorpio Black WD7500BPKT 750GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache 2.5″ SATA 3.0Gb/s Internal Notebook Hard Drive -Bare Drive Western digitals are considered very good hard drives, so I got them ordered.

They were delivered this past Thursday, June 9th.  When I opened the 1st one, I noticed that it had some unsecured from it’s packaging in it’s own box.  But since those boxes were surrounded by packing peanuts, I didn’t think too much of it. Hubby used that one to change out his hard drive, took 3.5hrs for the operating system to install, 1.5hrs for it restore from back up and then it ran slow as heck.  Let it sit over night to make sure everything was lined up and it worked faster in the am.

So Fri we decided to do mine, only took about 50mins for the operating system to install and 30min for it to restore, but I also only had 30GB….his was about 150GB. Didn’t take long at all for mine to be up to speed and no issue.  His started to freeze up, opening programs, playing tunes….so I did some research, sounded like a hard drive issue.  We ran the disk utility, ran the repair, still had the issue.  I started to remember about the packaging and the fact that hard drives are sensitive…..so we switched back to his old and put in for an exchange on the new one.  I will say that so far, newegg.com has a really nice and simple online process for returns.  I’ve never used them before, but was aware of them….so definitely a site to keep in mind when we need electronics.

I got the damage hard drive shipped off and now waiting on the exchange.  Now that we know what we are doing, shouldn’t take long to switch it out and get it running again.

Monday, June 6th was the day we planned for a 12mile hike on Mt St Helen’s, as a late anniversary celebration.  Well, we didn’t go to bed as early as we should’ve and didn’t get our NW Forest Pass like we needed.  We figured we can get them when we get there.  We got our packs all ready Sunday and left here by 6 am, figuring the drive would take about 2-3hrs.  We did figured pretty correctly on the drive, took only a little bit longer due to the fog that we encountered the higher we went.  One moment it was clear the next moment couldn’t see a thing on a winding mountain road.  The pass thing really messed us up, because none of the centers opened until 10am.  If you want to do an all day hike and be back by sundown, you need to start by 8/9am.  So we had already checked a few possible substitute shorter hikes that we could do instead.

They did have some pullovers for you to view the area.  You could see tree trunks from the landslide buried sideways in the dirt and exposed by the rivers that recut their flow through the land.  It really does mess with your mind when you think about it and see it and then the info at the observatory, a bigger mind frock….wow

We went to the Johnson Ridge Observatory, where the original hike would’ve started.  Johnson Ridge is what forced the landslide to move west instead of keep coming north.   Wow about the view…..the pictures we took do not do it justice.  When we first got there, Mt St Helen was covered in clouds and would peak out.  When the observatory opened, we saw the 16min movie they have.  They used the original film with some added CGI, it was actually pretty well done.  Learned a lot more about the blast that neither of us knew.

Didn’t feel so bad about not getting the pass needed for the hike until late, because the trail we wanted to take is still covered in snow and won’t be open until July 4th area.  So the fact that we’ve been doing the higher elevation hikes in the fall, has been a good thing.  And it was a very good thing that we ended up doing the 2.5 mile hike….it was a big workout.  Going by how long it took us, with similar terrain, that they 12mile hike would’ve taken us 9-10hrs.  We really enjoyed ourselves and learned a great deal.

I’ll be posting some pics in a separate post and I still need to make a gallery.

I’ve been working this for a couple of hours and heading to bed.