OH MY! I’ve been playing with Instagram stories to post the pictures for National Hot Tea Month. I can see how people get sucked in! The sparkling filters are beautiful! BUT I am spending too much time formatting the images for this.
Now to figure out how to make this youtube embed smaller.
kiddo #2 (looking in the extra room’s closet for some random other thing): What’s in this old shoebox? Who’s is it?
me: Well, it’s our old cellphones.
kiddo #2: Why did you keep them?
me: We were told that if you dispose of an old phone, some mystery “someone” would be able to access all kinds of personal information from it. Just like all the conspiracy theories floating around right now, this might be a legitimate one.
kiddo#2 (rolls eyes and walks out of room mumbling): whatever Mom.
me (pondering voiceover): maybe I should go through these – definitely more interesting than lesson planning.
A trip down cellphone memory lane.
My first cell phone was a purchase by my Mom. She was worried I was driving alone at night and so bought the phone and paid for the first year of service. This was about 1990-1991. I still have the same phone number! This monster had a plan for 60 minutes of talk per month.
We upgraded in the late 90’s to the Nokia phone of the day. We also got one for John at that time. No idea where the other one is but it’s information is probably out there being used for nefarious purposes!
Now I have to clarify that some of these phones belonged to the kiddos. My mom also felt when they got to high school they needed their own phone. She again purchased and paid for the first year and all these years later, we are still paying!
Remember when you could look at a text and it didn’t count against your 50 per month???
As you may recall, I got an Apple iWatch Labor day weekend. I’ve been faithfully wearing it to track my steps. The only drawback I have is that the app that comes with it (Activity) doesn’t calculate a total for the month or an average for the month.
To solve that issue I use the Accupedo app. It records all the stuff from my watch/Health app but also totals the steps for the week, month, and year into a nice graph. Love this app!
![img_5121[1]](https://declutteringthestuff.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/img_51211.png)
Unfortunately I still have to add up the miles manually using the “History” information. Easy enough to do, just annoying. You can also tell when I changed from using my phone as my pedometer to the watch.
So here are my totals for 2018 since getting this awesome “pedometer”:
I can’t believe I’ve walked 235 miles! If 4 months was 235 miles, a year would be 705 miles.
GOAL FOR 2019 is 1,000 miles!
Years ago, I purchased the Jawbone UP. It worked perfectly until it didn’t! The company sent a replacement for it since it was under warranty. Again, it worked perfectly until it didn’t. I liked it so much John got the UP24. I upgraded to the UP2 that latched and then that one failed. Trying to replace the new one coincided with the downfall of the company and they never sent a replacement (so sad – it really was a decent device.) We both like the app and features offered.
John was getting tired of his UP catching on things and wanted to upgrade. With all the UP drama, John opted for a FitBit Surge. It has been a very dependable device for him. John recently upgraded to a FitBit Versa and LOVES it!
Sorry no pic of his watch/tracker.
I tried finding a pedometer app for my phone that had many of the features I liked on the UP. I have tried too many pedometer apps to document. They all have slightly different features. The downfall is that you need to carry your phone with you for every step since they use GPS tracking. Now the search was on for an armband. This also didn’t work as well as I had hoped. Something about doing EVERYTHING with the armband on was annoying.
But I think I have found my favorite activity tracker – an iWatch 3! I really didn’t want a fitbit when we were making the transition. It seemed too ugly and big. So here I am with a watch face that is definitely larger than the fitbit but so much more versatile. It’s comfortable too! I also picked the Sport Loop band instead of the traditional Sport Band. I’m so glad I waited!
I’ve had the iWatch for a month now – purchased on September 1 intentionally.
I walked 55.79 miles in September. 121,617 steps according to the Accupedo app (that’s a separate post) I moved about 4053 steps a day. Not perfect but it gives me a baseline to work with.
Now to get back up to my 10,000 steps a day!
I have joined Anne at Minimalist Sometimes and decided to do a count of the digital clutter I remove this year from my desktop, laptop, ipad, and phone.
