Category: General

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays everyone. Wishing all y’all peace joy and love.

Recently I realized that the all the television I’ve watched this fall has consisted of: Local on the 8’s a few times a week, Dennis Kucinich emptying his pockets on the Colbert Report, my kids singing the Spongebob Squarepants theme to wake me up one Saturday, a cool show on extrasolar planets, and a few instances of random channel flipping. I’ve heard that the average American watches 6 hours of TV a day, but I don’t see how that’s even possible.

It’s gotten to the point where I generally find TV difficult to watch, largely because of the constant interruption of commercials. I always mute the ads, but even so.  More an more they go for disturbing, just to get me to buy things I don’t want. It’s like thought control from a Kurt Vonnegut story. It used to be when I was a kid there were 4 ad breaks an hour, totaling about 10 minutes an hour. Now it’s about 50-50 each of show and ads. It makes is hard to tolerate even if a show is good, and most of the shows out there are not. And with cable it’s even worse than regular TV. You’re paying twice to watch the show, cuz you’re paying for the channels and then you pay again by being shown ads.

I’ve been wanting to get rid of cable for a long time. For a few years we were getting our internet via cable in a bundle, so to drop cable wouldn’t’ve saved much money, but now we’re getting our internet thru the phone company via fiber. And the cable company just raised our rates to $650 a year! I’d go for a system where I could pay for just the channels or show I like, but the industry is too greedy to allow that sort of thing and they want me to support hundreds of channels I don’t like, so goodbye.

Plus we have NetFlix and a pretty good shelf of DVD’s so we can watch what we choose without ads pretty easily. I tend to like movies and documentaries. One thing I want to do this fall and winter is watch the entire (13 hour long) Lord of the Rings trilogy. I started in September and now it’s mid-December and I’m halfway thru The Two Towers. So I’m doing pretty good.

Now we’re back to plain old TV with rabbit ears. Have to figure out how to get the weather report from the internet or the radio or regular TV. Other than that I don’t miss it. I haven’t even seen how the channels come in yet. Our house never had a roof antenna but I might look into getting one if we need to. Meanwhile, I can take the $650 I saved and look into buying a drum set!

Happy Hallowe’en everyone!

Since the kids went back to school, it feels like we’ve been continually busy every day every waking moment for the last nine weeks. Working all week and every weekend something going on. It’s gotten to be the time of year already when it’s still nighttime when I get up in the morning, which is never much fun. I feel like I’m several weeks behind in writing about what’s been going on, so here’s a general update, to be followed by some more specific posts.

Work has been busy for me, building a major new application while learning a new language. More on that later. Lizzy has been busy too. Third grade is a big year. She’s building skills and discipline. She needs to memorize her multiplication tables, so we made up some flash cards and I’ve been drilling her every night. It’s been paying off, but requires persistence. She also started flute lessons, so we have to make sure she practices, which requires supervision too. She’s been at it a few weeks, and about a week ago had her first big breakthru, where she was able to consistently get a good tone where the pitch is not overpowered by the should of breathiness. She was very proud, as well she should be.

It’s been an unseasonably warm fall until this week, but now fall is finally here. I’ve been both raking the leaves and then mowing the lawn cuz the grass is still growing. Wearing shorts and no jacket. Now we’re getting into the heavy part of leaf season, so hopefully we’re done mowing for the year.

I’ve also been trying to keep my outdoor workout going as long as possible into the fall, even though we’re now into the dark half of the year. I had been going out rollerblading 2 days a week after work, more and more into the twilight as the weeks went on. Then I decided to switch to biking, since that’d be safer and easier in the dark. (I don’t jog cuz of an ankle injury from years ago.) I found the old clip-on headlight for my bike, and was happy to discover it still works. I find it hard to exercise enough in the winter, so hopefully I can keep this going a while longer.

Happy October, everybody. Or should I say Rocktober! We’ve been so busy of late I missed mentioning some important markers of the change of season. So, happy fall equinox. Happy harvest moon. Happy birthday Martin!

This may be the mildest September I can remember since leaving California. We haven’t turned our heat on yet; we haven’t even taken our air conditioner out of the window yet. But now there’s more darkness than daylight. Pretty soon I’ll have to stop going rollerblading after work. I guess the good news I tend to do much more origami in the winter.

Almost at end for the yard and garden too, apart from the copious raking in the weeks ahead. The first leaves are just starting to fall. Our new grass has come in nicely. Our fig tree’s best year yet.