Day 2183

We're making progress. Our broadband service was finally restored today and the humidity in the house is down to 38%. When the technician called to tell me that everything had been fixed, I asked him what the problem was. "We found four separate faults in the fiber line to your house," he told me. "That sounds pretty major," I said. "Was service out for the entire neighborhood?" "No, it was just you," the guy said. It figures. Our house just seems to attract problems.

I stretched the soiled photo backdrop out on a long clothesline this morning and sprayed it with the Nature's Miracle enzyme. It was a nice day, so it didn't take long for the muslin cloth to air out and dry. I think it looks and smells much better, but Dot and Dash beg to differ. They are still real interested in the cloth backdrop when I take them outside. I'll see what Janet thinks. You can't dry clean or wash these hand painted backdrops, because all the paint will come off. I'll clean the backdrop again tomorrow and hopefully by next Saturday it will just be another large, somewhat dirty piece of canvas. I'm hoping for the best. The last thing you want is the smell of pee when you're shooting a long sequence of pet pictures. If one dog has marked the canvas, all the other dogs will want to pee on top of the same spot to claim it. That's just the way dogs are.

Even though our U-Verse service is working again, I'm still tempted to switch to Time Warner. I checked prices today and their top of the line bundle is about 40% less than what we are currently paying right for U-Verse. Cable providers are tricky though. They are masters of bait and switch tactics. You sign up for something and then you notice a few months later that you are paying quite a bit more. None of the cable providers include taxes in their pricing either. It's amazing how many weird and often expensive local and state taxes they can get away with adding to your bill. No wonder so many people are just watching Netflix and Hulu on the Internet. So far, the Internet has managed to escape most of the ridiculous taxes the utilities and telecom providers tack on to your bill.

The evil bird that poops on my car has returned to spend another Winter taunting me. I know it's the same bird every year. I wonder how long birds live? I think that parrots can live 50 years or more, but what about Blue Jays and Cardinals? This bird always poops on my car and never on Janet's. It drives me nuts. I've tried everything to scare the bird away, but nothing seems to work. I really thought rubber snakes would do the trick, but this bird has no fear of snakes. It even pooped on one of the rubber snakes yesterday.

I thought I might be able to see Comet Catalina this morning, since it is currently located very near the Moon and Venus in the pre-dawn sky. It turns out that the comet was fainter than expected though, and I wasn't able to find it with binoculars. I'll try again tomorrow morning, but I suspect that the glare from cars and streetlights will pretty well mask the faint sixth magnitude object.

Work continues to be slow this month. Maybe this is the new normal. I certainly hope not.

Humphrey is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 2180

Our U-Verse service has gone out again. Whenever I deal with cable company customer service representatives I understand road rage a little better. It is infuriating to pay so much for a service that is so unreliable. Whenever U-Verse goes down I'm tempted to go back to Time Warner Cable. Then I remember that their service was even worse. The last time I had reliable internet service was in the Internet dark ages when I had a dedicated DSL line pulled to the house. The old DSL line was faster and more reliable than the fancy WiFi network I have now. Everything was connected by Ethernet and I rarely had an outage. The phone company doesn't even offer DSL lines anymore. Times have changed.

So, how am I posting this if I don't have Internet service? I have a backup connection with another phone company. You have to have a back up for everything these days, especially if you're a website developer. It's frustrating to be at the mercy of the phone company. Nothing is dependable anymore. U-Verse won't even come out to look at the problem until Monday. They told me that they had no technicians available. Really? I saw a U-Verse technician in the ally behind my neighbor's house about thirty minutes after I got off the phone with customer service. I told him that my service was out too, and asked if he'd check my line while he was in the neighborhood. He must have done absolutely nothing, because the line is still dead.

The only productive thing I did today was get a haircut. The mall is already packed with Christmas shoppers. I had trouble finding a parking place. Every time I get a haircut, I look at the clippings on the floor and am amazed at how white my hair has become. My hair used to be curly and now it is perfectly straight. What's that all about? The stylist was complaining about having bags under her eyes. I looked at myself in the mirror and said, "That's nothing. Look at me. I look like a racoon." Basically, every aspect of growing old sucks. Especially looking in the mirror.

On the way back to the car, I stopped in the Apple store. I really like the new larger iPad Pro. This thing has a great screen and could easily serve as a laptop substitute if it was paired with a wireless keyboard. It would also make a great little teleprompter for video shoots. Unfortunately, I can't afford one of these seductive gadgets at the moment. I can't even afford the WiFi scale that also caught my eye.

It's weird not having a TV. There's almost always a TV on in some part of the house, even if nobody is watching it. The house seems unnaturally quiet. If I listen carefully, I can hear the dehumidifier running in the living room, but that's about it. As you've probably guessed, the dogs have gone to sleep already.

I'm still dreading tomorrows photo shoot. Nobody scheduled a break for lunch, so we're booked solid from early morning until mid-afternoon. I'm tired already. I've got all the batteries charged. I've packed up the equipment in various nylon bags and I'm ready to go. I'm thinking that this is the last year I'm going to do this, but that was what I thought last year as well.

Today's Dalmatian of the Day passed away yesterday. He was always one of my favorites. RIP Camp!

Camp is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 819

I went to the AT&T store today to find out a little more about U-verse. I've been getting these flyers in the mail for the past several months with what look like incredibly good deals and I wanted to find out if they were really true. The $79 a month bundle price they quoted was indeed correct, but the more I learned about it, the more I wondered if anyone would really sign up for this rather limited service. You got a phone, but you were limited to a certain number of minutes a month. You got internet, but it was slower than what I have now. You got TV as well, but not very many channels. When I asked how much it would cost to get what I really needed, the price suddenly got a lot higher. Despite the bait and switch tactics, I'm still thinking of switching from Time Warner to U-verse anyway.

