I Wouldn’t Be Comfortable

After reading yesterday’s blog, where I mentioned that we are trading in our 2005 Ford Explorer on our new pickup, four different blog readers contacted me asking if I would consider selling it to them because it is already set up for towing behind a motorhome, with the Blue Ox baseplate and auxiliary braking system.

Our across-the-street neighbors, Jesse and Jennifer, who are such good friends, also mentioned buying it in passing, and I replied to the e-mails the same way I did to them. I’m sorry, but I wouldn’t be comfortable with that.

The SUV is almost seventeen years old, and while it has served us well, it has 150,000 miles on the odometer, not counting another 75,000 or so miles that we towed it behind our motorhome. While it looks pretty good, and we have always been diligent about maintenance and putting new tires on it and such, that’s a lot of miles, and it’s starting to have some issues.

Sometimes when it sits unused for more than three or four days, the battery goes dead. I’ve had it to a very reliable shop twice, and they’ve kept it for several days at a time and have not been able to repeat the problem and fix it. It’s obvious that a phantom load is drawing the battery down, but nobody can find it. I’ve replaced the battery three times, so I know that’s not the problem. At any rate, we just would not feel comfortable passing on something that we know has problems to somebody else. Once we trade it in to the dealer and tell him what the issue are,  he can do what he wants, and I won’t feel that we took advantage of a friend or blog reader by selling it to them.

Speaking of Jesse and Jennifer across the street, Jennifer works for a company that supplies tech support for computer programs for medical offices, and yesterday she came over and spent some time checking out my Dell desktop computer to see if she could figure out why it’s running so slow. And we may be onto something. In doing her research, she found several articles that said Malwarebytes can really slow down a computer, so we deleted it from mine and also turned off AVG Antivirus when I am writing and not actually online.

So far, it seems to help a bit when I’m dictating in Microsoft Word. The speed seems much faster, and it only stopped working once while I was dictating this blog. When I was finished with the blog in Word, I tried it in Dragon and had the same problems of very slow speed and the program freezing up, so there are still issues there.

And finally, here’s a chuckle to start your day from the collection of funny signs we see in our travels and that our readers share with us. This one is for our granddaughter Hailey, who is a horse owner and barrel racer.

Congratulations Coleen Ehresmann, winner of our drawing for an audiobook of Luminous: The Story of a Radium Girl by Samantha Wilcoxson. It’s a novel about Catherine Donohue, who worked at Radium Dial in Ottawa, Illinois, and the secret lurking in the greenish-grey paint the company used that magically made things glow in the dark. We had 32 entries this time around. Stay tuned,  a new contest starts soon. Note: Due to the high shipping cost of printed books and Amazon restrictions on e-books to foreign countries, only entries with US addresses and e-mail addresses are allowed.

Thought For The Day – I’m afraid my wife is starting to get Alzheimer’s. She keeps saying she can’t remember what she ever saw in me.