Every year around this time, the “Status Collage” gets popular on Facebook. It’s just a collage of the things one posts in their Status box. Here’s my collage:
Wow, I babble a lot over there.
An antidote to annoyance
As you all might expect, I am seriously irritated by my lack of Internet connection at home and the Keystone Kops manner in which EarthLink is going about fixing it. The latest? Out of curiosity I decided today just to see if maybe my phone was causing some kind of problem, so I experimented with plugging it in, unplugging it, et cetera, just to see if my DSL would come on. And what did I find out?
Since their “tech” came out, my landline has apparently been dead too! What the hell did they do, shut off my entire phone line instead of fixing it?
AGGHHHH!!!
So I’m annoyed and need something to amuse me. Which brings me to…some pie-throwing action.
Antigone Magazine is trying to raise money by selling calendars; in an effort to drum up business, the editor, a young woman named Amanda Reaume, has decided to take a pie in her face for every ten calendars they sell. They must be up to thirty, because so far, she’s received three:
Self-inflicted, too — that takes some moxie.
And then there are Ten Unexpected Pies in the Face:
And…ten more (with a Star Wars one)!
OK, that’s helping my mood. A bit, anyway. Harumph.
Stupid EarthLink.
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Status unchanged
Well, folks, I’m still offline at home. I may have opportunities to get online here and there over the next few days, but it’s starting to look like “New ISP shopping” time at Casa Jaquandor. EarthLink told me day before yesterday that a tech would be out “tomorrow” (yesterday, in real time) to check our phone lines. I have no way of knowing if that happened (they said he wouldn’t need access to our apartment at all, which is good because The Wife and I both worked yesterday), but when I got home, our DSL modem wasn’t even picking up the DSL line. At least before it would pick up the line but not connect to the Internet; now it wasn’t picking up the line at all.
So I called yet again, to be greeted by a recorded message that said, “According to our records, your issue has been resolved successfully. Would you still like to speak to a representative?” I said yes, and then proceeded to rip into the poor guy who answered. Oh well. The long-and-short of it is that another tech will be dispatched, yada yada yada. I’m not optimistic. I told the guy, this is EarthLink’s last chance, and believe me, it is: if we’re not reliably connected to the Internet by the time I get home from work tomorrow, I will cancel my EarthLink subscription and begin looking for a new ISP. The guy assured me that it would be resolved, but at this point, I have less than zero confidence in EarthLink’s ability to provide the bare minimum of technical support to a customer who has been giving them forty bucks a month for seven years.
So, I may have new posts up at times over the next indeterminate period. I hope to, anyway. Keep checking back, and thanks for checking in anyway!
(Oh, and for my Buffalo region readers, what’s a good ISP in these parts if all I want is Internet — no phone and no cable teevee?)
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Holding Pattern Epsilon
Sorry for the lack of posting, folks, but again, the DSL here at Casa Jaquandor has been in and out, all weekend long. It’s been enormously frustrating. I was willing to grant that the weather we had several days ago was behind the outages at first, but that excuse is getting harder to accept.
Now, our ISP is EarthLink, and has been since 2003. But I’ve noticed that since we switched from dial-up to DSL, when I view the blog from home, it shows up on my SiteMeter as a hit from Verizon.net. So my supposition is that EarthLink’s DSL is simply Verizon’s, rebranded in the same way that a lot of the store-brand merchandise at big stores like Target or Wal-Mart is name-brand stuff with a new label slapped on. If that’s the case, then I wonder if Verizon is purposely letting their DSL go to hell in hopes that enough people will sign up for FIOS.
If that’s the case, well…it may end up working. We have no interest in a cable teevee plan, so if we decide to ditch the DSL, our best option is to go with FIOS Internet on its own (perhaps also ditching our landline telephone). For now, I’ve been posting lots of nasty things about EarthLink on Twitter, to see if they pay attention to that. Calling their service number isn’t an appealing option; I’ve gone that route before only to end up talking to a call center employee in Mumbai who very nicely talks me through the steps in power-cycling my modem. Which I’ve already done. Multiple times. Each day.
