It's That Time Again

Yep, it's that time of year again.  

Along with the beautiful fall colors, pumpkin flavored everything, and cooler temperatures -- which will eventually get here -- it's time for my annual fall head cold.  I could feel it creeping up on me yesterday, but I was hoping beyond hope it was just the high ragweed counts.  It wasn't.  

Alas, the aforementioned head cold hit full force about mid- morning.  I'm running a slightly elevated temperature (but not really high enough to be considered fever), sore throat, and clogged up sinuses.  Good thing I got my errands run early, so I can sit in front of the TV for the next three days and get over this.  

As we would say in the South, I have me a case of the epizoodies.  I'm just sick enough to feel blah, but not sick enough to be sick sick.  Eh, it's a good excuse to skip mowing for the week.  

So, the first place I went when I was running my errands was to the internet company, to trade in my router for a newer model.  There was a bit of confusion when the Sparklight person verified my street address, and it was the wrong one.  "No,"  I said.  "I'm at [correct address]."  She asked if my internet was working fine, and I told her yes, it was.  She then said they had a different name listed for that address, and she'd have to investigate and get it corrected.  At that point, I pulled out my driver's license and showed it to her to prove the address was mine.  

I asked if the name they had listed for the address was the one the installation guy had told me when he came, but she said it wasn't.  Even so, that would explain the confusion on his part.   We got everything straightened out in the computer -- at least as far as my part was concerned-- and I got my new router and went on my merry way.  I tended the rest of my in town business, then came home and hooked it all up.  Aaaand, nothing happened.  No internet.  Not even any lights on the router.  

It was supposed to have lights.  And internet. What's going on?  Did they give me defective router?  It was brand new, fresh out of the box! Why didn't it work?

I checked the cables, and they were hooked up correctly.  I crawled under the entertainment center to make sure the plug was all the way in, and that's when I found the problem.  Somehow, I'd accidentally hit the on/off switch on the power strip.  I turned it back on, and bingo!  I have internets again!

The hardest part of it all was dragging my entertainment center away from the wall.  It's not really that heavy, but there's nothing to grab on to.  While I had it all pulled away from the wall, I moved the router up here.  

I wasn't sure I'd be able to, because the power cord was too short to reach, but I managed to dig up an unused extension cord and voila, we have an elevated router.  It made a big...sort of...difference in the signal in my bedroom.  Yep, it's now "Fair" instead of "Poor".  Nevertheless, I tried to watch videos on both my Hulu and YouTube apps, and they worked fine.  I should be able to watch TV just fine in bed now.  

By the way, my new Fire Stick had arrived Thursday, but I wanted to wait until I got my router exchanged before setting it up.  Yeah, I'm lazy.  I didn't want to have to enter my password twice.  Well, I mean, twice for that one device.  I had to enter the password for every device I have. Those would be two Kindles, two Rokus, two Fire Sticks, my laptop and my phone.  I think that's all of them.  I haven't hooked up my streaming DVD player to it yet, because I seldom use it for streaming.  

OK, now that I've completely bored you with all my technical jargon, let me show you what I bought at Walmart. Remember the little scarecrow I bought last week? Today, I got the matching one. 

And finally, while I was at Walmart, I ran into one of my coworkers.  We greeted one another and she said, "Did you leave early, too?"  No, I had vacation already scheduled, I told her.  She said they'd asked for volunteers to leave early, and she said she always volunteers to leave.  She thought they'd be going at 11:00, but it was 8:00 when they sent them all home. 

She also told me they shut down third shift last night.  All the temps were laid off, and they gave the full-time employees a choice.  They could go to second shift, or they could quit.  I'd known they were going to shut it down.  Third shift, I mean.  I just didn't know when.

I guess that's all I have for now.  I think I'm going to go drink tea and ignore my to do list. 

Laters.