Last Day Preparations

We had such great plans for the day and everything went according to plan until the afternoon.

Starting with gassing up the truck and performing a hand wash at the vehicle wash station here at Happy Trails. I hitched up the truck again and now the rig is ready to roll. We went to the post office to mail some last minute stuff and then went to pick up the tow dolly for the rental truck. It seems like an easy task to load the Jeep onto the dolly and secure it for the trip. We find out today. We also stopped by the church across the street to see if we could use their huge lot to park our rental truck and dolly overnight. They refused to allow it since they have had some problems in the past with truckers using the lot. The alternative for us is to park it in the Sam's Club parking lot and we got permission to do that from the store.

The next scheduled job was to do as much shredding as possible to eliminate the rest of the old files. Before that, I contacted a few RV storage facilities in or near Vista to get  a reservation, if needed. It seems that the RV storage units in that area are all "pack-em-in" places where you don't have enough room to open slide outs on your RV because they are so close together. That won't do for us, since we need to have access to the inside of the fifth wheel in order to come in and out for things we may need in the apartment. This has been our home for the last 4 years and there are lots of things we will need that we won't unload today. I finally located one that had enough room to open the slides - we hope - and it will do until we can gain a better knowledge of the area and look elsewhere.

Following that exercise I attempted to send some emails to our management team in Vista and couldn't get signed on to the Internet. The rest of the day and evening were spent trying to get online. I phoned Verizon who took me through many (failed) attempts to fix the problem. They suggested I take my broadband card to the local Verizon store and have a new Simm card put in to see if that would fix the problem. So, it was off to the Verizon store at around 6 PM and the net of the problem is that Verizon is going to overnight a new device to us in Vista. It will be there on Friday. In the meantime, they set up my new phone to be a hotspot so that I can have Internet access. So far, I still cannot sign on to any website through Internet Explorer which drives me closer to making the change to an Apple platform to get rid of this Microsoft junk software once and for all. This blog entry is being entered through Google Chrome.

The day got away from us again and I never shredded a single piece of paper. Those files will go with us to Vista where I will have to complete the job in our spare time. It has been a real challenge to get the things done that we needed to get done on our schedule. It is what it is, and we will leave this morning at 7 AM to load the Jeep and be on our way. We hope it all goes smoothly today...

Computer Problem at Work

We had what we thought was a small problem while closing out the computer on Sunday night. Josie has been trying to do the closing procedures so that she would know how if it comes time for her to do it alone. She accidentally let her finger slip while "clicking and dragging" information during the backup procedure after closing, and just before shutting down the system. I tried to locate the file that was inadvertently "dropped" in the wrong place while opening up for business yesterday. I not only couldn't locate the file that was lost, but I created other problems while trying to get the system fixed the way it should be. To make the long story short, we ended up bringing in the managers on their day off, and sending for the Campground Manager software expert - Terry, who hired us on in the first place - to come up from Eugene to help get the system fixed again. The trip from Eugene is 2 hours so you know how embarrassed we were to have to get these people involved in fixing the system. The system was down for almost the whole day while we finally got everything restored to where it should be and could use it for normal business transactions. All of the day's business had to be manually recorded on paper until we could enter the data into the computer after it was fixed. What a day. We felt terrible that we created the problem but these things happen. Terry was very understanding, as were our managers. You have to make mistakes in order to learn.

Actually, even though we made the mistake that caused the problem, the system procedures for restoring data in these instances is the most complicated I've ever seen. Restoring data from a backup disk should be a simple matter and accomplished in a very short time. We certainly learned about being more careful in handling the data during the closing process. We have proven ourselves to them as being good, competent workers, so there were no repercussions about having the problem. The closing last night went a lot smoother, and we will know if everything is OK again in a short while when we go in to open for today at 8 AM.

Today is a short day - we work until noon - and we have some grocery shopping to do after we get off work. Let's hope this is a better day for us...