Rain stops play 2

Yes, you've guessed it. Today as yesterday it was raining and so no work was done on the bus. I have steel that needs to be drilled and painted. I have to attach things underneath the bus. The trouble is with rain and wet ground that's not possible either. I can't work with bare steel in the rain or it will rust. Mind, I'm expecting to have to deal with rust on my car. Nissan, it seems, cannot be trusted to do decent paintwork on their vehicles.

At this point I would have inserted a photo of peeling paintwork on a vehicle that has been looked after fir all the time I have owned it. Then I would have uploaded another photo of which more later. The vagaries of satellite internet though mean that I cannot do this. For some unknown reason the images were resolutely up,oading to 90% then just stopping. HughesNet is not used because it's good but because it's the only alternative to cellphone data. There just are no cables to the area in which I live.

I did head out once today. If you remember, following the demise of my smartphone I pulled out my trusty Blu phone and put a Tracfone SIM in it. That turned out to be an interesting experience. My previous provider had been Straight Talk. Both ran on the AT&T network. That's where it gets really interesting because I never ever had a problem with Straight Talk on AT&T. Tracfone by comparison was terrible. In the month I had Tracfone I made one moderately successful phonecall. I placed the call and after plenty shouting repeat that, say it again and can you start again, about 20% of the message was actually understood. I tried placing another call and had some ridiculous message about the network being full. Then somebody tried calling me and couldn't get through. And that was my lot for Tracfone. Today the month prepay expired. I'd used maybe 200 texts and 1 phone call. I don't know about you but Tracfone just seems to suck, especially when a fair few texts just never arrived.

So, today I headed out and picked up a Verizon flip phone. It's pretty good and even has a built in alarm clock. Unlike my smart phone which needed at least daily charging, the flip phone could keep going for a week or more. Thus far it looks pretty good. I would have inserted a photo of it but for HughesNet being somewhat useless today.

Have I missed having a smart phone? No. I have not. I'd like to take photos of bus construction with a smartphone but my tablet does just as well with its camera. I have seriously not missed being played by the phone companies. There's a huge difference between paying $50 a month for a connection and $18. I'm going from unlimited talk and text to 300 texts/minutes. Last month I made one two minute phonecall and sent about 30 texts. This is why Tracfone appealed so much to me at $20 every 90 days. Really and truly I don't even need to be paying $18 a month. If I could get a phone where I paid for only what I actually used, the phone company might make $5 a year!

I'm pleased to say that despite the torrential downpour there has been no water ingress into the bus.