I'm home from my short trip to Michigan. It was great to visit with my brother and his family, and I also got to see an old friend who is in assisted living now. His health is precarious, which is hard to see, but I hope the visit brightened his day.

I'm not sure how much I spent on gas, because I forgot to grab one of my receipts, and Discover is only showing the pending amount of $1 for the time being.  So I'm guessing it was $42.  I made two gas stops, because I wanted to fill up before I got back into Illinois. Good move on my part -- gas is about .50 higher per gallon here.

My other spending was $2 on road food, $14 at an antique store, $19 on wine and hand soap (bread & butter gifts) and -- here's the one that makes me sad -- $159 for a new phone. Yes, it turned out to be true that the 5G-compatible phone I bought just a year ago did not weather the 5G upgrade because it is not voice-over LTE (?)  So it was apparently using the 3G network. The guy who sold me the phone at Target said it's all been a big mess, very poorly handled, and he has been selling new phones to a lot of unhappy people.

And of course when my "old" phone conked out, I was on a trip.

What happened was -- the phone was working perfectly except suddenly I could not call or receive calls.  Ironic, huh? Did everything except what a phone is supposed to do. My replacement phone, I was told, is not quite as good -- though I can't tell the difference -- and it is using the 4G network, which I was promised will be viable for several years at least. A truly 5G-compatible phone would have been at least $500. I just couldn't do it.

So the carrier that kept hassling me to get a new phone was right after all. I am quite annoyed because switching over to a new phone is never quite smooth. There are new things to learn and I was happy enough with the way things were. But Consumer Cellular did provide a nice discount on the phone, and it's a Moto G like my old one, so I'm happy about that.

The other annoying thing that happened -- just before I left home, my property management company sent out an email that they goofed up and gave us the wrong numbers on our new monthly assessment fee.  Mine is $2.44 more.  The problem is, two days later, they charged me a $50 late fee because I hadn't changed the automatic payment -- which I didn't do because I was traveling and then transitioning to a new phone. I wrote a scathing email after I managed to get my new phone up and running to pay the flippin' $2.44.  I did not pay the $50. It looks like the late fee has been removed from my account, but I'm going to keep checking. No one actually answered me yet. How annoying is that? Their mistake -- two days notice -- ridiculous. I hope it was something automatic that was corrected.

Well, that's it -- the good, the bad and the ugly. Overall it was still a great trip.