I betcha that nobody even noticed I was gone.;)

Last week I moved from my 800 square foot house with the fantastic view to a place that had some view but was a little bit larger. There was no option if I wanted to remain married. Without exaggeration, there was not a single horizontal surface anywhere in the house that was not piled with S*T*U*F*F*, sometimes two and three layers deep. I'm talking about the rim of the bathtub, on top of the computer hutches, under the bed, covering the nightstands, on top of cabinets you needed a seven-foot ladder to reach. There was literally no place to put anything else.

So, we moved. It took until last night to get my computer system marginally functional again and get internet service working. The only peripheral that is set up is the network printer.

Attached is a pdf file showing where we moved to. It is a big file, about 4MB, and there is no earthly reason why you should be interested enough to download it, but I am quite pleased with the house and just had to show it off to someone. It came fully furnished, exactly as shown in the photos.

At the same time as the move, my in-car GPS broke. It actually still works, giving audible directions, but the touch-screen no longer accepts touches so unless I want to go to the airport (the last destination programmed) it is completely useless. We've had it for about six years, it was a discontinued TomTom model when we bought it that has so little memory that when people tried to update to newer maps it actually bricked the unit. (I avoided that trap by reading the reviews on Amazon.) As obsolete and with as few features as it had, it served my needs perfectly. I don't need voice recognition, I don't need traffic updates, I don't need any kind of bells and whistles. I just want to be able to enter a destination, either by address or by intersection, and get audible and screen instructions to get there as I drive.

There must be more than 1,000 on-dash portable GPS units at Amazon.com. And if I can believe the reviews, not a single damn one of them is worth the postage it would take to return it. Seriously, any GPS with less than 20% one-star ratings stands out as a champion in the field. Does anyone make a dependable, simple, on-dash portable GPS for car use, or have the in-dash and cell-phone devices killed the market?

Any recommendations?

tanstaafl.