I can’t point to any particular trigger that caused the decision, but I’m doing my best to get Google out of my life and off my devices. It’ll take a bit of time, but I’m working on it. I’ve had a Proton account for quite a while now and have been enjoying their products. They also won’t sell everything I discuss, look up, buy, etc. to every marketing company on the planet: proton.me. A lot of their products are free, but it’s been worth it to me to pay the $9.99 per month for some extras. With them I get: email, calendar, drive, password manager, and VPN. The first 3 replace my existing google products. I’m also able to automatically backup all photos taken on my phone to their Drive product, so that gets rid of Google photos.

Besides those main items, I’ve also made the following replacements:

• groups.io instead of Google Groups (free)
• Discord instead of Google Chat (free)
• Aegis instead of Google Authenticator (free)

When it’s time for a new phone, I’ve been looking at: https://murena.com/. I’m sure there are some others – it sure would be nice to get a phone without all the bloatware and crap that comes with Samsung.

All in all, a work in progress! The email for this posting will be the last one that comes from my gmail account.

I had a pretty laid back holiday weekend and got caught up on some of my backlog of shows and movies. The quilting and Halloween bug bit so I started playing with some fabric and patterns:

I’ve got several patterns and will keep making more quilt blocks as the mood takes me. Someday they’ll all be put together into a blanket. 😁

I also played some Stardew Valley which got a big update a little bit ago. It’s a fun, quaint, and relaxing game. You can easily lose a few hours to it without knowing how much time has passed.

Nyx got a clean bill of health and is all healed up from the cyst rupture. Glad it wasn’t anything worse! Here’s a pic of Nyx in quite the sleeping position:

That would kill my neck and back! 😆

Hope everyone had a great holiday weekend! Hugs!