Tragedy Averted.

Woke up this morning, and things were going pretty good until the internet stopped working.  One minute, things were going fine...the next, I got up to unload the dishwasher, and when I came back, the magic was gone.

I gave it about an hour to come back on it's own, but nope...so, instead of carefully turning the wireless router off, and then turning the modem off, I lost my patience and used the switch on the surge protector to give EVERYTHING(TV, WII, Modem, router, cable box) a power-on-reset.

It didn't fix the internet.  I gave it about another hour, and finally called the fine folks at Charter.  'Ken' stepped me through unplugging this, resetting that, 'please wait, I send signal!'  Eventually, the right chicken bones landed in the right postions, and the internet came back!

With the internet problem solved, I went to fire the Wii back up, so that my wife could have Netflix waiting for her, but, there was a problem.  After my little 'power-on-reset', the Wii no worky-worky.  In fact, the little light that said it has power going to it wasn't working at all.  I tried more than one plug, and pouted.  It was quiet obvious...venting my frustration at the internet had caused something with the Wii to stop working...the question was, was it something with the adapter/cord, or something internal to the Wii?  And it was a $120 question...Fred Meyers(luckily) had replacement adapters/cables for $30, whereas Wal-Mart wanted $150 for a new Wii.

I almost bought both the new cable, AND a new Wii, with the plan that at least I could fix the problem right away, and once the wife was occupied watching dramatic British Series, I could safely return what I didn't need.  Kind of like bringing two dresses home, since you couldn't decide which one looked better in the store.  In the end though, my anticipated displeasure at having to deal with the customer service desk outweighed my lack of a back-rub from my wife if she had to wait two more hours to watch North & South.   

In the end the new power cord fixed the problem, and I learned a $30 lesson about letting my temper get the better of me when dealing with electronics.




 

It's just two initials!

During the Black Friday sales today, my mom bought a couple of new memory cards for her camera and her Blackberry.  Until yesterday, when I showed off with my phone, she didn't know that you could load songs on a micro SD card, and then put that micro SD card into your phone to play music. 

Proving I'm not really the best person to show off new technology, I didn't know enough to warn her than in additon to Micro SD cards there are now Micro SDHC(high capacity) cards, and that older equipment(like her Blackberry, and my Samsung Cell Phone) that were designed for Micro SD cards don't play nice with the newer Micro SDHC cards...

Sigh...at least my wife is excited now...when we get home tomorrow she should have her new Droid waiting on the front porch, and at least two Micro SDHC cards available to choose from. 

Thanksgiving

I'm not someohe who has a lot of 'Thanksgiving Traditions'.  What with my parents being divorced, and living about 2 hours from each other(and about 4 hours from our place in Richland), we seem to do something different each year in an effort to keep everyone happy.

When we lived in Belfair, things were close enough together that we could get in the car and make a big loop of everything, doing one parents for dinner, and the other for desert, or just host everything.  That would be one of the things I am thankful for...even through they got divorced, by parents still get along good enough to spend time in the same room together civilly for the sake of their grandchildren. 

This year our plan was to come over Wednesday afternoon, and use my mom's plave as a base of operations until we head back Saturday.  We went to my dads yesterday for dinner and desert, while my mom went out with some friends. We ate too much food, and had slivers of two types of pumpkin pie, apple-cranberry pie, and peacan pie, just so I could say I tried them all.  Then my mom mom and SWMBO headed out at 11PM last night to wait at Target for them to open, then had breakfast at Shari's before hitting Fred Meyers at 5, finally dragging themselves back in at about 6:45.

The rest of today is recovery for them.  I am getting to ready to roll with the plan of taking both of my youngin's out to see the new Muppet Movie.  Huge sacrifice on my part, although no movie with Amy Adams requires that much arm twisting on my part.  You want me to see your movie, put an asthetically pleasing red-head in it.  And the Swedish Chef.

As for everthing else I am thankful for, it can pretty much be summed up in this picture:

I don't need much justification...

Jay G is pushing Jack Daniels today, and recommends that everyone pick themselves up a bottle to thank the fine folks at Jack Daniels for their Operation Ride Home.  Jack Daniels is donating over $100,000 to help pay for plane tickets and other travel expenses to help soldiers at Fort Cambell make it home for the Holidays, a very worth cause.