Tonight I spent about an hour going through my contacts for one email account – 44 contacts removed and 122 emails removed while trying to figure out who the email address belongs to. I was able to put a name with many of the email addresses as well.
I made it to the K’s tonight. Feeling so much “lighter” and organized!
Actual items out of the house/premise today = 0
But we accomplished so much!
Barb spent the day organizing and purging her work portable hard drive. Today she started with about 46 GB worth of files (this is when she decided to look about noon). No idea how many actual files, probably over 30,000. By the end of the day, there were 25.1 GB and 14,356 files. Many of those were duplicates.
John spent the day fixing the sprinkler system. About a month ago, kiddo #2 was home alone and heard a weird clunking noise in the bathroom. When she walked around the house to investigate, there was water all over the patio. John thought he fixed is a couple of weeks ago, but when he turned on the water, it obviously wasn’t. We must have had a pressure surge because 3 pipes had cracked/burst at the same time. Today was spent finding and fixing the other 2.
Total for the challenge = 240 items + a bunch of digital files!
Daily Average = 18.46 items per day. We definitely need to remove some items tomorrow!
Our beloved coffee maker, who lives full time with us and travels with us in the motorhome, decided this morning to stop spitting out water. We tried running it with vinegar thinking maybe the hard water had clogged up the lines.
While researching online how to deal with this brand of coffee maker when it decides to stop spitting out hot water, there were numerous posts suggesting a spanking. Since it wasn’t working, what did we have to lose?
Now this bad, bad coffee maker needed a spanking – literally. If you’ve ever tried to spank a metal object on its bottom, it can be quite painful to the spanker. John brought in his mallet and gave it about a dozen good hits.
After a couple of tries, coffee maker decided the pain wasn’t worth it and delivered hot water the way it was supposed to!
Gotta love when brawn wins the fight against technology!
This is one topic that causes “heated” discussions in our home. Barb would love to remove a TV (or 2 or 3) from the home. John is against it – period.
Now to be fair, the TV we have in our bedroom is not connected to the cable system. It is primarily used in the RV during the summer. It spends the rest of the year in our bedroom to decrease the odds of the RV being broken in to.
Kiddo #1 (who has been married for 15 months now) “sacrificed” her room as the guest/extra stuff room. We were “lucky” that the Great Flood of 2015 happened about a month before her wedding. John really wanted a place to watch TV if both girls were home for an extended period without having to listen to us!
Last week we changed our cable provider and he had them add a cable box to this room. I guess it is considered a win since our bedroom does NOT have a cable box any longer.
We just received our third call of the afternoon claiming to be from Windows Technical Department.
I know they are:
Thankfully, we receive very few of these type of calls – maybe 2-3 per week. It’s weird that they called 3 times this afternoon. Also thankful the other 2 phone calls we received this afternoon were from kiddo #1 and kiddo #2.
Read this today! From Roots to the Past
So now cemetery headstones can be connected to the internet!
“Each headstone has a brick with a QR code. If you have a smarthphone, all you have to do is put your phone over the QR code and voila! Up pops scads of information about the “resident” of the cemetery. These may be the only cemeteries in North America where each and every resident is identified in this way. Quite extraordinary when you think about it.”
…to continue reading this post, visit Sandra Phinney’s blog.”
We recently read an article in the New York Times (Sep 6, 2015) by Allison Arieff titled “The Not Very Smart Home”. (Online the title appears to be “The Internet of Way Too Many Things” – not sure why the difference)
She seems to hit certain dilemmas in our minimalist/simplification/environmentally-friendly quest right on the head. We often comment about some of the same things she mentions in her article.
“…a night light that “listens” for your smoke detector to go off and then calls your smartphone to let you know your house might be on fire.”
“Technology is integrated not because it is necessary, but because the technology exists to integrate it.”
Wouldn’t it be better if the night light called the fire department??? Continue reading
Decluttering the Stuff 