Oh well. We’ve had this problem with our DSL before, and it’s always turned out OK after a few days. Hopefully that happens again now, but if it doesn’t, I’m prepared to pull the trigger.
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A shout-out to the fine young man who helped shovel out my car
Hey all!
Now I’m blogging from a public terminal at the Orchard Park Public Library. I hope the home DSL comes back on soon. Yeesh!
I was able to leave work today with relatively little fuss, which was nice owing to the large number of horror stories I had heard from denizens of the South Buffalo area regarding travel. The big difficulty was digging out my car, which had been buried in about a foot of snow since parking it seven hours prior. But a coworker of mine came along to help me do the digging, at one saying, “So, are you going to mention me on your blog?”
Well, here he is. Thanks, dude! And in the brief time span I was out there, he helped shovel out four different cars for coworkers. I’m sure there were more, even, than that. Huzzah for helpful coworkers!
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Holding Pattern Delta!
Wow, are we ever getting hit with snow in the regions surrounding Casa Jaquandor. Lots and lots of snow, that wonderful lake-effect stuff that beats the hell out of a region about five to ten miles wide and leaves folks half-a-mile outside of the snow band scratching their heads and saying things like, “What in tarnation do you suppose the fuss is all about!”
I assume it’s weather related, but our DSL connection at home has been extremely spotty over the last day and if it is weather related I expect it to remain spotty, so I’m not likely to be online a whole lot. But don’t just say “Well, screw him!” and click Back on your browsers! I’ve posted some good stuff lately (also on Flickr), or at least I like to think so. Hang out, leave a comment or two, yada yada yada. Meantime, new content will show up, oh, sometime when I can actually post new content. Cheerio, folks!
(I’m posting this from work, which is something I don’t like to do, but duty calls.)
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Kind words, freely given
I’d just like to thank everyone who has weighed in either here, or on Facebook, or in e-mail about today’s anniversary of Little Quinn’s passing. It really doesn’t feel like it’s been five years, sometimes; other times, it seems like it’s been longer. Maybe some time I’ll write more about the various strategies The Wife and I used to cope and get through all of the challenges that Little Quinn posed, from the moment of his birth to the moment of his death. (Keep that in mind, all you regular readers — we’re two months away from the next edition of Ask Me Anything!) Those challenges were many, and they went on a long time even after he was gone — a longer time than I had even thought likely. The passing of a child is a long-haul kind of thing.
Some of you seem to worry — and this is perfectly normal — about the inadequacy of the words you have to offer. Believe me when I tell you, any words of support and love and understanding are the right words. As long as they’re from the heart, they’re the right words, and I value each word that anyone has ever said to me about him.
So anyway, now back to regular content, huzzah! (But I’ll probably be skipping Sentential Links for this week. I just haven’t been online much, and judging from my traffic numbers, none of you have, either!)
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Runaway trains! Antiques! Food! Pies! What a weekend!
(UPDATED below.)
I spent a muchly-deserved, muchly-anticipated long weekend over the Thanksgiving holiday. It was a great time. Details and photos and such after the break. This is a “daily life” type of post, with a bunch of photos. But there’s also a punchline at the end which you may find amusing, if you’ve ever thought I warranted some kind of “just desserts”….
Thanksgiving Morning here at Casa Jaquandor is a lazy affair. The Wife and I are often quite tired heading into this particular weekend, as our jobs both tend to pick up and become very hectic as the Holiday Season approaches. We’re always grateful to have a morning that consists of lazing about, watching the Macy’s Parade, drinking coffee, and eating donuts. It’s especially relaxing because…we don’t cook T-giving dinner.
For the last five or six years, our tradition on Thanksgiving has been to eat out. With my parents not really feeling like cooking the massive meal anymore, and with their drive to our home being about an hour, we’ve decided it’s best just to go to a local restaurant. We tried a couple of different places early on, and were disappointed, but then The Wife and I discovered Danny’s a few years back. We first went there on an October night several years ago, whereupon we discovered that they were open for Thanksgiving with special meals, including a turkey dinner. We loved their set-up, and we had a winner. So that’s where we go. This year, they did away with the “special Thanksgiving menu” and instead set up a buffet line, with all the usual Thanksgiving selections. (Almost all, actually — The Wife didn’t get her beloved green bean casserole.)
