I didn’t really go to bed any earlier, though I have found a way to go to bed sooner. Usually, once I do finally go upstairs I’ll turn on the TV, at the very least to light the way back to my bed after I turn off the lights. My channel of choice, Ion, plays its episodes marathon style. Whatever the show of the day is, it plays all day long. I suppose it’s kind of nice to follow the story lines across the episodes, however it turns into a giant time sink. If you blink through a commercial or two (easy to do with a phone in hand,) you’ll miss the fact that another episode has restarted, which kills the “I’ll turn it off after this episode” method of going to bed.
I have a timer set on that TV to turn it off at one am and that helps. However not so much on nights that I go to bed past one. A few nights ago I was channel surfing for some reason and left it on one of the channels that plays reruns of older shows, nothing interesting. Now I’ll still turn it on for light as I walk to bed and once I’ve relaxed and gotten comfortable, it’s easy to turn off after a few minutes.
Up early, the new usual (again,) I didn’t quite jump out of bed and I didn’t dawdle either. Was I excited to come downstairs and.. and what? Check my email a few milliseconds faster than yesterday? Yes. Yes, that was it I guess, nothing else has changed. Yet all the same, I was downstairs well before eight. It didn’t take me long to think of setting up the Venus server. Venus is an operating system based on Linux specifically built (and released) by Victron to support its line of solar chargers and inverters to connect to Internet for automatic online logging. It even has a website ‘widget’ I was able to add to my site when I first it up before I took off.
Is it useful? Well, maybe, maybe not. It does have a lot of pretty charts though in the online portal and it stores the history too. The devices can also connect to a bluetooth phone app, though their app only displays thirty days of history, and not nearly as well as the online portal. And really, it’s the historical charts I like. To see the solar season over its annual cycle displayed in pixelized perfection. In the image you can see the ‘today’ stats- you’ll notice what time I finished this job and started getting the data online; eleven forty five.
Here the day broke down a little bit. I was hungry, it was almost noon, and I had just finished a ‘big’ project (a whole bullet point all by itself,) perfect time to stop for lunch, right? That’s what I thought too. To the fridge.. and out of salad, I had forgotten my opportunity to break break with my younger son earlier this week- my salad count was off and I was a day short.
I did want to go do some errands today, to get out of the house at least. But not this early, I was still having fun with the Venus server so I pushed it off. One thing, then another, then I thought again of a massage- thinking this time I should call ahead. A few more clicks around on my computer, another hour gone by, and another. Maybe a few hours later I called to make an appointment and headed over. Kind of.
Just a few tabs to close, find the keys, where’s the wallet and out the door, twenty minutes or so. Then I saw my front driver tire was low (the tires are much better now, thanks to Pueblo Tire repair in Alice, Texas,) so I pulled out the air pump, it was down to twelve pounds. Filling it, I walked around and cleaned up the yard (another bullet point off the list.) When it finished, I moved it around to all the rest. Thirty, twenty eight, and thirty one pounds each. Now all four at thirty three pounds again. For now..
On my way for a massage! Wait- on my way for lunch? Certainly shopping first, I still hadn’t eaten lunch and it was four o’clock in the afternoon. But if I shopped, I’d be leaving the food in the car for the massage. Ahh, my internal debates. Wendy’s.
Now four thirty, and I parked and made my way in again, after just a few minutes wait, I was called and walked to the back, took off my shoes, emptied my pockets and laid face down on the table. In that time chatting with the masseuse, the younger of the two. She is really nice and really does not speak English very well. An hour would have been great though she was only available for half that.
I could have laid on that table for eight hours. She was able to knead my muscles so deeply, so thoroughly. Kayla knows me, though we haven’t talked much over the years I’ve been going there. Whether it’s the technique she uses for me as I’ve trained her- or the way she does it for everyone as she’s been trained otherwise, it works. She’ll go soft and gentle to ease my muscles, lest I flinch. Once soothed, she’ll calmly bury her elbow in your glueteous maximus.
Last year, she had to take it easy on a lot of my parts. My body hurt, my ankle was broke, my hip was out of socket, massages helped- unless they hurt. The older lady there doesn’t speak any English. She doesn’t know the words “NO” or “STOP” or “THAT MOTHERFUCKING HURTS”. I go with the younger lady or- if she’s not available, I’ll use the old lady but I keep my eyes open and my hands at the ready to stop her. To be fair, she is also very good. Especially if you like the elbow thing. The older lady has thin pointy elbows.