Why do competing companies make it so difficult to compare services these days? You always end up comparing apples to oranges and at the end of the day, you're just guessing which company is actually better. I'm convinced this is why telephone, internet, and electricity providers try so hard to get you to sign a two year contract. Without a contract, there would be nothing preventing you from just leaving when the disappointment sets in. Somehow phone companies always seem to deliver less than they promise. They never mention all the city and state taxes that are going to be added to your bill either.

I got a bid on putting in a new furnace as well today. Although the price was more reasonable than I expected, it was still pretty high and confirmed my decision to just wait until next Fall to do anything major. There are far to many expenses on the horizon these days anyway. Taxes are due in less than a month. The rent house is empty and not contributing anything to the monthly cash flow. The Defender 90 is almost due for another major service. The list never ends.

Enough complaining though. The weather seems to get a little nicer every day. I'm not wild about daylight savings time starting so early this year, but it's nice to be able to put the heavy Winter coats away for another season. Walking the dogs is a lot more enjoyable in warmer weather too. Although Dot and Dash haven't officially become photo assistants, they are both becoming better about letting me take pictures during our walks. I never really thought of myself as a nature photographer, but I'm actually starting to get some good shots.

The iCloud has turned out to be a good thing as well. I was a bit apprehensive about upgrading everything to take advantage of the Cloud, but it's certainly making my life easier. I don't have to synchronize calendars and contact lists anymore and I just noticed that my iPhone upgraded itself to the latest IOS all by itself. Now, if I could just train these devices to do my web and writing work for me.

Wyatt is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 818

Decisions, decisions. When I went to the storage warehouse today, I noticed that there was a much larger storage unit available right across from mine. I've been wanting a larger unit for quite a while, so I went to the manager and asked how much more it would be to upgrade to this larger space. The manager told me that I could move to the larger storage space if I wanted, but that I would lose the entire discount I had received earlier by paying for my storage space in advance. What? This seemed ridiculous. I thought they would just pro-rate the new space based on the additional square footage I would be occupying. I should have known. If you want something that someone else has, you almost always have to pay for the privilege.

If somebody wants you on the other hand, there are all kinds of deals available. I've been getting these flyers in the mail from U-verse lately, offering what appears to be fantastic deals if I will switch from my cable provider to their service. Since U-verse is offering a telephone, television, and internet bundle for less than what I currently pay for phone service alone, I keep thinking there's got to be a catch. Cable was pretty reasonable too when we first got it installed, but the cost has kept going up dramatically every year since. Maybe U-verse really is a good deal, but I keep thinking that the minute we abandon our cable service, the U-verse will start acting flaky and we'll want the cable back.

I got a call from the HVAC folks today saying that the cost of the new gas valve required to keep my furnace limping along for another year or so is over $400. Since it was warm today, I'm thinking about just waiting until Fall and then getting an entirely new furnace. The only trouble with waiting until Fall is that I might have already wasted the money for the new furnace on something else. I think the yearly rent on the new large storage space I've got my eye on is almost exactly the same as the cost of a new furnace.

Life is complicated. If I could just bring myself to throw stuff away, I wouldn't need a new storage space in the first place. Of course, if I could bring myself to start wearing sweaters indoors, I probably wouldn't need a furnace either.

Lance is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 466

Yay! We have grass again. Well, at least we have some grass. When I was picking up sod at Miller Grass this morning, I overheard one of the grass guys tell someone ahead of me in line to buy twice as much as they thought they would need and everything would work out right. I only bought what I thought would be enough to cover the backyard, and as a result, I'll have to go back and buy some more tomorrow.

Planting the grass was a family affair. Dash dug big holes in the dirt while Janet and I arranged the squares of St. Augustine sod. Dot supervised, as she usually does, by barking at Dash when he got too rowdy. It seems like there ought to be some sort of tool that would allow you to easily cut the sod squares to fit irregular shapes, but I haven't found one yet. We have lots of curved pathways and borders in the yard and every time we would come to one of these areas, we would have to cut the sod to fit using shovels or tree trimming tools. I need to go to Home Depot and see if there is a better way of doing this. Probably, most people just have rectangular yards and it isn't a problem.

Friends and even some other bloggers seem to think I shouldn't be having the problem's I'm currently having getting a new heat pump installed at my rent property. Believe it guys. This is an old Bud Oglesby building. I've known other people who have lived in Oglesby homes who had to jack hammer all the way through the concrete slab under their living room floor just to fix a minor plumbing leak. Old things are usually hard to fix. Old Oglesby buildings are always hard to fix. There must be some sort of logarithmic curve that defines the cost of repairs based on the age of the object being repaired. At any rate, waiting fourteen days for a replacement heat pump is nothing. I once had to wait over six months to find a water pump for my 1972 Citroën Maserati. Come to think of it, I've been waiting over a year for a small mechanical part on an old Omega watch I'm having repaired.

I downloaded the Time Warner app that is supposed to let you watch TV on your iPad. They've been advertising this thing on TV and after seeing the commercials over and over again, I finally got curious enough to give it a try. I don't know why Time Warner even bothered to release this app. It's totally worthless. Remember when you used to try to watch YouTube videos on a real slow computer? That's what the app is like. You watch TV for about fifteen seconds and then everything freezes while the next little segment is buffered in memory. After doing this several times the iPad runs out of free memory and the whole thing crashes. I think I'll just continue watching TV on the television.

Dalmatian of the Day

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