Zoo Story; No Dishes; Splitting Services; No Energy; Help Arrives

Just Finished Reading: Chapterhouse: Dune by Frank Herbert

When bathing a dog in the traditional way, you are out-numbered. Your opponent has 4 legs and one tail, all working towards the same objective: avoiding a bath. You have 4 limbs but they do not work together. Best to deploy what tools you have to increase your odds. You have two hands, use two hoses or two dryers or two brushes at once. Do not limit yourself.

Go over to CC's blog. No, not right now! After you're done reading. Why? Because she's got the video of our zoo trip. It's not one of those boring, home video things where we introduce you to relatives you've never heard of and don't care about. This is a short video of the polar bears at the zoo.

Recently, the zoo here opened their Northwest Passage section. The main attraction is the polar bear enclosure which features a glass-sided pool so you can watch them as they swim and play in the water. It is SO cool. I could have stayed there all day.

It was actually an odd trip to the zoo for us. For one thing, we didn't walk the entire park for a change. We went over to the new section first because they were feeding the sea lions and then stayed in that general area so we wouldn't miss the polar bear feeding. We did manage to see the pandas and gibbons and a few other animals but that was it really. Did a LOT of shopping though :-) We came home with two t-shirts, a jacket, a polar bear, and a 3-d wooden puzzle of a carp (which looks REALLY cool by the way).

In a way it was more like a trip to the mall than the zoo. Or maybe a combination of the two. Of course the important thing is that we had fun. We REALLY enjoyed our visit and we'll be going back. Might even get a membership so we can see the bears more often. :-)

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I'm a little annoyed that we can't get a dish up here. See, I wanted to drop our cable company and go with Direct TV. More channels, better price. You see the dishes all over the place in our apartment complex. I set it all up with them and they sent a guy over today to install it. The problem is that we're on the third floor and our apartment building is in the way of the line of sight. In order to hook it up they'd have to put the dish on a pole outside the building then string cable up to the third floor. I expected that. How else would you do it right? Several people have it set up that way here in fact. But apparently that's not something the installer is allowed to do. *I* could do it. An independant contractor could do it. An official Direct TV guy can't do it though. So no dish for us.

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What we were able to do is something CC wanted. We split our cable and Internet services. We had them bundled from the cable company, which is fine except that if something happens to the cable connection we also lose Internet. She didn't like that at all. At least twice we lost everything and ended up spending the day unplugged. You want to see my wife go nuts, take away both cable and Internet. She just doesn't know what to do in the background :-) CC likes to multi-task. If she's watching TV, chances are she's doing something else too. She likes having the computer downloading something while she works on other things. Or she'll play music from the Internet radio. Losing both cable and the net at the same time just isn't acceptable to her.

Anyway, we're now on DSL. Bellsouth sent us the kit yesterday and I got it set up. Had some trouble getting it to work with the router at first though. Their "easy installation instructions" don't say anything about a wireless home network so it's lacking a LOT of technical information that I need to make everything work right. I spent quite a while digging through their web site looking for what I needed but I found it eventually. So at least THAT story has a happy ending :-)

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I have no energy. Two days now, no energy. I'm behind in my e-mail and I'm blogging MUCH later than usual. I think I'm coming down with something. Allergies don't sap my energy this way. So if I'm slow responding to something you sent, just be patient. I'll get there :-)

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And finally, I got new hearing aids on Monday. Talk about a difference. They're the same size as my other pair but MUCH stronger and MUCH lighter. It's going to take some getting used to. I can't turn them up too loud or things get distorted. That was never really a problem before because my old pair just didn't have that much strength.

On the plus side, this pair should last a good long time. I'm only using maybe 1/4 of the power right now. And I got a lot of free things too like 40 batteries. That'll last me a while :-) They're also more comfortable to wear. The ear pieces are made of a softer material that doesn't shift around much.

The down side is that I won't be able to ignore people as much. New hearing aids means I hear better. Can't deliberately misunderstand folks once I get used to them. Ah well. That game was getting old anyway :-)

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