Southern Kind of Life

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.