Still without internet plus a tiny rant

We lost internet but thankfully not power last Saturday when we got eight plus inches of heavy snow. In my neighborhood, if a squirrel farts we lose power so this is overall a good thing. Supposedly we will get reconnected this afternoon, although I'm dubious.

In the meantime, let me just go on record as saying I hate ankle pants especially in the winter. They may look cute in the summer with sandals and bare ankles and all that. But screw that in the winter, I want socks, and then that just looks stupid. Plus I get pulled back to something that happened in fifth grade while I attended the base elementary school at McConnell Air Force Base.

I'd gone through a growth spurt as kids do, so all my pants were now high water (aka ankle) pants. My class was lined up in the hallway for something or other, don't remember that detail, when one of my classmates pointed out my fashion faux pas. I mumbled something or other and put on my best "don't care" face in hopes things would stop after the one comment. Well you know it didn't, the rest of the class got into the act and it was just a miserable few minutes there in that hallway.

I've been pretty self-conscious about that sort of thing ever since and generally refuse to wear ankle pants in the winter. However, it's practically impossible to find trousers or anything other than skinny ankle pants that aren't frumptastic. Which is a rant for another day because I do think this fashion trend is one that (a) should die and (b) was created merely to save fabric costs when making women's clothing. Same thing with the ridiculous necklines on everything.

PS: Want to know why women are colder than men in the winter? Look at the shirts we can buy and see how much skin is exposed. Men, you'd be cold too if those were your options.

What a week

Last Saturday was freaking hot here in Kansas. Kent and I decided to get all our normal weekend chores done that day anyway—he mowed the yard, I weeded, we did a Costco run and a Home Depot run, and a couple of other errands I don’t remember now. It was so incredibly hot—how hot was it? We hit 98F, with a heat index of 115. I'm so glad we did all that Saturday because we sure couldn't have done it Sunday.

Heat like that fuels massive thunderstorms here and last Saturday’s storm was epic. We lost power at 10 PM, and got over 2 inches of rain. In a most annoying twist, the street to the north of us never lost power, nor did neighbors two doors up and on the other side of the street. But we were in the dark with over 100K people.

We hustled and moved our brand new giant container of feta cheese (thanks Costco), and the unopened yogurt into the freezer and left that shut for the next 53 hours. Fortunately, our trash pick-up is on Mondays always (even if Christmas is on Monday, our trash gets picked up) so Monday, we tossed food we knew would spoil that morning.

External battery, love it!

We were hot, and so were the cats but mostly we were bored. I had some books on my Kindle, and we had our phones but we didn’t feel like we could leave the house. We needed to be there when the power came back on, and we couldn’t leave the cats. I was so very glad Ben and Jen had given me an external battery—mine has a ton of capacity and we used it to charge our phones multiple times. That helped so much.

At the same time, KCP&L (our electric company) had tweeted that they were giving out dry ice to people without power. Kent decided he’d go, so he loaded our cooler into the trunk of his car, came back for something, went back out to leave and then came back in to tell me his car battery was completely dead. And his jumper cables were in his trunk, which requires electricity to open. And of course the cooler was in the trunk.

OK, we have two cars so he took mine. But all the dry ice had been handed out in 15 minutes, so he couldn’t get any. But he did pick up a set of jumper cables powered by a rechargeable battery, which he decided he would use once we had power again.

Our power came on at 3 AM Tuesday morning—hallelujah! I got cleaned up and headed to work, and Kent charged up that battery for the jumper cables.

This is where the week ended up being almost comical. He said the jumper cables worked like a charm and he drove around for a bit to get the battery charged back up. He got back home and realized that no, the car battery wouldn’t hold a charge. Then he decided he would charge the battery again, take the car over to the Volvo dealership and catch the shuttle back home (remember, I was downtown at work).

The back of the bill--ouch

The next message I got from him said his car was possessed and random lights were coming on—but the car wasn’t turned on. The next message said he’d tried to move the car and the power steering died and he was calling a tow truck. Turns out his Volvo (and any Volvo with a satellite radio installed) drains the battery because even if you aren’t a subscriber, that satellite radio scans and looks for a signal, which just kills the battery. In fact, there’s a class action suit over it. This is the second battery we’ve gotten for his car in the last 26 months.

Oh but wait, there’s more. Thursday, our internet went down. Kent called our provider, who wanted to ship a router. But that wasn’t the issue, so Kent pushed hard for a service call which was supposed to be today. Yesterday, the router we didn’t need arrived, and to no one’s surprise the service call had been cancelled. The issue still isn’t the router, and now we have a technician scheduled to be here Monday.

That was my week. How was yours?