Tech

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I Did Something Really Stupid – and I Blame RVing For It

I’ve been having trouble with my fridge and especially freezer lately, thankfully after I got through all the meat and stuff in it (including all the ham from Christmas I wasn’t able to foist on other people). My landlady, her husband, and TWO handymen showed upwithin a couple of hours of my asking for help. The guys were going to look at it, she was going to translate if necessary (nope, yay!), and I wasn’t to worry, if there was a real issue, they’d pay for an emergency service call from a fridge repair professional OR a new used fridge right this very afternoon.

So to recap, my landlady responded very appropriately to a fridge emergency.

But I didn’t have a fridge emergency.

I did have a fridge with a magnetic seal that is weakening a little and which was not helped by my having something in the door that was keeping it from shutting properly. My landlord said that if the seal had been stronger, the thing in the door wouldn’t have been as much of an issue, but, ultimately, I’m an idiot who didn’t realise she wasn’t shutting her fridge door properly. Erm, he didn’t call me an idiot. That’s your blogger adding editorial flavour.

And I’m also an idiot who didn’t know that the fridge and freezer communicate. The fridge door not being properly sealed meant that all the cold air from the freezer was getting sucked out too.

I blame RVing because I’ve had a fridge with a door that latches shut for almost eight years now. This would never have happened with my Norcold!

We all had a good laugh and I said I was glad that I was stupid and that there was no massive repair bill in sight. Landlord said he is replacing the seal, though, because even with nothing in the door, it still needs an extra push to really seal tightly. So it was totally worth having him, two repair people, and a translator rush over to my house. Totally.

Post Edited To Add: This post is even funnier if you look at the title of the one before it!

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Handling a Power Outage with Aplomb

There was a planned power outage scheduled from 6AM to 2PM today. My laptop battery can last most of a day if I do a few tweaks to conserve power, so my only concern was internet access since my modem needs power. Of course, if I was home, power wouldn’t be an issue, but I’m not so well equipped in Mexico.

In case TelMex was also down, I made sure last night to buy some data for my phone so I could get internet through Telcel today. I picked their 1GB package good for a week as that would ensure enough bandwidth for the day while not being a huge investment if I ended up not needing it.

The first thing I did today was string an extension cord to the truck from my office window. The power went out at about 6:40, so I plugged my modem into the extension cord, went out to the truck, plugged my inverter into one of the truck’s 12V outlets, and came back in to see if I had internet. I sure did! That was fantastic since it meant that I could keep working from my office instead of having to do so outside with all the mosquitoes! As a reminder, that’s because I only have TelCel internet with a cellular booster, which needs to run off the truck battery as well.

To preserve computer battery life, I left the computer in sleep mode when I wasn’t actually working and instead checked my emails on my phone. This meant that by the time the power came back on at 1:30, I still had 10% computer battery life left (about one hour of run time if I kept it in power saving mode or 30 minutes if I had to work)! If the outage had gone on, I would have used a bit more truck battery capacity to charge my computer, no biggie.

The only thing I would have needed for today to be totally stress-free is small solar trickle charger to keep my truck battery topped up during the day. It’s one of those things I keep forgetting to get because I’m still so used to having everything I own with me at any given time. But I knew that one day of running the modem wouldn’t kill my battery (I mean, I ran my booster for several days when I first arrived), so, really, I wasn’t particularly stressed today.

Those of you who follow me on Facebook know that I did have one power-related emergency today: I forgot while I still had power to grind coffee beans for my second cup of the day. My solution to that was not a joke. I put some beans in a baggie, put a cloth around the baggie, and then put the cloth-wrapped baggie on a smooth rock from my yard. I then used a rounder rock to grind the beans. The cloth kept the rock from going right through the baggie and getting ground beans everywhere. My ‘primitive’ grinder worked perfectly!

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Hunkering Down

I have somehow managed to find myself swamped with work through the weekend. Because of this and my needing to make a withdrawal at the bank, I decided not to do any overtime today and instead go to Maz after my shift ended at 2:00, then hunker down and work for the next three days.

