SIMPLIFY this!

I found this metal wall sign in a small shop in Fairbury way back in their clearance area. For just $3.98 I thought what a cheap way to remind myself to keep life simple.

Meant to be motivational, the sign, which hangs just to the right of my computer desk, now serves only to mock me.

We continue to swear up and down we are "downsizing" and that even if we don't sell the farm we will decrease our work load here and along with that our standard of living, working towards a small homesteading attitude amidst a too-big farm, yes, that is what we keep saying.

Yet, in the last month, we've done everything except...SIMPLIFY.

When Keith's computer kept getting slower and slower and freezing up even when the house was warm and toasty we decided to upgrade. At least for now, until we downsize we encouraged each other. This meant his PC went out of the office while my current PC became his NEW PC. This meant of coarse that I needed a new PC.

Which we bought. With elder sons help we got those two PC's up and running. Well, they were running, until I tried to load software from my old PC onto my new PC. Seems several programs were not compatible since my new PC operated on Windows 8 and much of my old software could only count as high as Windows 7.   So companies had to be called and midlife farmwives put on hold for hours and new software was eventually downloaded over the Internet via something called a "driver."

Miss Daisy was not amused with her new driver.

Then we realized Keith's new PC which was my old PC would not allow downloading of the printer software for the printer he had, since it was an archaic 5 year old printer. So of course we had to buy a new printer.

In the midst of all that, we decided our land line was no longer needed but a smart phone was. So to keep things SIMPLE I got the smart phone while Keith kept his old Tracfone. But the volume had stopped working well on it a couple of months ago so we decided it would be SIMPLE enough to give him my old Tracfone to use but we'd have to switch his minutes and phone number from his old Tracfone to his new (formally my old) Tracfone since customers often called on HIS number.

A phone call to Tacfone and a new sim card SIMPLY took care of that matter (maybe, we haven't installed THAT yet) while I tried not feeling like such a dumbass while learning the ends and outs of my new smart phone. I have less than 2 weeks to master it since we are disconnecting the land line you know...to simplify things.

So now I can answer email and text and Facebook and take old fashioned phone calls all from one device, at least theoretically I can. First though I have to master actually turning the phone "ON" which really is not as SIMPLE as it looks.