Southern Kind of Life

For those of you who think the United States has a huge problem with the size of the federal debt (and I do) there is a movie tonight being shown in select theaters around the country called I.O.U.S.A. From the trailer, it looks good.  I’d love to go see it but I’ve unfortunately already got plans tonight.  It’s at the North Hills Stadium 14 in Raleigh, NC at 8pm and after the movie there will apparently be a live panel discussion with Warren Buffett and other financial leaders.  The movie in the theaters is apparently a one night only thing (update: apparently it has a limited 12 city run starting Friday, but the premiere tonight will be in 358 theaters, so your best chance to see it in the theaters is tonight) but the movie will hopefully be on regular TV in a few months.

See the trailer below:

It always seems like there’s way too much stuff happening. The big thing, though, is that Big-B started back to school last week. He’s in 2nd grade this year and likes it so far, so hopefully he’ll have a really good year. The first couple of weeks, though, are a bit rough as my wife is still in West Virginia at the summer camp where she works each summer. So, Big-B and I have been on our own. He’s been going to the afterschool program and seems ok with that. However, I’m not able to pick him up until 5:30pm at the earliest and his bedtime is normally 7:30 which leaves almost no time at all to eat supper, get ready for bed, and do anything else we might want to do (library, grocery store, Tour de France, etc…). But, things seem to be working ok. Thankfully, my wife gets back Thursday evening. I really have a newfound respect, though, for single parents.

Today has been fairly challenging as I managed to catch some sort of bug that has me keeping fairly close to the porcelin throne.  I haven’t eaten hardly anything since lunch yesterday and don’t really have any desire to.  I’m really hoping that things will feel much better tomorrow and this will just have been a 24 hour virus or something like that.

I finally got my car back yesterday morning and it’s running very well.  Thanks much to Wasp Automotive for the good work, even if it did take a bit longer than expected.  Unfortunately, because I had to return the rental car Wednesday morning, I was left Wednesday night with no car and no cable or Internet.  The cable technicians finally came out on Wednesday.  They were supposed to be there between 3 and 5pm.  They arrived at 6:15pm and promptly found that the line had problems and that I needed line maintenance to come out.  They said they’d try to be out that evening, but of course that didn’t happen.  Then, to top things off, just after the cable techs left, a storm blew through and my power went out.  So, there I was with no car, no cable, no internet, and no power.  I’m very thankful that we have a gas stove so I could cook my supper.

Anyway, I got the car back the next morning and then when I came home Thursday evening the cable and Internet were working.  My DVR box, though, seems to still have a few problems.  There are several channels that won’t tune at all, or tune but with a messed up picture.  I need to get through all the stuff saved on the box, though, before taking it in to get a new one.

This weekend, I’m going to be at the RTP Startup Weekend.  The goal there is to basically get a bunch of people together for one weekend and start a company together.  I went to the previous one about 8 months ago and had a good time, even though our company didn’t get past the weekend.  This weekend, I think, that we’ll actually be starting multiple companies, so we’ll see how that goes.  If you’re at all morbidly curious, they will apparently be streaming live video all weekend and you can see it here:http://www.ustream.tv/channel/rtp-startup-weekend

I got back into home last night after being away for most of last week and previously most of the previous week before that.  I had spent the last few days in WV in the middle of the National Radio Quiet Zone visiting the camp where my wife is working for the summer.  Cell phones don’t work there and it’s impossible to get cable or DSL internet so they use WildBlue satellite service.  Unfortunately, they had managed to transfer more data than WildBlue allowed so they had been throttled down to a 128Kbps down/10 Kbps up connection.  For 150 people.  Yeah, so, not so good.

So, I was looking forward to getting home to a good cable internet connection, watching some of the Tour de France on our DVR and figuring out what I needed to do at home for the next few days.  The reality, however, turned out not quite so good.  Apparently, while I was gone, Time Warner Cable decided to go belly up at my house and not only did my digital cable & internet not work, the upper analog channels are fuzzy and nothing was recorded as far as the Tour de France was concerned.  (Not that it would have mattered, the TWC DVR won’t let me watch any recorded programs because it cannot get a signal from the mothership.)  So, after calling TWC, waiting on hold for a full 30 minutes (!!!) they started to tell me that they could send a tech out this morning.  However, someone had swooped in and grabbed that timeslot so they had to call over to “dispatch” and after doing that they came back and said there were “service disruptions” in my area and wouldn’t schedule a service call for me.  They said everything should be fine by the morning and if not to call and someone could come out today.

Well, fast forward to this morning and sure enough, nothing works.  So, I call and the first thing I’m greeted with is the computer saying “you have a service call scheduled for … Thursday”!!! W! T! F!  So, after getting an operator they transfer me to the “local office” who after a while finally tells me they’ve scheduled someone to come out sometime today and that they will call me 30 minutes before they come (since my wife & son are in WV, there is no one to let them in during the day so I have to come back home in south Durham from my job in south Cary).  We’ll see if they actually call.  If they don’t, I’m calling the BBB and possibly whatever government body that oversees the cable companies to complain.

When I came out to my car for lunch today I noticed that pollen season has started.  My windows were covered in yellow pollen.  Thankfully I’m not allergic but I have friends who are.  It’s nice to see it finally here, though, because that indicates that the cold weather is moving out and warmer times are ahead.  The weather this week looks a bit iffy, but hopefully the weekend will be better.  If it’s sunny on Saturday my son and I will probably head out to Herndon Park and try to use his new Astrocam 110 model rocket to get some pictures.  I’d post them right away but the rocket takes actual real film (and 110 at that!) and you can only get rolls of 24 so we’ll need to make quite a few flights before getting them developed.

Happy New Year to everyone out there!  Of course, considering I just started this blog yesterday, there’s probably nobody reading (except maybe Mike who I showed the link to at the New Year’s party tonight).  Anyway, here’s hoping that this year will be better than the last, that our drought will end, and that progress on the ATT bridge over I-40 will actually happen.