Don't Make Change too Complicated: Just Begin!




Saturday, November 7, 2009

GPS gets the Best of Cece!


Well, yesterday, I was gifted with a GPS!.. Those of you that know me, know that this is a much needed piece of equipment as I just mastered left and right when I had moved from NY...only to discover that in NM there is north, south , east and west! LOL. IN NY we just went up and down...or right and left...we did not have to maneuver with 4 directions! I can hear you laughing!

Well. I got my GPS home and began to open the boxes and packaging. That took me almost 2 hours...yes, I did say 2 hours. Have you ever tried to open one of those theft resistant plastic packages? This is what is left of the packaging for the friction mount for the GPS. I contemplated calling the bomb squad to blow it open...but I kept telling myself to be a big girl and struggle through it...and that this packaging would not get the best of me! I contemplated using my teeth, but my mother told me never to use my teeth as a tool! I tried knives,...both serrated and regular, a screw driver, scissors, a butter knife to try to pry it open and finally after several attempts with a serrated mega shear....I was able to almost sheer it open,...and glory be, I did not cut myself in the process! Then I assembled all the parts and tried to make sense of them. I looked in the teeny tiny direction manual and searched for the chart that labels all the parts...to no avail. I looked at garmin.com on the Internet to find the full manual and had to download a 76 page manual all the while telling myself....why can't you be green? Printing out all this paper.? I knew if I had this much trouble in such a short amount of time, I had better print out the manual for future use. Well, there still was not a chart labeling all the equipment pieces...and there were NO numbers on any of the 76 pages I printed out that would tell me which was page 60 when looking up a topic. So, of course, I had to count and number each page and check that my numbering was correct. Do you feel like this is taking me all evening? I have not even gotten to the MOST fun part yet.

Here is the most fun part....so far! It is harmless looking enough isn't it? Well, that little ball's head is supposed to go in the little round hole in the pic below. I said supposed......



Try as I might. that ball would not go into that hole. The directions told me to snap it in.




Sorry about the fuzzy pic....perhaps it is just a reflection of how foggy my brain felt last night......the pic shows like a rocking or a levering of the ball into the mount. This did not work. To me, it seemed the ball was too big for the hole! I looked in the product manual to see if the right mount was purchased....not wanting to contemplate trying to open another one of those tamper resistent packages ...but I found out it was the correct product! Well, I twisted and I leveraged and I turned it this way and that...and I took cleansing yogic breaths and tried to remain calm. Finally, after about another hour of maneuvering...there was no more miss nice guy! I discovered that the directions should have read...........

"Shove the ball into the damn hole!



Needless to say, I have not had a chance to read the voluminous directions as to how to configure the GPS! Perhaps I have already gone through the hard part..... yeah right!




cece





Sunday, November 1, 2009

YES! I am a Yankees Fan!

Last night, Andy Pettitte struggled to pitch in the 3rd game of the World Series in Philadelphia. To quote the Philadelphia Inquirer, "The 37-year- old Pettitte, who extended his major league record to 17 postseason wins in the Yankees 8-5 win last night at Citizens Bank Park, was in deep early trouble, laboring to locate his assortment of pitches."

When Pettitte was interviewed after the game, he said this:

"It's a grind when you're out there by yourself. There's not a whole lot of anything that can help you, except trying to just keep battling."

This is my motto when hill climbing...it is how I feel....but I think this is a great life lesson too for when the times get hard on the many fronts of our lives...and they do......
Cece