Dogs Days of Summer

My pomeranian is 9-years-old. He doesn’t do much…

Technorati Tags: dogs, summer days, pomeranian

The Cost Of Cable TV

    

No I’m not endorsing the 2008 Torrent SUV (or whatever that car is), I’m demonstrating our crystal clear TV reception…with $17 rabbit ears from Radio Shack.

     I often rant about our cable company Time-Warner and how much I despise it. Buck feels the same way. We have the package that combines TV, telephone, and Internet service. If you’re familiar with these packages you know that they find out which channel you really want, in our case that would be the Speed Channel (which for us is job-related). We had to have HBO if we wanted the Speed Channel, so that’s what we got despite the fact we rarely watch HBO, if at all.

     In late July we received a letter informing all Time-Warner subscribers that its rates will be increasing in a few weeks. This would put our monthly bill at about $200, almost half of it going towards cable TV.

     We were so disgusted with this new circumstance — because we can think of about a dozen things we’d rather do with a hundred bucks than spend it on TV — we called Time-Warner and canceled it.

Yes we canceled TV.

     And then we went to Radio Shack and bought an old-fashioned antenna for $17. But we quickly learned that old-fashioned antennas aren’t so old-fashioned anymore. We plugged it into the television (it comes with a 6′ easy-to-use cable that simply plugs in to the TV) and watched as our TV came on with a crystal clear picture.

     Well.

     We were stunned into silence, staring at this reception that was as good as what we’d been paying all that money for every month for the past I-don’t-know-how-many-years. And because we can read each others minds, we said in unison, “Fuck you, Time-Warner.”

     Granted, we don’t get all the specialty channels that come with cable TV, but we still get PBS and Fox, as well as NBC, CBS, ABC, and about a dozen channels out of Mexico.

     The weird thing is that while we live and die by TV, when we don’t have it we don’t care. We just don’t care. And we’d rather watch the shows we love like Sunny In Philadelphia and Flight of the Concords we’d rather watch on DVD anyway, because we have addictive personalities and want to watch them in marathon sessions.

     And there are tons of shows you can watch online. You’ll find a partial list of them here.

     We’ll have to buy the converter box by January, but it’s a one time purchase and you can get a coupon for that here.

     I’m blogging about this because I want people to know you don’t have to be a slave to the cable TV and Dish companies. If you’re interested but nervous about making the break, go buy an antenna and try it before you cancel your cable or dish. You can always return the antenna if you don’t like it.

     But I’ve gotta tell you, there’s an incredible sense of freedom that comes with eliminating the cable TV bill from your monthly budget.

    P.S. - If you’re interested in the same antenna we bought, click on the photo and it will take you to Radio Shack.

Technorati Tags: cable TV, rabbit ear antenna, saving money, the cost of cable TV, Time-Warner, ComCast, Adelphia, Radio Shack

Friday “SO FAR”?

I’ve been working this week, which is a drag because I took this job so I wouldn’t have to work. But I wanted to share this headline with you from Wednesday’s paper. I don’t know if the rest of the U.S. is aware of what’s going on here right over our border but it’s shocking. To read more about it you can click on the photo if you feel so inclined.

To leave you on a happier note, Stella is spending the afternoon safely napping:

We Went Out Today

We actually left the house today, a monumental event that I captured with my video camera. As usual Buck insisted we pass the house he wants us to buy and live in:

Apparently we’re just not isolated enough in our current home. He wants to get to “High Ground,” whatever that means. Thank God this thing isn’t available to live in. Construction had to be stopped. Something about the fact when you step out the door you immediately fall down a fracking cliff…Can you picture moi living there, shooing the rattlesnakes out of the way so I could have a place to put my lawn chair? And what about my inflatable pool? A cactus would pop it!

