Fun and Games Dept

This blog entry will be updated as this personal saga continues.  We have Time Warner Roadrunner high speed (“turbo”!) Internet service. As of 2130 last night the speeds were down to a crawl. I called the local service number at 2210 after using my considerable geek skills to diagnose the issue: packet loss due to poor signal strength on the modem. Rebooting five times did not resolve the issue. Isolating the network to just one computer hooked to the modem resulted in the same deal. I was going to have to call.

Tue 10 Aug 10

2210: Dial my 10 digit home number, 2, 1, 2, 4. Waited on hold for 35 minutes listening to a badly chopped up marketing message and then I hung up. I know why the marketing message was chopped up and I can’t believe they’re still using that service.

Wed 11 Aug 10

0536: same dialing deal. Todd in Albany. Confirms my issues. Next appointment is between 0800 and 1200 on Tue 17 Aug. Call back after 0600 to talk to someone local since he’s on a skeleton crew and can’t really do much. A 24/7 service does not deserve 24/7 support.

0601: same dialing deal. Nancy. Use of IM makes me suspect she’s working from home. She needs me home phone number (even though I just typed it in) to confirm I am who I am. She says Tue 17 Aug because my speeds are slow instead of down completely. I offer to go outside and fully break it. She gasps. I ask for someone on the 13th since we can have someone at the house then. She says no, I have to be home today, take it or leave it. I lie and say yes though no one will be home. She’s not technical. No shit, but I give her credit for being mechanical.

0707: home phone, 2 1 2 2 4. Joe after 8 minute wait. In order to get an evening appointment you have to schedule your outage or trouble call in advance. (I wish I was joking about that). Reschedule for 13 Fri between 1000 and 1200. That sucks but because I didn’t plan my broken connection in advance its the best I can do. Apparently new customers are more important.

1244: An internal spy at Time Warner has confirmed that it looks like I have a problem in the outside wiring and that the 13th is the earliest date I can have for a trouble call. I appreciate the update very much but really? 48 hours is the earliest you can have someone out there? That makes me really want to sign up for that digital phone service the chopped up marketing message was trying to sell me.

I mentioned to Earl last night that it had been a long, long while since we had a bucket of supper so tonight he made a run to the local Kentucky Fried Chicken for just that: a bucket of supper.

I don’t know if it was the mention of such a supper in a Reba song I was listening to the other day that jogged a memory or two of enjoying a bucket of chicken with the family when I was a kid but something made me crave a choice of original or extra crispy. I remember sharing a couple of buckets of chicken at Grandma City’s house on a Saturday night or Sunday afternoon on a couple of occasions. The Kentucky Fried Chicken wasn’t too far away; since this was the mid to late 1970s it was the older style establishment with the big bucket on top of the pole. This particular restaurant sat on the corner of Old Liverpool Road and the then-modern-sounding Electronics Parkway (which led to Electronics Park). I don’t remember the restaurant having a seating area but since it was 35 years or so ago, my memories might be a little hazy.

Earl and I took a somewhat healthy approach to our bucket of supper tonight: we supplemented the chicken with green beans and cole slaw. There were no mashed potatoes or gravy to be found. That’s okay though because it was just as good as I remembered it back in the day.

From Picasa Web.

Last night I made a stop at the Amish baked good stand to pick up our weekly stash of homemade pies. I brought home a blackberry and an apple crisp pie. Both look delicious. I have sampled the apple crisp pie and I have to say that it lives up to my expectations.

I have a lot of respect for the Amish. They do their thing in their definition of life and they stick to their beliefs despite all the chaos going on around them. They live their lives the way that they choose to and while I might not agree with some of their beliefs (and they probably wouldn’t agree with many of mine), their adherence to their lifestyle is worthy of my respect. I think that there is a lot that we could learn from them.

The first time I stopped at their road side stand I ended the exchange with the young girl with a kind “Have a nice weekend!”. Her response was simple: “Yes.” The sound and tone of it wavered somewhere between Bea Arthur as Dorothy and Suzanne Plechette as Emily and she cast her eyes away from me. I smiled nervously and walked back to the car, where I promptly realized that perhaps the weekend did not carry the joyful significance for her as it did for me, so I filed this speculative thought away for future reference.

Last week when I stopped at the stand (blueberry and cherry), a different girl greeted me and her demeanor was a little more lively. The order came to $7.25, she gave me back $2.25 and then quickly corrected her mistake with a giggle and the right amount of change. I simply said “thank you.” Her response was a smile, but silence. She appeared to look over my right shoulder.

Last night we were back to the original girl and I slightly changed my approach by saying “have a nice night.”  Again, she responded with a simple “yes” with her eyes cast downward.

Quite frankly this is perplexing me.

I have a small worry about traveling outside of English-speaking countries. While I want to see the world and all that it offers, I don’t want to make the people in the country where I am a guest uncomfortable by being a typical American, because I don’t see myself as typical in any way. This concern of discomfort stems from my lack of language skills; I barely have command of the English language let alone any other sort of language. I guess that’s why I think of traveling to places like Canada, Ireland, Australia, Wichita, the Carolinas and the like; while I might sound a little funny in those places, I shouldn’t offend anyone with what I have to say because that common ground of English is present. I also feel kind of foolish because while we expect everyone else in the world to know their own language and a command of ours, the typical American only speaks our mangling of the English language.

I also don’t like the lack of control I think I have by not knowing what is being said around me. I live by the credo of “always be aware of your surroundings.” I listen to every conversation, I read body language of everyone around me, I know where the emergency exits are, even if they are in an aisle behind me and I tune into the vibe of any given space so I can use my chameleon skills to blend into the surroundings if necessary. I have control issues, I freely admit that, and when I don’t have control I am uncomfortable because I can’t control whether I’m making other people uncomfortable or not.

