In God's Country

Yes, yes, I know I said I was taking a holiday break, but I'm cranked up and need to express myself. As per usual, this trip has been "eventful." -- I love the word eventful, it's so full of potential & suspense. Eventful enables me to conjure up tails of brilliance, sorrow, silliness and in some cases all of the above. -- To say I have a lot of events to cover would be an understatement. I will not try and share everything for fear that I will not give proper weight to one tale or the next.

He's so smart I feel like my name should be Lennie Small

OK, Slick's family is so insane-smart that they turn any cliche' about farm-folk on it's head. Slick herself has a Master's degree from Yale and sometimes I wonder if she's the "slow" one.

Her cousin "BMW" does next-gen server software development for a large cable/internet provider. For years, he and I used to talk shop. Back when he was in high-school & I was actually doing on-site IT support, we had a relatively level playing field and could hold conversations. On Saturday night, I found my eyes glazing over as he's talking about redundant storage clusters using terms I've never even heard of before. Did I mention he's 24?

The Fall

"They" say that Potter County is "God's Country." Seriously, it's on the signs. I can't say this is true, but I can tell you that it's doggy paradise. My dog was beside himself with glee as he ran wild-eyed across those snow-covered fields. Unfortunately...

On Sunday morning while mulling the news about Karen, the dogs and I went for a hike up the hill. Unfortunately, on Saturday the we had a warm-spell and a bunch of rain. This was followed by a freeze-over. The snow covered fields were crusted over with ice. Coming down the hill, I found myself on section of frozen run-off. Even the dogs were sliding. I slipped, I fell, I was fine. I then took 3 steps and hit the ice before I even knew I had fallen again. The impact was bone-jarring. The ice was so thick that I didn't even leave a mark. I've now learned that a person with Fibromyaliga should never play impact sports. In addition to the slightly sprained wrist, my body went into complete pain-mode and has been that way all week. Needless to say, the rest of the dog's "walks" this week have been done from the driveway.

Christmas Eve

Christmas eve was amazing. There's so many things to choose from, but I've got to go with this one. You know those consumer electronic commercials involving separated family & video enabled computers? Well, AirForceFamily (That's Slick's cousin, pilot husband & kid) are expecting any day. They simply couldn't make the trip up. A video feed was setup via MacBooks & they participated in the gift exchange. Seriously, someone from Apple needs to get "us" to do a TV testimonial for them.

Flat Tires & Dumb Luck

Because of the funeral tomorrow, Slick and I drove to her parents' place a day early. We're here now. It's always odd living at someone's house when they are 5 hours away. But then, that's what family is all about. Anyway, we had to run out to get some supplies and discovered that a tire was flat on the Escape. Now, we could all look at this as rotten luck, but I look at this as serendipity. We made it 5 hours to their place before the tire went. And the Queen's Altima is in the garage. Since she doesn't need it, I can wait and call AAA tomorrow when we get back from the funeral.

Lying to Tech Support

So, the errand is done, I'm ignoring the flat and Slick is graciously doing a few loads of laundry. What am I doing? Setting up the Queen's new laptop & wireless router. One problem, their ISP has some wacky setup to make the modem & router talk, but they don't have it listed on their website. So, I called their 800-number. After 2-million prompts I get live tech-dude.

Poor junior IT-dude stuck on the swing shift: "What's the phone number of the customer?"

I rattle off the Queen & flyDad's* phone number.

IT-dude: "What's your name?"

I tell him flyDad's name.

IT-dude: "And what's the trouble?"

"Yes, I just got a wireless router and new laptop & I'm having trouble configuring it with your modem. I got a Linksys router as your company recommended. I'm really aching to get it setup so I can sit in my recliner and surf the web while watching sports."

"No problem *flyDad*. I can help you."

Turns out that they change the standard IP of the Linksys router. Why? No idea. Why couldn't they put this on their website? No clue what-so-ever. And yes, all their techs are trained to service Linksys. I was going to ask him if he really didn't have enough brain-power to service a Netgear, but he was being helpful and I didn't want to break character. ;-)

More mindless babble...

Well, that's about that. There were some other funny things like 6 people trying to figure out what PetDoc (the expecting member of AirForceFamily) might have used for Granny's MacBook password so it could be updated only to discover that there was no password. And yes we called PetDoc. If you only knew the number of advanced degrees in that room, you would have found the situation really funny.

flyDad* - I've been working on a nickname for my father-in-law for a while. Since my dad is iDad & Slick's dad is a rabid fly-fisher, we've got flyDad.