But enough of Buck’s DREAM HOUSE. Here’s my video from today. Buck wanted me to be sure and mention that his appearance in this video was preceded by an optical exam at the doctor’s office in which 9,000 wires  were attached to his head with gel (yes, I took a photo of them when Buck wondered why I hadn’t done so already):

But here’s my video, and Buck has optic gel in his hair. The “Barbara” in question is my best friend and Joan Harvest’s sister. Oh, and there’s a shot of an empty chair that I was unable to edit out no matter how many times I tried. Damn you Windows Movie Maker 2!

Technorati Tags: El Paso, food shopping

A Clarification

The Happy Couple, Enemy Of Neighbors Everywhere

I should probably clarify something. In my post Slow Day News-wise, I was telling commenters how Buck gets nervous about me going out into the neighborhood and filming alone, etc., which is why I think he feels safer if I’m just hanging around filming our dogs or him or our property. I realize that sounds pretty cryptic. I respect his trepidations about me interacting with our neighbors. They don’t know us, we work from home so they rarely see us leave, and we believe they think we’re operating a meth lab or something. We fit all the characteristics listed on the police websites. We only go out after dark if at all, strange cars driven by young people come and go in our driveway (kids from work who come out to fix our constantly jammed-up computers), and a pack of dogs that are only heard and never seen.

It probably didn’t help matters the day Buck had been sandblasting our courtyard and stumbled outside to get some air while he was wearing goggles, covered head-to-toe with white sandblasting powder. The guy next door saw him and quickly ran back into his house. I’m sure he thought our meth lab had exploded.

Anyway. In our old neighborhood on Cape Cod I have, in the past, had run-ins with neighbors. There was the time one of them slapped my 10-year-old son and I confronted her. For an hour I chewed her up like a dog with a bone, reducing her to tears with my cruel words and threats to have her committed to an insane asylum. It wasn’t until two years later that I found out I’d attacked the wrong neighbor. My kids said, “No, Mom, it was the other Marilyn.”

Then there was the time a neighbor who looked like the Unabomber, a renter from across the street who was also illegally building an apartment in the basement to equally-illegally sublet, came over when Buck wasn’t home and told me the muffler on my Saab woke him up every single morning and he was sick of it. I then told him he must be a Welfare bum because I never left the house before 11 AM, and if I was waking him up at 11 AM then he deserved whatever he got. Thing escalated, words were said, and he pulled back his fist to hit me right in front of my three children (who were shocked away from watching Alf or something similar on TV). I just smiled at him and said, “Go ahead ya fuckin’ loosah! Hit me! Hit me in front of my kids! I’d love to spend the rest of my life garnishing your filthy Welfare check! And man, I will follow you to the end of the planet if I have to…”

To make a long story short, that one ended with Buck on the guy’s front lawn, lifting him off the ground by the scruff of his Unabomber sweatshirt and threatening to kill him if he ever went near our family again. He also told the guy he didn’t want him even walking past our house, and the guy complied. He also moved away about a month later.

The list goes on. My son and his friends pissing into water pistols and shooting passersby; the time I was walking my well-behaved German Shepherd while an elderly neighbor was walking his out-of-control Lab and his Lab went berserk (the guy started yelling at my dog for getting his spastic dog excited, and then his dog flipped him and the man broke his back in the fall, was hospitalized, and was never the same again); the time a drunk neighbor back out of her driveway at top speed without looking and almost killed me and I ratted her out to her husband, who then had her taken away to a drunk tank…

But my point is that Buck is a good sport and allows himself to be a human sacrifice, he ignores my efforts to keep my camera trained on him in the hopes I won’t wander off into our neighborhood and come home with a police escort.

 

Technorati Tags: neighbors who suck

Insight To My Heart - LM’s Meme

Warning: Some men might want to skip over this post and go straight to the Buck video in the previous post.

 

Little Miss Sew ‘N Sew gets all the credit for this great meme. She started the ball rolling when she posted a beautiful video of the song Hummingbird by Seals and Crofts. The song makes her cry, but in a good way. It so nice to hear that song. I’d nearly forgotten about it!

For me it’s House At Pooh Corner by Loggins & Messina. I think of it as my “crying song” because the second I hear “…But today I have wandered much further than I should, and I can’t seem to find my way back to the wood…” I start to tear up. 

