Roll On 18 Wheeler

Well, it's been a day or three since we posted anything here. We've got a good bit of catching up to do. We'd like to keep things in chronological order, so that means we need to start by backing up a few months...so here goes!

Some time this summer, Beth and I took a little trip to the north coast. As we were going, we took a few pictures to highlight the differences between this highway and an American interstate highway. This first one isn't that out of line--just a farmer carrying some peppers to market in the back of his pickup. Okay, so he may have put one or two more sacks than the truck was designed for, but still, it's a truck with peppers in it. 

Same deal with this next one: it's not crazy to haul some coiled up tubes in the back of a Chevy, but he might have put a few more on there than he should have. 

But then it gets a little strange. We couldn't tell if this next one was cow bones, palm branches, or some combination of both! 

These office chairs looked a lot funnier in real life. Imagine those wheels that are sticking straight up also spinning wildly in the wind! 

You might see a truck carrying scrap metal in the States. But he might pull a tarp over the top, or at least throw a rope or two over the pile to keep things in place. And yes, there's a guy sitting on top of the heap, too.

Here comes a cell phone tower, on a truck made for carrying two-by-fours! Where's the red flag that's supposed to be tied on the back? 

 And is this a sliver of a really big satellite dish? Or maybe a drainage pipe? Who knows?

Box springs! A huge stack of box springs headed to a mattress factory! At least he tied them down.

Ceramic toilets and sinks. Packed in with straw. 

We weren't sure that little rope was enough to hold that tailgate up against the weight of these hoses, but it seems to be doing okay. Really, most all of these things are also transported by trucks on I-10, but trucks in the states have closed trailers so we don't see what they're hauling. And they can't overload them and stack them up twice as high as the truck. 

This next shot was a little concerning. We were headed north, and started seeing a line of southbound trucks on our side of the divided highway on our right! They just made their own service road out of our right lanes to avoid going a long way to turn around. 

 Now this will communicate in any language! See, everything's not that different. 

Look closely at the stickers on the back of this one: Somehow this Chevy is powered by Windows XP! I guess the spell-check feature was turned off. 

As soon as we started home, we noticed a pretty strong showing of tomato trucks (no, it's not the first time we've seen lots of tomato trucks on this road!). So we started counting. In two hours, we passed by 158 trucks full of tomatoes! It takes a lot of tomatoes to feed 20 million people who all want tomatoes and tomato sauce at every single meal! 

Yes, there's an app for that. Just click on the plus every time you see a tomato truck and let the phone keep track for you. 

And that was our road trip adventure. Stay tuned for more catch up posts coming very soon!

Complex Connections

In our previous post, you can see the happy Seminole fan getting the season kicked off. What you can't see in that picture is what had to happen for that to be possible. You see, our current home is about 6506 Miles.(10,470 kilometers) from Doak Campbell Stadium, so lots of electrons have to move through lots of wires (and probably some waves have to bounce of a satellite or two, as well) in order for live images of boys playing a game with a funny-shaped ball to reach my desk. It's not quite as simple as sitting on the couch and pushing a couple of buttons on the old remote.

First, you might have seen the two computer monitors on my desk. I just bought the bigger one a couple of weeks ago. It lets me read news stories or study maps on one screen while reading and responding to email on the other. Really, I got it so the little letters on my laptop screen could be big enough for my 40somethingyearold eyes to read. But I digress.

(Here's a cute shot of our youngest Seminole fan, just because almost everyone reading this is her grandparent)

For the past three football seasons, we've been able to watch American college ball with the aid of a device called the Slingbox. The Slingbox connects a cable TV box to the internet, so we can see whatever is on at Beth's parents' house. We sign in and whatever they are watching comes on our computer screen. And if they're watching a movie and it's time for the 'Noles to kick off, we have the power to change channels from that same computer screen. (Mysteriously, our phone always rings right after I do that.)

This weekend, however, my Slingbox remote wasn't working, and Beth's folks were not home to fix it. But those proverbial cats can be skinned using a variety of methods. OnE of the biggeSt American sPorts Networks offers lots of games online. You go to their website and click on a game and Poof, there it is. So I did that, but they have this pesky rule that their service is only offered to people in the States.

But there are ways around that, too.

I simply had to sign on to a VPN connection to make my computer appear to be in the States. I did that, then went back to the aforementioned website to watch. They are a little selective and wanted to be really sure I was in the States and with a partnering cable provider. So I had to sign in with the user name and password from our American cable provider. And it worked!

After all that, we were still a few hours away from the midnight kickoff in our time zone. So I got to watch a little of the Miami-Boston College game. I was proud that my kids noticed how much the BC colors look like FSU colors. I really wanted to watch UF struggling against Bowling Green, but that one was blacked out and it wasn't worth trying to skin a different cat to try to get to that!

We're undefeated so far, and looking forward to a fun season!

Happy Man

So what if he had to wait until midnight for kickoff? This guy is watching Seminole football! He's a happy man.