Sunday, March 10…Too Much Time On My Hands (Styx)


   Last night on a walk after dark I realized that it’s never quiet around here…trains, highway traffic, construction vehicles, birds, dogs barking…always background noise.  However, when I walk past the tent area on my way to the bathroom at 11 p.m. or so, my footsteps sound amazingly loud even though the night isn’t quiet. If I was in a tent and heard that crunch..crunch..crunch sound approaching, I’d be on high alert.                
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   Time change Sunday…except that Arizona doesn’t observe Daylight Saving Time and our phones are smart enough to  know where we’re located so we went to sleep last night secure in the knowledge that we didn’t have to change anything. 
   Alarm went off at 8:30 am…got up, showered and had plenty of time before church at 11.
   About 10:50, we headed over to church…to find the front door locked.  What!? Kim, the door is locked! But we just saw that young couple get out of their car and come over here.  Where did they go? What’s going on here?  Why don’t you try that door over there?”  Kim opened that door to find 15 or so people milling around in a room.  It looked like a kitchen area and it appeared that we had stepped into fellowship time…coffee, treats, talking.   Rick Wilson, the pastor, came over to greet us… 

Rick: Hi…good morning.  Good to see you guys again this year.  Come on in…join us.
Me, because I was a bit confused:  Good morning, Rick. Uh, is this where you’re having church today?
Rick:  No, church starts at 11…this is Sunday School.  Oh, did you reset your clocks?  Arizona doesn’t observe the time change, you know.
Me:  No, we didn’t change our clocks because we know that Arizona stays the same. But our phones indicated that it was almost 11.  Right, Kim?   (Kim checks phone once again to verify that, yes, it says 10:56.)
Rick: No, it’s almost 10 but you’re welcome to join us for Sunday School.
We decided to go back to camp to have breakfast and return for church in an hour.  As we were leaving, I was muttering, “Well, so much for having a smart phone.  Looks like it’s not very smart because it can’t figure out what time it is and now neither can we!”
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   On the way back to camp we wondered why the phones hadn’t changed because they’ve always changed time automatically according to the time zone we were in.  In fact, neither of us knew how or if the time could be manually changed.  Never had to do that before.
   Since we suddenly had a free hour not only did we have time for breakfast but also time to sit down with our phones to try to figure this out. With some investigation Kim found that under ‘Settings’ and then ‘General Management’ there’s an ‘Automatic date and time’ feature that when turned off allows the user to manually set the time. And when it’s ‘on’, the phone uses the date, time and time zone provided by the network.  But whose network?!  I guess that’s not an issue to be concerned with because we manually set the time and life was good.  Man triumphs over technology!!😎
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   Except it didn’t take long to realize that the Fitbits hadn’t changed to the correct time…and we couldn’t figure why. 😕 The Fitbit syncs with the phone using the app.  Despite the fact that our phones were showing the correct time and we had synced the Fitbit with our phones (many times I might add), the Fitbit time had not changed.  Not very user friendly as the Fitbit serves as a watch, too.  Aghhhh!  
  Wait..Wait...Wait! As I was finishing that last paragraph Kim figured it out…I’m going to write down the steps for reference because this will probably become an issue again when we head home.   Go to Settings…then to General Management…then Time and Dateturn off the Automatic date and time feature.  The ability to manually set the clock becomes available and Select Time Zone is where we found relief.  Arizona is in Mountain Standard Time not Mountain Daylight Time….the phone makes that distinction and that’s what messed with the Fitbit.  Selected Mountain Standard Time and Fitbit changed time immediately.
   I still have questions about why the technology worked seamlessly on both the phones and the Fitbits as we traveled cross country and why it didn’t on the time change day; HOWEVER, we got all relevant timepieces on the same page and NOW life is good.👍
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   Thirty-eight people in attendance at church today.  Six of us were from the campground. 
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   Kim has a knee that’s been giving him problems now and again. Sitting on a bike for 250 miles yesterday did it no favors….it stiffened up overnight.    So we stayed off the bikes today…well, had we gotten back before dark I might have been tempted to take a short ride.  We decided to make it a Saguaro National Park day.  There’s a visitor center that we’ve been to several times and I thought it had a walking/hiking area around it…we grabbed our fanny packs, our walking sticks and camera for a hike in the desert.  Well, the visitor center has a walking path but it’s only about a ¼ mile loop…although we walked it, it’s not what we had in mind.  So we went across the road, always keeping the center in sight, to wander through the desert.  The vegetation is so green this year due to the rain.  Most of the saguaros were looking especially healthy, too…green, tall and almost fresh.  Or maybe that’s the way they always look in the setting sunlight.  I don’t know, but it was a breathtaking sight. 
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   Today started out cool…39o at 7:30 (although my phone said it was 8:30).  Warmed up quickly.  There was also a little breeze so our stroll through the desert wasn’t sweating hot.  I was glad to have the water along, though.
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   We didn’t do a 3 mile walk this morning, although it seems we would have had plenty of time. 😄It was a day off from that as well as from the bikes.  However we both got our 10000 steps through the course of the day.  Wandering through the desert definitely helped.
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   Yesterday a coyote ran out in front of Kim’s bike on IR 15…and he was moving fast.  Today a roadrunner ran across the road in front of the truck.  First one we’ve seen this year.  Antelope jackrabbit, coyote, roadrunner…javelina would round out the wildlife portion of the trip.  We’ve also been on the lookout for rattlesnakes…Kim wants to find one and I want to avoid one.  😏
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   Arrived back in camp after dark but as of 8 p.m., the sky wasn’t looking too promising for imaging.  Stars were visible but so were some very thin clouds. 
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No bike miles today

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