Helen Keller

A few moments ago, I was thinking this exact phrase to myself:

"It's OK to drown olives, cuz they can't cry for help."

I'm not going to try to explain to you all the events that chained together to end up in that one particular thought. You're reasonably bright, so you'll eventually make something up that your mind is comfortable with and latch onto it with the zeal of a religious fervor.



But it did get me to wondering.

Enough about you, though.

I'm still battling with the cable company who steadfastly refuses to try to diagnose the problem with my bandwidth, though it's getting harder and harder to find a tech support person who is willing to try to pin the problem on my modem (well, their modem that they supply with the service). The fact that I can always get the advertised bandwidth to their local server, but that the bandwidth I get to any other server in the country varies by time of day and tops out at half of the advertised BW at prime time, but is perfect from 1am to 9am is awfully suspicious of an upstream problem in the line feeding their local server. Only the dumbest of tech support people could possibly deny that. Instead, I'm getting, "we'll monitor the situation and call you back," and on the callback all they ever say is, "we can't find anything wrong with your modem."

Of course not. We've already eliminated my modem from contention.

The guy today really thought he was on to something. Maybe, he posited, I was using a VPN. I swear they don't read the tickets at all.

They are all very seriously polite, though. And they speak English perfectly. This isn't some off-shore support operation.

--

My foot still hurts. My Dr. Scholls custom-fit orthodics inserts have managed now to also make my shins hurt. Possibly my foot hurts slightly less, so maybe we've accomplished lowering the peak magnitude of the pain by spreading it out over a wider area. I'm not convinced that's an improvement, though.

This is perhaps just what it's like to get older. My dad is double my age. At the rate I'm declining, I can't imagine I'll make it that long. I try to convince myself that I'm just approaching death asymptotically, and that once I make it around the knee of the curve, it'll be a smooth, long glide down until life becomes a rounding error and, poof, it's gone.

But I have a hard time believing myself given that I just make stuff up.

I should probably exercise more.

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Max and Hannah have lost TV privileges for the rest of the week. I don't really know why, as it happened while I was at work. When I asked The Mrs., she said something to the effect of, "they're a couple of spoiled little shits who never do what they're told," though I've cleaned that up a bit given this is a family blog and all. The end result of this is that MaxieC has become a lot more annoying, given how bored he is.

I have to make paper airplanes with him now.