Whacky Day

And Hot

I spent most of the day--with breaks because of the heat and humidity--weed whacking.

I have a bank extending about 100 feet along the front of my property that grows grass and various weeds. I cannot mow it as it is too steep. When the vegetation gets too tall, I cannot see cars on the road when I try to pull out of my driveway.

I have an electrically powered hand held string trimmer for the job. I had to put new trimmer string in it before I started. As anyone who has ever used a trimmer knows, this, in itself is a challenging job as the plastic trimmer string has a mind of its own. That finally done, I went out to whack and the knob and spring holding the trimmer head flew off. Apparently, I hadn't tightened it enough.

OK, give it another 45 minutes of searching the lawn to find the lost pieces. Got things back together and started working on the bank. I'd guess that was a good hour's plus work in the hot sun with cars and trucks rushing by, many not even bothering to move over onto the other side of the road to give me a few more feet of safety.

Done there, I had to come back inside for a drink of water and to cool off.

Repeat scenario about 4-5 more times during the day as I trimmed near the fence, around trees, and near the barn area.

By then, I was sweaty, hot and miserable. I fed the Boys, but on my swimsuit and headed for the pool. I did 24 lengths just because if felt so good to be in the water.

Back home, I discovered we'd had a power outage. I flipped on the TV to find no picture whatsoever.

We have cable TV out here and it's generally pretty reliable. When it does go out, there is, however, a challenging ritual to perform. "The Calling of Comcast." This involves facing one of those charming answering systems--"Press 1 if you want English, duos par Esapanol. Press 1 to pay your bill, press 2 for service and press 9 to vent your frustration at the answering system. etc." Well, miracle of miracles, I got a nice service person rather quickly who told me there was nothing wrong on their line, so it must be just my house and I could have a serviceman there to fix it by Thursday between 11-1PM. OK. A week without TV? Guess so, as long as they don't charge me for it.

Shortly thereafter, my neighbor called to tell me his cable wasn't working either. This unleashed a whole new series of phone calls, as now it wasn't just my cable that was down. Comcast doesn't recognize and outage unless more than one person calls to report it. My neighbor is elderly and the "Press 1,2, and 65" system completely baffled him. But when I tried to report his outage too, not only could I not get through for the first 3 times, but when I finally did, I was told I could not report his service interruption--he had to.

Finally, after a while, Comcast called me to tell me there was a general outage and that they were on the road fixing it.

Then the power went out again. And about an hour later, it came back on.

Comcast called back. Was my TV working yet? No.

I decided to order some dinner and drove to the Italian restaurant to pick it up. On the way, I saw the Comcast repair guy on a pole. I stopped by and asked him how things were going. He told me he'd just gotten there was looking for the problem.

On the way back home, he'd moved his truck up the road towards my house by about five poles and another five poles up, there were three Public Service electric company trucks doing something to the power wires.

Back home, I had electricity, but no cable.

Now, I had planned on working the horses once the heat of the day had begun to fade, but now, the phone rang again. Comcast. Was my TV working? No. I was now told the technician was on the job and I needed to hang around so they could check with me to see if the cable was back up.

I decided to watch a DVD. Loaded the disc and my DVD player didn't work. Mind you, I had a brand new one still in the box because I'd had trouble with this one before, but I use it so seldom I hadn't bothered to swap out yet. So, at least this pushed me to make the switch.

I started watching Nanny McPhee--a really cute film, by the way--only to be interrupted by Comcast at least three more times asking if my cable was OK. There had been a major outage in our area and the technician was sure he'd fixed it. No.

This time the service rep said it must be my system but my having to wait a week to get it fixed was ridiculous, so she'd give me a service appointment today (Sunday) between 1 and 5. In the meantime, if my neighbors' cable was still out, I was to let Comcast know because then they'd know it was a line problem and not just my individual house.

I called my neighbor and sure enough, his cable was still out. This now required at least two more calls to Comcast. Of course, I never got the service person who'd told me to call back, so trying to explain everything again was really a pain. Then we finally agreed that they'd come back out to fix things either last night or today, as scheduled.

So, here I am, "Tour de Franceless" waiting for a thunderstorm to break which will probably kick out my computer DSL.

If it storms, I can't ride and I can't swim, and I certainly won't weed whack.

Guess it's time to go read a book--until the power goes out again and it's too dark because of the storm.

Does this mean I have to house clean?