Tuesday, March 12, 2013 – Vero Beach:

            Happy Birthday to grandson, Jackson, who is five years old today!  Happy Birthday, Jackson, and hope you have a great day!

Jackson - making a funny face as he wished us bon voyage in October!

            It was chilly, windy, and getting windier as we woke up this morning.  Also the boats on either side of us were in the process of leaving, so now we are by ourselves again.  The weather started to deteriorate just as soon as we got up and by the afternoon, it was raining. 

We have been having problems with our mobile phones with regard to our data plan in that every other day we get this text message from Verizon that we have used way over our data plan gigabytes for the period ending on such and such a date (I think they are going by Martian time), and that we had better increase our plan or our phones and computer will implode and sink the boat (and I’m sure they were thinking of developing a special plan just for us and this plan would probably involve us borrowing money from China).  I don’t even want to tell you what angst this caused us.  There was actually one time a few days ago, where we might have actually accused each other of being the culprit who was using the most “bytes” because of one us was certainly using the phones too much for e-mail, games, google maps, GPS, and maybe trying to get it to make coffee and bake pastry.  So we had visions of taking the courtesy shuttle to the Verizon store to find out what was actually wrong with our data plan and why we were getting these messages. 

So because it was raining, we decided we didn’t want to go anywhere that could have required potentially getting wet, and I don’t know what possessed us, but we decided to call Verizon on the phone…yikes!

So we made a deal – I would call Verizon and get a real person on the phone and then Bob would explain the problem to them and try to resolve these very real perplexing issues.  And lo and behold, I got a real, live, talking person reasonably quickly; and then I told the very nice lady, who laughed when I asked her if she was a real person, that I was going to hand over the phone to my husband who had the Verizon web site up with our data plan in front of him.  So Bob explained about the messages we kept getting on our phone about the data plan, and the nice lady exclaimed, “Don’t pay any attention to those messages.  We have been having trouble with those data alerts, and you probably just got a belated message cause you changed your plan last month!” Huh?  We don’t need to pay any attention to the data alerts?!  We got into a bit of a testy discussion because of the “data alert”, and now we learn that we don’t need to pay any attention to them??!  Can I send the Verizon Company to Mars?!  And now we also realize that we probably never needed to upgrade our data plan in the first place!!  Aaarrgghghgh, or yikes, as may be more appropriate.

But the good news was that we didn’t have to take the bus to the “hub”, and then get on another bus to take us to the mall, and then walk another mile to the store!      

After that we were so relieved we decided to play cards for the rest of the afternoon.

So while we were whiling the afternoon away and watching the rain, Bob got the idea that it would be fun tomorrow to put the dinghy in the water (that is, if no one comes into the slip next to us, because we could only put the dinghy in the water if that slip is empty), and dinghy up the creek to the little store we went to the other day – instead of painfully riding our bikes.  We could do whatever shopping we need to do and get to see some new scenery. 

We had made dinner reservations at the Pomodoro Grill, which had been highly recommended, for this evening, but once it started raining, we decided to reschedule our reservation for tomorrow night.  So I will make skillet barbeque pork chops this evening.  We have to start using up the food in the freezer anyway before we fly home in a couple of weeks.

If we can actually put the dinghy in the water tomorrow and take a little ride up the creek, I don’t think it will be as exciting as exploring Murdock Bayou, but it might give me something to write about.  So stayed tuned…

Basically, what we and the cat were doing on this rainy day - staring out the window and napping!