As I said earlier, I have a lot of respect for the Amish and I admire what they bring to our area. I also really like their pies and breads. And I don’t want to make them uncomfortable when we meet, even if it’s for less than two minutes.

Perhaps there isn’t a proper way to bring a transaction to an end aside from just saying “Thank you”. It could be that this young woman is quite comfortable with our little transaction and she is adhering to a custom that I am unaware of. The control freak in me says that I need to do some research online and get comfortable with the fact that I’m not overstepping any boundaries and if I am, I need to correct it.

Motion., originally uploaded by DJ SuperCub.

I have recently given up talking and texting whilst driving. It wasn’t the speeding ticket that prompted this change in attitude (not that I did it that much anyways), rather, it’s just common sense to pay attention to what you’re doing while you’re driving.

That being said, I couldn’t resist taking this photo this morning because I thought it might come out cool. I did all the camera settings before I left for work and then put the camera on timer and set it on the dash. So aside from the quick fiddling of putting the camera on the dash, I paid attention to my driving the entire time.

I thought the picture came out pretty good.

Velocity., originally uploaded by iMachias.

Tom has his ears in streamline position, the tail up provides balance and measures wind velocity. I think he’s pretty impressive for clocking in at 15 years old these days.

Creative 003.365, originally uploaded by iMachias.

This hot and humid summer has brought us a relatively good-sized crop of thunderstorms lately. Now that I’m not on-call for work every three or four weeks, I can enjoy storms for what they are and not what they’ll do to my life. I am enjoying this change.

I snapped this photograph on my way home from work just as a storm was rolling in. When I got home I shot some video of the rapidly rolling clouds; they’ll be used as a B-roll in one of my upcoming movies.

Creative 002.365, originally uploaded by iMachias.

Tom is not happy unless he is able to get outside first thing in the morning after he has chewed six to eight pieces of kibble and spit one or two of them into his waterbowl. At nearly 15 years old, I suppose he’s allowed to do that sort of thing. He has a routine and he likes to stick to it. If his routine is broken, or it’s the weekend, he will yowl loudly at the top of the stairs as if to do a reenactment of a stabbing scene and he will awake all that choose to sleep beyond 5:30. He even compensates for Daylight Saving Time. He’s smart like that.

I guess Tom is like his Daddy in some ways, because I’m pretty rigid in my morning routine as well. Not being a morning person, the only way that I can guarantee that I will be dressed when arrive at work is if I follow my routine to the letter, which involves acknowledgement that I am actually wearing pants, a shirt and shoes. I figure the underwear and socks don’t show so while I remember to wear them 99% of the time, there is always the risk that I won’t because they don’t go under the acknowledgment check before leaving for the day.

Earl tiptoes around the house in the morning during his routine because he doesn’t know what my mood is going to be like so he opts for the “live grenade” approach. I don’t think that I’m that unreasonable in the morning as long as I’m on my routine. I will give him credit that like Tom, who is smart enough to figure out Daylight Saving Time, Earl is smart enough to figure out my sleep walking in my actual sleep versus my sleep walking through the day up until about 10:00 a.m. or so.

That last sentence makes you nervous about yesterday’s picture of me driving on Thruway on my way to work, doesn’t it.

Southwick Beach State Park., originally uploaded by iMachias.

Earl, Jamie and I took (or had) a day off from work today. Our friend Scott joined us for a day at Southwick Beach State Park. It was a very good day.

So I just stopped at the gas station to fill up the car. I swiped my debit card, punched in my zip code, told the pump I wanted a receipt and started pumping. Two things happened that irked me. First of all, I had to hold the handle because New York State (at least this part) doesn’t allow you to use the little latch that holds the pump in an on position. They want you to stand right there and hold that handle yourself, regardless of the weather (and it gets mighty cold in these parts). This is undoubtedly because someone downstate (I’m projecting here) probably screwed up and doused themselves with gas and then lit themselves on fire and it was deemed dangerous to let the pump do it’s thing itself; they’d rather you stayed right there and sucked in as many gas fumes as possible. I project this onto downstate because they’re next to New Jersey where you’re not even allowed to touch the gas pump, you have to have the well paid Fuel Attendant do it while he’s enjoying a smoke.

Secondly, the pump stopped pumping at $0.04 and promptly spit out a receipt. So not only did I get no more than three drops of gas into the car before cashing out, I had to hold the handle for every drop of that four cents worth of gas.

I swiped my card again and went through the whole rigmarole where the pump claimed I had a full tank at 10 gallons but I knew better and was able to squeeze another 1.5 gallons into the tank. I figured if I had to hold the handle the entire time I was going to get every last drop into that tank that I could. It’s kind of like shaking it in the bathroom.

Because the OCD in me can’t stand to pump gas to an uneven amount (I either go to the nearest dollar or nickel, or something cute like $34.56), I had to go to a weird amount that was off by $.04 so I could compensate for the other receipt I had.

I’ll let Earl figure out the bookkeeping.

The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico makes me sick to my stomach. This morning on the drive in I heard discussion about the merits of using a “nuclear detonation” to seal the hole off to stop the leak. There were doubts as to whether this would actually be done, however, the merits were being discussed. That approach can’t be too healthy for any living things around the spill site.

I tweeted yesterday that I thought that any person that goes to a BP gas station is a fucktard. (I’ve been using that word a lot lately). I stand by that belief.

BP’s approach to stopping the spill is to make sure they can tap into the same oil by drilling close by. While we are an oil dependent nation, it’s probably not going to do us a lot of good if we don’t have a planet to live on.

I need to buy a hybrid.