Monday Meanderings - 4.09.2012

Spring in Austin continues to be delightful; the weather has provided some primo patio sitting this past week. It's been gorgeous, but I still want one of those carpets like I'm seeing in the Lowes TV commercial. You know, the one where the woman takes the carpet out of storage and unrolls it outside to become a beautiful flower-filled green lawn, complete with fountains, paths and stepping stones.

Speaking of patio, I came out the other morning and found a little fungus forest, growing out of the door mat.

They were short-lived little organisms - less than two hours later they were flat and shriveled up. And the same morning I found this guy wandering among the pots.

So now when I'm out on the patio I have birds and snails to keep me company and 'shrooms to keep me happy.

The Time-Warner cable saga continues. Once again, I had to call customer support about our misbehaving cable box. I've called so often that I have been assigned a special number to cut through all the uh... red tape. For a while there, TW would insist on going through an elaborate process to prove that I was who I really claimed to be. The usual name address, phone number, then - and I kid you not - SSN, 18-digit account number, the services I was paying for, and the exact date and amount of my last bill! I was livid at this point, unable to convince the tech of the absurdity that I might be calling about problems with some service other than my own! That's when the supervisor I demanded to speak to assigned me my own account code. "Just give the representative this number and there would be no hassle."

Well, I don't know if it would have helped or not. This last call, the technician started right in on my problem with no questions asked. I thanked him for that, and he said, "Yeah, like you are going to call with somebody else's problem." Now we have another new cable box. This time a technician came to the house and replaced it with a brand new model that TW has started using and checked it all out. Knock. knock.

Service trucks were lined up around the block that morning; TW and the air conditioning people as well, since they found a leak in the coils in the inside unit and came to replace it. I love warranty work.

I'm becoming very fond of reading e-books, either on the Kindle itself, or the Kindle app on the iPad. I've discovered that I can prop the iPad up on the treadmill, enlarge the type just a bit and walk and read at the same time. Like movies, the page-turners tend to have you walking for long distances. One of my favoritest things is that I can tap on an obscure word and get an instant definition and pronunciation (sure wish I could do that at the Learning Ally studios). And the Kindle device has an "X-Ray" feature that gives you a synopsis of every character in the book. Confused about who John Smith is? X-Ray to find all of the places he's mentioned previously. How cool is that?