Here’s House At Pooh Corner with some illustrations by “Mr. Shepard” (for A.A.Milne fans), aka E. H. Shepard for those unfamiliar with the artist.

Meme Rules and tags after the jump.

Rules for “Insight To My Heart”:

Post the song that just gets to you every time you hear it.

Link back to Little Miss.

I’m tagging five people, but if you’re not on the list and want to play along please do!

Moonbeam McQueen

Dragonfly

Joan Harvest

All The Elbows

Teeni

 

Technorati Tags: memes, meme, Seals and Crofts, Loggins and Messina, Hummingbird, hummingbird songs, House At Pooh Corner, EH Shepard, AA Milne

Slow Day News-wise

      This Morning’s Acu-Rite Reading

 

No, that’s not “mountain graffiti” in this photo. On my way home from the store today I happened to be at a red light  when I saw a person enjoying my idea of a dream ride: cruising in a convertible with a German Shepherd as co-pilot. The photo isn’t great (I had to hurry before the light changed) but you get the idea.

Shepherds are wonderful companions. They’re intelligent, sweet, and possessed with an excellent sense of humor. Plus, they love to go anywhere you’re going. This one caught my eye because he/she was standing up and peering over the windshield until its owner told him to sit down.

 

Obviously it’s a slow day news-wise here at our house, evidenced by the following video so wonderfully titled After The Lawn. This is the rough cut of After The Lawn because the edited version, which was much more entertaining, had a terrible hissing noise that drowned out the sound of Buck, and I had to delete it. The program that inserted the awful hissing noise was Windows Movie Maker 2, which is already installed on my computer. I Googled it then, hoping to find a fix for the hissing, and this is the CNET review I found and totally agree with:

“Windows Movie Maker 2 is so easy a child could use it — an incredibly patient child born to filmmaker parents who didn’t mind restarting this application every few minutes.”

Does anyone know of an inexpensive video editing program they would recommend?

Just for the record, I never post any video without Buck’s verbal consent. I insist he watch videos that feature him before I post them. So far he hasn’t objected to any, nor does he jump up and down and say “Excellent!” But I’ve never seen him have “Excellent!” reaction to anything. What he does is watch the video, then shrugs his shoulders and says something like, “I don’t see anything here that will get us arrested,” and continues on his way.  

Working Hard or Hardly Working?

Sorry…I’ve been tied up with work yesterday and today.

Trying to get back here.

This blog is my carrot on a stick. Though technically I’ve stopped eating carrots. The sugar content is too high. I’d rather get my sugar from a hot fudge sundae than a pile of carrots, if you know what I mean. And I know you do. Would you rather have a pile of carrots of a Waffle Sundae from Dairy Queen? And don’t say it’s a different kind of sugar. Take it up with Atkins.

Okay, I’ve gotta get back to work…

As I Was Saying…

Buck is working so I’ll have to blog on without him today. Here’s what’s been garnering my attention this morning as I try and psyche myself up to do some work of my own:

• I read that George Carlin’s last album, It’s Bad For Ya, is available as of today. As you know he died of a heart attack last month at the age of 71. His daughter and brother went around the country scattering his ashes at his favorite places, comedy clubs he’d played, etc. One stop they made was at a New Hampshire summer camp where, as a child, he received a necklace for winning a drama competition. It was touching to read he was still wearing that necklace on the day he died.

 

• Jurassic Fight Club premiers tonight and I won’t be watching. What a hideous and stupid idea for a show. I’d rather watch the chicken cam at Vasalini’s farm on Martha’s Vineyard and will a goat to stick his face in the camera.

 

• Speaking of vicious animals, Hell’s Kitchen star Gordon Ramsay had to get stitches when he was bitten by a puffin this past weekend. He was hunting puffins TO COOK on his British TV show The F Word. Also, he broke his leg when he fell off a cliff. Chef Ramsay that is, not the puffin. Don’t know what happened to the puffin.