After the mid-afternoon meal (when we sat down, the Lions led the Patriots 17-10, but when we left, the Patriots had won 45-24), my parents absconded with The Daughter for a couple of days at their home, allowing The Wife and I some quality time together. This was extremely welcome! The Wife and I have, in the past, found it entirely too easy to lose sight of making time for one another — especially since for years we’ve worked opposite shifts at our respective jobs — so now, we tend to aggressively plan our time together and make the most of it when it comes. And we crammed a lot into the 48 hours we had together!
After T-giving dinner, it’s become our own little tradition to go to a movie. This year we selected Unstoppable, the runaway-train movie with Denzel Washington and Chris Pine. But since the show-time was still ninety minutes away, we were able to run home and change into more comfortable clothes.
Among the many virtues of bib overalls is that of all pants, they are by far the most comfortable to wear in the hours following an enormous meal.
So we went to see Unstoppable, which we loved. I’ll have a full review of the movie up sometime soon, but I do want to note that the Regal Cinemas in the new addition at the Walden Galleria Mall is a great place to see a movie. They’ve somehow made the concept of stadium seating even better, with seats that rock a bit and armrests/cupholders that swing up and out of the way, which makes for easier hand-holding with one’s sweetie during a movie. Yay! (We tend to like the action pictures on T-giving Day. Not sure why.)
The next morning, of course, was Black Friday. We’re not the types who go out at four in the morning to find the best deals on stuff; we do go out shopping a bit, but later on, after more morning relaxing and coffee.
Later on we ventured out to do some shopping. JCPenney (clothes for the kid), Barnes&Noble (book ideas for the kid — but none purchased), JoAnn Fabrics (sewing supplies for some of The Wife’s projects), Home Depot (bought a Dremel 4000 rotary tool, huzzah!), and a few other stops. We had lunch at Panera Bread, where I looked kind of bored:
We also planned to make a nice dinner that night of steak, and squash, so it was off to a grocery store to pick up those items among a few others, including…three coconut cream pies.
More on the pies later….
But amidst all of this, we were also having some frustration with a local tire dealer. Our minivan needed new tires, and to make a long story short, The Wife got a quote for new tires several weeks ago, and then, in the intervening period, the tire place changed managers. This new guy proceeded to muck things up to the point that next time we’ll just go someplace else. (For the locals: it wasn’t Dunn Tire. Not going there in the first place was probably our first mistake.) This manager guy started off by telling us he would honor the quoted price, then said that he could only honor the quoted price if we got the same identical tires as last time (which weren’t in stock), then told us he couldn’t honor that quoted price unless we could prove, with receipts, that we’d had the previous tires properly rotated every…however long it is you’re supposed to allow to transpire between tire rotations.
Anyway, The Wife got more and more angry until the guy finally got all apologetic and offered a $100 discount for the “miscommunication”, but we’re still unhappy and do not plan to go back. I love it when management people blatantly screw up and try to blame it on a “miscommunication”. Ugh!
During all of this, lake-effect snows started to move into the region, for the first real snowfall of the winter.
To give an idea of how quickly the snow bands can move at times, this intersection — about 2 miles from Casa Jaquandor, the corners of Southwestern Blvd. and Milestrip Rd. — looked like this ten minutes after I had driven through it the first time. That’s what can happen in Buffalo, folks! It’s been a very mild winter thus far — the one day before this that we “had snow”, a couple weeks ago, it was an overnight dusting that had already melted by the time we got up.
Now, however, the “blustery” has arrived.
Our other main shopping destination that day was the Orchard Park Antique Mall, which is a big store that is full of antiques, offered by different dealers. We spent close to two hours there, that’s how big and fascinating a place it is — you can find everything there from beautiful antique jewelry to vintage action figures to old books to old furniture. Just an amazing place.
And in any antique store, you can find lots of questionable stuff as well. At one point we saw a set of glow-in-the-dark plastic figurines from the Casper the Friendly Ghost movie that came out in the 1990s. The Wife and I recoiled in horror, because these figurines were a tie-in item when we worked at Pizza Hut. Aieee!
