Happy Medicare Birthday to my brother!

A few days ago, I decided I needed an app to track packages. The Mac podcasts I listened to have raved about an app called Deliveries (from JuneCloud) for years; it was $4.99 on the App Store, so I bought it. It works well for USPS, UPS, FedEx, and DHL tracking; you can even give it access to your Amazon account and it will track Amazon orders no matter how they’re shipped (and even before they’re shipped). It has an Apple Watch app; there’s also a Mac app, but it costs another $5. It’s attractive and makes good use of notifications.

But…it doesn’t support FEIA, the carrier that’s delivering my webcam. Instead, I wound up using parcelsapp.com to track that package – and after a while, I decided to try their iPhone app, Parcels (free, with optional in-app purchases).

Parcels is not as pretty as Deliveries, doesn’t have a Watch app as far as I can tell, and doesn’t have a Mac app. Notifications require a subscription ($3.49/year, which also turns off the ads, which are pretty annoying). But it tracks more carriers and goes into more detail. It imports orders from a few merchants (including Amazon and eBay), too.

If I’d realized how good Parcels was in its free mode, I would have tried it before buying Deliveries. But now I have both – I’m going to have to order more things!

If you’re looking for a package tracker, try Parcels first; it may be all you need.

We’re getting a little better at meal planning and shopping preparedness; this week, we had everything that we needed written down on one piece of paper and in a rational order for a short trip through the supermarket. And we almost stuck to our list – but at the end, we discovered that Diane’s cereal was on sale, so we bought a few boxes (we were standing in the cereal aisle waiting for the cashier anyway!). We have to pick up a couple of things at a different store tomorrow, but then I think we’ll be finished for the week.

We got our remaining airfare refunds for our cancelled trip to Iceland today. We also got a note from British Airways reminding us that if we want to cancel our flights to Portugal, they’d be happy to give us a voucher good through 2022. I plan to wait and see if they cancel the flight so we can get a real refund, but if all we can get is a voucher, it’ll be OK. I hope we can take a trans-Atlantic trip safely before 2022!