 

 

• What’s that you say? Literary tattoos are all the rage? Well that’s just fucked up. If I had gotten a literary tattoo when I was in my 20s I’d have a quote by Christopher Robin on my body, as I thought he was profound: “If your own house is blown down, you must go somewhere else, musn’t you, Piglet?” Stupid, perhaps, but this one is just sad:

• I’m interested to know if any readers with kids in high school are trying to steer them into a career of tattoo removal. I think you are wise. I see this as a growing field.

 

• At first I thought these cats were negotiating sex, but then I realized they were just discussing a spa treatment.

 

Technorati Tags: George Carlin, Gordon Ramsay, puffin bite, Christopher Robin, talking cats, growing occupational fields, Jurasic Fight Club, chicken cam

Dissa and Data

Buck spent about two hours on the phone today with Time-Warner, our land line phone provider, and our problem is still not straightened out. Suddenly we can’t make long-distance phone calls, and they don’t know why and can’t send out a service tech until next week. (In addition to that, we left one of our phones outside during the flood last weekend and it drowned.)

I’ve been trying to figure out a way to get our whole phone/Internet/cable TV package down to a reasonable amount each month, and what does Time-Warner do but send us an announcement in the mail that everyone’s bill will be increased by $10-$20 starting with our next bill. This is getting so stupid, I can’t believe it’s happening. And they way they’ve got it set up, if you eliminate one feature such as the “digital cable package” your bill doesn’t go down at all…they just raise your Internet and phone bill.

Doesn’t Time-Warner realize that the economy is so bad people are getting rid of their land lines? People in their twenties rarely have a land line anyway, but when confronted with stagnant wages people in their thirties and beyond are beginning to look at a land lines as a luxury they can do without.

I read an interesting article in Slate Magazine reporting that with 1.4 million home foreclosures in the first half of 2008 (and 2 million expected by the end of the year) people under financial duress are likely to disconnect their land line and find a temporary housing, making it unlikely they’ll acquire a new land line. Once they’ve begun relying on a cell phone it’s unlikely they’ll ever go back to a land line. I say more power to them. Get with it, Time-Warner! Because as soon as I figure out a way for us to record interviews over the Internet or by cell phone, I’m getting rid of you.

_____________________________ 

      We’ve been reading about Madonna lately and like the rest of the world we’re wondering why she’s looking so dreadful. Britain’s Daily Mail reported Madge will be cutting her daily gym workout from four hours a day down to three hours a day in an effort to save her marriage. Well I think she should cut it back even further, say to 30-minutes every other day in an effort to save her body. By the look of her arms and neck, this workout schedule isn’t working out at all. And as for those who are insisting she hasn’t had any plastic surgery, WAKE THE HELL UP.

We see that Manny Ramirez has started his usual bullshit. King Kaufman wrote an interesting summation over at Salon, and at ESPN Peter Gammons blogged a great piece on Manny. (Thanks to the reader who sent me the ESPN story.)

We rarely get a live Red Sox game on TV here in El Paso, which is a travesty. I really like obsessing over how we’re doing, where we’re at, and living it while it’s unfolding. And thank you, Time-Warner, for making it impossible to get just one channel that would allow us to see the games. Nooooooo, you bastards insist we buy an entire package upgrade if we want to watch our nation’s favorite pastime.

FYI: We’re on Season 2.5 of Battlestar Galactica and lovin’ it. So say we all. I can’t tell you how much I love watching an entire series on DVD. It’s so much better than watching it on TV. No commercials, no waiting a week for the next episode, no being shocked that you’re watching the season finale.

Speaking of TV shows, our favorite show of all time will be back soon. It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia returns to FX on Thursday, September 18 with 13 new episodes. I can hardly wait. I never get enough of the gang or their enemies, the horrific McPoyle family.

I hope there’ll be plenty of McPoyle action this season.

 

Technorati Tags: Time-Warner, land line telephones, Madonna, Manny Ramirez, Battlestar Galactica, It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia