Overbooked

Before going to Sarah’s dorm to start packing her things up, I stopped by the U-Haul Storage to check in and find out where I needed to go once we came back with Sarah’s stuff.  I tell the person at the counter I am here to “check-in” and find out where my storage locker is.  They ask my name, look me up and I get a “ohhh… I’m sorry but we don’t have a storage locker for you.”  My first reaction was, what the hell do you mean?  I am about to start loading up my daughter’s dorm room, I had better have a pace to put it, especially since I reserved this spot over a week ago. 

The manager comes over and explains to me that they didn’t have as many people “check-out” as they had expected, so unfortunately, they can’t give me the indoor storage locker I had reserved online.  But I can have a “U-Box” which is nothing more than a large, plywood crate that is on a large skid that ends up being moved with a big forklift and stored in a garage.  I wanted to pull a Seinfeld, and say “But I have a reservation”, but thought better of it.

I told them I suppose I’d have to take it since I just drove three hours and am about to start unloading my daughter’s room and I need a place to put it all.  I just don’t understand why I wouldn’t have been contacted when they realized that they weren’t going to have an indoor locker for me, and let me decide if I wanted to go with the box, or go someplace else and look for an indoor one.  Wouldn’t you think that would be the normal thing to do, rather than waiting until I get there to tell me?  This move isn’t starting out on the best foot right off the bat!

In The Books

Sarah’s first year at college is in the books.  It was rough at times, but I am pretty sure that she got used to being on her own and would tell you that she had fun.  And the most important part is that she did well in her classes.  I think she’ll get her final grades next week, but I don’t believe she is in any danger of failing any classes.  From what she told me, the worst she could possibly do in any class is a C, and that is if she were to completely fail her final.  I think she is in the A/B range for everything, so I would expect that her grade point will stay pretty high, which is a good thing.  I am keeping my fingers crossed that she stays on the four year to maybe just over the four year plan.

Fixing The Ford

It is finally time to do some upkeep in the Escape.  I have had it now for just under six years and luckily, I haven’t had to do any major repairs.  Well that ended today.  I took it in a couple of months ago to have the oil changed, and I wanted my car guy to look at a rattle coming from the front end, and maybe check the alignment.  Well, the oil got changed fine, but I also found out that the front sway bar links needed to be replaced (which is what was causing the rattle).  And they didn’t even do the alignment, because the tires were worn and needed to be replaced.  He told me that it wouldn’t pay to do it because it would just most likely have to be done again when the tires got replaced.

So today was the day that all that was being done.  And I got a call when they were pulling everything off to have the tires replaced, to tell me that the front brakes were 90% gone and would also need to be replaced.  I suppose that makes sense.  The original tires on the Escape were 50,000 mile tires, and my odometer is at 55,800 currently, so it is obviously time to have the tires done, and if the tires are that worn it would make sense that the brakes would be as well. 

Everything is running good now, so hopefully I won’t run into any more mechanical problems any time soon.  The next thing that will need to be done is to have several rust spots fixed.  I figure I will have this car for at least another 5 years of so, so I will have to make sure it lasts.  I just hope the several small rust spots don’t end up turning into one large bill to get fixed.

Awesome Sauce!

I finally had the chance to get back to the cable TV store/office to take care of updating my service.  It was night and day difference from last week.  It must have been because it was the beginning of the month and people were going crazy either paying bills or bringing back equipment.  But today when I went in, there were two other people in the entire place, so I only had to wait for a couple of minutes.

The good news is that the guy got us switched to the “silver” programming plan.  Then I get a bonus…  As he is typing away entering whatever he needs to enter he says to me, good news, it looks like I can get you down to “X”, which is about $12 less than the girl I spoke to last week told me I would be paying.  Giddyup!  So I said, great, sign me up!  Then as he is doing his thing, I mention that the girl I spoke to last week said I would need to make an appointment to have a technician come out and replace my router because my basic internet package was going to be going up speed-wise from what TWC had us at and that my modem couldn’t handle that speed.  The Customer Service Rep looks it up and after about 10-15 seconds of reading to see what type of router I have, he says, no… it looks like your router will be just fine, no need to have it replaced.  WOOOHOOO!  More good news.  Looks like the girl I spoke to last week had no clue what she was talking about.

So then as the guy is reviewing everything on the updated service, he mentions the DVR.  We have a whole house DVR that can record 2 shows, which sucks because if you are recording two shows at once, the TV has to be ON one of those stations.  So we basically HAVE to watch one of the shows we are recording, which defeats the purpose of being able to record two shows.  So as he is reviewing things I interrupted politely to ask, is there a possibility of upgrading the DVR?  He tells me yes, we can get an “enhanced DVR” which records six shows and has more memory.  I asked how much extra that would be, and he says, oh, there is no extra charge for the upgraded DVR.  What???!!!  Then why didn’t I have this from the start???!!!  So I asked if it was possible to upgrade that, and he says certainly, but I’ll have to bring the old one in to swap it out.  No problem… but what about the stuff we have recorded on the DVR currently?  He says, Sorry, that would get wiped out, there is no way to transfer it.  He then also said if I wanted to do it, they have several units in stock right now, but they won’t last long, so if we want to do it, we should do it as quickly as possible because they can’t guarantee they’ll have one here for us if we bring our old one in.