They are also accepting public donations.  I plan on showing MY thanks by splurging for a bottle of Gentleman Jack.

New tires!

Nothing like waiting until the last minute.  The weather in the mountain passes was crap the beggining parts of this week.  Over the last 72 hours Snoqualmie Pass has been everything from Bare and Dry to totally closed for avalanche control.  This caused me to do something I should have done like 6 months ago...give the tires on my wife's car a close look.

Mmmm...not so good.  I wouldn't go as far as to call them bald, but to meet Washington States definition of a 'traction tire' you need to have a Mud and Snow identification(check) and at least 4/32" of tread(not sure why they didn't reduce their fraction and just say 1/8") which she didn't still have on her car.  I could barely get a finger nail down into the tread anymore.

So...this morning I was up and moving early, waiting in the parking lot of Les Schwab about 5 minutes before their scheduled opening time of 8.  Which wasn't early enough...there were already 4 cars up on the lifts being worked, and another 7 or 8 checked-in in front of me.  So much for me thinking I was motivated. 

With a weather report calling for just rain, I almost chanced it...but, she was going to need new tired sometime before winter really set in, and I was there, and the wait quoted seemed acceptable, so I settled in with a bag of fresh popcorn for breakfast, and waited...and watched.

Since moving back to Washington in 2000, I have never gotten tires at any place other than Les Schwab.  They have a very good customer service reputation when it comes to people with flats(which I have luckily never needed to test), and quite a system going. 

I want to say that this morning, I counted somewhere between 14 and 17 tire jocks working on the cars, and about the only time they were not moving in hustling type manner was while a tire they were working on was spining on the stiping machine.  Always active, always professional...quite an operation.  It could just be that as someone who works someplace where people are expected to work 3 whole hours someday, I am easily impressed by people doing their job in professional, courteous, complaint free manner. 

Either way, it took them 16 minutes from when our Subaru went up on the lift until it was done...which is pretty impressive, since a few months ago at work it took me something like 98 minutes to do one tire on my F-150. 

The wrong things catch my eyes, sometimes...

Floating around on Yahoo this morning, and there is a story about a broken tanker truck that dripped 100's of gallons of driveway sealant across tens of miles of Pennsylvania turnpike.

Over 150 cars that drove through the spilled sealant were disabled when their tires started to stick to the road, making a pretty major mess of things. 

All that's a bummer, but what really caught my eye was this statement:

Laura Frick told WTAE-TV she was traveling from Cleveland to New Jersey for the holiday.

"Now we have to turn around and go back home," Frick said. "It's horrible."

Lady you said it...if your only choices for the Thanksgiving Holiday were Cleveland, or New Jersey, that is pretty horrible. 

Gotta go pack for my trip now...it's raining in Snoqualmie Pass today, which at least means it isn't snowing...

I don't get it.

What with politics and most of the real world depressing the hell, I have decided to focus on the mysterious and, well, not real side of things.

Some mysteries are bigger than others though, and today we will focus on the biggest ones out there:

How the HELL is this thing as popular as it is??!?!?!?!?!?!?

Picture stolen from Time Magazine, because for some reason this sandwich qualifies as news.

For those of you who enjoy The Finer Things in Life...that is the McRib sandwich.  3 guesses who sells it. 

Let me start by saying that McDonalds is pretty far down my list of fast food restaurants, if I have a choice.  In fact, it's at the bottom of my list.  I also despise onions, and that means The McRib already has two big strikes against it. 

This is the 3rd Strike:

Picture borrowed from SFGATE article comparing McRib meat to a yoga mat.

That is what the McRib patty looks like prior to be slathered in nasty candy-flavored BBQ sauce. 

Yummy.

I'm not even going to address the 'it's not healthy' argument('Restructured Meat Product with some heart, and tripe, glued together with 960mg's of sodium).  If you are eating fast food, you know what you are getting into from a 'health' standpoint.

It's just FOUL!  The texture is wrong...the BBQ sauce doesn't taste like BBQ sauce...and, and...it's just plain wrong. 

Go to Dairy Queen and get a Flame Thrower Burger instead...now that's good.