Monthly Archives: January 2009

Why Does My ISP Provider Suck is the Monday Meme/Updated


Blogging may be sporadic for the next little while. Because we don’t live in town, we are at the mercy of limited choices where internet access is concerned. Our service has been – in a word – shitty for the last week and finally crapped out almost entirely Friday night. There are brief, and I mean minutes only, windows of service*, but it is too hit and miss to bother sitting and waiting on.

So today, feel free to rant about the shite service you pay for because you haven’t a choice. Our provider never returns calls or acknowledges email. They assume that if there are problems it is because the customer is an idiot. That is the way of all IT people I have ever known. It couldn’t possibly be the equipment or them. It is always the user. 

So rant people. I will check in from the library – which has equally abysmal service by the way but a bit more consistent than I have right now.

*Mysteriously, service was miraculously on all evening but I don’t expect to wake up to service in the AM. Al Gore giveth and ISP’s capriciously deny access.

UPDATE: Rob went to the ISP’s office today and talked to one of the owners. Apparently he thought we were freeloaders using the signal for free which is why he hadn’t responded to us. Rob assured him that we are indeed paying customers and the owner quickly went on to assure him that we were slated for a new radio within the next week or two because the company had just received permission to put up another radio transmitter in a location that is actually closer to where we live. Hopefully this will improve our signal and ensure less interruption of service. 

The service is actually quite good when we get it but the lack of response from the company when there is a problem is irksome. It is, sadly, typical of the kind of service a person can expect here in Alberta however. Despite the slowing of the boom economy, there is still more demand than there are workers and everyday services are very taxed by the lack of warm bodies. And, like the U.S., infrastructure really doesn’t extend much beyond the major urban ares.

Friday Updating


It’s been hard to focus this week because I’ve been fighting a sinus infection,both Rob and BabyD have had spiritual encounters*, the Steelers won the AFC, and controversy in the form of assumptions and projections found me again.

In spite of all this I can pretty safely say the memoir is done. I am adding and revising things in the last two chapters still but – until the true revising starts in a couple of weeks – it’s complete at just under 87,000 words. A bit  short of my estimations. Likely to be shorter still because I think I am going to dump at least one of the opening three chapters and use the other two in abbreviated forms in later chapters. The chapter breaks too are still open to reinterpretation but again, that is for  later. 

So how many pages is 87,000ish words? 

357 pages. Double spaced with a 12pt font in New Times Roman. 

I am neither thrilled nor displeased with what I am calling a first draft despite the fact that some of it was revised a bit – more than once – as I wrote. I tried to just write without stopping but not having an outline other than the years and months, I had to reread on occasion and that always leads to revision.

I didn’t include as much of the correspondence between Rob and I via email and IM in the first draft as I thought I would, but this was mostly due to the volume of it. I will need to shore up chapters and this means going back through more of the “documentation” which is time consuming. I didn’t take into account when I began this that reading email, IM sessions and old blog posts would eat up a lot of writing time. I will have to factor “research” into the revision process.

On the quest for physical improvement front, I did not feel like puking or need a nap after spin this week. The women who have been talking the class since October assured me that Tuesday’s session was the hardest one yet and I held my own. Good on me. 

My new yoga instructor is awesome and I am finally getting into a more serious pose oriented yoga. I keep trying to talk Rob into yoga, but he still raises his eyebrow and looks at me as if I have never met him when I bring it up.

Rob has agreed to help me with my spin homework however. Yes, the spin instructor assigns homework. Abs and lunges daily. I can do the abs but lunges don’t work for my right knee, so I am to do plies instead. Rob gave me the look when I suggested plies for him. He will do lunges. And start lifting weights again, for which I am so pysched. He has the most awesome biceps and shoulders and pecs as it is  and more of that would be … well … more better.**

Finally, I am struggling with the book I am reviewing next Tuesday, Ingrid Cummings’ The Vigorous Mind. It’s not that I don’t agree with her theory or that the book isn’t useful. It is a bit repetitious however and very grounded in non-fic/self-help formula presentation. It doesn’t make for sustained scintillating reading. It’s something you tackle in stages and is not bedtime reading. So between not feeling well and being dog-tired from my new work-out routine, I am behind. I will be done on time, I think.

