Today, Son&Heir got a mailout from AARP trying to con him into becoming a “member” of their gang.
Go ahead, AARP, MAKE me feel old, already. . . *grumble-grumble-gripe-complain*
Streaming TV
Seriously considering dropping the TV portion of our cable service. Oh, my Wonder Woman would have to delay watching some of her shows–on Hulu or some such. But for the most part, the TV I’ve been enjoying recently has been stuff streamed on Amazon Prime (*whispered* or downloaded from YouTube *heh*) like Top Gear or various BBC “cop” shows or Amazon’s offering of “Under the Dome”–a new episode each Friday*.
Mostly, my leisure “entertainment” budget (time and $$) is consumed by books, but it’s nice to have a wide variety of interesting TV, movies, etc. The only thing is watching my bandwidth consumption, since my cable provider has put a cap on all users–yeh, different caps for home and business users, but caps all the same.
*Yeh, it’s a CBS show, and I don’t watch CBS, but since it’s w/o the commercials and CBS doesn’t get my bandwidth, I’m letting this one slide by my boycott (of not watching CBS). Gray area. *heh*
Fungi, Flowers-n-Flies, Oh! My!
Oh! *!#@$%* this summer rash that has me singing the Leprosy Song (“Leprosy, all my skin is falling off of me; now my ankle’s hanging from my knee; oh, leprosy came suddenly. . . “)
Luckily, mowing and weed-eating does eough of a number on my nasal passages and lungs that the other allergens and irritants take a back seat while I’m doing yard work. It’s just later. . .
Oh, well.
And Not a Hint of Trouble During the “Bank Fails” of a Couple of Years Ago
One really nice thing about banking locally (no, REALLY locally) is the VERY personal service. Fraud alert call on a debit card? (Happened today.) Couple of minutes on the phone, fraudulent charges handled and card redlined. That’s pretty normal. In person: immediate service, two signatures. Now, fraudulent charges not only handled but new card and all, in almost no time. It really does help to know and be known face to face (and it doesn’t hurt to have the head teller as a next door neighbor :-)).
We deliberately took a percent and three quarters hit on our mortgage a couple of decades ago, because it meant going with our local bank. Got cookies and such from folks there when we paid it off early. Yeh, yeh, not a big deal, but it was a nice personal touch, and over the short time we carried a loan with the folks there, we had many times to be glad we had a direct line to the folks who “owned” our home with us.
Ah! Life’s Little Pleasures!
After years of using an “old tech” 12-volt NiCad battery-powered string trimmer and suffering through the NiCad woes (finicky recharge cycles, maintenance difficulties during storage, progressive battery “senility” *heh* etc.), I’ve been enjoying some backyard cleanup using the new 20-volt Li-ion battery-powered string trimmer my Wonder Woman got me as a Fathers Day present. Really sweet.
Now, next on my list is the companion polesaw that uses the same battery packs. That would ease some of the tree trimming I need to do, and even cut down on the amount of ladder and climbing gear use for most of it.
Obama Suggests He Will Increases His Support Al-Qaeda: Fixates on Unused Repugncan’t Jock Straps
Syrian factions vie for control of chemical weapons.
Meanwhile, Syrian rebels pledge loyalty to al-Qaeda, and Obama Steps Up Military Aid To Syrian Rebels
Personally, I think Syria stored Iraq’s WMD in the unused jockstraps of ball-less, go-along-to-get-along, bend over and say, “Please may I have another” cowardly country club Repugnican’ts who have sucked up to traitorous Dhimmicraps for decades, and The Zero just wants to be in on the jock strap raid, but what do I know?
ISP? Usually OK
Mediacom cable Internet is usually OK. . . until someone upstream decides to “improve” things, in which case things are usually SNAFUed beyond usability for a while and then level out.
Some time back, the company began capping usage. For my account “level” my usage caps at 250GB/month. *meh* It’s not bad, since our usage–even with more than a few streaming videos and LOADS of software downloads (I try out just about every OS I can load into a VM, for example, which usually run at 1GB or more/download)–is not really that heavy.
Heck, last month we only used about half our allotted usage. Well, most of the Poirot videos we watched last month were just in SD (because the older shows weren’t offered in HD, of course), so that sort of thing kept usage down a bit.
Even with the occasional “Hey! Let’s fix somthing that ain’t broke. . . yet” downtimes, the reasonable usage allowance and generally workable D/L-U/L speeds make our cable service a better buy than local DSL (*gagamaggot*).
No Brainer
No, seriously. Absolutely NO thought seems to have been put into this ad for the Hyundai IX35 hydrogen fuel cell powered car:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HueuiSLt-HI
“Edgy” huh? #dumbassery
Anyone Notice. . .
. . .that politics have been (mostly) absent around twc for the last short bit? Yeh. Even evil gets a bit boring after a while when all it does is repeat itself: Lies, Damned Lies, MORE Damned Lies and yet MORE. . . with no evidence of any creativity or even the scantest attempt to make the lies anything but blatant, bald-faced yawners.
*shrugs* Maybe that’s the plan, make evil so yawningly, terminally boring that there’s just nothing left to say about it.
Anywho, at least I can watch yet another episode of Poirot via Amazon Instant Video. I never tire of the saxophone in the theme music, and the acting, settings, costuming, dialog and even, to some degree, the fairly predictable Agatha Cristie plots, are all just wonderfully enjoyable. And, of course, the incidental music–quite apart from the theme music–is extremely enjoyable.
There’s that, at least, when all the rest of the world has gone mad, mad, I say. . . *heh*
Early Crop
I have already been able to start harvesting an early crop of. . . dandelions. I’ve not yet harvested much of the crop, as I wanted to let ’em go to seed and spread the wealth a bit first. (Second crop should yield some nice, tasty flowers.) So far, I only have a goodly mess of greens and enough dandelion root to make a couple of pots of dandelion infusion, after a roast and grind. The greens are washed, ready to pat dry and freeze in a vacuum pack. The roots are cleaned and ready to roast this evening.
Looking forward to some good eats. A few plants harvested daily should keep me in dandelion “tea” and greens for a while, and as those I expect to sprout from seed come on, I ought to be able to make it through the rest of Spring and at least some of Summer with a bounteous dandelion feast. . . if my Good Neighbor doesn’t take it into his head to mow my lawn as he’s out playing with his riding mower (he’s done that once this Spring–oh well *heh*)