Costs rising

May 4, 2007 (12:31pm)
56º F, A nudder nice day, E wind 11 mph.

Good afternoon,

Wow! Another really nice day for us. That is supposed to end this evening though with some showers moving in. Don’t think they are supposed to be significant, but right here, we really don’t need any until the present water in our swamp runs off or dehydrates. The soil is still very soupy in most of the yard. Not being accomplished outdoors.

There have been a flurry of email continuing to flow between Iron River and here. One very nice amenity of the realtor, is they are making sure all of the utilities and like that are transferred into our name and address up there. That will save us a lot of time and effort. For them, since they probably deal with those folks on a regular basis, it fairly easy. Not too sure what we will do about phone yet though. We have to see what the fixed wireless provider can provide. If we can phone using the internet, we sure will. Not too sure how it works for local calls though. Calls across the pond should indeed be a bunch cheaper. Just paid last month’s bill today and am anxious to try something else even more. We’ll see.

While I was working on the van just before supper time yesterday, pastor drove in. It has been 2-3 years I think since that has happened. He brought a package I had dropped shipped to the church. At the moment I am using my new wireless keyboard and mouse. Can you tell the difference. It is an improved/upgraded model from the one that wouldn’t work out of the box. This set-up has many more features on it, that I probably won’t use most of, than the other. One important feature is that it has "spill resistant" keypads. I really like that part and it is needed for me. The mouse is the same as the other one, but the transmitter/receiver is different too. I think the transmitter/receiver was the problem with the other one. This one doesn’t know how to spell any better than the old ones I had!!

I was wrong about the hotel we will be staying in while in Chicago for the Church Wide Assembly. I said it was the Hilton, but it actually is the Hyatt ( http://chicagoregency.hyatt.com/hyatt/hotels/index.jsp ) instead. Noodling around their website, I found that the normal low rate for a one bed room is a snitch over $300.00/night. The Church has gotten a "deal" at $120.00/night for two folks in a room. When Margriet come along, it will certainly be expensive. But ....The real corker is that they don’t have any free breakfast in the morning or free access to the internet. Almost all small motels have at least that! They do have a coffee maker in the rooms though. The hotel also agreed to reduce the parking fee from the $20.00/day for the Church folks. I sure do hope we car pool or bus down from Appleton or Green Bay.

We also noodled around the Navy Pier website ( http://www.navypier.com/home.html ) to find thing for Margriet to do if she didn’t want to sit in on all of the meetings and also somewhere to eat. Prices, not unexpectedly, are also high there too. Some really crazy! Like $40.00 or more for and entree? And it isn’t even lobster and steak! Coffee probably would cost at least five bucks too. Did find a couple of places that were more "reasonable" too. I do think we will bring fixin’s for breakfast at least. Past that we will see what the meeting at Synod has to say in a couple of weeks.

Last night I had a symphony to listen too. I went out about dark to burn the trash. After lighting it, the light breeze got a little more strong. Since the dead foliage above the water is so dry, I decided to stay with the fire until it burned down at least. It wasn’t long until I had a course of frogs, birds, and other critters providing their music. It was really cool! Many memories of deer camp came to mind. Especially those when Dori and I would go up to open trout season. Most years the same thing happened and we would sit and listen to them for a long time. Double cool.

The price of gasoline went up another nickle a gallon yesterday morning. Sure hope someone runs out of nickels to raise it soon. Now they are predicting the price to reach $4.50 a gallon possibly! Not so good.

Time to get a-going.

In Christ My Saviour,

Chris <><