 

*BabyD was under the table playing on Tuesday night when she said, “Who called me?” Rob and I were reading the newspaper and hadn’t spoken and told her so. “Well, someone whispered my name,” she informed us. “I wonder who it was?” Who indeed. If it was that damn dead husband of mine, he knows better than to be playing games like that when I am having a tense week already.

**My motivation for motivating Rob to exercise is grounded in more than my concern for his health.

Weed(s)- Why didn’t I Think of That?


I picked up the dvd of the first season of the Showtime hit, Weeds, with the every intention of watching it –  over two years ago. I think it was a day after Thanksgiving special at Target. I had a habit of snatching up dvd’s on sale back then and never even breaking the shrink wrap on them. Television and movies were never my escapes. I think the only time I used a tv show as a diversion it really wasn’t a diversion as much as a way to immerse myself in my own feelings being experiencing them through the characters. Distance and yet not so much at all. 

Rob pulled Weeds off the shelf recently, and we have been watching it a couple of episodes at a time. Each one is about 30 minutes which makes it perfect for nights we don’t want to invest in a feature length film, but still need to unwind a bit before sleep*.

The main character is a widowed pot dealer. Hence the title “weeds” as in illicit smokes and mourning attire. My first thought was,

“Damn, why didn’t I think of that?”

I was a public school teacher working with at-risk teenagers at the time of Will’s death. Those that weren’t active pot-heads were simply waiting for the ankle bracelets to come off so they could get back to it.

I had several students who came to the afternoon classes so stoned they could barely see. One boy was a freaking genius and his bloodshot glazed vision and slow-motion two finger typing did not keep him from completing the computer modules in a startling progression and eventually returning to regular course work with the “normal” children. But there was another young man who could barely speak English when he was under the influence, and it was his native tongue**. I finally had to sit him down – one day when he actually showed up straight – and inform him that there was no way he could possibly salvage the year unless he stopped coming to class stoned.

To his credit, he didn’t bother to deny his usage, but he wondered why he was failing when DeeJ could be just as high and be getting A’s and B’s.

It was then I had to point out the cold truth.

“Some people can go through school so stoned you wonder how they stand upright because they are just really, really smart. You are not one of those people.”

He didn’t comment but went back to work. Bless his little heart, he tried to do school without the enhancements, but he eventually was expelled for bringing drugs to school and “sharing” them.

Between the inhalers and the gang members I knew, I could have established quite the side business. I wouldn’t have been the first teacher to work two jobs during the school day. I knew people who ran construction businesses and managed rental properties in between (sometimes during once we got phones and Internet in our rooms) classes. One guy, a drama teacher, was so constantly on the phone with his bookie that some of his students who’d had me the year before would show up in my room after school to ask for help with homework he’d assigned them at the beginning of class without any instruction at all beyond,

“Just read the directions.”

He’s  a principal now. 

The Widow Nancy, who eventually will achieve drug lord status, is surrounded by a cast of interesting characters including her loser brother-in-law, Andy and her two sons – one of whom will eventually go into the “family” business.

Her friends are various degrees of off-center or just fuck’d-up. I especially love Doug, her accountant, played by Kevin Nealon and her dealer, a black woman in the “city” who is hilarious in her assessments of Nancy’s suburban white girl deficiencies as she struggles to adjust to her new reality. But the show’s themes are adult, so expect nudity, sex  – a whole lot of drug use – and really bad language.

The show doesn’t really go into how Nancy ended up dealing or how long exactly she’s been widowed. It does deal with her grief, and her kids’, but in a way that is actually quite real for a show with such an outlandish basis. She grieves in between. When she has time or when the moments hit – though sometimes you can see moments come up and her consciously pushing them away or aside for a while.

The comedy is dark. It can be uncomfortable and more so when you find yourself laughing at it.

There are only ten episodes in the first season. I wasn’t sure we would continue onto the next one, but Rob went ahead and ordered seasons two and three from Amazon the other day.***

It’s mindless, politically incorrect and probably soul-warping.  Forewarned is forearmed.

 

*Yeah, I know what you are thinking. Why aren’t they having sex? Seriously people, you live in the gutter. And who says we aren’t as well? Hmm.

** I taught plenty of non-English speaking stoners too, he just wasn’t one of them.

*** Considering how sporadically we’ve watched season one – took us nearly a month – it was actually cheaper to buy the discs outright than rent them from the local supplier of cheap audio/visual entertainment.