And then there are things which are well-nigh inexplicable:
I do not want to know.
After that — about five o’clock — we went to pick up the completed minivan and returned home for our steak dinner. Later on we drank some wine, we watched The Man with the Golden Gun…and we attended to the matter of those three coconut cream pies.
Obviously we couldn’t eat three entire coconut cream pies — not just the two of us, at any rate. So, to what use did we put them? Where did those pies end up?
Well…here’s where they ended up:
Yup. All three, in my face.
What can I say? I’m a sucker for a pie in the face. This is a fate that befalls me every once in a while, and as my good friend Belladonna once said, “It’s a bit of a rediculous tradition I suppose, but it has been fun and keeps me from taking myself too seriously!”
The holidays can be a deeply emotional, and for some folks, troublesome time of year. I find that getting hit in the face with a pie is a good antidote to that. Yes, I believe in “pie in the face therapy”. Hey, it can’t be any less effective than some other “therapies” out there!
Here’s how it went down:
I hope your Black Friday was as much fun as ours (new tires notwithstanding)!
UPDATE: No, this wasn’t the first time I’ve been pied. My last pieing can be found here. (Ignore the date on that post — I backdated it to keep it hidden as a kind of “easter egg” for people who went digging around for it. Now, I figure, why hide it?)
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Five years….
How can it possibly have been five years since I last held my son? Time is awfully relentless. Wow.
This photo was taken just days before he decided that he’d had about enough of his limited life here with us. I can’t say I blame him for that, but…well, it would have been nice if he could have said something first. But then, it would have been nice if he could ever have said anything, at all.
Anyway, I sure hope he’s OK, wherever he is right now.
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Things I’m Thankful For
I’ll be spending some quality time with The Family over the next few days — first just with The Wife, as my parents take The Daughter for two nights, and then with all of us for the rest of the weekend. That being the case, I’ll be taking a break from the blog. I’ll have new content up either Sunday or Monday, depending.
For now, here is a partial list of things for which I am thankful — partially recycled from last year, and with some new additions.
Cheddar cheese so sharp it makes you pucker
Sesame crackers
Our azalea plant
Our ivy plant
Cats
Get Fuzzy
My blog
Other peoples’ blogs
George Lucas
Star Wars
My dining room table
Klein screwdrivers
LED flashlights
William Shatner
Sela Ward
Mary Stewart’s Arthurian trilogy
Stephen King
The hardware store in my old hometown
Angle grinders
My new jigsaw
The glory years of the Buffalo Bills
Watching Star Trek: The Next Generation every night at college
Surprising The Daughter with a new Webkinz
Ms. Pac-Man
Sergei Rachmaninov
The Beatles
Van Halen
Baked pasta dishes
Pizza
Cookies
Harry Potter
Guy Gavriel Kay
Big, thick poetry collections
Small, artfully illustrated poetry collections
My drill
Schopp and the Bulldog (Buffalo sports talk radio guys)
Fried chicken
Italian sausage
The Amazing Race
Elections
Aaron Sorkin when he’s on his game
Steak
Chess
Big breakfasts that leave me full until mid-afternoon
Light breakfasts that take the edge off until a nice lunch
Firefly
The Mentalist
Tasting something good at a restaurant and figuring out how to make it at home
Ice cream at the roadside place down the road
The County Fair
Libraries
JRR Tolkien
Route 20-A in the fall
Sandals
Using the scissor jack at work
Blue denim bib overalls
Hickory-striped bib overalls
Pies on the table
Pies in the face
Pies in MY face
Monty Python
Aquariums and science museums
The Origin of Species
Complete collections of Shakespeare
Thick, fuzzy socks in the winter
Eggs
Watching the Super Bowl
Watching figure skating
Discovering new authors
Liking books on the re-read that I didn’t like the first time
Daniel Craig as James Bond
George Lazenby as James Bond
The Y
My MP3 player
My cell phone
The Burchfield Nature and Art Center
The Daughter learning the string bass
John Williams
Hector Berlioz
Toronto
Roast turkey
Chicken wings
George Carlin
Hayao Miyazaki
Baby Fiona
Little Quinn
The Daughter
The Wife
So, what are you thankful for?