Peach yogurt

I'm finally back on track after the whirlwind of the time away in Colorado and getting us back to the world of audio communication after being without phone service for three days.

I don't think I had jet lag as such but there's always lots of energy spent when I'm in a new or different location that depletes whatever rest I've accumulated. While we were out west, I was fine, but I dozed a lot on the flights home, and since then I've slept very soundly. Maybe that's been, in part, because the house phones were dead so things were fairly quiet around here.

We had no phone service when we arrived at home, and I chalked that up to the nasty storms we've had around here. My husband mentioned an article in the paper about continuing phone outages and attempts to find the cause, and when I called the cable company on Monday, the recorded message while I waited referred to outages in our town and three others, so I sat tight. I figured it would be taken care of soon. However, when Tuesday rolled around and we still had no phone service, I decided to pursue the matter. I chatted online with tech support, answering their questions about the sound that I heard when I picked up a phone, what the lights on the modem looked like, and if a phone plugged directly into the modem was able get a dial tone. I was told to bring each phone to the modem to listen for a dial tone to ensure that there wasn't one bad phone among the extensions we have, and when I found the bad one, to take it out of commission. Trouble is all five extensions worked correctly. I returned to the online tech chat and I described getting a dialtone when one working phone was plugged into its own jack, but that a minute later the modem showed the phone line to be in use when it wasn't. Sheesh! We went through a series of tests until TimP assured me that the trouble was not in our phones but in some aspect that needed hands-on investigation by a technician, and that I was to call a number to schedule an appointment for a tech to visit. I wasn't happy that we'd apparently have to wait another day, but I did as I was instructed. The voice recording told me I had a ten minute wait and that I was 5th in the queue, but if I wanted to leave my number, a tech would call me back. I tried to do that, as instructed, but it said the person at that number had rejected my attempt to call and it bounced me back to the dialtone. Okay. I took a breath, told my husband what happened, and tried again, but this time the projected wait would be 19 minutes...so I tried the leave-your-number process again but this time it simply bounced me out of connection. That was enough. I took my car keys, grabbed the grocery list, told my husband I'd be back in a little while, and took off in my car.

There IS a happy ending to this story. While I was gone, my husband called a former student (Howard) who is a middle level person in the cable company and he left a message for him. In less than five minutes he received a phone call from another former student (Mike), an installer for the same cable company wanting to know if he could come to the house to try to remedy the problem. He arrived shortly thereafter (he lives about 2 miles away), and while he was bringing his tools up from his truck, Howard called to make sure his tech had arrived. Talk about service! By the time I arrived home and saw the cable company truck in the driveway, work had begun. It turns out that the wiring inside the wall jack wasn't up to snuff (he could tell who had done the installation by the way the wires were knotted, almost like recognizing someone's handwriting) so Mike cleaned that up and reseated the jack. All five phones were tested and found to work perfectly. Woo hoo!

It's nice when people in our community can help each other out beyond the formal procedures that exist in so many places, and it was very nice when the head of Customer Service called the next day to ask for the details of our experience and I could praise Howard and Mike for their willingness to help us out in such a swift and professional manner. I think Mr. Customer Service was annoyed to hear that their phone service didn't work as advertised while I was waiting in the queue but he was grateful for the feedback. The various cable, dish, and phone companies in the area are vying for business and there are gentle price wars going on to gain more customers, so any information about their reputation as observed by customers is a help to them. Their VIP (video/internet/phone) package isn't cheap, and they know they need to do a good job as people look around for the best deal in these not so friendly economic times.

I've done some cleaning and rearranging of furniture, some jewelry making, a little reading, some baking, and I found that an all-in-one printer/scanner/copier works perfectly with the iMac. The Canon scanner just wouldn't, and I was mourning its loss, but this machine that had been sort of extra baggage, took its place. That allowed me to clear off part of the cabinet where the old technology had sat, move the current piece (epson stylus CX7800) into place, and place my paper cutting board in the newly created space. I'm a happy camper.

I finished my copper pendant in class on Monday. It came out pretty well, looking almost exactly like what I expected. I'm glad I learned all the techniques we were taught because I'm likely to use most if not all of them in the near future to make pieces that are different from what I now make. Soldering is a technique that I need much more practice with if I'm going to use it correctly, but I'm regarding it as being much like my ability to drive a manual transmission: I can do it if I need to but it's not my preference. Using the mill to impress texture onto metal is something I enjoyed doing, but the creation of hammered texture and the shaping of those pieces is what I really want to continue doing. I have a few questions about tools and techniques for the instructor who gave us her email address and encouraged us to keep in touch with her, and I need to find a good source of plate metal for my projects. I'm looking forward to my travels in this direction.

While we were away, we ate out for every meal, and because the food was so good, I certainly didn't lose any weight. Once we were home, we ordered takeout twice, and I began to realize that I'd look like a barrel by the time I had to try to fit into school clothes if I didn't do something about my eating habits. (I'd intended to walk every day to get "back into shape" but that lasted about three days. Walking around the pedestrian mall while shopping and eating ice cream does not count.) I'm reverting to an old plan that I learned probably ten years ago from Tom, the colleague who inhabited the classroom beside mine. He'd found that if he ate 5 or 6 small meals a day, his weight dropped nicely. He'd breakfast at home, have a piece of fruit between 2nd and 3rd periods, eat half a sandwich at noon, eat the other half at the end of the school day, have a small portion of dinner, and something light before bed if he wanted it, and it worked for him. I've tried downing liquids all day, skipping meals, avoiding "anything white," and other measures, but the one that seems to help me most is a version of Tom's plan: breakfast (coffee and 1/2 muffin), morning snack, stuffed celery at lunch, lowfat fruit yogurt in the afternoon, small dinner, and a small oatmeal cookie or a piece of something sweet in the evening (I inherited an insistent evening sweet tooth from my Dad). The snack, crunchy celery, and yogurt tide me over and are good for me. I feel less bloated and sluggish, and once I've felt better for a few days I'll feel more like moving around and exercising which is, after all, the other half of what I need to do.