The nearest Scotiabank to me is the one on Ejercito Mexicano, about 1.5KM from the embarcadero. I walked there and on the way noticed several stores, even hole in the wall abarrotes, that said ‘recarga TelCel aquí’ (recharge TelCel here). I’ve been meaning to put money on my phone so I can make and receive calls, but the website has been so terribly slow that I haven’t had the patience to do so. I’d never put money on the phone from a vendor before and decided to see if that’s easier than using my credit card on the website. Is it! I gave my number to the clerk, told her I wanted to add $100 to my account, and she punched it into what I assumed is a cell phone, although it looked like a big old Nokia from 10 years ago.

After about 30 seconds, her phone dinged and I got five text messages confirming that I’d added the $100, what my rates were, special promotions, etc. Super easy! That’s all I had to do because I was going to use the money for calls and texts. If I had wanted to buy bandwidth, I would have needed to send a text message to that effect.

I just checked the text messages and one of them says that my $100 got me $100 in bonus time (saldo regalo/gift balance)!!! I can use that for calls, texts, and bandwidth at full price. Wow! I remember from last year that I pretty much spent the winter making calls on only saldo regalo, but don’t remember it being that generous.

The Amigo plan (pay-as-you-go) rates are also pretty amazing. Get this, I only pay $2 per minute… to Mexico, the U.S., and Canada. I have been staring at those numbers for the last five minutes trying to figure out what I’m reading wrong. That’s 0.16CAD per minute. There has got to be a catch. I am going to have to call someone in Canada to see if this is true! Skype is free, of course, but it’s good to know that I have the phone as a backup! I just skimmed the fine print and it looks like I can use my phone in the U.S. as though I was in Mexico, which is very interesting. I will get back to this as this plan sounds like a game changer because I could keep my TelCel account active when I’m home and use my Mexican SIM when I’m in Montana!

But I digress. From the abarrotes, I crossed the street to use the Scotiabank ATM, where I was able to take out $4,800. It came out in all $500s, plus a $200 and a $100. Ouch! I much prefer withdrawing from Santander, which gives some small bills… but I don’t miss the fee! I went into the bank and asked to change the $4,5000 worth of $500s to $100s and $50s. Not a problem. The teller ended up giving me almost all $50s! I really didn’t mind, of course, but that made for a rather impressive stack of bills!

Since the big Waldo’s is just a block or two further down the road and I needed a few things for the house, it made sense to head there next. But since I was still on the Scotiabank side, I decided to have lunch first. I knew there was a Rin Rin pizza by the big Ley (where I didn’t need anything this time), but they wanted over $30 for tiny slice with a drink. Pass! I went to the Chinese place instead and had a nice lunch for $48.

Then, I climbed up and up and up and up and up and up some more to get to the pedestrian overpass to cross Ejercito Mexicano and then came all the way back down to ground level. Whew! I still prefer that to playing frogger in front of the Scotiabank!

Waldo’s had everything on my list… and a few things that’s weren’t. For those who don’t know, Waldo’s is equivalent to a higher end dollar store in Canada and the U.S., like Dollar Tree. I especially needed some plastic containers for storing leftovers and the like since the ones I bought last year weren’t in the kitchen when I arrived.

Walking back to the embarcadero, I was struck by the fact that this was my first time walking down Gutiérrez Nájera in that direction and that everything looked so different!

There was a short wait for a lancha, but I was back on Isla in a flash.

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I made a quick stop for beer ($90 for seven, so $13 each, almost half the cost of getting a beer at a restaurant!) and then it was time to get home because I was ready to drop. It’s been a busy work week! I plan to get a bit of a later start tomorrow, which will probably mean 7:00 instead of 6:00. 😀

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A Surprising End to the Day

I had a busy and good work day, thanks to my no longer being worried about running down the truck battery. By 2:00, I was more than ready to shut down the computer so I could take advantage of the cloudy and cooler conditions today to head for the Malecón. But I had no sooner turned onto the main part of my road that I saw this coming down the street in my direction:

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That’s a TelMex truck, folks. As in an internet provider truck. As in I turned right around when I saw my landlady walking behind it. Well, first, I waved at her to confirm that I had this, and then I turned around.

It was the same guy as last year (!) and he was just as lovely. Since the cabling was already installed, it was very quick for him to get me online and he was gone by 3:30ish.