I haven’t had a massage in four months. There is only so much I can do for myself on my leg with my rollers and massage tools. There are places I just can’t reach or can’t be relaxed as I try to massage myself- I can’t ease my way past my own tension. And my last massage, well that didn’t go well. That lady was the worst at massaging legs as a masseuse I’d every met- like she’d never done it before. I didn’t go back to that place again. That was the kind of place you want to avoid.
Today though, oh today, today I had Kayla. Ten minutes on my back, twenty minutes on my legs. It took me a minute to realize she was avoiding my hips. Oh, those hips used to hurt so bad- and explosion of pain if touched, as bad as a root canal without pain killers. Thinking of it now makes my hips feel so good, even with the last few days of walking a bit more. I broke the silence of the moment, turned and looked back and while pushing on my hip I said “all better”. She nodded and I think said “oh, good” and went to work.
Still on my belly the elbow went into my left ass check and just drilled and rotated and wobbled around until it found the inside of my knee. In the meantime, I twisted and shimmied, convulsed and pulsated. Normally the elbow only comes out for knots- she’d already found a few in my back. Were all of my hamstrings hamstrung? She alternated with all her techniques, up and down my legs, moving my legs around and massaging the muscles from different angles. By the end I was putty. Absolutely the best.
Oh what else? There was more today I’m sure– ahh- the massage almost made me forget!
So once I was back home I was working on something or other at my desk and the Internet stopped working. Finding that very odd for Comcast, I looked down at the modem and all of its lights were blinking- it had rebooted. I checked the power cord, yet everything seemed to be fine. So I waited for it to boot up and re-tried the webpage I was visiting. That’s when I knew I had a problem- rather than my webpage load, it loaded a “Welcome to Xfinity – Let’s activate your device.” page instead.
I took a deep breath and went over to my chair for a moment for my phone (and the pipe) to pull up the Xfinity app and try to activate the router, again. Opening my phone, I couldn’t even go straight to the app when I saw an email notification, I checked it first. Received my cancellation request? WTF? I couldn’t believe it. When I tried to cancel three months ago it took two hours on the phone. Now just past twenty four hours into my new service (that I’ve been very happy with!) it’s cancelled? WTF!
To the pipe. So is this a bad habit? Time and place? My readership seems to drop when I mention cannabis. Yet, sometimes like a deep breathe it can really help a person stay calm. Just a toke or two and I was back at my desk to refresh the screen- Activate. Okay, let’s activate. Back to the chair, past the pipe, to the phone, past the email, to the Xfinity app. Can’t login in, no Internet. To the settings, disconnect phone from broken Xfinity wifi, back to app. Activation fails.
Would you like to Chat with a representative? I took a deep breath and clicked yes. Click, wait. Click, wait. A few checks of everything and it said I needed to be provisioned. Would I like to be provisioned, it could take while? Rolling my eyes, click, click. It was actually pretty easy I guess, just a bit tedious. Long enough I went to sit in my chair- as nothing could load on my computer. Argh..
Finally, the process finished, the Xfinity Gateway rebooted one last time and my webpages loaded again. Finished the chat and went to the speed test page- isn’t that where everyone goes first after an Internet issue of any sort? I’d done it yesterday and was happy with the seventy five mb download and ten mb upload speeds- compared to one or two bars (if you hold it in the right position,) of cellular service, seventy five mb was the land of plenty.
Now after my cancellation (and to be clear, no, I did not do that, nor did anything to inadvertently cause it, to the best of my knowledge,) activation message and a re-provisioning, I’m downloading at two hundred and thirty mb with a twelve mb upload speed – that is the next speed tier up. How did this happen? I still don’t know, yet it was certainly a bit of grace in this day.
The thought process over the hour was.. interesting? From technical glitch to technical SWATTING (is that a thing?) Is it? Could some nefarious enemy of mine call Comcast, impersonate me and spend two hours on the phone to cancel my service? How would they even know I had just gotten it installed? OH. LOL. Yeah, how could someone have figured that out? As the story ended though.. Maybe I have some an “Angel” looking over me at Comcast and saw I was back and gave me a hookup (should I check the TV for free HBO? Just kidding, no coax TV for me.)
A few hours of APRS and radios and other light tasks. I need to find the key for my bike chain (or use the universal key again..) I redrew my list on the white board. By next Monday I need to restart posting the list. Public viewing of the list seems to encourage me to scratch the items off a bit faster. My body still feels good, yet my ankle is rough, the spasms are bad tonight, jerking and pulling it around. Altogether, a great day. Tomorrow is the weekend. I want to go for a walk in a park.
Time to rest.