Karin's Adventures

This is the season for outdoor activities. It's nice and warm, not unbearably hot anymore. The mosquitoes are pretty much gone. The backyard provides plenty of dry leaves and sticks for a small fire. Time to have smores!

Put a marshmellow on a stick and hold it over the fire. Melt it, but don't burn it. Then lay a bar of milk chocolate on a graham cracker and hold that under your soft marshmellow. Use a second graham cracker to pull the melting marshmellow off the stick. Now squoosh the gooey mess flat between your crackers and enjoy.

My plans for a relaxing evening working out at the YMCA were abruptly cancelled by a mattress flying off a truck two cars ahead of me. The traffic light at the intersection of Washington Center and Coldwater had just turned green. Everybody was close behind each other and accelerating when a queen size mattress fell off the back of this truck. The driver ahead of me barely managed to stop right before the mattress. I slammed on my breaks as hard as I could, but still bumped into the back of that red Dodge. The SUV behind me didn't stop quite as quickly and rear-ended my van hard.

Nobody was seriously injured. Just my back now hurts a lot due to the blow from behind. The car in front of me got a small ding in the back fender and some paint scraped off where my front hit it. The plastic part of my front fender is cracked. The back door of my van is bent so much that it doesn't open anymore, and the back fender will have to be replaced too. The car behind me was leaking coolant and had the entire front badly smashed. He needed towing. 

The person who lost their mattress never even bothered to stop.

This summer saw a lot of digging activities on campus, which sometimes forced me to take a different route for my lunch break walk around the Concordia Lutheran Cemetery. Now that day sessions are back in full swing and the grass is growing over all those holes, it seemed like I could return to my daily walking routine. I was going to settle for that until today, when I discovered some newly dug holes with these fancy posts in them along parts of my walk.

..... somebody has the fantastic idea of putting a sidewalk in along Lima Road!

Construction to widen Highway 3 up to three lanes each direction has been ongoing for almost a year now. It doesn't look like they will get done any time soon. While driving that way is still a big mess, there is hope for an amazing future along the road, though.

There is a sidewalk! 

Ever since email became mainstream crooks and thieves used it to try and phish personal details and passwords off unsuspecting honest people. These fraudulent emails are easy to recognize: they tell you some very exiting story about lottery winnings, or a huge amount of money somewhere, or it looks like a job offer - and then they ask for sensitive information, like your full name, birth date, address, home phone number, account number, SSN, ........ if you actually fall for that, and give up your data, you're toast!

Over the years people got wise, though. I don't think anybody in their right mind replies to scam emails anymore. So the criminals had to come up with different ideas. Lately they've been doing it with mobile phones.  

So, just in case you are young/innocent enough to still believe anything somebody will tell you, beware! Here's what happenend to me twice in the past few days:

You receive a call on your cell phone, the caller id shows just a number (sometimes it doesn't even look like a phone number). When you answer, a female computerized voice comes on saying something like 'Hello, this is ........... (insert the name of your bank here). Your account (or credit card, or debit card) has been temporarily suspended. To reactivate, please press 1 now to be transferred directly to our security department.' 

If you are curious enough to proceed to press 1, you will really be transferred. Just not to any bank's security department! The person will ask for many very personal details, and then abuse that information immediately to drain your bank account, or even overdraw it, if you were naive enough to opt-in for the 'overdraft protection' that your bank has been trying hard to push onto you recently (so they can charge you $25 per incident).