It was too late to go to Maz by this point (since it gets dark around 5:00 and I wanted time to have lunch and a long walk), so I instead went for lunch at Lety’s on the beach here. Shrimp quesadillas with beer and totopos. Is there such thing as bad food in Mexico?!

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I think Lety’s is going to be my go-to beach restaurant from now on. The service isn’t as good as at El Velero, but the similarly priced food is several notches better. I would have been happy with just the rice, salad, and pico de gallo on this plate!

Can you see the lime green slice of fruit on my plate? That’s an orange. I only learned very recently that oranges can be green and still perfectly ripe, but they are all artificially forced to turn orange for folks in non-orange growing places who couldn’t wrap their brains around that. At any rate, I had no idea what I was about to bite into and was pleasantly surprised by the very sweet orange flavour!

I’m pretty sure today was the last one at this pace for a bit because I now have no excuse to get back to my other clients. But if I can steal an hour or two a day just to sit on the beach with a beer, if not a meal, it’ll still be an improvement over last year!

Now, to start catching up on my online stuff backlog…

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Garmin Nuvi 2559LMT

I bought my first GPS when I hit the road in 2008. A few years later, it was badly outdated. Updating the unit from a Mac was impossible at the time and the update was nearly the same cost as buying a new unit. My newer unit had 2011 maps, which I managed to update before leaving last year, with the cost being much less than for a newer unit. But it only gave me Canada and the US. For Mexico, I used an app on my phone. I hated using the phone for navigation. It was so much more clumsy than my GPS, the screen was smaller, and the POI database was seriously lacking. So I decided to go back to a dedicated GPS this fall because I knew I’d enjoy my travels through Mexico a lot more if I had a decent navigator along.

Of course, my first thought was to update my 2011 unit, but I wasn’t sure if the purchase of the lifetime update for North America maps, the recommended update for my unit, would actually include Mexico. I fired off an email to Garmin and they got back to me in less than 15 minutes! Wow! As it turns out, their units can only be updated with the maps they come preloaded with. So, no, it would not be possible to add Mexico to my 2011 unit. Only their ‘Advanced’ series comes with Mexico maps.

So I had a gander at those and discovered a model that has not just North America (US, Canada, Mexico, and some Caribbean countries), but also Europe, all with unlimited lifetime updates! It’s the Garmin Nuvi 2559LMT. Because they now come with lifetime updates, GPSes are much pricier units. So it made sense to go all out and get the model that will serve me for the rest of my life, not just the near future, even if the cost made me blanche a bit!

I priced the units and found absolutely no variation, not even at Costco, and the USD price converts exactly to the CAD. So for convenience’s sake, I bought mine on Amazon.

This new GPS has proven itself to be to my old model what the Enterprise D was to the original Enterprise. I can’t believe the new array of features! They were a little overwhelming at first and I’m still trying to figure out some things, but the pros really outweigh the cons. I like that I can plan a route with multiple stops since I could only do one extra stop with the old unit. Very good for the day when you’re headed for a motel, but need to stop at Panera’s, Cabela’s, and the Apple Store without going too far out of your way! I really love how you get the nearest fuel, rest area, and restaurants right on the navigation screen. I used that a lot while driving down.

Another really neat feature is that the GPS knows what traffic lies ahead. As I was going into Denver, it actually told me that I was going to have to slow down in so many miles and then be stuck at a standstill for so many minutes. And it was accurate! I also liked how it chimed to warn me that I was entering a school zone, so I’d better slow down! Another neat feature is that if I exceeded the speed limit, the current speed would get a red background.

Now that I’m in Mexico, I’m really testing it. It’s been very accurate about telling me when I’m coming up to a Pemex and an official rest area, but I haven’t yet really asked it for directions. POI information doesn’t seem as good as in Canada and the US. It didn’t recognize Panama’s bakery at all or the address I gave it for the TelCel store I originally wanted (but it did recognize the BMW dealership). It is quite accurate at knowing what the current speed limit is, a feature I use a lot in the US. Its Spanish pronunciation is terrible and disappointing.

The Garmin Nuvi 2559LMT is proving itself to be a great traveling companion. I look forward to trying it out in Europe in the nearish future!