So I spent the evening going thru the DVR and trying to record stuff on DVDs that we wanted to save, and delete the unimportant stuff, or stuff I could watch later On Demand if I needed to.  This had me up until just after midnight, but I think we are all set.  I’ll be heading out right after work to see if I can get the enhanced DVR.  They better have one in stock, because if I stayed up transferring content for nothing, I am going to be MAD!

Looking For Storage

I made the decision after last weekend’s visit to LaCrosse that I am going to look for a storage unit for Sarah’s stuff until she can get back up to her new apartment to move things in.  The only problem is that with it being less than two weeks until Sarah moves out of the dorm, the pickings are a little slim.  I found out on Saturday that lots of places have no open units since a lot of students will store their things there for the summer.  I called around on Monday and found one place that had one unit open and was very reasonable price-wise, except that Sarah would have had to call him, go meet him to look things over, sign papers, etc.  When I asked if she could find someone to drive her to meet the guy, she had a bit of what I would call a meltdown.  At the very least it was a “just leave me alone” type message.  So I guess I’ll have to handle it myself from the Falls.

One place I called was full up, two other places never got back to me, One place that did get back to me told me they have two openings, and they are lockers that are bigger than what we would need, and they are a little more expensive than I was looking for.  I am holding out for one more place to get back to me, but if I don’t hear anything, I guess I’ll need to go with the one pace that did get back to me.  With any luck they will pro-rate it for the days we don’t NEED it, and then since Sarah can pick up her keys on June 1^st, maybe we can go up the weekend after and move the things out so we only end up paying for one month instead of two.

It's Wet

Happy Spring!!!  It is raining like crazy outside.  We had a couple of warm, dry days and I thought that the back yard was beginning to dry up.  I even cut the grass for the first time.  However, with all the rain we have had the backyard is like a wet sponge right now.  How do I know?  I had to go and replace some blocks of suet in our bird feeders.  And in just walking back to them my feet were squishing like I was squeezing out the sponge when I wash the cars. 

The good news is that my grass is nice and green, even without fertilizer.  The bad news is that it is growing like mad!  It needs to be cut again, and I can’t do it until the ground dries up a little.  I think that when it finally is able to be cut, I’ll have to make at least two passes, because the grass will be too long to take it down to the length at which I normally cut it.  Maybe I can use the break in waiting for conditions to dry up as an opportunity to sharpen my mower blade.  I don’t think I have done that in a couple of years, so it probably wouldn’t hurt.

Additionally, I need to put down some seed to help fill in the bare spots.  I don’t know how much it will end up helping since in reading up on how to get rid of the moss in my grass, it looks like I need better drainage and possibly more alkaline soil, in addition to some more good topsoil to build up a few low spots.  But that is again all stuff I can’t really do until it dries out.  Although, with the ground as wet as it is, maybe I should use the opportunity to try and pull my fence posts back to being straight.

Cable Company

As everyone in America that has (or had) Time Warner Cable knows, they have been bought out by Spectrum.  Two years ago we made the switch from AT&T U-Verse to Spectrum when AT&T wouldn’t negotiate on the price of our service, at least until we had already committed to TWC, and by then it was too late.  Well, the time period of our initial promotion with TWC had come an end at the end of April, and the new bill from Spectrum jacked the price $25ish a month.  So I went in to see what we could do to bring the bill back down, what sort of promotion was currently running, etc…

Fully expecting to have something in hand, I was shocked to find out I needed to select a new TV package, because the service I had been getting with TWC does not equate to any Spectrum packages.  I thought, OK, no problem.  Then I find out that the channels that we watch most are split between three different programming tiers, and that if we wanted them all, well then we’d be paying basically what we are now.  But we could drop down a level or two, and then we’d just be losing channels.  Personally, if we dropped from the top, we’d lose a couple of channels that I watch, and I guess I can live with that, though I sort of liked them because they were showing the programs that used to be on H2 before it was replaced with that crap-pile called Viceland (AHC and Destination America in case you were wondering).  We’d also lose a couple of channels that Alison watches from time to time, like Nickelodeon, though I can’t for the life of me imagine why Nickelodeon isn’t in the basic tier of programming.  And MTV would be gone too, though they don’t play music videos anymore, and when they do, it’s all R&B and rap…  Sorry, no.  But we’d get other MTV channels.  So how they get rid of the flagship, but keep lesser ones is beyond me.  At least with ESPN, you still have the basic ESPN but would lose some of the ESPN satellite networks (ESPN Classic, for example).

 

But even with the change in programming to something with enough channels to still make most everyone in the house happy (i.e. not me) the cost is a couple bucks more than what we were paying.  I’ll probably go with the mid range programming package for now that keeps us at what we were paying, but I am also going to start exploring the streaming options, like the Amazon Fire Stick, or Chromecast, and see what sort of streaming services I can get with those.  Because paying as much as I am for the crappy programming we get with cable is getting out of hand.  I have heard that Sling might be a good option and isn’t too bad as far as a price goes.

 

I’ll have to make a list of the channels we HAVE to have and see what we can do.  I’d be willing to bet there are only about 25 or 30 channels that make up 95% of our TV watching.  Everything else is just waste as far as I am concerned.