(Someone overheard me say that today and was apparently offended (or surprised). That was the one sentence I uttered, so they were offended without context, which is always amusing.)
So today we had breakfast at Barbecue House, where we could not yesterday. The place was more than slow late this morning. There were more people behind the counter than dining. But that’s Spring Break. The food is not taking off. Delicious as always.
The cable people had to come back out today. Last night we discovered a lot of pixelated programming had been recorded. There was a Les Mis special on PBS that The Yankee wanted to see and that was mangled so badly it hurt to watch. Shame, too, because what you could hear sounded great. And, then, the straw that broke the camel’s back was a ruined episode of 19 Kids and Counting. And you just don’t mess with the Duggars or they will show up and make you babysit.
So I walked out of the room for a moment to put a dish away and when I came back she was on the phone with the cable people, who helpfully booked an appointment for this afternoon, lest the Duggars hear about it and come visit the cable office.
And they mean business. Two guys came out today. Charter has been here so much, though, that they’re having to recycle techs. One of them had been here before.
He plugged up his tricorder to the cable, pronounced the numbers flatlined and then went outside to jiggle the wires, call a friend and have a sandwich. Do you really know what they’re doing out there? A second guy is inside and I am insistent that he explain everything to me — but in analogies I can understand (“So it is like water in a pipe, then?”) — and have no idea what the first guy is doing outside.
He comes back in after a few minutes with a few pieces of hardware in his hand. He has replaced some splitters. We now have the industrial strength Cabletronic 4000s, which is a step up from the 3000 series Crash-A-Lot model. It seems that we have now exhausted all of the possibilities for diagnosis, repair and replacement inside the house (they’ve been here approaching a dozen times in the last several months) and if this continues a systems tech will be airlifted in to examine things at the hub.
It sounds so ominous, but really, we’re just keen on a signal that plays audio and video, displays the channels for which we’re overpaying and keep a consistent Internet connection. (Though, to be fair, that last one hasn’t lately been a problem.)
They’re nice guys, these guys. They tell jokes. They notice the cat. We comment on the larger company and they spin tales about some of their better calls. The first guy plugged his tricorder back into the cable stream and found everything to be much better. Now we shouldn’t have a problem.
But there’s all kinds of problems you can have. Today I learned that, in addition to signal load, competing tech demands of phone/cable/Internet, rainwater and what your neighbors are watching, another thing that contributes to data transmission rates is temperature. It seems that when it is cold the insulation on the cable shrinks. That means less cable can get in your home. When the weather turns warm the insulation expands, letting cable in. When July gets here we’ll suddenly get a rush of things that couldn’t make it through in December, I suppose.
Drove to the grocery store for a few items today. We walked last night for two, drove today for two bags worth and yet we must still make the HEAP BIG trip sometime later this week. We think, though, we have this down to a science: farmers market for produce, Sam’s for poultry, Meat Lab for beef, sausage, eggs and bacon and Publix for everything else.
We planned this. We’re planners.
Saw a new item I hadn’t noticed before. I gave it a “Where have you been all my life?” moment:
There is a coco version too, apparently, which just seems evil. Don’t ask why one is OK, but another is not. I enjoyed more than my share of kid’s cereal (and still do on occasion) but the chocolate ones always seemed a bit over the top. Except for Cookie Crisp. There’s nothing wrong with that cereal except for their odd character erasures.
Speaking of cereal being erased. I read recently that Cap’n Crunch was going to walk the plank. (And now, who knows? Sad as that is, they’re just pulling on your heartstrings with the old graphic treatments:
Went to the Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art tonight to see the documentary Awake, My Soul, which is about the oldest surviving form of American music: Sacred Harp.
It is an intriguing thing, mostly southern and western — which makes a great deal of sense as spelled out in the documentary — but growing across the country and, in several other countries as well. Most everyone interviewed for the documentary lives in Alabama or Georgia, however. They’re all very passionate and it makes for a nice documentary.
Raymond Hamrick, the first gentleman you see in the trailer has a great story, and is a marvelous storyteller. Doesn’t hurt, then, that he has been a prolific composer in the genre. He’s still working, in his 90s, six days a week in a jewelry shop in Georgia.
The history, reaching back to pre-Revolutionary America, was nicely explained. It moves into the work and perception of those who brought it to this generation and then those who would be the prominent contemporary leaders. In the midst of all that are the lost bridge between the 19th Century and those very aged devotees. Somewhere in all of that nostalgia and hope and loss all mingle together, powered by this incredible, powerful sound.
Much of this documentary makes sense to me, or anyone that’s ever been to a primitive style church in the South. I’ve never been to a Sacred Harp singing and I don’t know these people, but I know these people. The documentary touched on the people in this singing community that had died before or during the recording. There was a shot or two that lingered on some old lady, and then a comment by an old gentleman who’d lost his wife and those just sat on the room for a while, until the next joke came along.
Matt Hinton, one of the filmmakers, was there for a Q&A. No one asked why he didn’t put a joke immediately after the most solemn moment of the film, but they should have. Instead, he fielded very intelligent questions for about half-an-hour. One of his central points is the participatory nature of this style, as compared to the performance-based styles of modern music. That becomes quickly evident in his film.
I came home to dinner, a baseball game (Auburn beat Alabama 2-1, in Montgomery’s Capitol City Classic) and two other anecdotes that I’m keeping for tomorrow. You have to come back now.
